Woman's "Contrariness"
Oh! for that Being whom I can conceive to be in the world,
though I shall not live to prove it. One to whom I might
have recourse in all my Humours and Dispositions: in all my
Distempers of Mind, visionary Causes of Mortification, and Fairy
Dreams of Pleasure. I have been trying to train up a Lady or two
for these good offices of Friendship, but hitherto I must not
boast of my success.--HERRICK.
What is the fate of the average man who marries, happily and
hopefully, a girl well suited to him? He desires with his whole
heart a mutual, life-long happiness. He marries with the intention
of fulfilling every injunction given him by father, doctor, and
friend. He is considerate in trifles, he speaks no harsh words, he
and his bride go about together, walk together, read together, and
perhaps, if they are very advanced, even work together. But after
a few months, or maybe a few years of marriage they seem to have
drifted apart, and he finds her often cold and incomprehensible. Few
men will acknowledge this even to their best friends. But each heart
knows its own pain.
He may at times laugh, and in the friendliest spirit tease his
wife about her contrariness. That is taken by everyone to mean
nothing but a playful concealment of his profound love. Probably it
is. But gnawing at the very roots of his love is a hateful little
worm--the sense that she _is contrary_. He feels that she is at
times inexplicably cold; that, sometimes, when he has "done nothing"
she will have tears in her eyes, irrational tears which she cannot
explain.
He observes that one week his tender love-making and romantic
advances win her to smiles and joyous yielding, and then perhaps a
few days later the same, or more impassioned, tenderness on his part
is met by coldness or a forced appearance of warmth, which, while
he may make no comment upon it, hurts him acutely. And this deep,
inexplicable hurt is often the beginning of the end of his love. Men
like to feel that they understand their dearest one, and that she is
a rational being.
After inexplicable misunderstanding has continued for some time,
if the man is of at all a jealous nature he will search his wife's
acquaintances for someone whom she may have met, for someone who
may momentarily have diverted her attention. For however hard it is
for the natural man to believe that anyone could step into _his_
shoes, some are ready to seek the explanation of their own ill
success in a rival. On some occasion when her coldness puzzles him
the man is perhaps conscious that his love, his own desires, are as
ardent as they were a few days before; then, knowing so intimately
his own heart, he is sure of the steadiness of its love, and he
feels acutely the romantic passion to which her beauty stirs him; he
remembers perhaps that a few days earlier his ardour had awakened a
response in her; therefore, he reaches what appears to him to be the
infallible logical deduction--that either there must be some rival
or his bride's nature is incomprehensible, contrary, capricious.
Both thoughts to madden.
With capriciousness, man in general has little patience. Caprice
renders his best efforts null and void. Woman's caprice is, or
appears to be, a negation of reason. And as reason is man's most
precious and hard-won faculty, the one which has raised mankind
from the ranks of the brute creation, he cannot bear to see it
apparently flouted.
That his bride should lack logic and sweet reasonableness is a flaw
it hurts him to recognise in her. He has to crush the thought down.
It may then happen that the young man, himself pained and bewildered
at having pained his bride by the very ardour of his affection, may
strive to please her by placing restraint upon himself. He may ask
himself: Do not religious and many kinds of moral teachers preach
restraint to the man? He reads the books written for the guidance of
youth, and finds "restraint," "self-control," in general terms (and
often irrationally) urged in them all. His next step may then be
to curtail the expression of his tender feelings, and to work hard
and late in the evenings instead of kissing his bride's fingers and
coming to her for sweet communion in the dusk.
And then, if he is at all observant, he may be aggrieved and
astonished to find her again wistful or hurt. With the tender
longing to _understand_, which is so profound a characteristic in
all the best of our young men, he begs, implores, or pets her into
telling him some part of the reason for her fresh grievance. He
discovers to his amazement that _this_ time she is hurt because he
had not made those very advances which so recently had repelled her,
and had been with such difficulty repressed by his intellectual
efforts.
He asks himself in despair: What is a man to do? If he is
"educated," he probably devours all the books on sex he can obtain.
But in them he is not likely to find much real guidance. He learns
from them that "restraint" is advised from every point of view,
but according to the character of the author he will find that
"restraint" means having the marriage relations with his wife not
more than three times a week, or once a month--or never at all
except for the procreation of children. He finds no _rational_
guidance based on natural law.
According to his temperament then, he may begin to practise
"restraint."
But it may happen, and indeed it has probably happened in every
marriage once or many times, that the night comes when the man who
has heroically practised restraint, accidentally discovers his wife
in tears on her solitary pillow.
He seeks for advice indirectly from his friends, perhaps from his
doctor. But can his local doctor or his friends tell him more than
the chief European authorities on this subject? The famous Professor
Forel ("The Sexual Question," transl. 1908) gives the following
advice:--
The reformer, Luther, who was a practical man, laid down the
average rule of two or three connections a week in marriage, at
the time of highest sexual power. I may say that my numerous
observations as a physician have generally confirmed this rule,
which seems to me to conform very well to the normal state to
which _man_[2] has become gradually adapted during thousands
of years. Husbands who would consider this average as an
imprescriptable right would, however, make wrong pretensions,
for it is quite possible for a normal man to contain himself
much longer, and it is his duty to do so, not only when his wife
is ill, but also during menstruation and pregnancy.
[2] The italics are mine.--M. C. S. [see transcriber's note]
This pronouncement of an exceptionally advanced and broadminded
thinker serves to show how little attention has hitherto been paid
to the woman's side of this question, or to ascertaining _her_
natural requirements.
Many men will not be so considerate as to follow this advice, which
represents a high standard of living; but, on the other hand, there
are many who are willing to go not only so far, but further than
this in their self-suppression in order to attain their heart's
desire, the happiness of their mate, and consequently their own
life's joy.
However willing they may be to go further, the great question for
the man is: Where?
There are innumerable leaders anxious to lead in many different
directions. The young husband may try first one and then the other,
and still find his wife unsatisfied, incomprehensible--capricious.
Then it may be that, disheartened, he tires, and she sinks into the
dull apathy of acquiescence in her "wifely duty." He is left with
an echo of resentment in his heart. If only she had not been so
capricious, they would still have been happy, he fancies.
Many writers, novelists, poets and dramatists have represented the
uttermost tragedy of human life as due to the incomprehensible
contrariness of the feminine nature. The kindly ones smile, perhaps
a little patronisingly, and tell us that women are more instinctive,
more child-like, less reasonable than men. The bitter ones sneer
or reproach or laugh at this in women they do not understand, and
which, baffling _their_ intellect, appears to them to be irrational
folly.
It seems strange that those who search for natural law in every
province of our universe should have neglected the most vital
subject, the one which concerns us all infinitely more than the
naming of planets or the collecting of insects. Woman is _not_
essentially capricious; some of the laws of her being might have
been discovered long ago had the existence of law been suspected.
But it has suited the general structure of society much better for
men to shrug their shoulders and smile at women as irrational and
capricious creatures, to be courted when it suited them, not to be
studied.
Vaguely, perhaps, men have realised that much of the charm of life
lies in the sex-_differences_ between men and women; so they have
snatched at the easy theory that women differ from themselves by
being capricious. Moreover, by attributing to mere caprice the
coldness which at times comes over the most ardent woman, man was
unconsciously justifying himself for at any time coercing her to
suit himself.
Circumstances have so contrived that hitherto the explorers and
scientific investigators, the historians and statisticians, the
poets and artists have been mainly men. Consequently woman's side
of the joint life has found little or no expression. Woman has
been content to mould herself to the shape desired by man wherever
possible, and she has stifled her natural feelings and her own deep
thoughts as they welled up.
Most women have never realised intellectually, but many have been
dimly half-conscious, that woman's nature is set to rhythms over
which man has no more control than he has over the tides of the
sea. While the ocean can subdue and dominate man and laugh at his
attempted restrictions, woman has bowed to man's desire over her
body, and, regardless of its pulses, he approaches her or not as
is his will. Some of her rhythms defy him--the moon-month tide of
menstruation, the cycle of ten moon-months of bearing the growing
child and its birth at the end of the tenth wave--these are
essentials too strong to be mastered by man. But the subtler ebb and
flow of woman's sex has escaped man's observation or his care.
If a swimmer comes to a sandy beach when the tide is out and
the waves have receded, leaving sand where he had expected deep
blue water--does he, baulked of his bathe, angrily call the sea
"capricious"?
But the tenderest bridegroom finds only caprice in his bride's
coldness when she yields her sacrificial body while her sex-tide is
at the ebb.
There is another side to this problem, one perhaps even less
considered by society. There is the tragic figure of the loving
woman whose love-tide is at the highest, and whose husband does
not recognise the delicate signs of her ardour. In our anæmic
artificial days it often happens that the man's desire is a surface
need, quickly satisfied, colourless, and lacking beauty, and that
he has no knowledge of the rich complexities of love-making which
an initiate of love's mysteries enjoys. To such a man his wife may
indeed seem petulant, capricious, or resentful without reason.
Welling up in her are the wonderful tides, scented and enriched by
the myriad experiences of the human race from its ancient days of
leisure and flower-wreathed love-making, urging her to transports
and to self-expressions, were the man but ready to take the first
step in the initiative or to recognise and welcome it in her. Seldom
dare any woman, still more seldom dare a wife, risk the blow at her
heart which would be given were she to offer charming love-play to
which the man did not respond. To the initiate she will be able to
reveal that the tide is up by a hundred subtle signs, upon which
he will seize with delight. But if her husband is blind to them
there is for her nothing but silence, self-suppression, and their
inevitable sequence of self-scorn, followed by resentment towards
the man who places her in such a position of humiliation while
talking of his "love."
So unaware of the elements of the physiological reactions of women
are many modern men that the case of Mrs. G. is not exceptional.
Her husband was accustomed to pet her and have relations with her
frequently, but yet he never took any trouble to rouse in her the
necessary preliminary feeling for mutual union. She had married as
a very ignorant girl, but often vaguely felt a sense of something
lacking in her husband's love. Her husband had never kissed her
except on the lips and cheek, but once at the crest of the wave of
her sex-tide (all unconscious that it was so) she felt a yearning to
feel his head, his lips, pressed against her bosom. The sensitive
inter-relation between a woman's breasts and the rest of her
sex-life is not only a bodily thrill, but there is a world of poetic
beauty in the longing of a loving woman for the unconceived child
which melts in mists of tenderness toward her lover, the soft touch
of whose lips can thus rouse her mingled joy. Because she shyly
asked him, Mrs. G.'s husband gave her one swift unrepeated kiss
upon her bosom. He was so ignorant that he did not know that her
husband's lips upon her breast melt a wife to tenderness and are one
of a husband's first and surest ways to make her physically ready
for complete union. In this way he inhibited her natural desire,
and as he never did anything to stir it, she never had any physical
pleasure in their relation. Such prudish or careless husbands,
content with their own satisfaction, little know the pent-up
aching, or even resentment, which may eat into a wife's heart, and
ultimately may affect her whole health.
Often the man is also the victim of the purblind social customs
which make sex-knowledge _tabu_.
It has become a tradition of our social life that the ignorance
of woman about her own body and that of her future husband is a
flower-like innocence. And to such an extreme is this sometimes
pushed, that not seldom is a girl married unaware that married
life will bring her into physical relations with her husband
fundamentally different from those with her brother. When she
discovers the true nature of his body, and learns the part she has
to play as a wife, she may refuse utterly to agree to her husband's
wishes. I know one pair of which the husband, chivalrous and loving,
had to wait years before his bride recovered from the shock of the
discovery of the meaning of marriage and was able to allow him a
natural relation. There have been not a few brides whom the horror
of the first night of marriage with a man less considerate has
driven to suicide or insanity.
That girls can reach a marriageable age without some knowledge
of the realities of marriage would seem incredible were it not a
fact. One highly-educated lady intimately known to me told me that
when she was about eighteen she suffered many months of agonising
apprehension that she was about to have a baby because a man had
snatched a kiss from her lips at a dance.
When girls so brought up are married it is a _rape_ for the husband
to insist on his "marital rights" at once. It will be difficult or
impossible for such a bride ever after to experience the joys of
sex-union, for such a beginning must imprint upon her consciousness
the view that the man's animal nature dominates him.
In a magazine I came across a poem which vividly expresses this
peculiarly feminine sorrow:
... To mate with men who have no soul above
Earth grubbing; who, the bridal night, forsooth,
Killed sparks that rise from instinct fires of life,
And left us frozen things, alone to fashion
Our souls to dust, masked with the name of wife--
Long years of youth--love years--the years of passion
Yawning before us. So, shamming to the end,
All shrivelled by the side of him we wed,
Hoping that peace may riper years attend,
Mere odalisques are we--well housed, well fed.
KATHERINE NELSON.
Many men who enter marriage sincerely and tenderly may yet have some
previous experience of bought "love." It is then not unlikely that
they may fall into the error of explaining their wife's experiences
in terms of the reactions of the prostitute. They argue that,
because the prostitute showed physical excitement and pleasure in
union, if the bride or wife does not do so, then she is "cold"
or "under-sexed." They may not realise that often all the bodily
movements which the prostitute makes are studied and simulated
because her client enjoys his climax best when the woman in his arms
simultaneously thrills.
As Forel says ("The Sexual Question," 1908, Engl. trans.): "The
company of prostitutes often renders men incapable of understanding
feminine psychology, for prostitutes are hardly more than automata
trained for the use of male sensuality. When men look among these
for the sexual psychology of woman they find only their own mirror."
Fate is often cruel to men, too. More high-spirited young men than
the world imagines strive for and keep their purity to give their
brides; if such a man then marries a woman who is soiled, or, on the
other hand, one who is so "pure" and prudish that she denies him
union with her body, his noble achievement seems bitterly vain. On
the other hand, it may be that after years of fighting with his hot
young blood a man has given up and gone now and again for relief to
prostitutes, and then later in life has met the woman who is his
mate, and whom, after remorse for his soiled past, and after winning
her forgiveness for it, he marries. Then, unwittingly, he may make
the wife suffer either by interpreting her in the light of the other
women or perhaps (though this happens less frequently) by setting
her absolutely apart from them. I know of a man who, after a loose
life, met a woman whom he reverenced and adored. He married her, but
to preserve her "purity," her difference from the others, he never
consummated his marriage with her. She was strangely unhappy, for
she loved him passionately and longed for children. She appeared to
him to be pining "capriciously" when she became thin and neurotic.
Perhaps this man might have seen his own behaviour in a truer light
had he known that some creatures simply _die_ if unmated (see p. 123
Appendix).
The idea that woman is lowered by sex intercourse is very deeply
rooted in our present society. Many sources have contributed to
this mistaken idea, not the least powerful being the ascetic ideal
of the early Church and the fact that man has _used_ woman as his
instrument so often regardless of her wishes. Women's education,
therefore, and the trend of social feeling, has largely been in the
direction of freeing her from this and thus mistakenly encouraging
the idea that sex-life is a low, physical, and degrading necessity
which a pure woman is above enjoying.
In marriage the husband has used his "marital right"[3] of
intercourse when _he_ wished it. Both law and custom have
strengthened the view that he has the right to approach his wife
whenever he wishes, and that she has no wishes and no fundamental
needs in the matter at all.
[3] "Conjugal Rights." Notes and Queries. May 16, 1891, p. 383.
"S. writes from the Probate Registry, Somerset House: 'Previous to
1733 legal proceedings were recorded in Latin and the word then
used where we now speak of _rights_ was _obsequies_. For some time
after the substitution of English for Latin the term _rites_ was
usually, if not invariably adopted; _rights_ would appear to be a
comparatively modern error.'"
"Mr. T. E. Paget writes ('Romeo and Juliet,' Act V., Scene III.):
"What cursed foot wanders this way to-night
To cross my obsequies, and true lovers rite?"
"Well may Lord Esher say he has never been able to make out what the
phrase 'conjugal rights' means. The origin of the term is now clear,
and a blunder, which was first made, perhaps, by a type-setter in
the early part of the last century, and never exposed until now, has
led to a vast amount of misapprehension. Here, too, is another proof
that Shakespeare was exceedingly familiar with 'legal language.'"
That woman has a rhythmic sex-tide which, if its indications were
obeyed, would ensure not only her enjoyment, but would explode the
myth of her capriciousness, seems not to be suspected. We have
studied the wave-lengths of water, of sound, of light; but when will
the sons and daughters of men study the sex-tide in woman and learn
the laws of her Periodicity of Recurrence of desire?