§ 65
To denote the highest type of special scientific student of the art of love, the term erotologist is suggested in preference to the word sexologist, which would imply the study of only the physical side of sex.
If a modern erotologist can tell us that husbands using toward their wives one form of behaviour are themselves unhappy, and have too many children, or too few, we should certainly be broad-minded enough to admit that the chances are, we ourselves shall be unhappy if we do the same things in the same way.
If the erotologist tells us that a million husbands have used a certain technique in their erotic lives and have become supremely happy, and have had just as many healthy children as they wanted and no more, we should certainly be wise, if we could find out what was the felicitous technique of the happy million. If we saw their wives retaining their youth and beauty and vivacity, and being both loving wives and proud grandmothers at the same time, we should not let envy of these men inspire us with hatred and prejudice enough to say that their methods are iniquitous, and not mentioned in the Bible; but we should inquire exactly what these husbands did, to keep their wives and themselves so young and happy.
We should at the present day inquire mostly in vain. A good part of the million do not themselves know what they do that is different from the practice of the other millions. They just love their wives and them alone.
The erotologists, however, have been quietly studying the marital situation for some decades. They have compared, weighed, correlated and investigated thousands of cases. Some of the sexologists have been unscientific and biased with ancient superstitions. A few erotologists, notably Havelock Ellis and Dr. Marie C. Stopes of England, Dr. W. F. Robie of Baldwinsville, Massachusetts, Dr. H. W. Long of Peoria, Illinois, and some of the psychoanalysts, are scientists, ready and willing to look at facts as they are and not as they might wish them to be.
The erotologists have actually discovered definite facts about the more intimate nature of the marital relation. It implies the interaction, in every married pair, of four sets of tendencies: the husband’s conscious and his unconscious trends and the wife’s conscious and unconscious trends. Anyone looking only at the conscious factors is naturally puzzled by almost all the external phenomena of marriage, e.g., why they fell in love, what either could see in the other, why another pair fell out, what on earth was the matter with them.