§ 67
The precipitate husband is over-precipitate only if he is or becomes more so than his wife. There is no norm except a comparative one. He must have control (and yet at the right time he may relinquish it); but at all times he must have more control over himself, and incidentally over her, than she has over his erotic reactions, or over her own.
A woman in perfect control of her own erotic reactions, in the sense of control through expression and not through repression or annihilation, probably does not exist. But if she did she would make the perfect prostitute. Such a woman could give any man the deepest satisfaction of which he was capable—until he found that she, and not he, was controlling her erotism. But the egoistic-social impulse operates as a repressive factor even in the prostitute, and renders the completeness of her positive control impossible for her; the more civilized the community the more repressive the control.
A man married to any woman who is in better control of herself than he is of himself is married to (but not mated with) a woman who is to him a prostitute by whatsoever proportion of control she exercises over herself more than he does over himself or over her. This is true both of the negative control of repression on her part and of the positive control of expression. For evidently if her repressive control makes her cold to his advances she is of the common prostitute type as far as he is concerned. He evokes no more real response from her than from the casual woman of the street. However much simulated responsiveness the prostitute may show, he knows unconsciously its unreality, and feels proportionately disgusted. In the wife who is cold because of environmental influences in her youth which the husband has not removed by his wholesome treatment of her, the objective result is the same as in the prostitute who is unresponsive from indifference or fear, or from the repression referred to.