A PLEA FOR
MONOGAMY

A PLEA FOR
MONOGAMY

BY
WILFRID LAY, Ph.D.

Author of Man’s Unconscious Conflict, The Child’s Unconscious
Mind, Man’s Unconscious Passion and Man’s
Unconscious Spirit.

O heart! Oh blood that freezes, blood that burns!

Earth’s returns

For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin!

Shut them in,

With their triumphs and their glories and the rest,

Love is best!

—Browning: Love Among the Ruins.

BONI and LIVERIGHT
Publishers New York

Copyright, 1923, by
Boni and Liveright, Inc.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

First Printing, June, 1923
Second Printing, November, 1923
Third Printing November, 1924
Fourth Printing, February, 1925
Fifth Printing, June, 1925
Sixth Printing, August, 1925
Seventh Printing, January, 1926

UXORI
AMANDISSIMAE

CONTENTS

A PLEA FOR MONOGAMY

CHAPTER I
THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF MARRIAGE

Common sense indicates, happiness and health demand, science proclaims and society is beginning to insist that men and women understand and apply the palpable truth of the sex relations in their married life.—Dr. W. F. Robie.

§ 1

We are living in an age when the contrast between intellectual complexity and emotional simplicity is becoming so great that the emotional reactions and, because of them, the creative and destructive acts of men are more and more unpredictable and variegated. Intellectual attainment has reached an extraordinary height. Emotions have not been trained or developed, if indeed they are capable of development. They may not be, though it will be assumed in a later chapter that they are susceptible of the kind of training that is produced by reassociation. Emotions are the organic sensations perceived by the ego as the result of reactions, caused by impressions from the external world, reactions taking place within the tissues of the body, and associated with external impressions. Emotions are no more complex than they were thousands of years ago.

When we say that the emotions of one man are finer than those of another man we may mean either that he has repressed his sexual emotions, which we have not been taught to call fine, or that his emotions of surprise, awe, love, hate, jealousy and others are aroused by, that is, associated with, more complicated external impressions than they are in another man. Or we may call fine emotions the constructive emotions with which pleasure is associated.

The emotions as physical reactions have not changed in ages of evolution. We have the same bodies as sounding boards on which the external impressions reverberate, the same bodies practically that men had five thousand years ago. But the number and variety of external experiences has multiplied in geometrical ratio. The result is that, while intellectually we are men of 1923, emotionally we may be cave men or apes. With the products of modern civilization, the material advances and complications, the means of intercommunication, of graphic representation and of the transformation of natural resources we are, as Robinson says in The Mind in the Making, merely monkeying. In spite of numerous sporadic beginnings in the line of social use of the results of modern scientific advancement we are as a race making almost no progress in the direction of fine living.

§ 2

This is no more clearly evident in any other sphere of life than in marriage. With all the intellectual progress made by humanity up to the first quarter of the twentieth century marriage is still looked upon by many men merely as an opportunity for either legitimized procreation or unlimited sensual self-gratification. A man puts as much intellect into his vocation as he is capable of. Into his marriage he puts not intellect, but the emotions of the ancestral ape. Even in his sublimated war of business he knows that a consideration of the other fellow is in the end a winning card, and the word “service” has come into prominence as advertising material. But in his marriage he uses the same crassly selfish methods he has used for thousands, perhaps millions of years.

The sheer blind, isolating selfishness of the average husband and the misery it causes him are the reason for my writing this book. If a man used one-tenth the intellect in his marital relations that he does in his corporation finance and in his inventions and scientific research, the latter would not be half as necessary as they seem to be, and he would himself be infinitely happier.

§ 3

Unless we are progressing toward a woman-made social order it is imperative that men carry on to a logical conclusion what they have begun.

“Charity begins at home” is one of the many maxims that were originated with a far different connotation from that which they have since acquired. Charity (Latin Caritas) originally meant “dearness” or “fondness” and once had an erotic flavour that it has since lost. The only place for sexual love is in marriage and its having escaped from this, like a captured thing, reflects not so much on itself as on the unnaturalness of its captivity. True erotism has practically fled from most marriages, leaving only an empty shell. Men should reflect that nothing is more necessary for the upbuilding of a real civilization than the personal lives of the individuals themselves. Penetratingly thoughtful men realize that the present state of civilization is diseased throughout, and that it “is not in our stars but in ourselves,” that we are to rely for advance.

§ 4

In this book an attempt is made to show how men can so control their marital situation as to make more and more unnecessary the tightness of the bond that operates to make many marriages so like an imprisonment for both husbands and wives. Also the suggestion is made that a certain type of action on the husband’s part will work in the direction of making both prostitution and divorce less and less necessary.

This type of behaviour, comparatively rare at the present time, is based on a pattern that will at once appeal to the sense of justice innate in every man. Although it implies a relaxation of much present constraint and artificiality in the married relation, it is in no sense antagonistic to true monogamous union but rather constitutes a much more advanced and progressive attitude toward the most vital question of the day.

The marriage of the near future, it is hoped, will be inspired by our latest scientific knowledge concerning the psychology of sex, including the ever present unconscious factor, which is the most potent factor in the marital situation and which has been necessarily ignored for the simple reason that, previous to a few years ago, everyone was ignorant of the unconscious mechanisms and their relation to each other, in making for mistakes and unhappiness in marital behaviour.

If every man would exercise the control over himself (the opposite of asceticism in the ordinarily accepted sense), the control which alone will secure that emotional ascendancy over his wife, necessary for happy marriage and unconsciously longed for by the wife, more than any other thing in marital life, he will reduce to the lowest possible frequency both divorce, which is the issue of so many marriages, and prostitution, which has for so many centuries been regarded as the bulwark of marriage and the protection of the wife.

As Grete Meisel-Hess says in her Sexual Crisis, “The happy marriage of the securely placed wife is founded upon the degradation and debasement of another woman, the prostitute”; and Havelock Ellis in the sixth volume of his Psychology of Sex (page 296) says that “the value of marriage as a moral agent is evidenced by the fact that all the better-class prostitutes in London are almost entirely supported by married men,” while “in Germany, as stated in the interesting series of reminiscences by a former prostitute, the majority of the men who visit prostitutes are married.” He then gives several reasons why this is the case.

If every wife should give serious thought to exactly how much degradation the prostitute has been considered to save her from, she would realize that what the prostitute guards her from could be transmuted by the proper attitude on the husband’s part from a crassly physical into a highly spiritual thing. And she would move heaven and earth to induce her husband to study the fine art of love in so thorough a manner that there could be no doubt of the happy issue of their mutual love life.

Critics of marriage as it exists today have amply demonstrated that it shields more immorality, in some cases, than even prostitution itself; and it is a fact that this immorality comes from a lack of spiritual rapport between husband and wife, that can be effected primarily, if not solely, by the husband.

§ 5

While this book assumes that the marital relation is one in which an emotional control is necessary to be exercised by the husband over the wife, it does not assume for a moment but rather denies that the husband should exert any control whatever over the activities of the wife, especially in spheres other than the strictly conjugal.

On the contrary, a husband domineers in small every-day matters only when, and because, he feels unconsciously that he is failing, or is beginning to fail, to dominate in the great and important sphere of woman’s emotional life.

For the health and happiness of them both, this sphere should be the love emotions; at any rate, only the constructive or anabolic emotions. A husband who rightly dominates need not and will not trouble to domineer. If the wife is as profoundly moved erotically by marriage as she should be this deep emotion will impel her to develop her personality to the utmost for the advantage of her husband and, a fortiori, of herself.

It should always be borne in mind by both husband and wife that the love impulse is uniformly to take precedence over the ego (social) impulse, a precedence that, however, in our present competitive society it is very difficult to give. But it is worth every thought that can be devoted to it; to refine the pattern, to ennoble the picture, of marital life.

§ 6

A common misapprehension that psychoanalysis leads to promiscuity in sexual relations needs emphatic correction. The reasoning wrested out of psychoanalytical findings runs somewhat as follows: Most modern ills and notably neurotic disturbances, mild and severe, are the result of the repression brought to bear on the sex instinct by modern civilized life. Therefore, in order to avoid or cure these multitudinous ills, the individual whose natural instincts have been repressed, must dig them up, with great toil and at great expense of time and money, and give them free play in spite of the prohibitions of society. Indeed, in this country, psychoanalysts, of the first rank in other respects, have been said to recommend both men and women patients to make what arrangements they could to indulge in sexual intercourse, even if unmarried.[1]

Now fully admitting that the mental and physical troubles of these patients, and all others who suffer from ills of psychic origin, arise from the repression of the sexual instinct, it still shows a far too great tendency on the part of their advisers to temporize and compromise with facts, if they give this advice. For, while a conflict between two forces, one or both of which were in the unconscious, is more satisfactorily and successfully carried on if the two forces are brought out into the open light of consciousness, the conflict still remains, and is only shifted to another field where it may go on as before, and with unabated fierceness.

The conflict between the individual and society is just as great whether a man takes it out in himself through a neurosis or gives up the neurosis and takes a prostitute or a regular mistress, neither of which has the sanction of society. In the case of many neurotics the cure is worse than the disease simply because the social pressure becomes clearer to the individual if he actually does, even in secret, the things he had before only unconsciously wished. For him the conflict not only is not resolved but is worse, for if like the majority of neurotics he is of a more sensitive type than the average person the contrast between his actions and the implicit demands of his environment will be all the greater. He will be doing in reality the very thing he unconsciously desired but feared to do.

And yet not the same thing after all. For unless the mistress is of that rare and extraordinary type of Mlle. Drouet who supplied for Victor Hugo what he would have much preferred to get from his wife, had she been spiritually able to give it, there will be, for the unfortunately advised neurotic, another conflict not on an ethical but on an intellectual and spiritual plane.

The advice for such people can only be to get married; or, if that is beyond the bounds of possibility, which is seldom the case, the suggestion to adopt a moderate autoerotism has been made by some physicians in good standing as an acceptable substitute at least for the neurotic of either sex. It frees them, at any rate, from the feeling that they are injuring anyone else, either directly or indirectly.

An emphatic reiteration is here appropriate concerning the harmlessness of the physical forms of autoerotism as practised, at some times in their lives, by almost nine-tenths of humanity of both sexes, especially civilized humanity, where a taboo is placed on other normal heterosexual practices. The autoerotism mentioned (in [sections 21-25] on mutuality) is purely a psychical intellectual or mental autoerotism entirely apart from the physical. Its results are, in the long run, far worse. (See note, [p. 24].)

Grete Meisel-Hess, in The Sexual Crisis, speaking of the men who are sexual compulsion neurotics and whom she describes as male counterparts of the demi-vierges, says (page 155): “They are unable to surmount the ultimate obstacle between I and Thou. They are unable to complete their work, incompetent to possess a woman utterly. The amatory intimacies are never fully consummated. They get through the preliminaries of love and the first preludes; but that which comes afterward, the most beautiful and also the most difficult part, remains unenjoyed, unmastered, unconsummated. I am not referring here to what is ordinarily termed impotence. This sentimental impotence has nothing to do with mere physical weakness, but is far more disastrous, since it forever bars those affected with it from an entry into the deepest experiences of love. It is only the strong in soul who are capable of love in its completeness.”

The physical autoerotic acts, far from having the results of producing physical and mental weakness (as has been unscientifically stated and slavishly repeated for two centuries), are nature’s way of developing the reproductive apparatus for strictly human use. The injuries supposed to result are now scientifically proven to be the result caused by the fear of harm, and the shame inspired in young people by stupidly ignorant elders.

The autoerotic mental attitude described in this section is a peculiarity of men who through lack of enlightenment have not yet outgrown a tendency to remain, in their psychic reactions, infantile or puerile. But there is no proof that the inevitably autoerotic attitude of the young need persist for a moment after they have grasped the idea of the difference between autoerotism and a real object love that contains the growing element of perfect mutuality. And yet many men unnecessarily get the idea fixed in their minds that autoerotic practices have weakened them physically or have produced a mental habit of mind that cannot be broken. From one point of view it is the easiest thing in the world to present the proofs of the utter harmlessness of the autoerotic practices and the utter groundlessness of the fears which make almost every man, that is human, lack the confidence which will give him the necessary control over his own, and incidentally over his wife’s, erotism. (See note, [p. 14].)

§ 7

The recommendation to the neurotic patient to take up clandestine sex relationship is based on the same misinterpretation of psychoanalytic theory that is seen in the explanation given by shallow, self-styled psychoanalysts of Freud’s term “polymorphous perverse” as applied to the sexuality of children. Polymorphous means “of many shapes or patterns,” and implies that a child gets as much pleasure and satisfaction from stimulation of any one of its “erogenous zones” as it does from any other including the genital. This is quite easily comprehensible from the point of view that the child’s sexuality, like the unassembled parts of an automobile, is synthetized at puberty under the “primacy of the genital zones” whereupon all the pleasures of stimulation of all the other zones serve only as preliminaries to that of the genital.

And the word perverse in its etymological significance means only “turned in all directions,” i.e., as much toward one zone as to another. But the word perverse in its ordinary sense has the connotation of moral turpitude.

It would be as senseless to call a child’s interest in its skin, and pleasure in sucking its thumb or a piece of candy, perverse in this latter sense as it would be to call a ring gear of a differential wicked just because it was lying on the floor of a garage, and the mechanic had not yet put it in place.

Thus has Freud been misinterpreted and the good of all his fearless investigation into sexual life annulled by the shortsighted and ignorant misreading of his work on the part of so many of those who would call themselves his followers.

§ 8

Only marriage and only a pure and complete monogamy without anesthesia[2] on the part of either mate will satisfy both conscious and unconscious cravings of the neurotic. It is a great advantage to have these unconscious cravings introduced into consciousness if for the only reason of giving a greater self-knowledge and therefore a greater self-confidence.

Not only all conscious and unconscious love cravings can, but all should be satisfied in every marriage from the beginning of it all through to the end of it. By the majority of healthy people they should be given conscious expression by both mates much more frequently than they actually are.

§ 9

So many unhappily married people ask, “What, Doctor, is a normal sex life?” It is generally considered by all authorities that individuals vary to such an extent that it is impossible to lay down any rule except that in the normal sex life the conscious outward expression should never take place except when it is a mutual and reciprocal expression, and that, on these conditions, no limits that could be called normal really exist.

But the attitude of this book is that the mutuality is largely if not entirely the result of the husband’s love-making. In the ideal marriage he is and always should be the leading factor in the exclusively erotic sphere.

§ 10

Every use of the term erotic episode or love episode or love drama, is to be understood as emphatically affirming the indispensability of an equal emphasis on both the so-called physical and the so-called mental or spiritual factor of the love life, neither one nor the other omitted, neither one nor the other unduly overweighted.

We are minds or souls inhabiting or, better, organically connected with bodies. Everyone knows the body cannot be neglected any more than the mind. But the most mental of the bodily reactions and the most bodily of the mental reactions are the emotions; and as far as present-day physiological researches have been able to discover, both are most closely interrelated by the interlocking system of ductless glands, among which the interstitial or sexual glands are the grand president of all the boards of directors.[3]

Tradition first, in classical Greek and Roman times, unduly overweighted the physical end and, in modern times, has attempted unduly to overweight the spiritual end of the balance, but neither of these processes has restored a balance which is fundamental to the highest type of Christianity—the balance between the erotic[4] and the egoistic-social trends.[5] This balance it is the object of this book to suggest, with the hope that such an approach to equilibrium of two tendencies that are now badly out of balance will help to show the futility of much activity that is now called civilized, but which is not most adapted to producing the greatest happiness of the individual, and through that, the greatest prosperity of such people as are destined by happiness and prosperity to survive the crumbling of the present state of society.

The Surprise of the Imperfectly Married

What? Every pair in every marriage attain absolute bliss in every love episode? Do you mean to tell me that the rose mist of dawn lasts through the entire day?

Of course, why not? Should one expect every day to be cloudy? Must we expect our lives to be unhappy? Is it wholesome to live in an atmosphere of tragedy? Not to have perfect married love is to act lower than the animals—to have abolished instinct, by which they act, and not to have attained knowledge, according to which are regulated the acts of all adepts in the art of love.

The Surprise of the Perfectly Married

What? Do you mean to tell me that every married couple do not go through the same perfect type of love episode we do every day or two? Why, we have never had anything else from the very first and supposed, of course, everybody else was exactly like us.

Of course, they do not. You see how people look, don’t you, after a few years of marriage?

CHAPTER II
MODERN EMOTIONAL UNREST

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds.

Shakespeare, Sonnet CXVI.

§ 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.

§ 26

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!

CHAPTER III
EMOTIONS

§ 33

Emotions, including moods and many nameless feelings, are some of the innate organic sensations evoked in our bodies by sensations that are not organic. In other words, they form a part of the internal sensations, which so far as generally named are originally associated with external sensations.

Frink remarks that “the emotion, from the point of view of physiology, is these various preparatory changes in the content of the blood, in the innervation of the various muscles, endocrine glands and other viscera. The emotion, from the point of view of psychology, is the afferent, sensory report of these changes.” And William James’ classical statement is as follows: “Bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion.... The more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike or tremble, because we are sorry, angry or fearful, as the case may be.”

While most emotions of the simple type, like surprise, admiration, joy and others are in infancy and childhood originally, though not innately associated with certain definite sensations from the outer world, they are frequently reassociated by experience through the influence of the environment, so that, in later life, one enjoys or detests quite the opposite of what caused instinctive attraction or repulsion in early life.

The complex emotions of love, jealousy and hate are not, in their greatest complexity, existent in humans before puberty, although the unsynthetized elements out of which they are finally composed are present in childhood, particularly hate. This, according to psychoanalysis, is a more archaic emotion than love and is not its direct opposite. It is likely that human emotions are progressing from a dominant hatred toward a reigning love.

Love in its fully synthetic and complicated form is not only impossible in children, but its higher types, spoken of in this book as erotic, occur at their best in those more intricately complicated personalities that are the peculiar product of modern civilization.

The expression of erotic emotion does not involve activity on the man’s part solely, and absolute passivity on the woman’s. Passion and passive are etymologically the same word, but the natural inferences from this are erroneous. It happened that emotions were called passions by some old Roman pseudo-philosopher who was translating Stoic doctrines and used “passions” to translate patheia, which, in Greek, means “sufferings.” The Stoics believed that emotions were sufferings inflicted on men by Fate. Their great discovery was that men could conquer them by training (askesis). Hence comes “asceticism”: the training by which a man might free himself from the suffering which was caused by feeling anything. Now we are beginning to realize that there are emotions that ought to be felt, and repeatedly—emotions that are as necessary to the growth of the soul as food is to the growth of the body. Asceticism (training), therefore, of the future will be a training in the emotions of love.

§ 34

Women are said to be more emotional than men. In the sense that their actions are guided by their emotions more than by the verbal processes of logical reasoning this may be true. For there is a type of mental process that may be called logical in which verbal consistency is sought and with little difficulty maintained. But as words are only counters, symbols or representatives of things and are used in only a part of all the thinking, conscious and unconscious, that goes on in the mind continuously day and night, a term is needed with which to describe the wordless thought-processes that are quite as important causes of action as are the verbal processes; and to these has been given the term psychological.

Emotions are for the most part indescribable, not to be adequately represented by words, and are therefore to be regarded as psychological processes tendency to subject their mental processes to verbal thought or reasoning.

Men are characterized more than women by a tendency to subject their mental processes to verbal control, while women utter many words in the vain attempt to give verbal expression to their feelings. In men on the average words have more weight in the determination of action; in women feelings or emotions.

§ 35

In the sense, however, that women perceive with greater clearness and intensity the internal organic sensations (or emotions) it is not true that women are more emotional than men. Unconsciously, “down deep in their hearts” the members of one sex are as emotional as those of the other. Men have as many and as powerful emotions as women, but have controlled some emotions more than women have, by annihilating or attempting to annihilate, them by means of repression. But women too have been forced to repress certain other emotions, notably the erotic.

§ 36

The most vital emotion is the erotic. I hope I shall not be misunderstood in my use of the term “erotic.” I place it above all the other emotions in dignity and complexity. It is sex plus love and more than that. “All the wonder and wealth of the mine in the heart of one gem.” All the dynamics of the ages in the force of one feeling. It is the physical plus the spiritual, the combination of bodily and psychical, the paradox that makes the individual’s greatest personal happiness consist in his feeling the happiness of another person of the opposite sex, the spiritual force that vitalizes and sublimates every physical thing it touches, the psychical that completely evaporates, if not supported by the most physical, an emotion that, unlike any other emotion, comes from the experience not of other things but of another’s emotions, the only emotion that responds pleasurably to every manifestation of bodily and spiritual activity of the member of the other sex. Erotism is the most nearly perfect type of conjugal love.

§ 37

“After she has had sexual experiences,” Kisch maintains, “a woman’s sexual emotions are just as powerful as man’s, though she has more motives than a man for controlling them.” (Ellis, Psychology of Sex, Vol. III, p. 202.)

Her motives for controlling them, which here means annihilating them or repressing them, are egoistic-social ones (see [§ 43]) just as man’s; but in man-made society these motives are stronger in the woman than in the man, because man has placed more repression on her sex impulses than on his own.

In placing more repression on hers than on his, he has not, however, given anywhere near a full expression to his own erotic instincts. Because of the dominance of egoistic-social impulses in modern civilization his erotism does not permit the expression of such fundamental strata of his unconscious as are stirred in woman, whose more flexible erotism is aroused to a pitch that he finds it difficult because of his egoistic-social interests to ascend.

As is maintained steadfastly in this book, he has repressed his own, but hers still more. In so doing he has lowered the moral, spiritual and psychical status of marriage, which should, if they two are to become one flesh, accept the entire body as well as the whole soul each of the other. In repressing what he has deemed the physical side of love man has put on himself a quite unnecessary burden. With the natural desire to control, which constitutes masculinity, he has, in his thinking, blunderingly made annihilation an equivalent of control.

This placing of more repression on her erotism than on his is due to the fact that his own is so quickly satisfied in comparison with hers. He acts en masse as if it would take so much of his time, now devoted to egoistic-social ends, to equal, in erotic expression, her greater capabilities.

§ 38

The most striking fact of most emotions, except those of love, is the facility with which they are reassociated with ideas different from those with which they first occurred.

The love emotions appear to be the least easily transferred, as indeed they are the least easily stirred to their depths. This is said advisedly on the well grounded observation that most people who say they love do not love fully, and deeply. The more deeply they love, the more their passion instills itself into every fibre of their being and the more slowly they are able to change their love object.

But ordinary emotions, other than the erotic, are readily and almost universally shifted from one object to another. Indeed, it may be asserted that there is no innate content of any of the emotions except love. Love innately requires an object of the opposite sex.

To illustrate the reassociability of the other emotions it is necessary only to recall what things one has liked or feared years ago and compare them with the present likes or fears.

And it would be enough to take fear itself as an illustration of the variability of its content. When fear becomes fixed in a phobia, it is extraordinary how irrational the association is, viewed from any logical standpoint. A woman fears mice or snakes, although she has never been injured by either, or beetles, although possibly she has never touched one. Or she fears to cross an open square, and nearly faints if she has to do so alone, although there is not a chance in ten thousand that any harm would come to her. An association of an emotion so profound as fear with some chance place or occurrence is ample proof that the emotions themselves have no essential connection with any external object. The absence of fear in some persons under circumstances where people generally would be afraid also demonstrates the ready dissociation of emotions from particular experiences. One can learn to like or to dislike almost anything.

To a certain extent this is true of love but far less so if we restrict the use of the term “love” to its more ideal phases. When we speak of “Off with the old love and on with the new,” it will be conceded that we speak not of true love but of a very shallow interest.

§ 39

A young woman, Miss F., married a man who made an ideal lover and to whom she responded passionately; but yet she was not happy with him. She had in reality fallen in love more or less unconsciously with a previous suitor. She frankly told her husband she could not love him fully, divorced him and subsequently married her first lover.

One might say that, if the reassociation of love emotions were as easy as that of most other emotions the young woman might have learned to love her husband. She evidently tried to do so, but she made the mistake, made by many uninstructed young women, of going against her better judgment in marrying the man she did. Her first lover was not in a financial condition to marry. She wanted to marry, and took the first available man. So, as in many cases, the fear of not getting married at all forced her to take a man whom she did not love enough. She must have been more or less conscious of this all the time. She made, however, a definite attempt to reassociate her love emotions. She was not able to do it. Her husband, although he is described as an ideal lover, was not able to arouse her full passion.

§ 40

Then there is the case of Mrs. G., who married the prominent Dr. G. practically on a wager. She did not love him, but in a spirit of bravado declared to a girl friend that she could make him marry her. Not himself being in absolute control of his own erotism, he succumbed to her charm. Not knowing also the part a husband is required to play in the marital life in order to make it a success, he did not make her love him, did not evoke in her the responses which make a woman the object of a man’s deepest passion. So, as in a great many marriages, he did not really love her, and she divorced him after a few years.

Both women were unfortunate in their choice of a man. The resultant divorces could have been obviated by the knowledge neither man had. But this is the history of most divorces where the couples have come to grief on obstacles considered to be erotic.

Neither of these women clearly distinguished between egoistic-social and erotic motives because neither of them had had erotic experiences, and in their marriages they failed also to get the highest type of erotic experience.