Woman

by Anthony M. Ludovici

It is useless to object that thousands of married men to-day remain faithful to their wives, and yet cannot be said to be among those rare geniuses in love for whom alone the monogamic marriage is suitable. In the first place it may be asked, how many of those thousands are really healthy positive men, sexually exuberant and virile? It is simple enough to be a Puritan if one is below par. But how many faithful husbands are truly normal, in the sense of their body’s insisting upon leading a satisfactory sexual life?

(G) It would be unfair to omit to mention among these objections to the modern monogamic marriage, those that arise more particularly from the woman’s standpoint in a match with a man who is both positive and healthy.

At the risk of repeating statements already made, the reader must be reminded here that when either party to a matrimonial match is negative or unhealthy, the union ceases from being one to which mere objections can be raised; it then becomes actually impossible. And by positiveness and health in the woman, I mean that condition in which the bearing of children is accompanied throughout by an easy pleasure-giving functioning of the body.

Because I am not attempting to discuss all the sordid complications of the sort of match in which either one or both of the parties are unhealthy or negative, it does not follow that I fail to recognize the enormous percentage of unhappy marriages, to which such unions lead. But this is not a book on the pathological aspects of sex. I take only the best possible conditions—the mating of a healthy and positive woman with a man of the same stamp, and show the objections that may be raised to their monogamic match. Naturally, if the unfavourable circumstances with which the start is made be increased, the objections to the match necessarily increase proportionately.

Now, despite the best initial circumstances, there are objections to monogamy from the woman’s standpoint which will be seen to be both serious and insuperable. But these objections, let it be well understood, only arise in thoroughly modern conditions. I have hinted at one of them in a former chapter (see Chapter [VI], section 3).

(G1) A woman may marry a man who is wholly positive, healthy, and therefore quite savoury (such men get ever more rare, but they are still to be found). Very early in her married life, however, she discovers that, through some cause which she of course cannot fathom, her husband is a person utterly unfit to make her his wife in the only way in which her instincts and senses easily accept the rôle—that is to say, as the yielding partner to an impetuous, masterful, and at the same time skilful initiator. Although he is not negative by nature, he has been brought up negatively. He fears and shuns what he should be most eager to experience. His timidity and awkwardness are infectious. He proves himself not only unmasterly; he convinces her that he is a bungler—often a bungler more terrified than she is herself.

A relationship which should have been but a means of raising their courting happiness to ecstasy becomes instead either frigid and frightened post-marital virginity for weeks after marriage,[58] which proves disastrous to their love and ruinous to their nerves; or else, a consummation which is so hopelessly clumsy, hurried and nervous, and so distasteful to either party, that it is repeated as seldom as possible, and is always followed by the most bewildering disenchantment.

I have previously explained that to the decent girl the act of consummation seems acceptable and right only if purified by fire. She does not need to be in the least influenced by Puritanical prejudices in order to hold this attitude. It is the natural outcome of her instincts, as they have been formed throughout the ages. The bulk of the ancestors in her line, for millions of years, on the female side, having encountered the proper impetuosity and fire in the male, which carries all before it—that prehensile and initiatory masterfulness that belongs by nature to the male’s share in the act of consummation—this is what her racial memory leads her to expect, this alone is what gives her that clean joy in sex, that light-hearted innocence in sex, without which her married life is but a torment.

Yet now she finds herself with a creature who far from showing any mastery or abandon, actually increases, if you please, her own natural timidity about the whole affair, and even carries it one stage further until it is brought perilously near to disgust and moral indignation.

Beginnings tell most poignantly, particularly when they consist of first experiences in fundamental matters. And this kind of beginning, if it is not quickly corrected, is almost always fatal. It destroys that trust, that confidence, that humble and willing subservience, which are at once a young woman’s instinct and her joy. It poisons the first hours of her maturity, of her self-realization, of her taste of life’s deeper waters; but, above all, it revives in her precisely those emotions and prejudices which ought to have been stifled for ever—her high-school doubts and qualms regarding the general desirability of her Maker’s scheme for mammalian fertilization.