Rinstinkt’s Reviews > In Defense of Women > Status Update

Now that women have the political power to obtain their just rights, they will begin to lose their old power to obtain special privileges by sentimental appeals. Men, facing them squarely, will consider them anew, not as romantic political and social invalids, to be coddled and caressed, but as free competitors in a harsh world.

The officers nominated by the male electorate in modern democracies before the extension of the suffrage were usually chosen, not for their competence but for their mere talent for idiocy; they reflected accurately the male weakness for whatever is rhetorical and sentimental and feeble and untrue. Consider

Many a rich man, at least in America, marries his typist or the governess of his sister's children and is happy thereafter, but when a rare woman enters upon a comparable marriage she is commonly set down as insane, and the disaster that almost always ensues quickly confirms the diagnosis.

Thus they have to apply their peculiar talents warily... He must be attached without any formal challenge, and even without any suspicion of challenge. This strategy lies at the heart of what Nietzsche called the slave morality—in brief, a morality based upon a concealment of egoistic purpose, a code of ethics having for its foremost character a bold denial of its actual aim.

The wholly manly man lacks the wit necessary to give objective form to his soaring and secret dreams, and the wholly womanly woman is apt to be too cynical a creature to dream at all.