§ 49
Many a young man making a success of his business, paying off his debts and beginning to pile up money, lets up a bit from the strain of business and begins to look about him for amusement keener than the ordinary recreations.
He meets an attractive young woman, puts her down mentally as not quite up to his social scale, but finding her responsive determines to go as far with her as she will let him. Of course this is starting wrongly, on the basis of not so much making her an integral part of his own personality as trying to find in her an objective and nearly impersonal means of procuring autoerotic pleasure for himself. Not how he pleases her is his ultimate thought but how she pleases him. It has possibly not occurred to him that he likes her because he likes the effects she produces in him and that no matter how much money he lavishes on her, it is barter for certain privileges she permits him to take with her. These privileges are not the highest and greatest he could avail himself of, with a woman he would make his wife, the chief privilege being that of developing himself through her and incidentally of developing her to the highest degree of which she is capable.
On the contrary he does not take a great deal of interest in any section of her personality except her body. He may think her cute and amusing or enigmatic if he is interested in solving puzzles; but he is not likely to find any of her mental characteristics engaging, although she probably has such, even if she allows him liberties he might consider impossible in some other women. He will probably not introduce her to his mother or sisters, as he holds them as a different class of women; and with the secretly followed woman he feels on a different social plane, no matter how personally neat and attractive she may be. If she engages with him in any erotic preliminary play, she ostracizes herself in his eyes from the class of women to which his mother and sisters belong, women who would not do that. This comes from his youthful propensity to bisect everything into absolutely good and absolutely bad. Women are thus divided into the mother class (which includes of course sisters and cousins) who are supposed by him to be non-erotic in a sense. Chief goddess in this class of erotically pure women is the mother-imago or angel-imago described in another section.
To the ideas, opinions, beliefs and other spiritual and intellectual characteristics of his clandestine “love” he pays little attention. Believing again, and again erroneously, in the utter bisection of human qualities, he does not know that supreme erotic attainments demand the highest intellectual abilities, or the utmost freedom from traditional superstitions about conventional morals. He does not know that his own greatest intellectual development is conditioned on his own fullest erotic development, which he can achieve only by the deepest and most searchingly passionate pursuit first of the soul and second of the body of his inamorata. His tendency toward gross bisection makes him accept the common shallow opinion that physical and spiritual are far as the poles asunder. He does not know that what he thinks the keenest physical pleasure is, as physical pleasure, far inferior to what it might become for him if he treated his evening love to the full illumination of his intellect and his reason. He also thinks and still erroneously that he can purge away all earthly love from the woman of the mother-imago class and find for his wife, whom he will later love spiritually after he has satisfied his physical passions, a woman absolutely pure of all human passion.
He makes the serious mistake of thinking he can love on a sort of departmental plan, a plan that may work well in his business or in any other egoistic-social sphere, but in the erotic is an utter failure.
He thinks, in other words, that he has passions that should be called base, and that he can gratify these desires with one type of woman. That their baseness is only a matter of the autoerotic mode in which he gratifies them has perhaps never occurred to him. Nor has he ever known that no passion can rightly be called base if gratified allerotically, which is the opposite of autoerotically. For allerotism is the passionate love not of self but of another. No one could be called in any sense unethical who gratified his own desires only through the gratified desires of another. But that is not the state of the well-to-do young man with a clandestine “love” affair.
The hardest thing for this young man to see is the fact, which is quite patent to the unconscious both of the young woman and of himself, the simple fact that his interest in her is merely autoerotic. Some indeed will say that they are fully aware that they are keeping up secret relations with women for purely selfish reasons. They see that, in their day life, business is business and one has to sell and buy; and they wrongly suppose that the selling and buying of women’s bodies is no worse than business. The woman gets well paid for her services. Indeed they may, if they have read him, quote Ellis, who contrasts the reward of the average wife and the average demimondaine, and says that the prostitute is much better paid than the wife, and does far less for the economic reward she gets.
But the young man who thinks for a moment that there is anything really erotic in the relations between himself and the young woman whom he disdains to make his wife, knows no more of erotism than a butterfly does of the depths of the ocean. His case is simply that of an undeveloped embryo. His autoerotic love is a wasted gonad that has never met the cell with which alone it could completely fuse and grow into an individual of its appropriate species.
Not all sexual acts are erotic. Many are no more truly erotic than smoking a pipe or chewing gum. The man who for egoistic-social reasons refuses to confine his love to a woman he has married or intends to marry, and thereby removes all chance of the vivifying effects of true erotism being caused in his extra-marital life by the depth of his marital love, is starting in the wrong direction every time. He has left undeveloped the truly erotic part of himself, which, thus banished into the unconscious, will nevertheless, through its indirect manifestations, completely warp his sex life. He will have no love life whatever. In spite of its frequent occurrence in men in general, sex life without love life is a monstrosity.
Erotism, then, may be defined as the highest expression of sex, from which all autoerotic impulses have been removed, or in which they have been so much subordinated that they play an almost negligible part.