ertoire of complaints.

This yearning for martyrdom explains one of the commonly noted
characters of women: their eager flair for bearing physical pain. As
we have seen, they have actually a good deal less endurance than men;
massive injuries shock them more severely and kill them more quickly.
But when acute algesia is unaccompanied by any profounder phenomena they
are undoubtedly able to bear it with a far greater show of resignation.
The reason is not far to seek. In pain a man sees only an invasion of
his liberty, strength and self-esteem. It floors him, masters him,
and makes him ridiculous. But a woman, more subtle and devious in her
processes of mind, senses the dramatic effect that the spectacle of her
suffering makes upon the spectators, already filled with compassion for
her feebleness. She would thus much rather be praised for facing pain
with a martyr's fortitude than for devising some means of getting rid of
it the first thought of a man. No woman could have invented chloroform,
nor, for that matter, alcohol. Both drugs offer an escape from
situations and experiences that, even in aggravated forms, women relish.
The woman who drinks as men drink--that is, to raise her threshold of
sensation and ease the agony of living--nearly always shows a deficiency
in feminine characters and an undue preponderance of masculine
characters. Almost invariably you will find her vain and boastful,
and full of other marks of that bombastic exhibitionism which is so
sterlingly male.

38. Pathological Effects

This feminine craving for martyrdom, of course, often takes on a
downright pathological character, and so engages the psychiatrist.
Women show many other traits of the same sort. To be a woman under our
Christian civilization, indeed, means to live a life that is heavy with
repression and dissimulation, and this repression and dissimulation, in
the long run, cannot fail to produce effects that are indistinguishable
from disease. You will find some of them described at length in any
handbook on psychoanalysis. The Viennese, Adler, and the Dane, Poul
Bjerre, argue, indeed, that womanliness itself, as it is encountered
under Christianity, is a disease. All women suffer from a suppressed
revolt against the inhibitions forced upon them by our artificial
culture, and this suppressed revolt, by well known Freudian means,
produces a complex of mental symptoms that is familiar to all of us.
At one end of the scale