when, as is often the case, they are unconscious that it is so with them. I once heard a married woman, whose talents and beauty put jealousy quite out of the question, making fun of her plain and elderly Italian governess for repeatedly saying that: "Io sono ancora una virgine" (that she was still a virgin). The interpretation put on the words was that the speaker wished to admit she had made a virtue of necessity, and would have been very glad to get rid of her virginity if she could have done so without detriment to her position in life.
This is the most important point of all: women not only disparage and despise the virginity of other women, but they set no value on their own state of virginity (except that men prize it so highly). This is why they look upon every married woman as a sort of superior being. The deep impression made on women by the sexual act can be most plainly seen by the respect which girls pay to a married woman, of however short a standing; which points to their idea of their existence being the attainment of the same zenith themselves. They look upon other young girls, on the contrary, as being, like themseves, still imperfect beings awaiting consummation.
I think I have said enough to show that experience confirms the deduction I made from the importance of the pairing instinct in women, the deduction that virgin worship is of male, not female origin.
A man demands chastity in himself and others, most of all from the being he loves; a woman wants the man with most experience and sensuality, not virtue. Woman has no comprehension of paragons. On the contrary, it is well known that a woman is most ready to fly to the arms of the man with the widest reputation for being a Don Juan.
Woman requires man to be sexual, because she only gains existence through his sexuality. Women have no sense of a man's love, as a superior phenomenon, they only perceive that side of him which unceasingly desires and appropriates the object of his affections, and men who have
