§ 191
Any plurality of women for a man implies reservation. He cannot love all of a woman entirely who thinks he loves in any degree any other woman. If for example he “loved” one woman for her hair and another for her eyes, another for her smile, this could not be called love, but only physical sex stimulation, or fetishism. Man’s supposed love of more than one woman is where his reservation makes him love one woman consciously and the others unconsciously. But conscious love is not complete love either, so that a man who consciously loves his wife, but is not able to arouse in her the erotic acme for any reason, cannot really be said to love her. He may rationalize to himself that his wife is a good mother to his children, a good housewife, patient, painstaking, self-sacrificing; but that other women whom he has seen interest him more in various intellectual spheres.
His wife could not be a brilliant pianist, good conversationalist, noted writer, artist, and singer, all at the same time. It would be a physical impossibility. He is interested in all those spheres in other women; why should he not find pleasure in their company? Why should he not call love that interest which the thought-provoking, intellectually stimulating woman arouses in him? Simply because he would not and probably could not evoke in her the fullest erotic reaction, and probably has not in his own wife.
Plurality of women would compare with Guyot’s violinist who should say he could play “Yankee Doodle” only on one violin and only a concerto on another, or could play only in E flat Major on one, and A flat Minor on another, needing a different instrument for each of the twenty-four keys.
That is not to say women are not different, but only that man’s satisfaction in marrying one is dependent largely on his own erotic technique which is far more important and valuable than either musical, artistic or any other technique; and that if he does not play upon her emotional instrument, to his and her complete satisfaction, he has no right to try to play on any other. Men go from one musical erotic instrument to another, saying, virtually: “I cannot play on this one. Of course, I shall be able to play on the next. This is an inferior one. Besides, the more practice I get the better I shall be able to play. After I have had a hundred or so I shall be a virtuoso.”
Women in general, however, are one as good as another for the production of the erotic music which can completely satisfy a man. He not only needs no more than one but on a priori grounds it can be safely said in almost every case that he can evoke no more satisfactory erotic response from one than from another, regarding this from the purely erotic viewpoint and not confusing it with the egoistic-social one.
Undoubtedly it gratifies a man’s egoistic-social impulse of self-magnification to have a woman flatter him, to make him feel that his very presence excites her, thrills her through and through. It is almost automatic in some women thus to try to play upon a man. But this too is never from purely erotic motives, but largely from egoistic-social ones.
The man who prides himself on his success with all women is constantly confusing the erotic with the egoistic-social aim. And many a man considers that he has fulfilled this erotic aim when, through his personal magnetism or his susceptibility to flattery, he has succeeded in getting a woman to consent to try to surrender herself in toto to him. But in using this pseudo-erotic situation as a factor in the egoistic-social sequence, he is showing an utter blindness to the essence of erotism, which consists in the woman’s fully conscious placing of the erotic motive ahead of the egoistic-social one she has been following in her course of verbal or other flattery and blandishment.
Can any satisfaction come to a woman except the purely egoistic-social one of superseding another, his wife, in the preference of a man whom she endeavours to captivate? Can any satisfaction except egoistic-social come to a man who prides himself on his conquests, on how easily women fall for him? Can he be said to be motivated more by erotic or by egoistic-social impulses in his attempts to add other women to his list, or to run risks and arouse in his soul the excitements of danger?