§ 141
Anesthesia is love-blindness. Love is pictured blind because he does not see defects. The worst blindness of love is its not seeing beauties. Most husbands’ love is blind. This is the anesthesia meant. When one is given surgically an anesthetic it is to make one insensible to pain. Love anesthesia is the insensibility to the love emotions which are stirred in every man by every woman.
Can a man be aware of these appeals, made by every woman, and choose to remain true to the woman he has married? What good would be done to him if the anesthetic to which, by virtue of conventional repression, we are all subject, should be suddenly removed? Would not such a man be irresistibly impelled to make love to any and every woman he saw? Where then would monogamy be? But if monogamy depended on anesthetics of this type it would be on a very insecure basis. It would not endure a week.
Yet most men are love-blind, are anesthetic to woman’s deepest erotic appeal. Furthermore the securest protection for monogamy is the removal of that anesthesia.