One can recognize immediately the man with a normally developed social instinct (just as one can recognize immediately a well-developed social community) by the strictness with which his fitfulness in regard to sex is not allowed to work havoc among his female acquaintances generally, or to make him neglectful of the responsibilities it imposes.
For, it should always be remembered that to the positive man, well-built and well-fed, the sexual longing is sometimes the most intolerable anguish, the most acute and importunate suffering, and its gratification a thing which for the moment appears fraught with such unspeakable, such ecstatic joy and delight, that to think of subsequent responsibilities here, to dwell on subsequent duties here, denotes a degree of social instinct that is far beyond the measure usually supposed to be possessed by even the civilized individual. During the moment of crisis, at its most acute stage, the only object that seems desirable, reasonable, possible, the only prize that seems worth while, is—gratification, satisfaction, in fact the willing Woman; even if damnation loom threateningly behind her, even if death stand waiting at the end!
Who has felt this and not marvelled at the fact that Man was ever able to build up a possible human society! Who has felt this and not learnt thereby to admire and respect Man’s social instinct, which was able, out of this fierce and tremendous passion to construct a scheme whereby he who felt it took upon himself the responsibilities arising from its very gratification![29]
No wonder a cold shiver of exquisite and mysterious pleasure courses down our backs whenever we are in the presence of a masterful example of Man’s order! What triumphs of the past that cold shiver remembers, which we are at a loss to recall, but which we still unconsciously applaud every time the regular movements of a multitude, the measured strains of a rich melody, or the swing and stride of a corps de ballet appear before our eyes! For these are but the outward, visible, tangible and most obvious examples of Man’s social instinct working for order!
Powerful as the sexual passion is in Man, small though intense as is his share in the joys of reproduction, only think what a powerful force was required to meet this sexual passion, with any hope of success, in order to discipline and control it! It had to be a force as great if not greater than the reproductive instinct itself. And what force is it in us that gives us a mysterious thrill, so different from, and yet so subtly akin in bodily strength to the sexual thrill? I have spoken of this thrill already; it is the cold shiver mentioned in the preceding paragraph—the cold shiver of the social instinct gratified. This, then, was the only power in man, that he himself could rally against his fierce and ungovernable sexual desire; it was the only power that held anything like a corresponding hold over his body; and he turned it so successfully against his reproductive instinct, that he taught the latter its limits, and forced it to accept the responsibilities its tempestuous ardour involved.[30] This is the only form of “self-control” that arises from the strength and not from the weakness of a man.[31]
To return, however, to the question of his attitude to the sexual act, it is clear that man, once he has risen from the couch, after gratifying one of his fitful longings, has for the time being done with sex. This is most important. After having rejoined the stream of Life to pay it tribute, he becomes once more the amputation from Life, and can turn away from its sexual thraldom until another of his fitful longings overtakes him.[32] As a well-known French painter once said to me at a moment when his house was in a turmoil over his wife’s presenting him with his first child: “J’y suis pour si peu de chose là dedans!”
It is clear, then, that while the joy of sex for man is intense, immense and indescribably pleasurable—for, in addition to the actual physical gratification it brings, there is the spiritual ecstasy of the exercise of power, and power in its most flattering form, i.e. over another human being—it is all concentrated into a few such brief moments, into a space so short as to seem ridiculous when the efforts made to experience it are taken into account. True, it is zenithal, stupendous, quintessential; but it is perhaps, for that very reason, short and exquisitely so. It is as if all the qualities of pleasure, physical and spiritual, had for man been distilled and re-distilled until they had been reduced to the smallest possible compass, in order that he might be quickly and sufficiently gratified, and yet not detained too long from those other duties to Life to which his other instincts direct him.
And it is precisely this tabloid form of sexual ecstasy that enables man to know exactly the limits and boundaries of his part in sexual life. He knows that there it begins and ends. It is a definite thing that he can seek and find. He can be quite conscious about it and is quite conscious about it from the start. It is small enough, short enough, intense enough, to be grasped and understood by consciousness. The only things connected with sex that last and endure, where man is concerned, are its responsibilities—and these are, of course, the very aspects of it that the man with a declining social instinct wishes to cast off from the problem of sex. That is why the value of a man, as a man, may almost always be determined by his attitude towards Woman. The anarchist, the degenerate, loves the prostitute; the true artist, the sober, healthy citizen loves the mother.[33]
To turn now to the attitude of the Positive Woman to the sexual act, how very different is the case with her!
Take the little jewel constituting man’s small instant of sexual ecstasy and beat it out to a length sufficiently great to cover twenty to thirty months, and sometimes more, and you have its extended and attenuated equivalent for the female. Until Woman has gathered up all the experiences that constitute her participation and her share of pleasure in the sexual act, and which are distributed over the period above mentioned, her sexual life and the pleasure it brings to her, cannot be said to be complete. Even the craving for the proper functioning of her organs and the primary instinct that animates and actuates her cannot be gratified unless she picks up every one of the moments strewn over that space of time—unless, that is to say, she passes through the whole cycle of events and sensations that go to make up her complete relationship to man and to the child.