(Franssen’s Note: I am reproducing this out of print work on behalf of my donors who purchased a hard copy of this book for me.)
The purpose of this book is a very simple one. It is to try to make the two sexes understand each other better by telling women what men don’t like about them. There is a great deal of plain speaking here about every phase of woman’s life in her relationship with men – in the office, on the telephone, in the restaurant, at the theater and concert, as correspondents, as sweethearts, as flirts, as other men’s wives, in bed. Some of the things said in this volume may seem unchivalrous to some women, but I believe that most women will, in the secrecy of their hearts, admit that they are true.
What has really prompted me to write this book is a superabundance of chivalry romanticism, and even sentimentalism. I am not alone in this. We men, alas, are all brimming with chivalry, romanticism, and sentimentalism. We have written nearly all the great and enduring love poems and novels and plays of this world. We have written all the soft music, all the songs. And always our inspiration has been a woman or Womanhood.
For myself, I claim to be no more than an ordinary man, who has heard and seen people, who has poured out his heart to friends and listened to friends pour out their hears to him. I have come to the conclusion that what has hurt men most is the other sex – their occasional thoughtlessness, their frequent breaches of good taste and their even more frequent callousness to the fine, inner wants of men. Every man carries within his heart a little garden. There is one flower in it, a woman. Whatever ailment the flower reveals, whatever harm befalls it, hurts him no end. For way down in his heart each man lives only for this flower – for the enhancement of its beauty and for the greater glory of its general being. Which is to say, that way down in his heart each man lives for a woman – for her approbationm admiration, and love. She is the corner-stone of his being. Whatever infirmity appears in it spells danger to his life.
The ways in which women hurt men are the ways in which they appear to be less worthy of adoration than men want them to be. Very often, I am convinced women hurt men unknowingly. For this men we are largely to blame, because shyness and false politeness keep them from telling women what offends and jars them. I think that it is for the benefit of society and of the happiness of both men and women that men ceased being so polite and told women more truths about the things women do that cast so large a shadow upon the days and nights of men – and hence upon the days and nights of women also, for a woman is really not happy unless the man in her house or in her dreams is happy.
Many of the statements in this book will perhaps be revelations to women, but that will not be because they are so unusual, but because they have been so common as to pass unnoticed. The statements, needless to say, do not apply to all women but to a sufficiently large number of them to be worth mentioning and discussing.
I hope, as I firmly believe, that every man or woman who reads this book carefully will find that she or he has saved herself or himself a great deal of unnecessary loneliness, irritation, and bewilderment.
Thomas D. Horton
