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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.”
“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.”
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
