§ 11

This book is written largely in the hope that the thousands of unhappy married women, and the unmarried too, as fate sometimes suddenly and unexpectedly finds them a partner, will, in reading it, realize what is making them so restless and discontented.

In the past few years all interested observers of social phenomena have been appalled at the lightness with which a great majority of the upper middle classes regard matrimony.

Intelligent women, readers of good books, and themselves often friends of authors, artists, musicians, and other creative personalities are all absorbed in the most vital topics of the day, chief of which is the discussion of the normal adjustment of the sex relation. Indeed, it has been charged that both women and men in this stratum of society talk sex ad nauseam. This is likely to continue until the much desired adjustment is better made than it is at present.

The cause of this concentration upon sex problems can be only the fact that sex is a problem. If our sexual standards were fixed in a universally serviceable pattern such that changing external conditions did not almost hourly tend to make it antiquated and useless, the attention of so large a proportion of civilized humanity need not be given to it in the present-day excited manner.

It is, of course, a question whether sexual problems can ever be permanently solved; but those in the focus of public attention today are so insistent that it is impossible to ignore them. Various solutions are being attempted more or less secretly where public opinion’s ban on sex discussion is stronger; less secretly elsewhere.

But a pattern of sexual behaviour, a true love pattern, even if it could not be final should have at least enough elasticity to make the changes in it a gradual transition. No sensational innovations can ever hope to be adopted overnight with the approval of society at large. In fact, conventions in other spheres than those of love are made, and have been made gradually for centuries. But it is a curious fact that the conventionalities which concern the expression of the erotic impulse are those not of yesterday but of many hundreds of years ago. This is but a manifestation of the extreme complication of the external circumstances of modern life in contrast with the wonderful simplicity and directness of the emotions themselves which reverberate in response to the external complexities.

It will appear, as this discussion proceeds, that the sexual problems of today are conditioned by the inhibitions placed by modern economic conditions upon the natural and instinctive expression of the erotic impulse. In brief, both men and women talk sex and particularly women, in a certain extensive class of society, for the real though disguised purpose of exciting themselves sexually.

There is every satisfactory proof that this would not occur if their sexual lives were normal. It is therefore the repressed sexual activity that breaks out, not in sexual acts specifically, but in the vicarious sex activity of problem novels, problem plays, risquÉ stories, and the talk in mixed company which has been objected to as persistent sex talk.

Men and women with a perfectly normal love life feel no need whatever to talk about it. But the inference from that—namely, that those who resolutely refrain from mention of all such topics are themselves quite normal in their own love life—is illogical in the extreme. Many are constrained by an inner fear of self-revelation, lest they show themselves as abnormal. Thus it may occur that some will not refuse to discuss this most vital of all topics, for fear they may be considered themselves abnormal.

But it is safe to say that the greater number of those who talk much about love are those whose love is either undeveloped or in some way awry, and that unconsciously they are attempting to straighten themselves out, in their own eyes or in the eyes of their friends.

§ 12

The most exciting conversation on love is, of course, that between two persons of opposite sex. And in many social circles there has of late sprung up a new term. A married woman will have some particular male friend not her husband, whom she laughingly refers to as her “playmate.” With this “mate” she plays at love and love-making under the guise of serious discussion. In some coteries, the married woman’s playmate may be some other woman’s husband, but the favourites for playmates are unmarried men.[6]

These “little beaux” or “playmates” are an indication of the essential childishness of the marriage relation where they play a part, and the position of the husband whose wife needs such amusement is an exceedingly unenviable one, no matter how purely Platonic the relation may be between his wife and her playmate.

§ 13

It will be consistently maintained in this book that the need of such Platonic friendships on the part of these numerous wives is a reflection on the lack of skill with which the husband handles the erotic situation. He may not be, often, indeed, is not, in the least to blame for his lack of skill, or for the discontent of his wife that causes her to give expression to the play side of love, or, even a part of it, in this taking of a playmate. It is a situation which practically calls the husband a workmate, or dutymate—a situation that is fundamentally deplorable and constitutes in fact the first step in the direction of divorce.

The playmates provide a large amount of innocent amusement, which the husbands do not or cannot find time possibly to furnish themselves. With the playmates the wives go to lunches, dances, theatres, concerts, and talk poetry, art, music—and love.

All the evidence points to the fact that these wives are not properly mated. It is not their fault. It is their husbands’, yet, because of the husbands’ ignorance of the love needs of women, the husbands are not to blame, at any rate until they have taken to heart the message which this book attempts to convey.

Possibly the wives themselves, after thinking the matter over in the light of what they may read in this book, might talk to their husbands about love now as perhaps once they did, and get them to realize what they are failing to do.

Seeking intellectual stimulation from a playmate whose tenure of office is permanent or nearly so is, as psychoanalysis has amply demonstrated, a substitute or vicariate for sex. The women are, but of course unconsciously, wishing for more extended and more intimate love episodes with their playmates.

In short, restlessness of wives is an expression of the exclusively economic trend of present-day civilization which makes a machine or an office organization or a financial manipulation a substitute, in the mind of the husband, for love. Such a man is most likely to take his business home with him, where indeed business has no place—even, indeed, take it to bed with him.

§ 14

The writer is aware of the unprecedented character of much that has just been said, but feels that he knows whereof he speaks, also of the revolutionary nature of the theses of the rest of this chapter in which the subsequent matter of the book is given in outline.

First, the statement that what is popularly known as romantic love has little if any significance in true marriage. For it will be maintained consistently that given a not too impossible combination of man and woman, as for example those of too widely divergent social level, any man can woo and win any woman and make her and himself supremely happy, entirely apart from the neurotic sentimentality of romanticism.

The theory that there is just one woman in the world who can make a given man a perfect wife, and vice versa, is scientifically absurd, for there is only an infinitesimal chance that these two should ever meet. Many useless tears have been shed by men and women alike over these “ships that pass in the night,” and thus frustrate what might have been supernal happiness.

Concerning the marital relation, a common sense view raised to scientific proportions, shows incontrovertibly that married happiness is a creation of the married people themselves and chiefly of the husband. More in every way depends on him than on the woman. As pointed out by Meisel-Hess the “sexual crisis” of the present day is due to the failure of the individual man to know how to play, and to play acceptably, his part in married life.

Indeed, we may go so far as to say with absolute confidence that if a Pacific liner should lose its way and ground on a desert island, the thousand or so men and women passengers, supposing they were all young and unmarried, could put their names on slips of paper in a box, and, knowing that they were doomed to remain on the island for the rest of their lives, draw lots for partners and become infinitely more happily married lovers than the average married couple in civilization and quite as happy as if they had followed conscious preference.

But the stipulation is made that the five hundred men at least must be adepts in the erotic technique.

That is to say that the real happiness of a marriage depends solely on the behaviour of the husband, consciously planned intelligent knowledge of what a real marriage implies.

§ 15

It will be shown in the subsequent chapters that the aim of marriage is not, as the reiterated phrase in Hutchinson’s novel, This Freedom, “men that marry for a home” might imply, to make the husband happy. It is, on the contrary, to make the woman happy, and the children, so that the marriages of the future may be happier than those of the present.

It will be shown that the husband not only can, if he knows how, but must, if he wishes to be happy himself, first see to it that discontent is an unknown thing. It is in his hands solely. His wife has practically nothing to do with it. The dependence of the woman on the man for erotic life is as absolute as that of the newborn infant on the mother for nutrition.

The concept of romantic love, like that of love at first sight, contains the implication that love and especially married love depends more upon what Fate or Destiny vouchsafes to the man than upon what he takes from Fate or creates for himself. The taking and creating is certainly the prerogative of the man while yet it may not necessarily belong to the woman.

§ 16

That is the essential difference between the masculine and the feminine nature. It is masculine to give and to create and to change external reality. It is feminine to receive, and to respond to the activity of the male. It is feminine to be thrilled at the effects produced upon the wife by her husband’s activities in every sphere of action. It is masculine to be thrilled only by the resultant ecstasies of the wife. It is not masculine to be emotionally impressed except by the results of his own individual and particular actions: results effected in other persons and things.

This is the essential masculinity and femininity assumed in this book. It will be evident to those acquainted with modern psychology that the reverse of these conditions implies the interchange of masculine and feminine psychic natures.

For example the man who should (and yet not a few do) derive his satisfactions solely from the emotions aroused in him by the actions of other persons and things is not truly masculine. His love could not in any real sense be called virile.

§ 17

Virile love is the only love that a man should have—the only feeling a real man can have—for a woman. Indeed, it is the only way a man loves a woman if he is truly to be said to love her. Any so-called love depending on being charmed by a woman is essentially effeminate, not virile. The moment he surrenders to her charm, he is not a man but an autoerotic[7] child. He should absolutely and positively charm her. There is no disgrace, no lack of true femininity in a woman’s yielding to the power a man must exercise over her erotic instincts. The power is strictly a one-way power, exerted by the man upon the woman if, and only as long as, he remains man and she remains woman. The bisexual nature of both man and woman often permits a couple to reverse this direction of power influence.[8]

If the wife’s charm is the only binding factor in a marriage the marriage is doomed to dissolve actually or potentially. And in order to maintain this merely superficial charm, which no real man needs to feel in a woman, she is obliged to resort to all varieties of artifice from the lip stick and the exotic perfume upward to the forced attempt to be intellectually frank and interesting. Woman as woman has no need for this artifice to maintain charm for primordial man.

It may be that man at the present day is not primordial superficially. But fundamentally he is and so is woman primordial woman, and for all the civilization which is only conscious, the ninety per cent more or less of unconscious action and being in the man acts upon and is inevitably and automatically reacted to by the woman; and any survey of the totality of the relations between them is incomplete if it does not recognize and control the almost unlimited energy of the primordial man and woman beneath the surface. The difficulty is that this recognition is a task; and most married couples attempt to hide it both from themselves and from each other. In such actions of the woman as are dominated, as most conscious acts are, by the egoistic-social[9] impulse, any artifice, great or small, as the case may be, is inevitably registered, to the woman’s detriment, in the unconscious records of the man.

“Does she,” the unconscious says, “really need these embellishments, or does she only think she needs them? If she really needs them, I have reels of mental moving pictures of women who do not. If she only thinks so, what have I failed to do that should inspire her confidence, or prevent her from unconsciously trying to attract the autoerotic glances of other men? I must adjust her up to a greater height of erotic exaltation. Possibly that is the fundamental reason. If she were actually my erotic counterpart the idea would not even unconsciously enter her mind to improve herself in this showy manner. I must remove this tendency from her.”

Of course the husband likes to have his wife appear attractive to him; but that does not require any branch of the cosmetic art except what she can do without drugs, pastes, powders and other mechanical aids. Of course he wants her to interest him mentally but that does not require her to do or say anything spectacular or anything that has any “news value.”

In her own femininity (which by the way is never enhanced but only lessened by strenuous efforts to appear charming either to himself or others), he has the field which he can, and will, in proportion to his psychic virility, cultivate into his own particular Garden of Eden. In her own essential womanliness he has the ground where he can plant and build, without external aid, the garden and the mansion, the work of his own hands, according to his own design, the outward expression of all that is fine and masculine in his own imagination. Any failure in the execution of this plan is due to the shaking of his own hand, the lack of attention on his own part to the necessary details.

§ 18

Arnold Bennett (in Pictorial Review, November 1922), writes: “She absolutely must exercise charm, whether things are going right or going wrong.... Women were born to exercise charm.... A large proportion of women, especially pretty ones, suffer from the illusion that in order to exercise charm they need only continue to exist. A mistake! To exercise charm is an active and not a passive function. It cannot be efficiently done without thought and hard work. It is sometimes very trying and exhausting, like earning money—but it is not less essential than earning money if life is to be fully lived.”

Many women prefer to earn money rather than follow this unremunerative trade of exercising charm; because they realize that earning money is productive and exercising charm is not. They can get in dollars a measure of their efforts. In personal charm, however, there is no measurable factor, except in reaction on the male, and that is an autoerotic element in his mental make-up.

Feminine charm is to be sure active and not passive. It is, however, reactive and not spontaneously active. It reacts to the positive action of the man, which is the response characteristic of true femininity anywhere, any time. As to its necessitating thought and hard work and being trying and exhausting, the contrary is the truth. No man can but dislike a woman who has thought and worked hard, been tried and become exhausted by this thoroughly artificial and unnatural attempt to “exercise charm.” His unconscious and real reaction to this trying position into which the woman puts herself to retain his affection by exercising charm is one of revolt. He may not know it but it is there all the time, and comes out in the unhappy moments.

And this attempt recommended by Mr. Bennett is only a superficial attempt. It never really succeeds permanently. It is the reason why men avoid designing women. They say to themselves unconsciously that this forced effort is an overcompensation for a real (i.e., unconsciously perceived) inferiority.

The only thing rightly to be called charm is the pleasantness of the natural reaction on the woman’s part to the binary situation, the situation of man and woman in social intercourse. Her forcing herself is always repugnant to him, if he is normally himself. The word charm,[10] therefore, applies to a type or action on her part that is conditioned solely on her being with him. It is character and conduct, ingenuous, instinctive, spontaneous; revealing, without traditional or conventional inhibitions, the essence of true womanliness, and brought out only in the situation that is really, and in the highest sense, erotic, where the erotic holds sway over the more ignoble egoistic-social impulse.

Her charm for her husband will consist in the fact that she is woman and wife first and foremost. That is enough for a man who is first and foremost man and husband. Uninhibited woman, unwarped by sex inhibitions, spontaneously making her direct response, her natural reaction uninterrupted, unperverted, unbroken by archaic traditions that have overweighted the egoistic social instincts and debased the erotic—such a woman has and will always have the maximum of charm for unperverted man. The eternal femininity, the universal femininity, is always at the core of every woman’s being.

Virile love alone is competent to tear away the impediments that perturb its reactions, and when this is done true monogamy is inevitable, for there is no preventive mechanism obstructing the total fusion of their bodies and souls. That kind of charm any woman naturally exerts over any man, but it has nothing in common with the conventional charm of the cosmetic and costumer’s art.

The monogamic husband, if he reads beneath the surface, feels this charm in all other women as well as in his wife; but, as he knows what it amounts to in care and attention, to uncover the soul of his wife, he realizes that to undertake the task with another woman would not be worth the candle. He could do it, but he knows he would get no more satisfaction from another woman than from his wife.

§ 19

In the sense of the universal and eternal feminine charm being exerted upon the primordial masculine, love is always love at first sight. But the reason that love at first sight becomes hate at second or closer sight is just this inability of the man to play the truly virile part. What has charmed him at first sight no longer charms him simply because all charm exerted upon him produces in him the autoerotic mental reaction. Only the first sight should produce that result. If the second look is not accompanied by the desire to dominate and to explore the depths of the soul behind that face, it is the look not of a virile man but of an autoerotic boy. And the boy goes on being charmed by the face; or stops being charmed and is antagonized. She will antagonize him actively and positively, of course, if, in due season, she does not sense in him the virile action. With her hostility aroused by this unconscious sense of his weakness felt by her, he is disgusted naturally and looks for another face.

The modern hologamous marriage is the creative work of a virile man, a work that, as do all vital things, needs constantly to be kept up. No overgrown boy will be able to accomplish this virile work, for being mostly brought up by women, he will not know what is the real work of virile man in marriage.

The marriages that run down, those in which the egoistic-social or material impulses gain the ascendancy over the erotic or spiritual impulses, are the marriages of autoerotic boys, not of virile men.

Psychic virility of the husband in the marital relation is the only factor that can insure the permanence, except superficially, of any marriage. “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.”

There should be alteration in love, but it should be caused by the progressive development of the husband’s love. This is the theory of relativity applied in the erotic sphere. Love should not alter when—that is, because—it finds alteration; but it should make changes in the reactions of the wife, so that each year finds the married lovers more completely fused physically and spiritually than the year before.

From the woman’s point of view, she is invited by marriage to a banquet, at which she may reasonably expect to find a variety of comestibles all of adult characteristics. If at this banquet she is served by her husband only with milk or pap she is rightly revolted, and will not eat. Milk alternating with pap in successive courses of marital banquet would be cruelty and adequate cause for separation, if their exclusive presence could be attributed to the voluntarily malevolent choice of the husband. But in most cases it is merely his ignorance for which his parents and teachers are the blameless cause.

§ 20

Is there any clearer truth than that all autoerotic practices in the marital union are unmanly? And is there any statement more incontrovertible than that the average husband who has not taken the trouble to know and control his wife in the erotic sphere is unequivocally autoerotic mentally?

Can it be doubted that the average woman has no possible means of knowing whether her suitor will, after marriage, be an autoerotic boy or virile man? Can we blame her if she is forced by our crazy laws to make this a trial marriage, divorce him if she can, and make another trial? Can we blame anyone for taking food if she is starving and call her act stealing? Not unless we have made it perfectly plain to her how and where she may legitimately obtain food. But we can blame the man, for he is, he always has been, and he always will be the provider of erotic power. A man has no right to undertake the erotic support of any woman, and then proceed to starve her and incontinently to fatten himself upon her. Universally such a man is scorned and always will be, except by women whose erotic instincts have been overgrown and overwhelmed by the egoistic-social impulses of conventionality. These do not scorn a man who resorts to prostitutes to feed his autoerotic appetites, or who keeps mistresses or has other illicit liaisons for the same purposes.

The moment an anthropoid human realizes what he is getting from the promiscuous relations, and that he is autoerotically getting in a puerile way instead of giving in a virile way, he takes no more interest whatever in the promiscuous relation. The reply to an obvious objection here is that if he finds his wife lacking in passion it means he has not learned to know his wife, and, if he thinks he finds more passion in the extra-marital woman, he is either deceiving himself or being deceived by her, the extra-marital one; and that he is sexually as anesthetic to all women as he fancies his wife to be anesthetic to him.

Unless she is a chronic invalid he has no justification in thinking that passion is impossible between them. He has not the knowledge of himself wherewith to develop in himself enough virility to awaken her erotic instincts. When once awakened these will adequately satisfy him. If he has not aroused them in his wife there is little chance that he will arouse a real feeling in other women. If he cannot consistently be satisfied with one woman and believes that men are incurably polygamous, let him, first, be sure to sound his wife’s erotism to the bottom, and he will then need no other woman nor fatuously imagine he wants another. This is the surest cure for the polygamous-nature-of-man delusion.

The errant husband may think he roves in search of a real woman. As husband he has a real woman by his side; but, having a real woman as near to him as he can bring himself to approach, he wanders forth in search of an imaginary woman, who does not exist in reality. There is no such thing as the imaginary woman except in his mind. His virile function is to make over this real woman at his side according to the mental pattern he has of woman as she should be, and within reasonable limits he can do it, if he has the virile strength to control his own emotions in her presence. If he cannot do it in hers he cannot do it in another woman’s, just because he has failed to do so in his wife’s.

The answer will of course be made that a man may marry a shrew. To this the reply is that a shrew like Katharine in Shakespeare’s play is a woman who has not been taught to love as every wife should be. A shrew is simply a woman not yet erotically developed. It may, to be sure, take a more than ordinarily ardent lover to develop such a woman, but barring the exceedingly rare cases of women in whom love is a physical impossibility, the shrewishness of a woman is only a measure of the inadequacy of the husband. Except for the sporadic freaks of nature there is no such thing as an impossible woman.

§ 21

Mutuality

In the minds of young lovers no doubt exists that their love should be mutual. The doubt comes later in their married life that possibly some impediment either existed in a latent state before they were married and has developed since, so that they ceased to be mutual; or, not previously existing, was developed by some factor in their later married life unforeseen in their earlier days and therefore impossible to avoid.

In the creation and maintenance of mutuality in the early married life the young husband is the only one concerned. If there is real mutuality caused by a perfect response in his bride, he can maintain it only if he knows how he has gained it. If it was gained by merely instinctive actions on his own part, and if he is impressed by the beauty of the mystery, and repeats to himself how wonderful it is, and how inexplicable to have so warm a response, he will not have a good chance of continuing it. He will have to do what he has not yet done. Consciously, and purposefully, he will observe his wife’s reactions during the entirety of the love episode; that is, from the beginning of one quite through to the beginning of the next one, not merely the period of the highest level of erotic excitement.

It is the privilege of woman to remain autoerotic in her reactions. She may or may not rise to allerotic action during her entire life. But man can never succeed in the marital life if he remains autoerotic. His first reactions to the marital situation are necessarily autoerotic. He cannot avoid that. His previous experience with women, if any, and particularly with prostitutes, gives him at first little if any opportunity to be with his wife other than essentially autoerotic in his reactions. A man’s first experience of a woman in an attempt at a love episode is invariably a bath of absolutely new sensations, a plunge into a sea of diverse stimuli, a medium in which many men flounder for the remainder of their lives, gaining each time no more than an uncoÖrdinated congeries of external excitement in which they act in no controlling manner. Such men never mate a woman in the highest sense. They only supply her with a child in the guise of a husband. There is no mutuality between the surf and the bather who is helplessly tossed about in the breakers and is finally washed up on the shore and left breathless by his contact with the countless laughter of the sea.

Mutuality in the love episode depends solely on the husband’s ability to control the situation. There is no real mutuality in a relation where the wife is merely a dispenser of physical delights to a husband that neither knows nor cares what he himself contributes to the situation, who immerses himself totally in his own sensations. He is deaf, blind and otherwise anesthetic to what he himself can accomplish in the line of studied and foreplanned effects of his own, self-initiated (not merely instinctive and automatic reflex) actions upon his wife. True, there are many women who expect no more of a man than just this automatic autoerotism. But, sooner or later, even though unconsciously, they perceive a lack of “some amorous rite or other” and their own passion cools, if it has had any warmth. There is no mutuality here.

§ 22

Mutuality does not exist where the wife has no alternative other than the autoerotic reaction of the husband. But in spite of an unchanging autoerotic disposition of the wife, mutuality may be absolutely secured by the instructed husband. As indicated below, the average honeymoon should see the beginning of the end of mental autoerotic reactions on the part of the groom.

Even the groom that has had previous sex experience is in his early marriage in an erotic situation which is essentially new to him—a situation that contains elements the like of which he never could have experienced before. The inevitable novelty of these new elements is a condition, on his part, of perceiving all new sensations, practically of having unprecedented things done to him.

The things done to him are more numerous and newer than anything in all his previous experience. In this sense, then, he is by force of circumstances placed upon an autoerotic level, from which it is his imperative duty to ascend in order that by his control of his own erotic reactions he may control those of his wife. No apology is needed for an initial autoerotic response on the newly wedded husband’s part.

It might be said that in the situation of bride and groom each having things done to them by the other, rather than positively doing things to each other, there might be a situation of perfect mutuality. But if it is, it never remains any longer than the duration of a honeymoon, for the essential femininity of the woman demands that in the erotic sphere alone, she be led, and with no uncertain guidance.

The honeymoon ends automatically when this point is reached; and the condition of true mutuality in perfect marital relations ensues if the husband has a virile love of his wife and takes the lead. If his love is not virile, but merely autoerotic and puerile, he never assumes this leadership, and his wife becomes more and more unresponsive to him, simply because the only type of activity to which she can respond is an erotic virility, a true manliness that contains the real essence of masculinity which is the imperative necessity to control the entire erotic life of one woman.

§ 23

It should not be assumed that these remarks about the honeymoon imply that all honeymoons or even any of them are failures. The failures, if such appear, are only apparent, and need not necessarily be real; for their success is always within reach of the husband who needs only knowledge and confidence. His one aim is the proper response of his wife, and that is his only needful success. If he uses intelligence and acquires knowledge (and the honeymoon is the source of his knowledge of the extent of his wife’s inhibitions, negativisms and resistances) his progress is limited only by the small amount of his love. If he has love enough, which includes a determination to win, he will succeed. And it should be remembered that a woman’s consent to marry is not her admission that she has been won, but only her consent to let the man win her thereafter, if he can.

When this control is properly assumed by the mentally and spiritually virile husband, real mutuality begins in the marital life. The husband now conquers his unavoidable initial autoerotic habit of mind and thought, and at the same time becomes a truly social being, realizing that by his own self-control alone, in the love episode, which absolutely assures his wife’s complete erotic affiliation with him, he is securing the only kind of mutuality worthy of the name.

It is obvious that this mutuality is reciprocal in a sense entirely different from any mutuality that could be attributed to the relation during the honeymoon stage. He knows now what erotically emotional effects he can produce on his wife during the love episodes, and exactly how he has produced them. Beyond any doubt whatsoever, he also knows from the most intimate experience that the production of these effects is the only real mutuality.

An effect, in the erotic sphere, produced in a husband by a wife, is one from which all truly virile men realize they gain only autoerotic pleasure. To this effect they contribute themselves nothing. In the end the wife gets nothing of the emotional catharsis which is the sine qua non of true marital living. In such circumstances the wife gives and the husband receives, certainly a gross disgrace if it be continued, a disgrace abhorred by all men. There is no mutuality in such a gift which but impoverishes the recipient.

It thus appears that in the marital relation the husband alone is the one rightly to be the giver. And his gift impoverishes neither himself nor his wife, the recipient, but paradoxically enriches both. The husband rightly gives his time, his attention, his love and thereby controls. But in order to do this he has to control himself absolutely, so as not to snatch away from both of them that of which nature has designed him to be the donor.

Mutuality requires the husband to be sure to get something, but the thing he can get is the erotic acme of his wife, and this is the only result that, to the spiritually and mentally virile husband, has any value whatever. If, on the other hand, he takes his own erotic relaxation without getting hers it is merely a half gift which he forces, or persuades, her to give him, and mutuality is out of the question.

§ 24

The idea of compensation or barter or quid pro quo must be rigidly excluded from the concept of mutuality; for this measuring of the balance of values of the actual physical performances or even intellectual attainments rests for its validity on the inevitable comparisons which are the basis of all values for the egoistic-social activities. To the greatest erotic success these comparisons are utterly antagonistic. In the erotic sphere, as is later noted,[11] comparisons are not merely odious, but logically impossible. There can be no balancing of giving and taking.

From one point of view, the husband cannot but give all and receive nothing, at least of the character of that which he gives. He gives an emotional reaction to a woman, which no other man can give.

He cannot in return reproduce in himself the emotional reaction of a woman. He cannot react as a woman reacts, if he be a virile lover, for such a reaction, though common enough in run-down marriages, is not the emotional reaction of a man. If his bisexuality leads him to approximate this feminine reaction, he is to that extent himself feminine and not masculine.

One should not, however, ignore the fact that both men and women are normally bisexual to a slight extent, and to that degree woman will desire to exercise some control in the erotic sphere, even if it be only to create in her mate the most complete erotic effects. Also, if a woman with a comparatively large proportion of masculinity in her nature be married to a man with an equal proportion of femininity, a happy marriage may result, if no other adverse elements enter.

But in general it will be admitted that the husband cannot rightly seek for himself the type of erotic reaction which is proper and peculiar to his wife; though it must be confessed that the suggestions operative even in the average married love episode are strongly that way. The husband hears the ecstatic responses of his wife and her repeated inquiries as to his own pleasurable sensations, and the whole situation is such as to suggest to him that he identify in every respect his own feelings with hers.

But to do so is in no degree to make for true mutuality. His own feelings should not be the utter surrender and abandon to physical and mental bliss which he sees so profoundly moving to his partner. His feeling should be a pervading sense of triumph and accomplishment, no less profound for being embedded in sensual gratification. The truth is that biologically the wife has no positive accomplishment to perform in the love episode; for the only accomplishment of which she is capable is the utter dissolution, temporary though it be, of the personality of her husband. If she succeeds, she is in the position of one who, not knowing, should try, by applying a match, to see whether or not gunpowder is inflammable. It is, and she is carefully kept in ignorance of the fact, but plentifully supplied with matches.

If this quite easy accomplishment of the wife is successfully performed, she has no husband left, at least for a while, and the explosion has ruined her own chance of happiness, until more explosive is provided.

The husband’s unequivocal task, therefore, which alone assures his erotically supporting his wife is rigidly to remain uninflammable until she, metaphorically speaking, is in ashes herself. For this scientific reduction of the modern wife, the modern husband needs, for he rarely finds it instinctively, the help of the present-day technique of love as taught by the best erotologists.[12]

This will enable him to avoid being consumed to a condition where he is no longer able to produce any effect at the very time when an effect is most loudly clamored for by nature.

The quick ignition of explosive powder produces only a puff and a flash, but the wife desires no flashlight of that type but a guiding star.

True mutuality, therefore, cannot be present in a couple where the husband does not reverse this process and absolutely retain his own emotional tension until her erotic acme has taken place. It cannot be too often repeated that the only means of securing the wife’s emotional catharsis in the acme of the love episode is the husband’s remaining tense and unrelaxed, avoiding his own emotional catharsis until hers is, beyond the peradventure of a doubt, secured.

§ 25

An absolutely novel and unprecedented result follows the successful accomplishment of this erotically virile performance.[13] The husband gains a relaxation of all his tensions; the most important of all, and the greatest, being that relaxation of his caused by the total relaxation of his wife’s erotic tension. A good part of his own tension is caused by his knowledge of hers.

The even unconscious knowledge that this has not been accomplished is the little rift within the lute of married life that increases until their relations eventually become no longer sweet bells, but jangled out of tune and harsh. No matter how much intellectual congeniality there may be between the married partners, which is a factor more egoistic-social than erotic, this lack of unconscious rapport is actually sensed, though not directly. With characteristically human proclivity to rationalize (instead of to know facts and to reason from them), husband and wife begin to disagree upon points apparently most remote from anything erotic, as for example the position of pieces of furniture in the house, or the thousand and one details of solely egoistic-social import.

This does not mean at all that they are not going to have differences of opinion. On the contrary, honest differences of opinion and taste are to be acknowledged by each as proof of the other’s positiveness of character; and the surprises caused in the husband by the unexpected reactions of his wife to all sorts of situations, chiefly egoistic-social ones, are part of the variety which is the spice of marital living.

They congratulate themselves that their disagreements and disputes do not concern really fundamental things, though if they but knew it, there would be now, as there once was (but they have forgotten), no question raised about such matters simply because such matters do not belong to the sphere of marital erotism.

Complete erotic mutuality based on the proper “firing order” of the love emotions of husband and wife, distinctly separates and keeps separate and apart from the single erotic sphere, where the twain are one flesh, their two individual spheres of their separate egoistic-social impulses and activities. The husband leaves unquestioned all of these activities of his wife and vice versa.

There thus emerges with increasing clearness the prime importance of the distinction between erotic and egoistic-social impulses and activities, and with this distinction grows the unalterable conviction, from every aspect of human values, of the unquestionable superiority of the erotic sphere over the egoistic-social spheres.

It is a matter of scientific proof of the last few years, too, that in the married relation this ascendancy of the erotic over the egoistic-social sphere is not only conducive to the greatest health, happiness and longevity but also productive of the greatest material success. The most successful men and women, from every point of view from the material to the spiritual, are the men who have secured, and the women who have experienced, this truly human erotic mutuality.

It is the object of the present volume to point out that the non-existence of the erotic acme in the wife is an inexcusable condition, that can be remedied, and that its substitution by the ability of the husband to insure the acme in the wife as often as she desires it is a condition of the true physical and spiritual progress which should mark the present century.

Nothing could seem further from the truly American ideal of a good “sport” than that there should be men who will take all and give nothing. No excuse is accepted of men who enter a game, and, as soon as they are in, become paralyzed and unable to do a single thing except shout about their membership on the team. But that is exactly what the average husband does in his marriage. He marries mostly to get something for nothing in sex life and he finds out later that the something turns out to be nothing. Who is to blame but himself?

He makes innumerable excuses for his failure, excuses sometimes handed out to him by physicians. He is a man and men are known to be hasty in the love episode. Civilized men always are and have been. There is no help for it. Their wives must make themselves content with the crumbs that fall from the husband’s table. It is injurious for men to change in any way or degree their instinctive reactions. Postponement or doing without their own erotic acme acts in such a way as to constitute a strain on the man’s nervous system. All these false statements have been made by different people at different times.

The necessary control on the man’s part is possible to attain, and once attained it is easy to maintain. But it depends upon a fundamental rearrangement of all values for the man such that the greatest value for him is not in the pleasurable sensations that he himself gets out of his relations with his wife but in the gratifications, totally different in sense quality, that come from the sense of triumph over resistances that is experienced by him when he has for the first time attained, or finally has secured, such control over himself that he can thereby control the emotional specifically erotic reactions of his wife.

If a man’s deepest unconscious satisfactions came from being emotionally controlled by a woman he would never learn to control hers. The unconscious satisfactions invariably are felt when control over the woman’s erotic responses is held by the man.

Nevertheless there is a level of unconscious reaction causing feelings of gratification that even in men come from being controlled. More will be said about this later. Instinctively in many boys this control is thrown off. They rebel against paternal authority. They scorn being managed by girls. They prefer to be themselves and act their own acts and derive satisfaction from the effects of those acts upon the persons or things of the external world.

Yet the fact that all individuals of both sexes, when infants and children, are dependent, and can gain satisfaction and relaxations of tensions of desire never by means of their own acts but only by means of the acts of others, makes it quite evident that there will be a tendency, stronger in some than in others, to get in post-pubertal life their satisfactions via the old route—the satisfactions that come from having things done to them and not from doing things for other people and observing the results.

There are two sources of satisfaction in every human, the infantile one which may be called passive and the adult male which may be called the active source or the source of satisfaction from the effects of one’s own action.

§ 27

It is not to be overlooked that the satisfaction derived from the effect of one’s own action may be due to an unconscious magnifying of these effects. Those who have a slight degree of discriminative ability will think that their acts and the results of their acts are fine, whether they are or not, and may remain in the same illusion throughout their lives. They may never become disillusioned. I may continue to believe that the effects produced on my readers are deep and far-reaching whether they are or not. But if I were content to read books and listen to lectures and felt no desire to write and to influence others or to persuade them to see things as I see them I should derive all my satisfactions via the route of passive experiences.

There is a fundamental difference, then, between the essentially masculine and the essentially feminine type of character, according as the individual gets his satisfactions—the relaxations of his tensions of desire—via the route of feelings caused in him by the action of others or via the route of feelings caused in him by the true and illusionless perception that he has produced effects in other persons or in other things.

The rearrangement of values is the transition from a frame of mind in which the satisfactions are via the “passive” route to those via the active route. This rearrangement need never, for any biological reason, take place in a woman who is properly mated. If she be married but not mated by a male individual who has not made the above-mentioned transition, she will herself tend toward getting her satisfaction via the “active” or “male” route. In other words, rather than have nothing, she deludes herself into thinking she has something by getting a cheapened substitute, by becoming husband to her husband, who in turn becomes wife.

No man can be said to be successful as a husband who has not made this transition. No man is exempt from the necessity of the transition from this type of physical autoerotism to allerotism, simply because he was once an infant, and until he makes this transition he is, no matter what his age in years, still an infant. It has been undeniably proved by psychoanalysis and experienced by people in innumerable forms that no woman can be dominated by an infantile man.

Therefore every man is either the one or the other; either an adult man or an infantile man. He can by taking thought, and after reading books like the present, learn to which class he belongs. If he belongs in the infantile class he has been dominated by the “mother imago” or “angel imago,”[14] and if this be a fixation it will require a deep analysis by an expert before he can come to a realization of his true status; but it is unlikely that nine out of ten who read this book will require more than the advice offered in the following chapters. Or it will require a good orientation and suggestive treatment from a well equipped erotologist.

No wife can be a thoroughly happy one whose husband is in the infantile class, and who thus needs her “playmate.” (See § 12.) Such women are truly in a tragic situation. The infantile (autoerotic) behaviour of such a man in the fragmentary (never complete) love episodes leaves the woman nervous, “on edge,” with an unconscious conflict in her psyche that tends to undermine her health, and to make her an insuperable mystery to her husband, who himself suffers through his own ignorance. He knows, if he knows anything, only that something is amiss, but blinded by his own egotism can never believe that the cause lies solely in him, no matter how blameless he may be, from one point of view, on account of his ignorance.

§ 28

To return then to the proposition with which we started: If the man believes that the woman can by her action evoke his erotic acme, she can. He should know and believe that she cannot; unless he knows she is going to arrive at her erotic acme at the same time he does. But no man can ever be absolutely sure of that, particularly if his egoistic-social impulses are inordinately active and she has few if any such activities, comparatively, and more leisure to follow erotic impulses.

The autoerotic condition in a man is the cause of his haste in the love episode, as his attention is so primarily centered on his own sensations that he excludes the possibility of his observation of his wife’s reactions in the most intimate of marital relations. If the husband is hasty, he is ipso facto mentally autoerotic. His haste is caused by his mental autoerotism. In blunt language he loves himself more than his wife. He may love the results she produces in his feelings. What he needs is to learn how to love more, to be more passionate, to go deeper into the nature of erotism, into the study of the woman, his wife, and her individuality, particularly her unconscious reactions to him.

The thought, “I can control the most elusive thing in the universe—a woman’s erotism,” is the most triumphant thought that can occur to a man, except possibly the thought, “And I know how to continue to control it.” It is almost equivalent and is analogous in many respects to an ability to overcome gravitation and propel oneself at will through the air at any desired speed.

§ 29

In this connection it must be emphasized that control of the erotic situation by the husband is absolutely and unequivocally mental.

In order also to give due weight to the reply to an objection that might be made here, two new terms will be proposed. The objection is that the distinction between mental and physical is purely arbitrary, so it is futile to say that the control is exclusively mental, because the exclusively mental does not exist. Mind, apart from body, is non-existent.

The answer: All phenomena into which a so-called mental element enters can be graded into what would be called without objection on the part of anyone, more mental or less mental, meaning, of course, consciously mental. Thus digestion is less mental than phantasying or day-dreaming, and some emotions might be called less mental than others.

But because we are required by everything that we know about the mind-body combination, to suppose that no so-called purely mental state is without its physical substratum without which it would not exist, and because no physiological process is totally outside of all causal connection with the mind, we are justified in saying that mind is more highly organized body, and body less highly organized mind.

Regarding then any human phenomenon as conditioned by both mental and physical causes we can remove the difficulty, and at the same time the objection that is being answered here, by adopting three Greek words and coining two new English words from them.

Soma is the Greek for body; hyper for upper, or above; and hypo for under or below. So we may call the ordinary physiological movements and processes hyposomatic or a lower form of action of the mind-body combination. Similarly we may use the name hypersomatic for the various degrees of mentality. From the point of view of this book all human action is somatic. Some of it such as digestion, glandular secretion, is hyposomatic or at one end of a series of degrees of complexity. Some human action is hypersomatic, such as remembering. Some of the human phenomena, like emotions, partake of both ends of the series in apparently more or less equal proportions.

§ 30

To return, then, after this digression, to the statement that control is entirely mental: By this, of course, is meant control according to a hypersomatic pattern. There is no control without a pattern. One never is said to control one’s actions unless he has an idea according to which he is going to act. Otherwise his actions are automatic—not controlled.

The immediate connection of this with our present argument is this then (an argument that runs right along with the ideas of autosuggestion): any man can do what any man has done, if he has the same hypersomatic pattern according to which his actions are carried out.

An obvious objection will at once be made, but it is only an apparent one. Many men will say they know they are physically weak, or weak-willed, are lacking in control. They know it because they have never controlled their love emotions, and have little control over any of their emotions.

To that excuse, the answer is: just because you have not is no proof that you cannot. If that were the case no progress would ever have been made by humanity.

That you have not controlled yourself is proof only that you have not yet vividly imagined a pattern according to which your actions might be carried out. The only hypersomatic pattern existing in your personality is that according to which you are now acting.

Countless biographies of men, great and less great, demonstrate that there have been revolutionary, cataclysmic changes in their actions resulting from alterations in the patterns, i.e., changes in the hypersomatic end of their personality.

The man who says he cannot change his actions is simply saying he cannot change his ideas. That would be somewhat analogous to saying he cannot learn a foreign language. But we know that everyone going to a foreign country and being environed month after month by a foreign language will learn to speak it, whether he tries or not. How easily and quickly he does is a matter only of his hypersomatic elasticity. Some are more elastic than others, but almost anyone who can walk can learn to change his hypersomatic patterns, can in other words become conscious of a new hypersomatic pattern, see its superiority to an old one, and regulate and control his actions accordingly.

§ 31

Psychoanalysis has among other striking paradoxes this one most applicable here. The person who says he cannot do a thing is consciously saying, “I cannot,” but unconsciously saying, “I do not wish to.”

Any reply that can be made by any man who says he cannot learn to control his own erotic emotions and therefore is unable to control his wife’s is excusing himself, on the ground that he will not be censured by others if he is really unable. He may be laughed at, or commiserated for his incapacities, but he cannot, so he thinks, be held responsible for them.

But if there is one important and valuable advance made by modern psychology it is that the unconscious, which says, “I do not wish to,” causing the conscious man to say, “I cannot”—this unconscious can be trained, reËducated, reshaped, repatterned. It may take more than a month. The final emergence of action, based on the re-patterned unconscious, may be sudden. But it can be done.

Those who say, “I cannot do it” are in their ignorance simply saying, “I do not wish to do it.”

They would wish to do it if they had in their minds—in the hypersomatic portion of their personalities—an adequately vivid picture of exactly what it is desired to do.

It would be impossible to put into a book a detailed pattern of marital behaviour on the part of husbands, particularly hyposomatic details. But it is hoped that the book will give as clear an exposition of the hypersomatic lineaments of the marital pattern as will be required to make any man that reads it at least willing to change his own love pattern for one that has in it infinitely more satisfaction and triumph, containing as it does the only means whereby a single demi-human atom may completely unite with another and form an entirely new whole.

§ 32

As far as records are available there is no reason to suppose that the champion shot-putter, prize-fighter, or longshoreman is any more able to evoke in his wife the climax of erotic ecstasy than is the rather flat-chested, spectacled college professor, the department store head, the banker, or any other member of the so-called sedentary professions.

The latter class of people have unduly and illogically overvalued the hyposomatic end of the scale. Woman can be courted and married (and thereafter won!) by men whose strength is hypersomatic just as well as by those whose strength is hyposomatic. But so far as the physical or hyposomatic side of the marital relation is concerned, there may be a difference between the pugilist and the college professor in the amount of egoistic-social development in comparison with the amount of erotic development in his past history.

After reading this chapter many people may feel disappointed and say: “You have not told me how I can insure my erotic self-control (or my husband’s).”

I will anticipate somewhat by saying that the affirmation “I know I can control,” if repeated enough times a day with sufficient conviction would undoubtedly help. If to this were added, “I know I love my wife better than I do myself,” it would also be a step in the right direction.

But for the material of the pattern on which is based the conviction of the truth of man’s ability to control himself, I shall have to refer the reader to the later chapters in the book.

At first all I can hope to do is to convince some of the men who read this book that they belong to the infant class of husbands. If the men whose wives are discontented or whose sweethearts are slow in promising, can read and realize that the whole situation is psychic or mental (hypersomatic) rather than physical or economic (hyposomatic), they will see that from one point of view their victory over themselves, and incidentally over others, is the easiest thing in the world, far easier than to lift a weight or change the colour of a leaf on a tree.

For the control recommended in this book no new muscles or nerves have to be supplied, nor do any actual muscles or ligaments or tendons have to be exercised or otherwise strengthened. It would be hard to go through a daily dozen or (gross) of calisthenic exercises and still harder, indeed impossible, to make hair grow (or not grow) where it did not (or did) before. But the procedure to be recommended in this book is more like opening one’s eyes, and seeing that a vehicle is bearing down upon one (or about to leave without one), than it is like walking in an ethical treadmill and satisfying a sense of duty by monotonous repetition of behaviour enforced from without.

For the control advocated here nothing is needed but a new picture of love, uncorrupted by the ignorance of traditional lore and superstition. What is needed is more creative imagination in married life, not spoiled by cynicism or emasculated by fatalism. Control can be secured!