Can We Save Our Vital Force? Once upon a time it was assumed that continence enabled people to save their "vital force," to preserve the "resources of their body."
We know now that the gonads produce two secretions, one which would pass out of the body in any event, and one which flows directly in the blood and is the only one which can benefit the organism.
The various puritanical theories as to the great value of continence had been shaken many times by evidence from the biography of all the great writers, artists, philosophers, inventors and other men and women who have left the world much enriched by their creative labor and at the same time indulged freely in the pleasures of the flesh.
Sublimation. Endocrinology strikes now the last blow at those theories, one of which by the way, was Freud's romantic hypothesis of the "sublimation."
Freud believed that sexual energy could be diverted towards social ends of greater value and non-sexual in character. This is scientifically absurd, as it disregards the dualism of glandular secretions. The outward secretions cannot be "saved" and the inner secretions which are beyond our control flow directly into the blood stream.
I have shown in another book, "Sex Happiness" that the platonic man is either the victim of his ignorance of sex matters and of ascetic superstitions which modern physiology can no longer countenance, or a physiologically deficient individual.
The heroes of Beresford's "God's Counterpoint" and of May Sinclair's "The Romantic" whom I analised in "Sex Happiness" correspond to the first and the second of those types, respectively.
The Sexless. There are men and women, of course, of the hypogonadal type, undersexed or sexless, who are capable of deep affection for a person of the opposite sex. That such an affection never culminates in complete physical communion is easily understood. Sexual failures discourage the weaker friend from risking any more experiments likely to result in humiliation.
The sexless man is practically a woman, and like certain homosexuals, treats women as members of his own sex. He may make a pleasant, delicate, safe companion, but no woman should allow herself to care for him.
Frigid Women who never experience any thrill in their husband's embrace and hence consider the physical communion as an indecent act forgivable in a husband only, as it is a part of the marriage arrangement, may love a man very deeply and yet never feel the urge to surrender their body to him.