s, which, through
inheritance and custom, has become continually more sharply defined.
Now, up to a certain point sex differences lead to sex-attraction, but
whenever such variability--whether initiated by some natural process
or by some intentional guidance of the pressure of civilisation--is
unduly exaggerated, the way is opened up for sex-antagonism. That
this, indeed, occurs may be seen from the fact we have already
established, that an exaggerated outgrowth of the secondary sexual
characters is not really favourable to development; the species thus
differentiated being bad parents and unsocial in their conduct. The
large felines, which are often inclined to commit infanticide in their
own interests, the male turkey and other members of the gallinaceae
afford examples, and so does the female phalarope, whose maternal
instincts are completely atrophied. Another illustration may be drawn
from the debased position of the Athenian women, where the sharp
separation between the sexes led, without doubt, not only to the
debasing of the marriage relationship, but to the establishment of the
_hetairae_, and also to the common practice of homo-sexual love.

Under our present civilisation, and mainly owing to the unnatural
relation of the sexes, which has unduly emphasised certain qualities
of excessive femininity, sex-feeling has been at once over-accentuated
and under-disciplined. Thus, an extreme outward sex-attraction has
come to veil but thinly a deep inward sex-antipathy, until it seems
almost impossible that women and men can ever really understand one
another. Herein lie the roots, as I believe, of much of the brutal
treatment of women by men and the contempt in which too often they are
held. For what is the truth here? In this so-called "duel of sex,"
while woman's moral equality has not been recognised, women have
employed their sex-differences as the most effective weapon for
compassing their own ends, and men in the mass--unmindful of the truth
that love is an understanding of the contrasted natures, a solution of
the riddle--have wished to have it so. What significance arises out of
this in the so-much-lauded cry, "Woman's influence!" "By thy
submission rule," really means in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred,
"Rule by sex-seduction and flattery." Yes, we women cannot burk the
truth--the seduction and flattery of man by woman is writ large over
the face of our present society, it speaks in our literature and in