Does not the unmated God of the Western nations symbolise the absolute supremacy of power over sex? And when people pray to God, what do they ask for, in the majority of cases, if not power (help)?
Self-Love. Yet we often consider the craving for power as a form of love, self-love. When Jesus said "Love thy neighbor as thyself" he testified to the fact that our self-love is the most powerful human feeling and he presented it as a goal which our love for others might reach.
He admitted that we all love ourselves first and he was too world-wise to advise men, as some of his followers have done, to repress their self-love. He only advised men to try and love others as much as they loved themselves.
All the great conflicts between nations have been precipitated by ego rather than by love. Love and sex were responsible, we are told for the most famous war in history and legend, the Trojan war. I am quite sceptical about it in spite of the "evidence" presented by a poet who probably never existed as an individual, Homer.
I know, however, that the most atrocious war ever fought, the world war, was unchained, not by sexual jealousy, but by the most sordid, the grossest form of predatory ego cravings, the will-to-commercial-power.
In innumerable cases, ego overpowers sex and compels it to suit its purposes. It masquerades in the guise of sex and deceives many as to its true nature. Prostitution, in its last analysis, is the enslavement of sex by ego, sex working to feed the ego and supply it with necessities or luxuries.
Ego in Sex Guise. Certain customs of ages past are sexual in appearance but the egotistical motive back of them is easily discovered. Take the right of the first night, which in several parts of the world survived until modern times.
The tribal chief or the lord of the manor had the right to spend a night with every bride within his jurisdiction before the rightful husband was allowed to enjoy his marital privileges. That custom made the first born of every family the putative descendent of the chief and fostered a deeper loyalty to him among his followers.
Even as economic exhibitionism prompts people to spend at show eating places sums in no way commensurate with their hunger, or to buy diamonds which are not in any way beautiful but only symbolical of the wearer's indifference to returns on his investments, egotism causes many men to pretend sexual cravings which they do not feel. Many stage women, actresses, singers, dancers, etc., are kept by men whose sex life is at low ebb but who parade their "conquest" before their associates or perfect strangers to demonstrate their sexual and financial powers.
Fatherhood. A constant craving for fatherhood is not infrequently a neurotic symptom, an egotistical desire to compensate for low sexual potency.