THE LOVE EPISODE
§ 64
From the earliest ages seers and poets have glorified Love. The Bible
says God is Love. Love as the perfect erotic control of the wife by the
husband will be a strange concept to some minds that have been accustomed
to the theory that woman is the Queen of Love, and to the ideas of men
brought up under the Madonna influence.
This control is indeed the opposite of the attitude that many husbands
have adopted (or in which they have been trained) toward their wives, to
whom they act as they would toward idealized mothers, not of their own
children, but of themselves.
A conviction derived from intimate knowledge of the marital relations of
many people forces the conclusion that this current attitude not only is
a false one, but is also one that gradually renders a husband impotent to
take the part which a true male should take, in the highest type of human
mating.
Love is the work of art of an entire lifetime. The calf love of the
adolescent, the adoration of the betrothed and the first passionate
outburst of the honeymoon are but preludes or overtures to an opera or
drama that should continue as long as the two partners live together,
and in which the husband is the protagonist.
§ 65
To denote the highest type of special scientific student of the art of
love, the term _erotologist_ is suggested in preference to the word
sexologist, which would imply the study of only the physical side of
_sex_.
If a modern erotologist can tell us that husbands using toward their
wives one form of behaviour are themselves unhappy, and have too many
children, or too few, we should certainly be broad-minded enough to admit
that the chances are, we ourselves shall be unhappy if we do the same
things in the same way.
If the erotologist tells us that a million husbands have used a certain
technique in their erotic lives and have become supremely happy, and have
had just as many healthy children as they wanted and no more, we should
certainly be wise, if we could find out what was the felicitous technique
of the happy million. If we saw their wives retaining their youth and
beauty and vivacity, and being both loving wives and proud grandmothers
at the same time, we should not let envy of these men inspire us with
hatred and prejudice enough to say that their methods are iniquitous,
and not mentioned in the Bible; but we should inquire exactly what these
husbands did, to keep their wives and themselves so young and happy.
We should at the present day inquire mostly in vain. A good part of the
million do not themselves know what they do that is different from the
practice of the other millions. They just love their wives and them
alone.
The erotologists, however, have been quietly studying the marital
situation for some decades. They have compared, weighed, correlated
and investigated thousands of cases. Some of the sexologists have been
unscientific and biased with ancient superstitions. A few erotologists,
notably Havelock Ellis and Dr. Marie C. Stopes of England, Dr. W.
F. Robie of Baldwinsville, Massachusetts, Dr. H. W. Long of Peoria,
Illinois, and some of the psychoanalysts, are scientists, ready and
willing to look at facts as they are and not as they might wish them to
be.
The erotologists have actually discovered definite facts about the more
intimate nature of the marital relation. It implies the interaction, in
every married pair, of four sets of tendencies: the husband’s conscious
and his unconscious trends and the wife’s conscious and unconscious
trends. Anyone looking only at the conscious factors is naturally puzzled
by almost all the external phenomena of marriage, e.g., why they fell in
love, what either could see in the other, why another pair fell out, what
on earth was the matter with them.
§ 66
To the observer not looking beneath the surface with the scientific
instrument of precision constituted by the study of the unconscious, the
actions of two married people are as unaccountable as those of a tack
sliding uphill on a piece of smooth paper. The erotologists have looked
underneath and seen the magnet in the hand of another person and are not
surprised.
To the erotologists marriage is in no sense a lottery, but a situation
in which the causal factors are just as clearly natural as they are
either in a twelve-cylinder automobile that runs smoothly or in one that
snorts along with a couple of cylinders working. Anyhow a lottery is only
a matter of chance; and chance is only cause to which we either have
blinded ourselves or have not yet become sentient.
The erotologist can tell us definitely that in marriage the erotic
situation should be controlled by the husband, as the husband is in every
case the cause of the good or evil outcome of the match. Masculinity is
the unquenchable yearning to control the woman emotionally, erotically.
Femininity is the insatiable desire to be erotically controlled.
Everyone will admit that for a man to be erotically controlled by a woman
does not represent the peak of masculine attainment and that a woman’s
desire to control a man is, while common enough, not an expression of her
love instinct but of her ego instinct by which women are just as much
motivated as are men.
The erotologist tells us (the main thesis of this book) that the sole
solid bond of union in marriage is just this erotic control of the wife
by the husband. It is not complete and perfect if it does not, in all
activities strictly marital, supersede all egoistic trends. A woman may
as mother of her children, as lady of the house, as woman of business,
display in those spheres as many expressions of egoistic-social instinct
as she has opportunity for or as circumstances allow; but as wife she is
due only to constitute the controlled member of the complementary fusion
of the marital pair.
It is not without deep significance that the Anglo-Saxon word from
which “wife” is derived is allied to the root WIB which means “to
tremble.” It expresses an essential psychological truth. If the feminine
element in the _binary_, as I have called the perfect marital union, is
somewhat analogous to the surging sea on whose rocks or sand beaches it
continues to break, we see in the rocks or the strand the solid, at least
comparatively unwavering thing to which the surges conform themselves.
There need only be a comparative steadiness on the part of the masculine
element. He may tremble, too, but if only he tremble _less_ than she, he
will be the masculine and she the feminine element.
§ 67
The precipitate husband is over-precipitate only if he is or becomes more
so than his wife. There is no norm except a comparative one. He must have
control (and yet at the right time he may relinquish it); but at all
times he must have _more_ control over himself, and incidentally over
her, than she has over his erotic reactions, or over her own.
A woman in perfect control of her own erotic reactions, in the sense of
control through expression and not through repression or annihilation,
probably does not exist. But if she did she would make the perfect
prostitute. Such a woman could give any man the deepest satisfaction
of which he was capable—until he found that she, and not he, was
controlling her erotism. But the egoistic-social impulse operates as a
repressive factor even in the prostitute, and renders the completeness of
her positive control impossible for her; the more civilized the community
the more repressive the control.
A man married to any woman who is in better control of herself than he
is of himself is married to (but not mated with) a woman who is to him a
prostitute by whatsoever proportion of control she exercises over herself
more than he does over himself or over her. This is true both of the
negative control of repression on her part and of the positive control of
expression. For evidently if her repressive control makes her cold to his
advances she is of the common prostitute type as far as he is concerned.
He evokes no more real response from her than from the casual woman of
the street. However much simulated responsiveness the prostitute may
show, he knows unconsciously its unreality, and feels proportionately
disgusted. In the wife who is cold because of environmental influences in
her youth which the husband has not removed by his wholesome treatment
of her, the objective result is the same as in the prostitute who is
unresponsive from indifference or fear, or from the repression referred
to.
§ 68
Quite as obviously if the wife shows a greater control over the erotic
situation than the husband, a control through expression, he will be
unconsciously repelled by this unnatural factor in the situation,
no matter how much pleased he may be consciously by the rich, warm
femininity he has discovered in her.
It is this positive or expressive control of the erotic factor which
gives to some women the reputation of being designing, gives them the
appearance of being more erotic than the husband or lover, and in some
instances repels the man.
The possibility of greater erotic control on the part of the woman than
the man possesses should be a provoking thought to all husbands who are
overhasty in their handling of the love episode.
Any husband controls his wife erotically, if he actually does, only
by means of controlling himself. At minimum his control of himself is
just enough to secure his wife’s erotic acme preceding or at least
synchronizing with his own. That is the one and only way by which he can
attain and maintain marital success.
§ 69
The love drama is the term that applies to the relations of one man and
one woman for the time when they devote themselves to each other. It may
be an hour or a lifetime, but the hour-long period surely is a pitiful
experience, a one-act farce, compared with the grandeur of the lifelong
relation. A man who thinks he prefers a succession of short periods with
different women condemns himself unnecessarily to a course of action
which resembles the career of a tea-tester. He may become a connoisseur
in various flavours but he cannot learn much about women. He is a narrow
specialist with really no wide knowledge. Moreover such a man almost
never tests his own effect on women, but merely the different effects of
women on himself; and is therefore merely autoerotic, merely playing with
himself; and his various instruments are virtually impersonal.
§ 70
Man is instinctively embarrassed upon rousing a woman to full passion,
and finding it plays so much greater a part in her life than in his, and
that it requires so much more attention on his part than he feels he has
time to give.
That may explain why some men are so easily satisfied with a woman’s half
love and shy from it when it begins fully to develop. They run from one
woman to another, shirking the labour of drinking because they have not
the stomach to drink love to the lees.
“Sippers,” they might be called, or “tea-testers.” The tester is doomed
to a sample. He not only never consumes a full cup but never swallows a
drop. He has not the power to hold out. No man could drink a hundred cups
of different consignments of tea. Nor can one man thoroughly experience
more than one woman. The sippers of women would be as disconcerted as a
tea-tester who should be ordered to drink full cups of tea to report on
a hundred samples, if they were expected really to know the women they
sample. Their disconcertment would amount to an actual impotence.
§ 71
The essential unsatisfactoriness of the promiscuous sex life is
experienced poignantly by most men who attempt it. One wealthy man who
kept numerous mistresses, seventeen at one time, to be exact, came to an
analyst to see if he could not get some help in unifying his life. It
was not that he had any troubles coming from any acts on the part of the
women. Most of them knew of his relations with the others, and professed,
at any rate, to be free from jealousy. This is enough to show that he did
not love any of them.
Half consciously he realized that he had lost or never learned the truly
erotic art and though he attended to the large businesses he owned, he
felt a complete dissatisfaction with his own life not because it was
sinful and criminal but because it did not give him any real sense of
accomplishment. He was unmarried and among his large acquaintance of
marriageable young women there was one, whose femininity, he recognized,
was so rich that while, for many reasons he would have liked to propose
marriage to her, he knew he would be unable to control her erotism.
Knowing full well that he controlled the erotism of not a single one of
his seventeen mistresses, he correctly inferred that his methods were
faulty, and sought confidential help from the analyst to bring into full
consciousness the reasons for his attempting in the future to cultivate a
true and deep love for one woman.
His methods were shown to be faulty because of the fact that his
clandestine relations with the numerous women were on a plane exclusively
or too predominantly physical. He was made to realize that love is
not love that does not include the entire personality of the lover,
physical, mental and spiritual.
§ 72
The confrontation of a shallow sipper like this with really profound
femininity is a test of virility in the highest erotic sense. The man
perverted by traditional views of masculinity, which overvalue the
physical side, and unenlightened by the modern psychology of love is face
to face with a situation for which he is utterly unprepared.
A man’s so-called satisfaction, then, with the superficial surrender of
a woman up to the point where she consents to let him try to control her
erotism is not, however, satisfaction at all but a withdrawal from a test
of virility. This primary consent on the woman’s part is not a submission
but merely in effect a consent to examine or as it were to make a survey
of his manliness. Of this she is, of course, entirely unconscious. If she
were conscious of it she would have one of the traits of the promiscuous
woman. But even if it is unconscious in her it is just as operative as if
it were conscious. And the result of the test is also unconscious in the
woman, if the test shows that the man is found wanting.
Her reaction to the man found wanting is as various as is the upbringing
of women, from the immediate rejection in divorce on the grounds of
incompatibility to the lifelong slavery in which she gradually withers.
Under the present inanely stupid method of bringing up women in total
ignorance of sex, and in blindness to the truly erotic, a woman has no
means whatever of estimating a man’s erotic virility before marriage and
practically no standard of judging him after. If she had, she might do
something to get him to learn of the existence of true mating.
And if she could know and could tell her husband how he failed, she would
then have a chance of becoming happy. No really human man will choose
the greater of two evils or refuse the greater of two good things, no
matter when or how that choice is offered to him, although to him it may
be humiliating whether first or last, to have it laid before him by the
woman.
§ 73
But no whole man will be other than fired by this consent to test. If he
is cloyed by it, his being so demonstrates his inadequacy; it proves his
anesthesia, his insensibility, his blindness to the future possibilities
of complete binary love-living.
To him this failure of his, this revulsion of feeling at the precise
moment when he has entered the very lists of love, this slacker’s
attitude, seems not a desertion on his part, not a failure of his, but
a sudden loss of charm on her part. She is, upon trial, not what he had
expected and longed for. But the failure, the loss of charm are his, not
hers. He ought to be the charmer. He ought to have been informed that it
is his privilege and power to attain the pleasure of putting his woman
into another world of sheer exuberant joy—that his own pleasure in life
can be attained by no other means; and that the consent of the woman to
be his wife is a consent not to take one step with him, and then have
him vanish, but to travel the path of life-love to its end—a path that
is long and joyous, a path from which no seeing man, no man with eyes of
love, can ever wish to depart. For with him is happiness personified and
before him and leading him on is light.
§ 74
The acts and scenes and various episodes and strophes of this lifelong
drama are never more than parts, and are organically related each to the
other and to the whole life poem. No matter what one’s egoistic-social
impulses and activities are, the racial theme, i.e., emotional culture
and development, should be as far as possible continuous and its phrases
related. The racial theme is organic, emotional. The narrower national,
or sectional, theme in life is the intellectual one.
For the so-called sexual act the term _love episode_ has been substituted
in this book. Like a duet on an operatic stage it should be just as
much a combination of the melody of the emotions of each of the two
partners, and the harmony of both of their orchestras of emotions, as are
the melody and harmony arranged by the composer of an opera score. The
husband should be the composer.
It will be replied that the ordinary man is not of the intellectual
calibre of the Wagners, Gounods, and Verdis, and that if the love life is
to be so exalted in the ordinary marriage it would be a hopeless task,
for so few men have the intellectuality to create a work of art of such
dimensions.
But the greatness of composers and poets consists in their approaching
so near to life with media so inorganic as sound and sight; and while
music is enjoyed by most people, different styles and grades of music
have the characteristic of bringing the melody and harmony to a definite
and gratifying end. Music therefore essentially consists of the art of
producing a tension and finally a relaxation of human emotions by means
of sound.
Love as an art consists of the same production of tension and relaxation
in a rhythm whose first pulsation begins even in childhood and whose last
is coincident with the final heartbeat of the individual.
§ 75
Love, in the sense used above, practically includes every action of the
husband or wife in relation to each other, from the beginning of the
first act of love-living to the end of their joint life.
The love episode is not a violent activity for a brief space of five or
ten minutes. In its highest form it begins when either of the pair thinks
of any part of it. A true work of erotic art will progress from these
thoughts, through all the phases of verbal mention, or actual carrying
out of any preliminary—all the various verbal and other endearments, all
the caresses and changing contacts, in multitudinous variety of external
circumstances. It will progress through the purely physical part of it,
or that part which is regarded as purely physical (but which never is,
exclusively), and will continue for an hour to a day after the erotic
acme.
During this post-acme time all the thoughts and emotions of each will be
referred to the past episode and not to any future one. In the interim
between the evanescence of these thought-reverberations, and the growing
tension of another approaching love episode there may be a space of some
hours or a day or two, but, where there is a fully expressed love life,
never more than that.
§ 76
There is an unmistakable sign when the union of the two natures of a
man and a woman has taken place. It is not the procreation of children,
it is not living together only, it is not a joint bank account or any
mere superficial unity or congeniality of external (egoistic-social)
interests; but it is an emotional reaction at a time of intimate physical
communion, a flood of feeling of an absolutely unique character, which,
once experienced, leads true lovers to say that nothing in the world they
have ever heard of could be in any respect like it—a flood of feeling,
which, like the perigee tide, enters and fills every nook and cranny of
the being of each, just as the waters of an estuary rise and fill and
overflow when the sun and the moon both pull together and the wind blows
into the river’s mouth.
And the first time that emotional flood tide is experienced is nothing to
what later psychosomatic communion may attain. Man and wife looking back
on their honeymoon thirty years before realize poignantly how infinitely
more exalted and overwhelming is their present-day love communion than
were the unsteady, brief and trembling, uncoördinated embraces of their
early married life. True, they looked at each other with eyes of love
long years before, but such simple, ignorant, artless infantile eyes,
that looked without seeing half there was to see. They have learned
each other as they never could have learned any two, much less three or
more, of the other sex. Each has learned how to give, and that riches
consist only in power to give, and that power to give is developed only
by giving, just as skill in swimming comes from swimming and not from
standing on the shore.
So they immerge each day into the invigorating ocean, and glory in the
rise and fall of its surf, in its colour and in its refreshing coolness;
and when they become too old to swim, they will sit by the open fire
and exchange sweet reminiscences of bygone plunges, until their spirits
together breast the waves of infinity and eternity forever.
§ 77
One of the factors of the general marital muddle that constitutes most
marriages is the ignorance of husband or wife, or both, about whether
their sex life, if they still continue it, is normal. What are the
evidences that the consummation of marital life has taken place as
satisfactorily as could be wished, or as could occur with the pair in
question, or (as is supposed at any rate) takes place with the newly
married lovers on their honeymoon?
It is not enough merely to be able to say they are happy, for they will
sometimes say so whether they know they are or not, and they will in some
cases not know. In fact few people in or out of the wedded state know
whether they are truly happy or not or how to become happy if they are
not so.
If a husband and wife are happy together they will have begun to make
their marital life a love drama, by the frequent enactment of the love
episode as described in these pages and their outlook upon life will be
buoyant and positive.
§ 78
In _The Secret Places of the Heart_, H. G. Wells has plainly indicated
that the love episode has taken place between Sir Richmond Hardy and Miss
Grammont. He writes only of the calm which follows the emotional storm,
and in these words (p. 253):
“At the breakfast table it was Belinda (Miss Grammont’s companion) who
was the most nervous of the three, the most moved, the most disposed to
throw a sacramental air over their last meal together. Her companions had
passed beyond the idea of separation; it was as if they now cherished a
secret satisfaction at the high dignity of their parting. Belinda in some
way perceived they had become different. They were no longer tremulous
lovers. They seemed sure of one another and with a new pride in their
bearing.”
§ 79
Some husbands treat their wives with a satisfactory erotic technique
from the first, and a few continue it through their entire married life.
Others err from the first, through ignorance, and still others are
backsliders in the pursuit of the erotic art; and true love departs from
these.
There have been others who by accident have found after years of wedded
life the key to marital happiness, or have been instructed by some
erotologist—some physician who knows or some intimate friend.
The story of one husband who happened to discover for himself a secret
that had escaped him for years is here given:
It was in the twentieth year of their marriage. Their son was eighteen
and their daughter sixteen. Another daughter was not yet born.
They were off for a week in the month of August in the Adirondacks. All
the morning they had tramped over the hills until they came to a lake,
solitary, shut in by forests, a mountain overtowering the side opposite
them—reflected green and blue in the waters that met their eyes as they
approached a beach of fine white sand.
Sitting awhile they rejoiced in having found so fine a place to eat
their lunch. They were miles from any human habitation. A heron floated
majestically through the air. A kingfisher hurried noisily athwart their
view. A fish jumped out of the water a dozen rods away and made a circle
of waves which slowly enlarged until it became lost to sight.
Instinctively they both threw off their clothes and stepped down to the
water’s edge hand in hand.
“I’ll beat you in!”
“Let’s swim to that little island.”
In they splashed and swam the first few yards under water, he leading the
way, she following, but his eyes closely watching for any indication on
her part of fatigue.
“Stay near me, Matey, there’s nothing but water where I am.”
“All right, Naiade, put your hand on my shoulder and rest awhile. We’re
almost there!”
He felt her warm hand on his shoulder and her thumb on the back of his
neck, and the warmth of the sun on his rapidly drying hair—there in the
pure water almost arrived at the wooded islet. He felt the impact of the
water on his flank stirred by the leisurely motions of her other hand and
arm as she made as if to help him tow her to shore.
They climbed up and sat on a mossy bank out of sight of every living
thing, looking from a shady spot at the lake shimmering in the sunlight.
“Our lunch is over there. We should have brought it with us. Nevertheless
I’ll feed upon thy lips, Corinna.
“What an experience this is! I never had a swim like this before. A
perfect day and a perfect place. Isolation complete. Thou beside me
singing in the wilderness, but this is a very Eden and we are undisputed
owners of it for this hour. I’m rich in time. I’d just as soon stay here
till sunset. An absolutely perfect place to rest and play. I feel as if
I could do anything—omnipotent as the gods of old, dependent on nothing.
It thrills me to think of myself—just me—and you—just you—the only humans
in all the world we see. If I were a magician I’d turn this moss into a
magic carpet and we’d fly through space.”
“Oh, Matey dear, I feel as if I _were_ flying! Tell me more like that.
Continue the story. Tell it softly close in my ear.”
“Up, out from this islet we are flying, without deafening roar of
airplane engine, but just soaring, soaring, wheeling in the air like
eagles, you and I together. Far subtler motion than the intermittent
strokes with which we paddled to that green islet now so far below us.
Blue sky all about and sunshine warm upon my shoulders and your breasts.
See down below us now a cloud. See our silhouette dotting the grey
mist of it. And look, dearest! That rainbow of which our shadow is the
centre. It makes a complete circle. Did you ever seen the whole circle of
iridescence like that? You never could on earth. Look again, for soon we
shall pass that cloud. A perfect circle of perfect rainbow colours—symbol
of infinite beauty.”
“Stop, Matey, this flight of yours is too thrilling. Take me down to
earth.”
* * * * *
“Matey, dear, in all our twenty years of love, I never knew you till this
day. Why did you not teach me about you before this?”
They were now slowly swimming through the placid waters of the lake
toward the beach of white sand whence they had adventurously departed two
hours before. The sun warmed their heads and the cool waters of the lake
caressed their glowing bodies.
They stepped upon the sandy beach again.
They devoured their lunch with eagerness.
They now, while eating, having dried in the sun, by force of habit put on
their conventional incumbrances of sex-differentiating toggery, took up
their staffs and turned their backs upon the lake with its silvery waves
and white sandy beach and slowly wended their way hand in hand through
the forest, to the road leading to the inn.
As they walked along the mountain road slipping on stones and gravel each
saw in the other’s eyes a new flame of love never lighted there before.
“I wonder, Matey, what it was that made this day’s adventure the grand
adventure of my life? I never saw you look so fine before. I never felt
closer to you than I do this minute. Why have you never before told me a
story like that, that fired my imagination as yours seemed to be?”
“I suppose I never felt fired just that way myself. Ideas occurred to me
I’d never had before. Besides, I’ve done a pile of thinking lately—and
reading, too. I think I’ve succeeded in piecing out a pretty good fairy
tale about us. It makes me much more interested in your view of the world
than ever I was before. But I can tell you other stories now. I think
I’ve learned how to fire your imagination.”
“You have, indeed! I’m eager for the next. When will it be?”
“Almost any time we have an hour or two alone. We need time to get up
steam, so to speak. We don’t need to swim in a mountain lake every time
either. I think you got your particular thrill because you had me and my
mind absolutely all to yourself.”
“Can I ever get that again?”
“Surely, dear heart, for when I saw for the first time that look in your
eyes, which was not joy alone but pure fire, I learned something about
you I never knew before. I realized that you yourself are a far more
complex and interesting personality with infinitely more potentialities
than ever I had dreamed of. Do you think now I would ever stop telling
you stories like that?”
“I don’t remember a word of it except the perfect rainbow circle. The
rest was silence. But it had somehow a world of meaning for me. I know
we swam. I know we couldn’t fly, but you made me think we did, which is
quite as good for me.”
§ 80
“Dear, why has it taken us twenty years to love each other as we do now?”
“It was our ignorance, which was so dense that it did not know it
was ignorant. That’s the blackest kind. What we knew was that we had
affection for each other, and for our children, but the lack of passion
was not clearly sensed, because there was no article in our creed of
love that declared passion to be a necessary factor in our marriage. We
knew the phrase ‘all in all to each other’; we identified ourselves in
countless superficial ways in addition to the really solid identification
represented in our children, but while we did it with our intellects we
really did not do it with our hearts. We have not been truly united,
truly fused, until this day.
“It needn’t have taken us twenty years, or even one year, for there
are people who instinctively soar in the same ecstatic flight in their
honeymoon, that we achieved only after twenty years of external devotion
and watchfulness. But those whose early married life is instantly
complete in total physical and emotional fusion think everyone else is
the same as they are and they don’t know what they _have_ any more than
we did not know what we did not have. A colour-blind man in a world
of people all colour-blind would not suspect his affliction. Possibly
it wouldn’t be an affliction. He might only laugh at the extraordinary
persons who say they can see colours in things visible, just as we now
consider people freaks who say they can see colour in sounds.”
“Do you think, dear, that most people are blind to the kind of love we
see now?”
“I do, for the vision of the circular rainbow on top of the cloud is
something that really requires a certain fine sensitivity that is the
product of civilization, and depends on the many factors of civilized
life. I could not, as my remote ancestors could, carry you off your feet
in a literal sense, and dominate you by sheer physical strength, which
would have been the only earthbound flight possible with men of that age.
Civilization has transmuted physical strength into mental, moral and
spiritual strength. And just as physical strength was sensibly evident
in every action and motion of the body, so now, in our present state of
civilization, it is obscured or obliterated and every mental reaction to
our environment is taking its place. To some women the strength of this
mental reaction is invisible, and even today they can love with passion
only the physically perfect man. But the majority of women now have been
educated to the point of realizing that physical strength may be present
in men whose mental and moral development is very small and that mental
and moral strength may exist even in the men whose physique is slight and
even frail.”
“Do you think you’re so much stronger mentally, morally and spiritually
than you were? Did you cultivate that strength consciously? Could you
tell others how to do it?”
“Yes, dear one, to all three questions, and so are you. The thing that
finally touched off this day’s passionate union was our realization,
helped by the increasing frankness forced by modern science on all vital
matters, that sex life is a part of the love life, and that not only
is sex not exclusively physical, but it is more mental than physical.
Men as ancient as Ovid knew that love is an art, but they did not know
it as well as we do today. If it is an art, it can be taught, it must
be taught. The reason it has not been taught is the taboo on sex. But
that is being lifted gradually and people are beginning to realize
that sexless love is as impossible as birth is impossible without the
fusion of male and female germ cells. The ancient love manuals were all
composed by men to enable men to get greater physical pleasure out of
what they called love. The modern idea is that man and woman together
are each to contribute an equal and complementary part to a spiritual
fusion comparable to the fusion of two human germ cells, and that as the
male cell causes a reaction on the entirety of the female cell, so the
female cell causes a total reaction on the entirety of the male cell.
To say that either absorbs the other is quite misleading. They stand
side by side and merely melt together, forming another different cell
which is the combination of all the properties of the two. This idea of
love implies that the two lovers be equally frank and open in every way,
concealing nothing of their own feelings from each other.”
“But, dearest, some women, I’m sure, are unable to express themselves,
and others instinctively avoid revealing their true feelings, fearing
perhaps to reveal because they may be giving away something it might be
to their advantage to keep. They think that if they let any man, even
their newly married husband, know how much they love him, they will
cheapen themselves in their husband’s eyes, where they desire to be
valued the most.”
“Do you think you would love me less if you felt you owned me less? If
you did, your love has possibly too much of ownership in it. Love is not
possession, any more than it is the inability to possess.”
§ 81
The erotic acme is the detumescence following a tumescence which
activates, in order to secure, a repose which can exist in consciousness
only by contrast with the intense activity, vivification and vitalization
of spheres of experience otherwise remaining without or beyond one’s ken.
A kiss which is ever so little retarded, a youth laying softly his lips
on those of a fair maiden, and, for the period of a breath or two not
taking them away, feeling that not alone the lips touched hers nor yet
only his arms embraced her, is filled with a natural response which
tingles through his frame to his very fingertips and makes soft and
undulating the sea crag on which they stand. More of her at once would be
too keen a pleasure, would make him faintly dizzy with a joy to which he
is unoriented.
The halo of that first kiss fades not in a day but lingers through his
sleep, recurring poignantly like the after image of the sun caught by
chance directly in his eyes.
All his being is pervaded by the sweet breathlessness of that virgin
experience of a maiden’s lips, a touch that spreads like fire through his
body and craves quenching by another kiss which but extends the influence
of the first.
“Our lips have met, a touch compared with which our hand-clasp was a
grinding of rocks in the mad surging of the ocean surf.
“Our lips have met, a fragrance above the honeysuckle and the roses of
the hedge.
“Our lips have met, our breasts have asked us too, why should not they
repose on one another. Our hands have known each other’s sides, and
flanks have questioned why they also might not have the soft contact.
“Why should not all the remotest parts of us clamor to share in this
meeting of two lovers’ lips? Each of us is whole and every part fired to
yearn for what every other part feels.
“I look into your eyes and see the world. All that invites to do and feel
and learn. There’s not a drop of blood within my veins that does not
hurry on its joyous course, to tell the uttermost confines of me, that
here in you I find a counterpart, for every region of my living self.
“We cannot part for hours. This sandy shore, warm with an August sun,
shall be our couch, remote from interruption. You are mine and I am yours
for now and evermore. Not till I know you all, and you feel me pervading
all the regions of your soul, shall we be able then to take anew the
threads of our existence in the world and weave with them a common robe
for both in which enclosed we act toward our fellows, a single person
binary in form.”
* * * * *
“My breathing now is calm like yours; our blood is throbbing softly in
our veins, we two went through a fire together, keen, that welded our two
spirits into one—inseparable, self-contained, at rest.
“Are other men and women thus close fused, each through the other’s eyes
beholding life? If not, dear one, the only other joy, not yet by us slow
tasted, is to look and see how we can make them also feel the deep-down
inner satisfaction pierce the very roots of their own being too, without
which we should lack companionship, and feel ourselves unique and lonely.
Thus, by throwing this same brilliant light of life with which we have
ourselves been newly filled, about us, we can see what ne’er before we
saw back in the times when naught we knew of this glad melting each in
other’s soul here on the sandy rock-bound ocean shore, where wave and
gravel mingle, air and sea and sun and sky; one universal touch and
penetration of each other’s heart. Now we are whole that fragments were
before.”
§ 82
The rationalistic thought may occur to some men that a woman’s all can
be taken at one love episode. It may come from her uttering words to the
effect that she is all his. If _his_ means _with his destructive mark
on it_ she is utterly his, to be sure, if he has ruined her. But by a
perfect love episode one can ruin only the egoistic-social value of this
woman for some other man. For any other man her sexual value would be
only increased by the proper kind of love episode.
But her erotic value is something that can exist only for the man whom
she loves and who loves her. The first properly erotic love episode
can never destroy or ruin but only create, or begin the creation, of a
woman out of a gynecoid female. A true woman according to the use of the
term in this book is a female who has become fused with a male. Then
she becomes a woman and he a man. The nature of this fusion has been
discussed elsewhere.
§ 83
As a woman’s all cannot be taken at one love episode, except that “all”
which is constituted by her strictly egoistic-social property value, it
follows that in the true erotic sense, nothing is taken unless possibly
as one should chip a piece of marble from a block out of which one was to
carve a statue of the Goddess of Love. The fragment of marble chiselled
away at the first stroke of the hammer is no part of the statue.
§ 84
The thought that the husband is getting an egoistic-socially valuable
possession by the exercise of his rights at the first love episode is
therefore quite absurd. He is performing an act which is in the nature of
a creation, if rightly carried out, but which is destruction if he does
not himself hold his instincts under absolute control.
That the love episode does not take away from woman anything that makes
her poorer is indicated by the fact, noticed by Ellis and others,
that woman’s erotic nature is deeper and stronger than man’s. For the
development of this great erotic nature it is as absolutely necessary for
her to be controlled by a man quite master of his own sex instincts, as
it is necessary for an ovum to be met by a zoösperm, if it is going to
develop any further than its ovum condition.
At a single love episode, neither can the woman’s all be taken by a man
nor can her development be completed. The first episode is only the
beginning of a development, that needs the entire excess energies of her
man for the rest of their joint lives. In the sections on virginity it
will also appear that except in a superficial egoistic-social sense, her
psychical virginity cannot always be terminated at the first love episode.
§ 85
The thought that she has given her all to him is worked out still further
in the irrational conclusion, which comes to some men’s minds, that there
may be nothing left for himself for a future occasion. Therefore he will
not take all this time, so as to leave a little for next time.
Possibly getting all of her at one stroke may be the root thought in Don
Juanism. _Jus primæ noctis_ may have originated from the idea that the
noble lord should get all there was in the vicinity to get; and he was
exercising his right to own and get everything in sight. The men who
cool in their affections (or whose passions cool) immediately after
the possession of the persons of their love objects may be inspired by
exactly this egoistic-social thought, that there is a possession that may
be acquired by means of one love episode, after which the woman has no
more to give.
§ 86
In phantasying, in his own ecstasy, the complete surrender of the woman
(cf. § 158), a man may also phantasy her being exhausted, dry like an
eaten orange, or, like a flower, drained of its honey by a bee; not
realizing that the beginning of a woman’s love is only the beginning of
an infinite growth, which he alone is able to develop for himself, and
which no other man can develop for him—that, in short, a man who deserts
one woman after another is simply showing an essentially perverted
appetite.
What any one of these tasted and rejected women might later be developed
into, in the shape of a full-blooded rich, warm femininity, he has not
the intelligence to conceive. Possibly the cynical roué might say—look at
the older women, are many of them attractive? To which we should reply
no, but the reason they are not is simply that they were not properly
loved into a state of full erotic development, in which they would have
preserved the attractiveness of youth.
§ 87
The only true human love drama is one that has an organic relation to a
whole lifetime of love. To the Don Juan type of ravisher of virgins the
love episode, as part of a life drama with unity in it, does not exist.
He satisfies himself with beginnings, with staking out foundations for
other people to build and live in the homes constructed by their hands,
not realizing, for his imagination is poor and weak, how soon his little
stakes will be pulled up and thrown away by the first workers on the
house, even if they do not entirely reject his plan’s outlines.
The only true love of a man for a woman is that in which he studies her
reactions to his own behaviour, and cultivates that power of his, which
is the innate power residing in any whole man, to control the entire
emotional life of one woman, let her intellectual life be what it may.
“Why,” the man of the world may say, “should any man be satisfied with
only one woman, when, if he has personal attractiveness, he may find
hundreds of women ready to fall into his arms, and may drink the love
life to the dregs?” What Enobarbus said of Cleopatra may be said of any
woman, if she be developed by a man, as she should be.
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety; other women cloy
The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies....
Woman’s infinite variety, supposed in Shakespeare’s day to have been
embodied in the arch-dispenser of delights, Cleopatra, was a rare
phenomenon; but the modern view is that the variety is present in every
woman, just as the fourscore keys are in every piano. In this sense,
then, woman’s infinite variety is dependent on man’s control of her
emotional reactions, no woman being full woman unless and until she has
been completely manned.
§ 88
No human male, however, can completely man more than one woman, any more
than one gonad can unite with more than one other germ cell. Complete
fusion of two cells requires the entirety of one cell uniting with
the entirety of another. This is the type of physical and psychical
immortality. The union of two single cells contains the potentiality
of development of all the qualities inherent in both, but in new
combinations.
In the psychosomatic union of two individuals there is the same
possibility of infinite variety in the physical and mental reactions,
only if the union between them is, like the fusion of the two single
cells, a complete total and exclusive union each with the other.
The fact that of the thousands of egg cells produced by one woman no
two can fuse with each other, and that of the billions of spermatozoa
produced by one man no two can fuse together, but that any one male germ
cell can completely fuse with any one female germ cell is the prototype
of a perfect full marriage, and is the suggestion that probably no
couples need be unhappy; for happiness is a matter of fusion, and fusion
can be accomplished by the removal of ignorance due to tradition.
§ 89
The right of the wife to experience the erotic acme at every love episode
is only beginning to be admitted. Up to the present time the husband has
generally gone on the principle of taking his wife’s body for the fine
physical catharsis he fancies it produces in himself.
Taking a woman’s body, however, for the fine emotional catharsis, without
“considering too curiously” just how it strikes the woman is manifestly,
to any thoughtful man, merely a one-sided affair. It involves only as
a negative quantity the results of his action upon the woman, because
erotically the result is negative in her case. The most it can do is
to stir her emotions a little, leave her with more or less ungratified
desire, a tension which in the end is most harmful to her.
Only a man whose mentality is below par or undeveloped can feel himself
fully satisfied with an attempt at a purely physical love episode like
this. To his unconscious it can be but the stepping up a step that
isn’t there, a striking out at empty air. For the exaltation (which
would come from passion reciprocated) is indelibly registered on his
unconscious as a negative quantity. It is a dent in a surface intended
by nature to be convex. In the fully developed man all the sensibilities
registering response in the mate are present, and if they are not given
the opportunity to function, the lack of it is definitely recorded in the
unconscious. The man has as much right biologically to a response in his
wife as the wife has a right to be sympathetically handled.
In a time soon to come men will take into consciousness and into
conscious control all instinctive actions, and all these unconscious
lacks; and will so plan their love that the absence of response will
be avoided. The woman’s right to be made to respond will be finally
acknowledged.
§ 90
The right of woman to experience such stirring up of unconscious depths
of soul as is caused by the erotic acme of the love episode, and the
advantage to her health and general welfare coming from such stirring
are two separate questions. Havelock Ellis has admitted that the woman’s
right to love and all it can include is not a right in a political or
even an ethical sense, any more than the right to be happy.
But for the existence of the relation of a higher type of erotism to
health of body and mind physiological science is piling up proof every
year. There is a positive relation, a direct connection, of cause and
effect. Only the fullest use of all the faculties makes the fullest and
therefore the happiest life.
Response as an actual manifestation on the wife’s part may be absent
while there is a repressed response present. In other words the desire
and gratification of it may both occur in her, but below the level of
consciousness. A previous attraction which drew her toward her husband
when he was her lover may have been repressed by some gauche behaviour of
his. Desire, even after conscious passion has cooled, may nevertheless
remain in the unconscious. If consciously accepted, desire is accompanied
by a perceptible physical condition of tumescence. If not consciously
accepted, either the tumescence does not enter consciousness or it is not
in the same organs it would be in if one were consciously entertaining
desire.
In the absence of the proper or suitable substitute gratification, the
increase of blood supply to specific organs gradually diminishes and the
desire gradually subsides; but there is still left a nerve tension that
is closely bound up with various ideas, images and other predominantly
mental states.
Sex desires may be aroused and even if not appropriately gratified, will
subside of themselves. An automatic relaxation of all tensions regularly
takes place in children, who also are much more facile than adults in the
acceptance of substitute gratifications.
§ 91
But after the sexual synthesis of puberty the desires are not only much
more insistent but much more definite and specific. Still they can be and
are repeatedly repressed by many men and most women. That they can be so
repressed is the reason why asceticism has been so emphasized by many
religions. The religious views of many people render uncomfortable the
actual emergence, into consciousness, of any sexual desires whatever.
If the training of the individual has not been such as to render
conscious the manifestation of the sex desire, it then does not appear as
a tumescence in the genital region, in many cases, but as a swelling or a
pain, or a hardness somewhere else, or as an emotion of disappointment,
disgust or hate. Some deeply religious people seem to prefer these
emotions, in spite of their destructive nature, to the constructive
emotions of truly erotic love.
And we are impressed with the irony of fate which condemns innocent
people to accept an unwholesome in place of a wholesome emotion, and
makes some people think they are justified in telling others what
emotions they shall have.
§ 92
The right of woman to experience the erotic acme would be immediately
conceded by every man, if he could in any way get into his mind a visual
image of mangled feelings. The tortures of Tantalus, Ixion and Sisyphus
of Greek legend should be kept in mind, and the erotically unsatisfied
woman regarded as a living, present human being, thirsty and standing in
the middle of a pool of crystal water, which constantly recedes from her
parched lips as they bend to drink; or tied to a wheel which, as it is
rotated, makes her sick and dizzy; or with huge effort rolling a heavy
stone up a hill that has no ending.
The right of a woman to satisfaction even if not conceded by a
hypothetical monster of selfishness, her husband, might be admitted if
he should be made aware of the detriment to his own psyche received
from her condition. It is surely not an exaggeration to say that to be
in daily relations with any human being who is so twisted and bent by
unrelaxed tensions that she can hardly be called sane, is a fate that
no man would choose unless he perversely wished to drive himself mad.
He might see his own advantage, if not her right, an advantage which he
quite clearly recognizes in all egoistic-social spheres. He will insist
on having his material environment as perfect as possible through his own
personal effort or supervision. He will insist on having the plumbing,
wiring and every other installation of house, garage, shop, store and
factory in the finest possible condition; realizing that any imperfection
will reflect directly upon himself. But he commonly does not see that
the reactions of his wife in the most intimate relations of marital life
should be made, not by mere supervision as of a physician but by his own
personal acts, absolutely perfect in every respect, and that his chief
responsibility in life is to do this very thing, without which all his
other forms of efficiency are of negligible importance.
§ 93
One’s wife is the closest part of one’s objective ego. She is at least
that. Many men are of course careless of their own bodies and personal
appearance. They recognize, however, that the responsibility for these is
their own and no one else’s. But their wives are above all things their
complementary bodies, and practically as much their own responsibility
as their own personal corporeal systems. A man may conceivably think his
wife has no right to happiness but as part of himself he must see that
she is really happy. She is as important for his welfare at least as his
arms or legs, which he would not choose to have cramped or palsied. Yet a
man with an unsatisfied wife is as personally and intimately defective in
himself as if he had a withered hand, and he is much more responsible for
the wife’s condition than he is for that of his other members.
§ 94
In the non-fecundating periods in the lives of the lower animals they
spend their energies in either seeking food or hibernating. We humans,
after the work of providing food and shelter is finished, have a surplus
of energy to work off. After procreating our children we need to develop,
in a sense to create, ourselves as humans advancing above the animals,
not as humans descending to animal levels. This development has been
tried in various ways by different men and women in different ages. Some
have given their energies to religion, to philanthropy, to charity, to
arts, to commerce. Few have seen the importance of developing the proper
human emotions.
At the present stage of civilization all objects of study, except the
last, have been worked over so thoroughly that there is nothing new under
the sun. Religions have been analyzed, codified, classified; philanthropy
and charity have been endowed, institutionalized and organized. There
seems no longer any development possible in the technique of the
various arts comparable to what was done centuries ago. Commerce and
applied science are already elaborated into an almost incomprehensible
complexity. Human emotions, however, and _par excellence_ love, have only
just begun to be sensed as a new field and source of human welfare.
It would seem a strange prophecy to make (yet all prophecies are
strange) that, inside of five hundred years, or even fifty years, men’s
excess energies would be devoted to love-making, instead of almost
exclusively to the pursuit of egoistic-social ends. And yet that is
what the renaissance of the erotic values of life will certainly bring
about. Tarde says that “if the ambition of power, the regal wealth of
American or European millionairism once seemed nobler, love now more
and more attracts to itself the best and highest parts of the soul,
where lies the hidden ferment of all that is greatest in science and
art, and more and more those studious and artist souls multiply who,
intent on their peaceful activities, hold in horror the business men
and the politicians and will one day succeed in driving them back. That
surely will be the great and capital revolution of humanity, an active
psychological revolution; the recognized preponderance of the meditative
and contemplative, the lover’s side of the human soul, over the feverish,
expansive, rapacious and ambitious side. And then it will be understood
that one of the greatest of social problems, perhaps the most arduous of
all, has been the problem of love.”
§ 95
Let it not be thought that truly and sublimely intense erotic occupation
is a thing that weakens men for the carrying out of great projects. The
greatest project is the successful living together of men and nations,
and this has not been approached, being as far from us now as the
nearest fixed star. The union of man and woman into the complete binary
individual is the first and essential step toward the formation of the
social group which will have its first perfectly successful existence
when all its individuals are binaries consisting each of a man and a
woman who have become fused into an individual.
Then and not until then will questions of class, nationality and race be
settled. There will probably be no separate and mutually antagonistic
nations. Men will not be strong enough to create the hologamous[17]
binary individual until they are emotionally strong enough and simple
enough to realize the supremacy of erotic over egoistic-social values.
§ 96
A fundamental principle of erotics is that in the relation of husband
and wife, this condition of preparedness for the husband’s relaxation of
his erotic tension is the erotic acme of the wife herself. This is the
pattern referred to at the beginning of the last section.
The emotional relaxation of the husband is, from the biological
viewpoint, essentially inept and silly if it occurs in the presence of
a woman unprepared for it. It is ridiculous enough anywhere else than
in the woman’s _presence_; but she is not all present, spiritually,
mentally, psychically, no matter how close physically, if she be not
herself in the very climax of erotic acme. His emotional relaxation,
occurring at any time previous to the complete alignment of the totality
of her personality solely in the erotic direction is as inept as falling
into the water completely clothed.
It is as if Nature had said unambiguously to man:
“Your happiness depends on your own emotional control of the emotions
of your mate. She should never know that you have lost control of your
emotions. If you do, you are a mere puling infant. It is therefore your
duty to make her lose control of her erotic emotions.
“Only in case you are able to exalt her to this altitude of supermundane
excitement, have you any right to lose control of your own emotions.
You can then let them go, give free rein to them; and you will probably
both come to at the same time, she not knowing definitely exactly what
has happened to her, but surprised, delighted, awed, overwhelmed at the
beauty and wonder of it. She knew that being in love was pleasant. She
did not know that the reward of being in love was a flight of illimitable
velocity through the azure empyrean beyond the stars and back again.”
CONSUMMATION
Burning—relentless burning—
With the gently caressing fires that will not be calmed.
A delicious sense of stifling.
Suddenly a fierce storm of sharp, exquisite pains ...
Like little electric needle shocks ...
Pierces every tiny part of your body—
Till you are raised out of this earth.
A great calm comes over you then—
And you open languorously, luxuriously
Like an enormous, fresh passion flower opens its petals to the sun.
Something comes and snuggles into its petals like a honey bee
And they slowly close again—and then—just nothing then—
The sensation of having no sensations—great peace, vast peace—and
Nothing, nothing, nothing.
—FLORENCE E. VON WIEN.
§ 97
So far as the woman’s slower progress than man’s toward the climax
requires, as much time as possible should be given to each detail of the
love episode. It will be shown in the chapter on control[18] that this
time, and the opportunity for observation which it gives, is an important
factor in the essentially human element of male control. Only its
crassest animal form, its acutest gasp, is “brief as the lightning in the
collied night.”
In the love episode, at the time when contact is deepest and most
intense, one sees, if one reasons biologically, that the time that would
be chosen by nature for the injection of spermatozoa (of the millions of
which only one is to be chosen by chance to be united to the single ovum
ordinarily developed each month) is the time when the container which is
destined to be the seat of the future life was either most open or most
turned toward the source of the spermatozoa.
As it is believed that the woman’s erotic acme is either coincident with
or associated with this change in shape of the innermost organ, we have
here a prototype giving more rationally the pattern for carrying out this
phase of the love episode.
In other words the wife is to be prepared for an emotional cataclysm on
the part of the husband. Just as the organs of any two animals have to
come together simultaneously so not only is this apposition necessary in
humans, but in them there is a psychical apposition, a rapport of purely
spiritual quality needed in order that the real spiritual fusion may take
place.
§ 98
In animals simultaneity is gained by the same mechanism as that which
arranges for cross fertilization of some plants, i.e., the time for the
impregnation is short or instantaneous in one sex and long in the other.
In animals the female is ready only for a short time, the male always.
The female animal is prepared by physiological changes, the female human
by psychical development. In humans the female is supposed by some men
to be always ready until by their ignorance and diabolical treatment
they find their women never ready. That which occurs in an animal is a
purely physiological heat. In women it has dwindled into almost vestigial
proportions in comparison to the psychically caused excitement. This
psychic element is enough, however (if rightly understood and managed
by the man), to make it safe to say that a woman may always be made
ready, even though by her own constitution and upbringing she may never
know it and so not admit it. The female animal never suffers the male’s
approaches except in her estrual period. Man has it in his power to cause
in woman the psychic analogue of the estrus at any time.
§ 99
Ellis (op. cit., III, 251) remarks that the sexual impulse tends to
involve, to a greater extent in women than in men, the higher psychic
region. Therefore sex, tending in men to be exclusively physical, needs
in them to be raised to the erotic level of the psychical, in order to
give man the master key to the situation. Thus the rapport (which is
psychical and not physical) can be established. The greater psychic
diffusion of love instincts in woman gives man the opportunity for a
complete dominance over her erotism as soon as he learns to exercise
it. In woman’s sexuality “lies the earth, all Danaë to the stars,”
symbolizing the direction from which man should approach woman, from a
psychically more exalted position, and not from below, like mephitic air
from a cave.
As one cannot put a finger into a ring, unless a ring is there, so in the
love episode the husband must be sure that his emotional power will not,
like a blow wasted in the air, fall upon a situation most inappropriate,
unreceptive and unproductive of the end sought. A blacksmith must be sure
the anvil is in place before he takes up his hammer.
It is obvious that, if the relaxation of erotic tension on the man’s part
is to do the work, which it certainly has to do, it must have a condition
which is appropriate for the most telling effect of this work. One of
the best ways in which this condition can be produced in some women is
outlined in the following section.
§ 100
A technique of the love episode has been described and advocated under
several names (Karezza, Male Continence, Dr. Zugassent’s Discovery, etc.)
which consists in that degree of virile control whereby, while the erotic
acme may be produced in the wife, the husband reserves his. There is no
doubt whatever that this technique is of greatest possible advantage to
the wife, if she herself reaches the acme. Opinions differ as to its
possible harm for the husband. It was the principle which the Oneida
Community (organized in 1847 and discontinued as a eugenic experiment
in 1879) followed for the 30 years of its existence with no observable
injury to the men. It is also spontaneously discovered and sporadically
used by married couples at the present day independently of the
propaganda in its favour, conducted by a woman writer who has published
the book _Karezza_.[19]
There is also no doubt whatever that only a comparatively few men are
willing, and some fewer are quite unable to control themselves to this
degree necessary to postpone their own erotic acme until a future time.
The ability to do this is the most potent factor possible in producing
that superiority of virile over feminine power which forms the greatest
fusing medium between the two partners.
§ 101
Indeed, it may be confidently asserted that the accomplishment of this
erotic _tour de force_ on the part of the husband (during which he may
observe the greatest possible effect that man can have upon woman)
gives the husband a sense of exaltation that could not be paralleled, a
feeling of power that produces in him a keenness and penetrating sense of
satisfaction that he has never before felt. After an experience of this
kind, he is fully alive, as he never was before, to the possibilities
of erotic ecstasy emanating from the preliminaries and every several and
separate phase of the love episode as responded to by his wife.
This entire reconstruction of the love episode not only throws into
strong light the value of the preliminary and intermediary phases of the
love episode, but it puts, in the husband’s mind, so much value on the
first and second acts of the play that the actual occurrence of his own
erotic acme has then a much lessened importance.
If he can so transform his wife, as he sees her transformed before his
very eyes, and perceives in every sense quality of consciousness, and
if he can thus express his love any time he wishes, his former hurried,
perfunctory and mechanical sexuality appears to him as a dried leaf as
compared to the full-blown rose of his present triumph. He recognizes
that he has stepped from one level of existence to a higher plane of
life, and that he is human in a new and enlarged sense.
§ 102
Kisses may stale but the occasional practice of this reserve on the
husband’s part in the love episode will never stale, but will compare
to the recharging of an exhausted battery, to the filling of a vessel
drained, to the incoming tide. It is a far greater stimulant to happiness
of all kinds than anything else discovered by mankind.
That this is rare and exceedingly hard to get, and that it involves
self-control on the part of the husband and abandonment of self-control
on the part of the wife, makes it like one of those elements in the
erotic situation mentioned by Freud as having been necessarily injected
into it by man, whenever he found love too easy and too free.
“It is easy to prove that the psychical value of the need for love
sinks, as soon as its satisfaction is made easy. An obstruction is
needed to drive the libido upward, and where the natural obstructions to
satisfaction do not apply, men have at all times conventionally inserted
them, in order to be able to enjoy love. This is true of individuals
as well as of nations. In times when the satisfaction of love found no
difficulties, as occasionally during the fall of ancient civilizations,
love became worthless and life empty, and there was necessary a strong
reactionary influence to restore the indispensable emotional values.”[20]
It is hard enough for any man to hold in check any instinct; but, when
he is holding the love instinct in check, in the face of everything
including his wife herself, unanimously calling upon him to throw away
all restraint, it becomes the most difficult, and (because of its
results, not its difficulty) the most desirable accomplishment possible.
It is hard for a woman of refinement, culture and puritanical antecedents
to relax the inhibitions necessary to be relaxed in order for her to gain
her own erotic acme. If she realizes that her husband must have his,
anyway, regardless of hers, this realization makes her still less able to
relax.
§ 103
If on the other hand she is assured by experience from the first that her
erotic acme will be taken care of with absolute reliability by the only
person in the world who can insure its coming, her own inhibitions are
much more likely to be overcome, and she to become relaxed and open to
him at his approach.
The vital importance, therefore, to the man, of doing everything in his
power to make himself absolutely sure, even from the very first, that the
erotic needs of his wife are amply taken care of by him, will be clearly
seen when he realizes that if he does not do it himself, instinct (which
is as strong in a woman as it is in a man) will ceaselessly pull her in
the direction of getting these needs supplied by some other man. If the
husband has not the strength of will to overcome his own instincts to the
minor degree of retarding, for his wife’s health, the relaxation of his
own erotic tension he will be unable consistently to blame her.
Man’s historic remedy for this defect in himself—namely, shutting up his
woman behind the doors of a harem—and the remedy that followed this, of
shutting her in behind psychic bars of repressions and inhibitions, is
the infantile method of force. Its success has been slight. The only
thing that doors and locks confine is the body, and perhaps that was
all he wanted. And likewise the only thing that inhibitions and bars
of repression can restrain is the physical manifestation of the sexual
impulse. The instinct itself cannot be annihilated. We know quite well
what happens to different types of people when the expression of the
sexual impulse is completely inhibited. Man or woman is equally affected
by this suppression, but woman in general has been the more suppressed.
§ 104
It cannot be overlooked that the constant pull exercised over every woman
by her erotic instincts, even though they be so repressed that she is
utterly unconscious of them, is more racking in the more refined and
cultivated type of woman than in the other. Lacking the satisfaction of
her erotic desires she unconsciously seeks gratification in numerous
activities toward which this blind erotism is the only efficient cause.
And as the real need is never met, these substitute activities never
completely satisfy.
§ 105
The practice of Karezza, or the husband’s reserving his own erotic
acme, has an interesting sidelight thrown upon it by the experiments of
Steinach in cutting the _vas deferens_. The effect of this is to stop the
external secretions of the interstitial gland. “The result is that the
seminal vesicle (either one of the two reservoirs for the semen) and the
interstitial gland are completely cut off from one another; and this in
turn gives rise to a multiplication of the interstitial cells, and to an
increase of the hormone produced by them.
“Professor Steinach has performed the operation on men on several
occasions. In some instances these men were fairly young but physically
weak; in others the subjects were senile men. The appearance of the
subjects became youngish, fresh; their bodily strength increased, the
tremor of their hand disappeared, memory and will power returned, and the
sexual power was restored.”[21]
It seems quite likely that Karezza may produce the same results. It has
too the advantage of being removable at will. That is, the husband, in
perfect control of his erotism, can thus reduce the external secretions
of his interstitial gland himself, without an operation, and reduce it to
as low a degree as he finds consonant with the buoyancy of his health,
and at the same time not only perfectly satisfy his wife but give her a
type and a degree of satisfaction wholly incommensurate with the effort
on his own part necessary to accomplish the result. If for any reason
whatever it seems at any time again desirable to produce the external
secretions he can do so. But it appears quite reasonable to suppose that
the arousal of the wife’s full erotism will under such circumstances
have the total favourable hygienic effect upon her, and his fears about
himself—namely, that by excessive external excretions of the interstitial
gland he may be weakening himself—groundless though they may well be,
will be quite removed.
§ 106
There is much discussion among physicians as to the harm that may be
done to the husband’s constitution by the practice of Karezza. But while
the physicians and scientists are weighing the possibilities of physical
harm to the constitution of the husband by this method of accomplishing
psychically what surgeons do with the knife, there can be no doubt of
the extraordinary psychic advantage of the procedure, an advantage which,
considering the well known but little used influence of the mind over the
body, may easily exceed any physical disadvantage.
The physical side of it is discussed by Dr. Robie, who thinks that
undesirable effects are produced by it, if it is continued long enough to
cause any of the disadvantages he mentions. The practice can be stopped
or interrupted at any time. The husband can control it perfectly so as
to have exactly as much external secretion as he finds he needs for his
greatest health.
And no matter how old he may become in years, up to the threescore
and ten, at any rate, he will have no need to give up for any fancied
advantage to himself his love episodes with his wife.
Karezza then while possibly unnecessary, or moderately undesirable for
young and vigorous men, may be a most salutary procedure for middle-aged
and older men, whereby they may preserve in themselves the functioning of
the interstitial gland, continuing its valuable internal secretions that
are stopped by complete abstinence.
Describing Karezza as the husband’s reserving his own erotic acme is not
psychologically accurate. As has been before stated the acme nevertheless
takes place, not physically through the sudden ejaculation of the
external secretions, but psychically through the indescribable emotional
exaltation on his part following the demonstration of his control, a
control which evokes an altogether unprecedented response from his wife.
He soon learns to value this response and his own power, which enables
him to evoke it, as the greatest accomplishment of his life, one compared
with which the egoistic-social emoluments and distinctions are as
nothing, a power of control greater than any other in the world in its
good results, a power of control which once exercised over one person
gives the possessor of the power the same or similar influence over
others.
§ 107
If the husband’s concern is for his adult feeling of exaltation and
power, his greatest concern is the complete overpowering of his wife
in the realm solely of the erotic emotions. His study of her, and his
refusal to study his own feelings, is the best method of arousing her to
the pitch of excitement that glows almost to a point of luminosity. He
should learn by reading, and by consultation with the best erotologists,
how every effect on her is to be produced in the management of the
love episode, failing which he is almost certain to arouse a degree of
resentment in her, which, the more repressed, the more independently of
her own control it develops, so that it may break out even years later in
some act of anger or spite.
What he says, does and even thinks during the hours of the first love
episode, beginning with the first mutual anticipatory thought or look
and ending with the last reverberating memory image of what he has been
through with her, every act, word and thought of his own has an effect
upon her total physical and mental reactions, his mental expressions on
her physical reactions quite as much as his physical or her mental.
He can be absolutely confident that what she most desires, whether she
knows it or not, is to be completely dominated by him in the sphere of
erotic action, and the amazing thing is the number of husbands who do
not seek this domination of the erotic sphere of their wives’ life, but
who seek merely their own relaxation of tension which they could get
mechanically and autoerotically any time, if that was all there was to it.
She cannot desire to dominate him. It is a biological impossibility. She
may be so twisted and muddled in her thinking between social-egoistic
ends and erotic ends that she consciously wants to dictate to him in
everything; but if he properly master her here, she will not continue to
do so.
She cannot desire to dictate to him, except to gain egoistic ends, and
these are largely conscious ones; while the true erotic aims, in every
woman, are deep in the unconscious, and need to be liberated therefrom by
her husband, for the mutual development both of herself and of him.
§ 108
A correspondent of Ellis (Vol. III, p. 210) writes that, one cause,
serving to disguise a woman’s feelings to herself and make her seem
to herself colder than she really is, may be looked for in “the
masochistic[22] tendency of women, or their desire for subjection to
the man they love. I believe no point in the whole question is more
misunderstood than this. Nearly every man imagines that to secure a
woman’s love and respect he must give her her own way in small things and
compel her obedience in great ones. Every man who desires success with a
woman should exactly reverse that theory.”
The unsatisfactory nature of this communication comes from the ambiguity
as to small things and great things. What are small and what great? The
answer is that the small things are those concerned with egoistic-social
impulses, the great things are the erotic. From the truly erotic point
of view no egoistic-social impulses lead to great, valuable or important
actions. A man may defer to his wife’s judgment in all kinds of every-day
affairs, unless this deference is unmistakably due to an actual lack of
confidence on his part, because confidence of all kinds is based on love
confidence.
And a man who not only defers to his wife’s judgment in egoistic-social
lines but in addition continues to “compass her with sweet observances,”
being always chivalrously polite and attentive to her, if he fail to
control her erotically, will completely dissatisfy her. His attentiveness
will actually annoy her. She unconsciously realizes that he is playing
the obedient little boy to her, and thus making out of her a mother and
not a wife.
The masochism referred to is an exaggeration. The natural desire of the
woman for erotic subjection is not masochism in the ordinarily accepted
sense, which means the pleasure experienced by some neurotics as a result
of pain inflicted upon them by others.
What Ellis’ correspondent means is that giving a woman her way in great
things and compelling her obedience in small things equally show that
love confidence without which any man’s actions will continuously gall
the wife’s unconscious. If he yields to her in great egoistic-social
issues, he shows the same confidence in the superiority of the erotic
instincts (the love confidence par excellence) that he shows in
compelling her obedience in small things.
§ 109
No egoistic-social experience, save when all the circumstances are such
as produce truly marital conditions, ever has the same transcendent value
as when the erotic within the married state is raised to the nth power.
Not does any of life’s rewards in the egoistic-social sphere compensate
for the loss of the erotic consummations of the binary life.
The married pair can be too sexual in the strictly physical sense,
they can leave undeveloped the more complicated organism of psychic
erotism—but they cannot be too erotic in the sense in which I have used
this term, for erotism, in the sense I use it, is psychically controlled
sex, controlled not as in the majority of cases, by repression and
inhibition, but by rational modes of expression.
§ 110
Modern science shows, and clearly, why it must be so, that man’s
emotional tensions are never to be relaxed in the presence of a woman
herself tense.
This applies in every other situation in life, as well as in the
distinctively erotic. A man’s emotional tensions are not to be relaxed on
a woman, but on a relaxed woman.
In every sphere of life the mother[23] is always a relaxed woman to her
son, particularly in his childhood, but is never a relaxed woman to her
husband, except at her consummation in the erotic episode.
If the husband is unwilling, or unprepared to accept these conditions
of marriage, he is marrying a woman to be a mother to him, instead of
a wife, and he is completely deluding both himself and her. If he is
unwilling or unprepared to accept these conditions of marriage, he needs
to wait till he is willing or he needs to be prepared.
This may sound, to some men, like giving entirely and not getting
anything in return. But they must realize that getting the response they
biologically need themselves, and consciously desire, if they be above
the animal level, is a process of constructive giving.
So much of their attention husbands must give in order to get what few
really get—the total response in every fibre of their wives’ life-love.
They cannot get anything by merely taking. Things merely taken turn to
dust in their hands. What they want to get must be lured forth from the
unconscious depths of their wives and must, to the wife, seem uncaused,
spontaneous, no matter how much the husband knows he has practised art.
§ 111
Much has been said not only in this book but in others about simultaneity
of the erotic acme in husband and wife. Gallichan in his _Psychology of
Marriage_ (p. 107), speaking of women, says: “It should be known that the
imperfect fulfillment of the marital act, unaccompanied by the normal,
healthy gratification decreed by Nature with infinite care, has a more or
less injurious effect upon the psychic-emotional being and may affect the
bodily functions.... The husband who does not experience this emotion is
either not the proper spouse for his partner, or some necessary element
of reciprocal love is wanting or amiss. If there is any human act that
should be perfectly mutual, it is this. When passion is shared alike,
Nature approves and blesses the conjunction.”
From that it may be inferred that the author quoted advocates
simultaneity of the erotic acme in husband and wife.
But there is a much better arrangement of the love episode than that.
The husband should see to it that in every episode the wife not only
arrives at the utmost climax of her erotic acme before he does but
that she recovers sufficiently from her ecstasy to enable her to give
thereafter conscious attention to his. Where, as in a passionate
honeymoon, both partners lose consciousness, so to speak, together,
in every love episode, neither has the supernal joy of witnessing the
ecstatic culmination of the other’s bliss. With autoerotic proclivities,
pardonable in the first weeks of marital life, they close their eyes
to each other, at the climax, and they sink into their own subjective
feelings, after which they come to the conclusion that each has loved the
other to the limit.
But this is not the case. They have loved their own sensations to the
limit but not each other’s. If it could be arranged that each should take
turns in “taking care” of the other so that now one and now the other
should first arrive at the climax, they would, it might appear to the
superficial thinkers, each gain the priceless boon of seeing his or her
own ecstasy reflected in the other’s.
§ 112
Nature has, on the contrary, so arranged it, as is obvious to all who
have had any true erotic experience, that a supposition that the husband
gets his acme first and the wife second, _in the same love episode_, is
an impossible one; for man is so constituted as generally to be unable to
continue a love episode after reaching his own erotic acme.
On the other hand woman is so constituted as to be able to continue any
love episode after she has herself passed the point of her own erotic
acme.
Therefore if the simultaneity of the ideal honeymoon, mentally autoerotic
as it is in its essential nature, is to give place to truly allerotic
marital behaviour, this transition can take place in only one way. It is
imperative that the allerotic action be that of the husband. The wife may
legitimately remain mentally autoerotic for the rest of her life.
It is a marital crime for the husband to remain mentally autoerotic. That
is what blasts most marriages.
Simultaneity, so unanimously approved by most erotologists, is an
introducing phenomenon, belonging only to the initial stages of marital
life. It should give place as soon as possible to the principle of
successiveness.
§ 113
All erotologists, on the general principle of altruism and mutuality,
sympathy and responsiveness, have advocated simultaneity of acme, without
realizing its mental autoerotism.
This book unqualifiedly recommends succession as infinitely superior to
simultaneity. Only by the arrangement of the love episode in such a way
that in every love episode the husband’s erotic acme follows, even after
the lapse of several minutes, the wife’s, can the spiritually deleterious
results of mentally autoerotic simultaneity be avoided. Only thus can the
most inexpressible joy be experienced by both husband and wife. Only thus
can they be said to be, erotically, perfectly mated.
For there is a peculiarly conscious human joy in feeling, in at least
comparative calmness, the ineffable bliss of just one other human being,
a joy of which no lover can ever, in wildest phantasy, dream, a joy that
mere simultaneity can never give.
Marital success demands succession.
§ 114
It may be said that it is characteristic of woman’s motherly and
unselfish nature that, in her utter surrender to her husband lover, she
is willing to make the sacrifice of giving him all and taking nothing
herself except the vicarious satisfaction of pleasing him. That has
indeed been the preachment, undoubtedly originating with selfish males,
for centuries of repression of erotism in women.
But its results are only conscious and superficial. Unconsciously, and
that means with nine-tenths of her available energy, she is unable to do
this thing. Nine-tenths of her very being, whether she is aware of it or
not, revolts at the monumental injustice of this arrangement.
Women of high moral and intellectual attainments can so coerce their
unconscious erotic instincts as to appear on the surface completely in
control of themselves. But what virile lover would wish them so, just
for the purpose of maintaining himself in a perpetual state of mental
autoerotism?
Succession in this order more than doubles the joy of marital fusion, and
does so by stressing the psychical or hypersomatic factor of the episode.
It is an arrangement of the love drama that is peculiarly human and once
attained will never be abandoned.
It is a technique depending entirely on the husband’s absolute control
of the erotic situation. He will have almost every factor in the total
situation against him—his own instincts and those of his wife, which, on
the principle of biological testing carried on unconsciously by the woman
will help make this attainment difficult for him; but it is the true test
of virile marital love.
It will be replied by the average husband that he simply cannot
accomplish this feat, that it is against Nature, and that physicians
have told him nothing should be allowed to interfere with the speedy
attainment of his desires once he is on the path.
But a little reflection will show the incomparable superiority in every
way of this completely virile technique.
It may be also remembered by those who know anything about the intimate
history of the Oneida Community that a group of some 250 persons carried
on a technique successfully for thirty years with no detrimental results
to the males, a technique which differed from this Succession Plan only
in the fact that the men, but not the women, abstained from taking their
own erotic acme entirely except for the purpose of procreation. In this
community in which their principle of Male Continence was raised to a
religious principle there was a much greater health than the average for
the United States at the time (1849-1879) and the nervous disorders were
far less than the average.
What has been done can be done, yet what is advocated here is much easier
of attainment than what was done by the men of the Oneida Community.
§ 115
To a technique like that of the Succession Plan here suggested the
unconscious of the woman cannot fail to respond in the most favourable
manner. It is manifest that in every marriage that is truly happy the
husband must have approximated this technique if he has not finally
reached it. And by happy is meant successful from the erotic standpoint.
For it is conceivable that some lives even of happily married people may
be marred by certain egoistic-social reverses. There may be not as much
money as would make them more comfortable, and either one of the pair may
have bereavements, or they both may lose a child. But none of these will
touch closely the erotic life they live in common.
By happy marriage is meant one in which the partners never have a really
serious temptation to depart from the monogamic ideal. If thoroughly
fused, neither will have the slightest temptation, for each will fill
every erotic need of the other and will continue to do so.
If men were universally taught this Succession Plan, there would be no
dissatisfied wives; nor would any man be attracted away from his own life
partner. For beauty of face and grace of form, brightness of intellect
and brilliance of egoistic-social attainment are as nothing compared with
the sense of power and triumph shared alike by both partners where the
husband controls the erotism of the wife according to this method.
If men universally used this method there would be no possibility of
prostitution or any other form of infidelity, for no man, even following
the lead of his own unconscious, would find anything better than
perfection, and every man would find, because he had himself developed,
perfection in his wife.
Let, then, every man who thinks himself incapable of this degree of
control over his own erotic emotions admit to himself that he is as yet
undeveloped. He is still in the class of autoerotic infants.
Let him not infer, therefore, that because he is mentally autoerotic, he
has become so because of past physical, autoerotic habits. Those who,
uninstructed by erotologists who know the facts, have lost their love
confidence by brooding in secret over the fancied injury they have done
themselves in their youth by physical autoerotism—such men can gain a
mastery over themselves when married, and can become perfect examples of
erotic self-control.
§ 116
There is no question whatever of the ability of most men to attain the
degree of control necessary to practise Karezza, or the Succession Plan
advocated in this book.
The only question is the amount of clear thinking a man may be willing to
do concerning himself, to realize whether he should remain in the infant
class of autoerotics, or should represent to himself in vivid colours the
advantages of ascending into a truly allerotic adult level of control.
It is certain that if a man realizes the advantage, not only to himself
but to his wife and to everyone else in his own milieu, he will make the
outline of it so clear in his mind that all his unconscious energy will
assist him in the attainment of it as an objective reality.
This ideal is here called a representation, or an imagination on the
principle adopted by the autosuggestionists that “where the will and
the imagination come into conflict, the imagination always wins”—Coué’s
_Law of Reversed Effort_. Therefore the natural and obvious expression
was avoided above. It might have been said that when a man realizes the
advantages of the Succession Plan in the love episode, he will exert
every effort of which he is capable to attain it. But for this form of
statement was expressly substituted the form “he will make the outline of
it so clear in his own mind.”
For what autosuggestion has so convincingly shown is that the unconscious
imagination of the _opposite_ of what one says or thinks consciously is
the result that may possibly follow unless he is forewarned. If a man
say to himself a hundred times a day, “I will control myself,” he may
yet have in his unconscious a clear picture of lack of control, of hasty
abandon, and _it is that picture which forms the pattern of his acts as
they are carried out_.
§ 117
The question will at once be asked: first, how one can tell whether
one’s unconscious imagination, which controls one’s acts and one’s
physiological reactions, contains the picture of control or of lack of
control, and, second, how one can change the lineaments of this pattern.
The first question is answered by saying that if a man show lack of
erotic control it is proved that his unconscious imagination is thus, and
not otherwise, patterned.
The second question requires a longer consideration.
If the unconscious is to be controlled at all, it can be controlled by
conscious thinking only by means of substituting one pattern of action
for another.
It is obvious that the unconscious mental processes that govern
digestion, circulation, excretion, and the work of the glands of internal
secretion, cannot be pictured at all in conscious terms, i.e., in visual
or auditory or other images. No anatomist, histologist, or physiologist
has a definite enough mental picture of what actually does take place
in the blood stream upon the injection of the secretions of the various
endocrine glands. Therefore the autosuggestionists give the most generic
formula possible—simply: “Every day in every way I’m getting better and
better.”
But in the conduct of the love episode this extremely generic formula is
not sufficient. So we come to a more specific answer to our question as
to how the unconscious can be controlled. It is controlled by impressing
on it patterns of action from the conscious. There is no other way. The
extraordinary and freakish accomplishments of Hindu fakirs are made
possible by their picturing in their conscious minds the possibility
of their living successfully through their months of awkward postures.
If these feats were attempted by Occidentals the results would be
fevers, congestions, and all manner of ills suggested to them by their
environment.
§ 118
The Succession Plan of the love episode is, however, no freakish Hindu
proposition. But it is a perfectly possible pattern which involves the
application of psychical (hypersomatic) imagination to a course of action
that in animals is entirely physical and in humans takes on more and more
the psychical characteristics, as men gain more and more insight into
the influence of the hypersomatic over the hyposomatic portions of the
mind-body combination.
It is obviously impossible in this book, however, to be more specific
than to recommend that the man having become fully cognizant of the fact
that other men have done, and are today doing, what is not generally
done, should say to himself, “I will retard here, I will observe there,
I will not hurry or allow myself to be hurried but will take everything
as it comes and reap the full measure of satisfaction before advancing
a single step farther, knowing full well that whatever acceleration is
urged will only defeat its own purpose.”
Each man should fill out the details of this pattern which in a book
cannot be any more specific; but above all he should know that he can
acquire control over his own passions—indeed, that he must, in order to
be able to give them the fullest play later, and that their fullest play
is not an iota less than they should have for the health and happiness of
himself and his life partner.
§ 119
The fetishism of the single sense quality is an important consideration
here. Harvey O’Higgins in _The Secret Springs_ shows how even a part of
the person or a phase of the woman’s personality may take on an overplus
of emotional tension in the mind of the man, such as to make him think
he has found the paragon of all the virtues in the first woman he sees
having this peculiarity.
If his mother’s hands were especially beautiful, it is likely that
beauty of hands will play a big part in his unconscious selection of a
life partner, and that homely hands will repel him in a girl otherwise
eminently fitted to be his mate.
The deep emotions experienced by a little boy in seeing his mother in
evening dress in the ruddy glow of a red lampshade in the drawing-room
gave him a depth of response to that one vision that made him twenty
years later fall suddenly in love with a girl whom he saw illuminated by
the red hall light in her father’s house.
One is partly, but only partly, conscious of one’s fetishes. No man
except the most self-conscious student of his own mental reactions can
tell exactly why he likes or dislikes _anything_. He can give many
reasons; but the real _cause_ lies in the unconscious memory he has
forgotten—a memory of some pleasurable emotion of exceeding depth that
has occurred possibly a quarter of a century before.
But whatever may be the real _cause_ of the disproportionate emphasis on
certain features, mannerisms, or mental or physical habits of his wife,
the fact remains. It may well be questioned that any such overemphasis
on the _way_ she speaks or smiles, or on some peculiar catch in the
breath, _should_ make him lose control of himself, but it does. It is not
necessarily that he is set to go off in ecstasies at the occurrence of
any of these factors, as much as that through his own experience he sets
himself thus in a sort of lock combination.
§ 120
In reality this setting is something that should take place during and
not before marriage, if it must take place at all in a man. It were much
better if it took place not at all in the husband but in the wife.
This overvaluation of a smile, a dimple, a look, a timbre of the voice,
a perfume or froufrou, is used by men even before marriage as a sexual
stimulus when in reality none is needed.
The question of most vital importance is not so much, however, the shape
of eyebrow, the laughter rhythm, or other mannerism or characteristic of
a woman that causes a man to decide that he wants to marry her, for that
is in most cases in the unconscious, and therefore actually inaccessible
to him except through much more study than he is able or willing to give
it. The fetishes made by the unconscious, kept in the unconscious, and
causing selection on the man’s part are as nothing in importance to the
fetishes that he had innately or has acquired that give overvaluation for
him to certain phases of the love episode itself.
It is likely that in highly sensitive and intellectual men some
ordinarily unobserved or half-consciously noted phases of action or
being are major causes in the man’s premature arrival at the automatic
and uncontrollable part of his own action in the love episode. As
an illustration might be mentioned the undue prominence taken in an
episode by the bodily fragrance (natural, not the result of artificial
perfume) noticed and especially dilated upon verbally by one husband, who
thereupon completely lost control of himself at an early stage and was
unable to gain the allerotic result of his wife’s (prior) erotic acme.
§ 121
As is repeatedly stated in this book, there are other types of reaction
on the woman’s part that are unconscious attempts to test his control,
and continually used by her. Unconsciously she gains her deepest
satisfaction, one that permeates every thought and action of hers until
the next subsequent love episode, from her _inability_ to make her
husband lose control of himself.
Fundamentally this is the main cause of woman’s mystery to ordinary
man. She is continually springing surprises on him to throw him off
his rigid course of action. Continually she is deeply disappointed
if she succeeds in doing this. Could anything seem more perverse and
contradictory? Is anything really simpler and more straightforward than
man’s imperative necessity to pursue his own course quite uninfluenced by
her unconsciously motivated actions?
She will beseech him to hurry through the episode, not knowing herself,
sometimes, that it is the last thing she really wants or needs. An
allegory will serve as an illustration.
§ 122
They are ardent mountaineers. They are ascending Mt. Chocorua in New
Hampshire. She is afraid herself to go ahead over the rough mountain
trail and see the new views as they develop. She needs also his
assistance, his hand, to help her over rocks and fallen tree trunks and
up steep ascents. She says to him: “You go ahead and I’ll follow. Rush
up quickly and tell me what you see.” If he does so, he runs till he is
out of breath and then attempts from a cliff he has reached to shout to
her, to tell her how to get up to him, to describe the valley of the
Swift River of which he has just caught a glimpse. But he is panting so
hard he cannot articulate. Why should he have run ahead of her? Indeed he
should not have.
It would have been much wiser for him to reply to her invitation to
anticipate her: “Why, dearest, I see you are tired. Of course no woman
can keep pace with a strong healthy man up these slopes. Let’s sit down
and rest a bit.” He would then sit with her on a mossy stone or tree
trunk, or take her on his lap, and point out the beauties of the place
they were in, and absolutely refuse to leave her. He really does not wish
to see the panorama from the peak first, before she does. He is very
foolish to believe her when she says she wishes not to see it herself but
to hear about it. She may be, consciously, perfectly sincere and really
think she doesn’t care about going clear to the top with him _this_ time.
These two are ardent mountain climbers; but there are many couples where
the woman has not ever climbed to the top of a mountain who sends her
husband on alone; and, poor thing, he goes, not realizing how much better
the view is when two are looking at it.
§ 123
But any two ardent mountain climbers are practically certain to arrive
at the top, whether they get there together or the man goes ahead and
waits for his lady to come up herself—with the help of another man.
For the mountain of which I speak has the peculiarity that no woman can
climb alone to the top, as the path is extremely narrow, precipitous and
dangerous. If her husband leaves her as they approach the peak (which is
an enormous hill of rock capped by one huge boulder), she will be forced
to wait until he feels energetic enough to descend a couple of hundred
feet or so and help her up. Or if, enchanted himself by the glorious
view—miles and miles of rolling country, numerous lakes and the silver
ribbon of the Atlantic Ocean nearly eighty miles away—he is absorbed in
his own sensations of grandeur, and forgets his wife down there below him
as so many men do, it is just possible that another more unselfish and
less uncontrolled man will give her his hand and help her to the top,
slowly and courteously as behooves a man to do in spite of her effusive
protestations to him to leave her and see the sunrise himself from the
mountain top.
How will the husband of this woman feel, if, standing and facing the
east, he suddenly realizes that there appears his own wife over the edge
of the boulder, lifted by the strength of another man?
Had he known the true etiquette of mountain climbing among true married
lovers, he would have waited until both had covered together the entire
ascent up to the base of the boulder, six feet high and twenty in
diameter; and then, making a foot rest for her with his two hands, he
would have assisted her to get on this pinnacle herself first, before he
did.
Then he would have watched her face for full five minutes in its
varying lights as she turned about in ecstasy at the sublime panorama,
the sunlight falling on her cheeks with their heightened colour from
her climb, the wind blowing a lock of hair across her temple. He would
have enjoyed for a while her outcry of delight as she saw and recognized
the miniature presentment of now a familiar village, now a lake, before
he jumped up beside her, clasped her in his arms and both turned about
from north to east to south to west together, and together drank in the
vitalizing air. He would be infinitely better able to tell her what to
look at, than he was able when he was on the boulder and she two hundred
feet below, to shout to her that he could see a hundred miles in every
direction.
And now he need not shout. He can whisper in her ears, between kisses on
every part of her head and neck, the joy of both of them, and can listen
to her murmuring endearments she never otherwise would have thought of
uttering.
§ 124
This climax-capping boulder on the peak of Mt. Chocorua in New Hampshire
has on its southeast side the six-foot sheer perpendicular up which he
helped her first. On its northwest side it has a slope of some forty
degrees up which they might have scrambled hand in hand and reached the
utmost altitude simultaneously. But she will be much better pleased and
admire his restraint forever, if he not only keeps her ahead of him all
the long trail up the mountain but finally lifts her up ahead of him,
up the steep side at the southeast and (with her pardonable childish
satisfaction, which well becomes her but ill becomes him) lets her, on
this mountain-climbing experience, be his superior in this one little
thing for these brief five minutes. During this time she will recover a
bit from the sublimity of her position, will regain her breath, and will
be able to turn her attention from the wonders of the mountain view, so
that she too may have the pleasure of watching _his_ face and covering
it with kisses when he has made his final upspringing to the highest
physical altitude in the region. Ardent mountain climbers like this will
not be satisfied until they have symbolically, so to speak, climbed Mt.
Everest in the Himalayas. And these ascents, each with the other, will
preclude their taking any interest in the company of other mountain
climbers. No woman will want other company than that of her husband, no
man will be able to find a more attractive companion than his wife.
§ 125
For, on the mountain top, thoughts come to each—thoughts that can occur
in _no other_ situation. The difficulties encountered and overcome make
them inseparable soul mates. The refusal of her husband to leave her and
go up without her endears him more to her than presents of many jewels.
It shows her he has the only strength a woman can respect, the strength
to reserve his strength and to use it for and with her, a strength which
all unconsciously she must test at every step of the ascent. If this
strength is found wanting, she will be left forlorn, the most wretched of
living things, far more miserable than any female animal. If it is found
present, it will make her the happiest of mortals, happy beyond words in
her defeat in the contest of strength, yearning to make him the father of
her children.
To both of them come deep thoughts, those of the one reflected in the
multitudinous facets of the personality of the other, thoughts deep into
the past, thoughts looking far into the future, thoughts corresponding in
depth to the vastness of the prospects before them as they turn now east,
now south. A realization of the greatness of the world will come to them,
of the minute littleness of lonely atoms of humanity, a realization that
this aspect of nature alone is the one view of life that enables each
to know the other deeply and to be a complete unity instead of solitary
demi-humans each longing for an unseen other.
§ 126
To revert to the concept of fetishism one may use the mountain-climbing
symbolism of the love episode and say that almost anything on the ascent
may be used as, and become habitual as, a fetish capable of causing the
husband to leave his wife on the trail and hurry forward to the peak that
has a thousand ecstatic views.
She may use any of a number of suggestive arguments or mannerisms or
actions to convince him if she can that it is his duty to leave her, no
matter how harmful may be his abandoning her for his own erotic abandon.
She may tell him that he must get there so as not to miss the setting
(or rising) sun, or a rainbow, or a nuance of cloud forms, obscured from
where they are, halfway up the trail.
Of course, he too, unless he has been convinced of the childishness of
his act, may think there is some reason why he cannot or should not wait
for her, halfway, three-quarters, nine-tenths, perhaps, of the way up.
At the very boulder he may be persuaded to take this last jump alone,
and indeed it were a pity if, having brought her so far, he should leave
her, walled by the boulder from at least half the complete view. Some
women would petulantly begin the descent, forever unknowing what was the
husband’s experience in looking over the half of the circumference of
horizon impossible for the wife to see.
§ 127
The _one_ injunction necessary for the too enthusiastically climbing
husband is: There is plenty of time. Sit on this mossy bank. Help your
wife over every stone and stick in the path. Tell her of the grandeur of
the view. There is no hurry provided you both arrive at the top and she
take the final step before you. No aspect of sun, sky, clouds, forest or
lake but is absolutely different after every ascent and superlatively,
nay ecstatically, sublime. This is not the only chance you will have to
climb Chocorua. Mountain climbing, if not too speedy, is good for the
heart, and no expedition so fortifies one for work among the world of men
as this pedestrian ascent into the sky. Only you should go together and
be together all the time. The men who leave their wives on the piazzas
of the hotels in the valley are purely autoerotic boys. No man can tell
in words this mountain-climbing experience.
There may be women who think this mountain climbing immoral, coarse, too
rough for their fine constitution. These will have to be tenderly lifted
up each step of the way but when once at the top will be enthusiastic
converts, for they will have in the panorama an experience they will then
recognize as totally different and distinctively human.
“It has always been common to discuss the psychology of women.
The psychology of men has usually been passed over, whether
because it is too simple or too complicated. But the marriage
question today is much less the wife problem than the husband
problem.”—HAVELOCK ELLIS: _Little Essays of Love and Virtue_,
New York, 1922, p. 75.