§ 48
Adult sexuality is not an egoistic-social expression in any essential sense. While the gratification of sexual desire is at first entirely selfish, starting as it does in every individual before puberty in autoerotic practices, it never becomes thoroughly adult until, in the case of the man, he has secured in his mate her perfect satisfaction on which his own depends. He can never marry in the deepest sense if he retains his autoerotic tendencies. A man’s satisfaction on attaining solely his own erotic acme without reference to that of his mate, is in every case an autoerotic satisfaction. The woman, in this instance, is merely an impersonal object or instrument by means of which he produces an effect on himself. In this respect his woman is no more personal than his food.
It may be said that a man’s satisfaction is none the less selfish, even though it be conditioned on a woman’s. But the self-satisfaction which excludes that of the woman must be greater in selfishness and actually less human. In fact this reciprocal self-satisfaction is the distinguishing human trait without which the sex life of most marriages, like all prostitution, is not other than animal heat.
A man frequently thinks he has to make a conscious choice between courses of action that are predominantly egoistic-social or erotic. He thinks of the erotic life as taking time, and incidentally money in the time lost alone, to pay enough attention to a woman to develop her erotic possibilities, and many men acting under this false impression that erotism weakens practical accomplishment, have decided that the egoistic-social path was the more attractive. But even they can never free themselves from the promptings of the erotic impulse.
Such men, thinking erroneously that all sexual acts are erotic, making as they do no distinction between the two, believe that they have somehow fulfilled an erotic need by keeping a woman, either a wife or a mistress. This travesty of the truly erotic by a man who acts mainly from egoistic-social motives is self-deception. The two are not only not the same, but never can be made so.