§ 72
The confrontation of a shallow sipper like this with really profound femininity is a test of virility in the highest erotic sense. The man perverted by traditional views of masculinity, which overvalue the physical side, and unenlightened by the modern psychology of love is face to face with a situation for which he is utterly unprepared.
A man’s so-called satisfaction, then, with the superficial surrender of a woman up to the point where she consents to let him try to control her erotism is not, however, satisfaction at all but a withdrawal from a test of virility. This primary consent on the woman’s part is not a submission but merely in effect a consent to examine or as it were to make a survey of his manliness. Of this she is, of course, entirely unconscious. If she were conscious of it she would have one of the traits of the promiscuous woman. But even if it is unconscious in her it is just as operative as if it were conscious. And the result of the test is also unconscious in the woman, if the test shows that the man is found wanting.
Her reaction to the man found wanting is as various as is the upbringing of women, from the immediate rejection in divorce on the grounds of incompatibility to the lifelong slavery in which she gradually withers.
Under the present inanely stupid method of bringing up women in total ignorance of sex, and in blindness to the truly erotic, a woman has no means whatever of estimating a man’s erotic virility before marriage and practically no standard of judging him after. If she had, she might do something to get him to learn of the existence of true mating.
And if she could know and could tell her husband how he failed, she would then have a chance of becoming happy. No really human man will choose the greater of two evils or refuse the greater of two good things, no matter when or how that choice is offered to him, although to him it may be humiliating whether first or last, to have it laid before him by the woman.