Indeed, if one inquires why anything becomes the fashion it will be found that there is a true cause for it.
The more femaleness a woman possesses the less will she understand a man, and the sexual characters of a man will have the greater influence on her. This is more than a mere application of the law of sexual attraction, as I have already stated it. So also the more manly a man is the less will he understand women, but the more readily be influenced by them as women. Those men who claim to understand women are themselves very nearly women. Womanish men often know how to treat women much better than manly men. Manly men, except in most rare cases, learn how to deal with women only after long experience, and even then most imperfectly.
Although I have been touching here in a most superficial way on what are no more than tertiary sexual characters, I wish to point out an application of my conclusions to pedagogy. I am convinced that the more these views are understood the more certainly will they lead to an individual treatment in education. At the present time shoemakers, who make shoes to measure, deal more rationally with individuals than our teachers and schoolmasters in their application of moral principles. At present the sexually intermediate forms of individuals (especially on the female side) are treated exactly as if they were good examples of the ideal male or female types. There is wanted an "orthopaedic" treatment of the soul instead of the torture caused by the application of ready-made conventional shapes. The present system stamps out much that is original, uproots much that is truly natural, and distorts much into artificial and unnatural forms.
From time immemorial there have been only two systems of education; one for those who come into the world designated by one set of characters as males, and another for those who are similarly assumed to be females. Almost at once the "boys" and the "girls" are dressed differently, learn to play different games, go through different courses of instruction, the girls being put to stitching and so forth.
