§ 186
A brief résumé will be now given of conclusions so far reached. Man’s control, while difficult for him to gain and particularly in the love episode, is yet essential to his perfect union with his mate, unless there is proved to be, which has not yet been done, a congenitally uncontrollable type of men. Such men could never satisfy any except women who are erotically the most highly developed, in the sense that anything or nothing would send them into transports—a comparatively rare type of woman.
Haste on the man’s part in the love episode, his acknowledged precipitateness, his hurry to relax sexual tension, is due directly to his own anesthesia, his insensibility to the preliminary reactions of his mate, and in some cases a total ignorance of the existence of her final reaction. He does not know what effect in his mate he should really strive to get.
A knowledge of that effect involves a recognition of the fact that all women are unconsciously trying continually to test the man’s psychical strength. Many actions of women cannot be accounted for except by assuming this unconscious motive, for which, of course, there is a biological cause in the attempt of nature to mate the woman with the strongest man. The congenitally uncontrollable (if any exists) man will go down under this test, uniformly.
This biological cause produces in the woman the tendency to dissemble. This tendency makes the woman coy, bashful, modest, reserved, retiring. As animal she is always facing away from the male in the sexual act and as Ellis has noted, only the human female has in the human love episode turned so as to face the man. But this subhuman characteristic is always present in the woman, manifesting itself in some of her actions if not in all, and constitutes an obstacle to the man’s self-control; for, unless he has insight enough into the feminine character to discount her dramatic prevarications, he will infer that it is useless and hopeless for him to try to produce any effect whatever in her, so he might as well produce what effect he can—namely, in himself. He does not know that the most satisfactory result in his own feelings is produced by the reactions which he effects in her, through the reservation of his own supreme reaction until she is past knowing it herself, until, therefore, he has convinced her that his control is greater than hers, that his strength is greater.
As it is evident that in animal copulation whatever acme is reached is reached simultaneously by both sexes, because of the briefness of the act, it is reasonable to suppose that the man’s unconscious situation contains the implication that his own erotic acme necessarily involves the woman’s. In other words every man has an unconscious phantasy that when he has completely satisfied himself his mate is completely satisfied. Only after years of married life do some husbands begin to suspect that something is missing from the marital relation.
If the male subhuman animal is excused from any concern as to the proper reaction of the female, that does not excuse any man and yet in so far as he is animal he has no cause to act otherwise than take his satisfaction without delay. The female animal is accessible only in the rutting season. Human woman is at all times accessible to the love expressed in true mating. Human sexuality has not only made a fundamental distinction between procreative and erotic love episodes but also has almost obliterated the periodicity in the sexual accessibility of the woman. Therefore human love is toto cælo different from animal copulation.
Considerations of the matter of control lead to the conclusion that it is possible only by means of the imagination, and because imagination is only the reawakening with possible recombination of images of past experiences, we are again confronted with the problem of explaining how the experience to be imaged in advance and looked for and waited for may be presented both to the men who have and to those who have not had sex experience.
As one cannot control anything except according to a pattern, the pattern of controlled action must be in the mind of any who intend to achieve control.
The method then, by which the husband is to achieve control of his own, and thus over his wife’s erotic reactions, is simply observation. He absolutely requires fully to note the effect that what he does has on his wife. If he succeeds in averting his gaze, figuratively, from himself to his partner, he will find that his own reactions take on a lessened value in his eyes. His own reaction, one of ecstatic pleasure is, in comparison with his wife’s, highly concentrated on one detail of the love episode. This is, of course, the most important one in animals and would be in humans, if humans were animals, but the fact that they are not and that erotic values have developed in humans that do not exist in animals, makes the man’s erotic acme take on a much smaller significance and value.
Most husbands go through the love episode as if they were animals, merely procreating progeny, while yet starting from no such purpose. The purpose is, of course, in so many men solely the purpose to gratify themselves and not anyone else, that, of course, any deliberate thought of ways and means of gratifying any other, does not occur to them.
Many men, indeed, are filled with embarrassment, if not dismay, in perceiving a deeper and more extended reaction in their women than they perceive in themselves. With such a power which they observe developing in their wives they do not know how to compete. The situation of a husband who finds himself developing in his wife a much richer and fuller erotism than he thinks he has himself, contains the unconscious factor of unflattering comparison. Unconsciously he does not wish to find her richer than himself because that gives him a sense of unconscious inferiority and injures his feeling of control. So the marital situation contains the unconscious wish on the husband’s part not to find in his wife an erotism greater than his own, entirely apart from any conscious idea he may have that he should not have an “oversexed” woman as a wife.