He says everything every reasonable man knows to be true, by way of his encounters with women, but could never articulate with such ornate elegance.

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It is only the man whose intellect is clouded by his sexual instinct that could give that

stunted, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-legged race the name of the fair sex;

for the entire beauty of the sex is based on this instinct. One would be more justified in

calling them the unaesthetic sex than the beautiful. Neither for music, nor for poetry, nor

for fine art have they any real or true sense and susceptibility, and it is mere mockery on

their part, in their desire to please, if they affect any such thing.

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This makes them incapable of taking a purely objective interest in anything, and the

reason for it is, I fancy, as follows. A man strives to get direct mastery over things either

by understanding them or by compulsion. But a woman is always and everywhere driven

to indirect mastery, namely through a man; all her direct mastery being limited to him

alone. Therefore it lies in woman’s nature to look upon everything only as a means for

winning man, and her interest in anything else is always a simulated one, a mere

roundabout way to gain her ends, consisting of coquetry and pretence. Hence Rousseau

said, Les femmes, en général, n’aiment aucun art, ne se connoissent à aucun et n’ont

aucun génie (Lettre à d’Alembert, note xx.). Every one who can see through a sham must

have found this to be the case. One need only watch the way they behave at a concert, the

opera, or the play; the childish simplicity, for instance, with which they keep on chattering

during the finest passages in the greatest masterpieces. If it is true that the Greeks forbade

women to go to the play, they acted in a right way; for they would at any rate be able to

hear something. In our day it would be more appropriate to substitute taceat mulier in

theatro for taceat mulier in ecclesia; and this might perhaps be put up in big letters on the

curtain.

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Whoever made things this way is cruel. To make the noblest of all of God's creation crave base beings as women is just cruel beyond description.