§ 89
The right of the wife to experience the erotic acme at every love episode is only beginning to be admitted. Up to the present time the husband has generally gone on the principle of taking his wife’s body for the fine physical catharsis he fancies it produces in himself.
Taking a woman’s body, however, for the fine emotional catharsis, without “considering too curiously” just how it strikes the woman is manifestly, to any thoughtful man, merely a one-sided affair. It involves only as a negative quantity the results of his action upon the woman, because erotically the result is negative in her case. The most it can do is to stir her emotions a little, leave her with more or less ungratified desire, a tension which in the end is most harmful to her.
Only a man whose mentality is below par or undeveloped can feel himself fully satisfied with an attempt at a purely physical love episode like this. To his unconscious it can be but the stepping up a step that isn’t there, a striking out at empty air. For the exaltation (which would come from passion reciprocated) is indelibly registered on his unconscious as a negative quantity. It is a dent in a surface intended by nature to be convex. In the fully developed man all the sensibilities registering response in the mate are present, and if they are not given the opportunity to function, the lack of it is definitely recorded in the unconscious. The man has as much right biologically to a response in his wife as the wife has a right to be sympathetically handled.
In a time soon to come men will take into consciousness and into conscious control all instinctive actions, and all these unconscious lacks; and will so plan their love that the absence of response will be avoided. The woman’s right to be made to respond will be finally acknowledged.