§ 150
Some men are always delighting the conscious life of women by the intensity and frequency and rapidity of their emotional relaxations. Such men seem so generous in their spending of the small change of emotion. But they are always maddening the unconscious of their women, whether these women be wives or mistresses, for they are repeatedly, almost universally, taking in the woman’s presence, and through the instrumentality of her presence, what she cannot herself get, and what she has biologically an expectancy, if not a right, to have. Such men are practically annihilating the chances of their own and their wives’ happiness.
The woman that is governed by the egoistic-social instinct unwittingly plans for the man’s hasty emotional relaxation, the while completely holding her own emotional reactions in check, under perfect repressive control. In the average civilized woman brought up under sex inhibitions this control by annihilation is the only control she has. The ability thus to annihilate the finest possibilities of erotic reaction in herself is the result of the only training many women get. It is the fine art of the prostitute, but not all of hers, however. The rest of it is to simulate a loss of control on her own part in order to effect the aggrandizement and unconscious sense of superiority on the part of her patrons.
This conscious retaining of erotic control is, to be sure, based on the biological necessity of man testing. The best of women cannot of themselves let go their own erotic control. It has to be taken from them by men who are emotionally their superiors in strength.
In so far as it (woman’s tendency to lie) is “almost physiological”[25] and based on radical feminine characteristics, such as modesty, affectability and sympathy, which have an organic basis in the feminine constitution, and can therefore never altogether be changed, feminine dissimulation seems scarcely likely to disappear.
Woman’s tendency to dissemble is dependent on her unconscious reaction of testing the male. But she must test her male for the deeply biological purpose of finding out whether he is strong enough for her. He needs to be, for her purposes, only stronger than she is, to be strong enough; although, when this motive is sometimes transferred to consciousness, she may become a fortune hunter or vampire, and throw away any man for the next egoistic-socially stronger she finds available. This does not of course refer to physical muscular strength but to psycho-sexual strength. If physical strength were enough there would be almost no divorces and no marital unhappiness.