""Oh, come now!" Helena spoke up at this point. "Surely you're not trying to deny that women too have their a part in sin, despite what you've been saying about men being the instigators and causes of all evil and it always being men who put us up to it? For the most part, that's nonsense. To take their part for a moment (for, after all, we are alone here and they can't hear us), what about all those shameless and corrupt women who dishonor our sex publicly, soliciting men openly and selling off their honor to the first bidder? Such women destroy men, stripping them of all their money and often bringing them to the point of death. And men certainly aren;t going to let us forget they exist-especially since many of them are upright and virtuous, like Scipio, Xenocrates, Alexander, and the others we read about in history." "Well that last point is true as far as it goes," replied Cornelia. "But you aren't going to find men like that often: they are like patterns of virtue that God sends into the world for others to imitate (though few manage to get anywhere near the mark), and that's the reason why historians pick them out for special mention, as something remarkable, outlandish, and memorable, like those amazing comets that appear once in the course of many years. By contrast, there have been endless good and virtuous women. But where shameless women are concerned-and I am not trying to deny that such women exist (would that they didn't!)-I repeat what I said earlier, that the source and the true cause of this terrible evil lies in the men who trapped, tempted, solicited, and lured on these women while they still had their honor, leading the naive and easygoing of them to fall head-over-heels to their ruin. But for all that, these women, wretched as they are, preserve a little more dignity than the men they consort with, because at least they aren't the ones the men; whereas men fall into their traps like animals and pay for them, however corrupt, vile, and wretched they are. Which is something that wouldn't happen if they kept their heads and showed some of that modesty and virtue we find in women. Just tell me: have you ever come across the case of a young girl, a virgin, so bold and shameless as to tempt a man into vice? It cannot be doubted that when a virgin loses her honor, it can be blamed entirely on a man who has shamelessly flattered and solicited her in all the ways he can find: eventually, as I say, he takes advantage of her naivete and gradually strips her of all her natural feminine dignity and power until she is finally reduced to prostitution, either because he ahs abandoned her, as often happens, or because some other hardship forces her into it. And once the wretched creatures are reduced to this state, knowing as they do that men, with their tricks and relentless pestering, have been responsible for their downfall, they decide to get something back for the great harm they have suffered and resolve never to love a man again, since they have been so deceived by them, but rather to give them a taste of their own medicine and, just as men once preyed on their honor, they prey on men's purses; they pretend to love them and if, by some chance, a man falls in love with one of them (for it does happen sometimes that men get more involved with these women than with decent women, because these women have become like men and share their propensity to vice)-if that happens, I can tell you, he's had it, because they will drain him to the last penny, just as he deserves. "And besides all this, those poor women have only one sin (and that one caused by men, as I have said), whereas most men have endless vices. So why should so much blame be heaped on our sex? I'm not denying that it is a most shocking and shameful thing, but it is unfair that all women should be blames for the transgressions of a few, or that their vice should reflect on women in general. Though even those few do not deserve to get all the blame while men stand by smugly congratulating themselves, because I have not come across any divine law that absolves men of this sin and punishes women alone."