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'We must admit and face our fear of woman—and as therapists make our patients admit and face it—the way the heroes of old faced it and, facing it, conquered fear and woman and the monsters of the unconscious deep, of night and death… We have forgotten, or tried to forget, how much we are in awe of woman's biological functions, her menstruating and her child-bearing, and how much we abhor the smelly fluids of her organicity, the many secret folds and wrinkles of her inevitable decay. We are trying to deny her threat to our manhood, her serpent's tongue and the sharp teeth in her two bloody mouths. We refuse to believe in the lure of her depths, and the infinite demandingness of her void. We belittle her sexual challenge and deride, uneasily, her fighting strength; the edge of her cruelty we sheathe in silence…
'In the course of history man has, since those first heroic victories, attempted many a defense against woman: during the Dark Ages, he tried to banish femininity; during the Middle Ages, through the inquisition, he sought himself to devour the all-devouring Kali; since then, woman has been the toy of the Rococo, the doll (Ibsen's Nora) of the bourgeoisie. The proletariat, out of brotherly love, mass produced denim-blue female comrades shorn of all feminine appeal. Each social system, in its own way, tried to limit her magic…
'I am prepared to be criticized… It may indeed have been remarked, and frowned upon, that in the preceding chapters I hardly ever bothered to separate fact and fiction, freely mingled historical topic, distinguished between what women are and what they are, by man, presumed to be. Indeed, it makes little difference. What they