Woman

by Anthony M. Ludovici

Meanwhile, however, although the husband’s sexual experience has been complete, his wife’s has been of the most fragmentary order. Her reproductive organs and functions, though repeatedly stimulated as if their important business were about to begin, have been robbed each time of the natural sequel to that stimulation. Despite hundreds of alarms and starts, the complete cycle has never been experienced. As a result, this large reproductive equipment has not only remained idle, but in this very idleness has also been cheated again and again of its legitimate expectations, when those expectations seemed most certain of being fulfilled. These repeated rebuffs, together with the continued inactivity of this important mechanism, has not been suffered with impunity. Gradually, as the idleness came to be felt more and more acutely, and the sense of physiological disappointment became insistent, vague messages were sent up through the young wife’s subconsciousness to her brain. These messages we can decipher without any serious inaccuracy as follows:—“We are still idle; we are still inactive. When are we going to function? We ache to function.”

It must not be supposed, however, that these messages are deciphered as accurately as this by the woman’s conscious mind. She is vaguely conscious of the importunate calls from her dissatisfied reproductive equipment; but she is aware of them only as dissatisfaction. Whence they hail, what they mean, she has not the slightest idea. If you told her that they amounted to protests from her inactive reproductive equipment, she would probably feel so utterly outraged that she would never speak to you or see you again. She would need to be a psychologist herself to interpret them accurately.

Now it is when this vague feeling of dissatisfaction first becomes insistent in her conscious mind that she proceeds to act upon it in the manner already described (see p. [196]).

Quite unsuspecting, her husband falls in eagerly with her plans. Truth to tell, any such marked change in a young married woman is a very serious sign; but the husband knowing nothing of these matters, and concluding after a review of the last three years that he has perhaps invited his wife to lead too dull a life, acquiesces with alacrity in her schemes.

Now if we suppose that the new régime, with its constant round of gaiety and variety, has lasted a further six months or a year, and still nothing has happened—that is to say, the young wife’s reproductive equipment is still inactive—a second and more dangerous phase very rapidly sets in.

The young woman suddenly finds one morning or evening that she is unaccountably exasperated by the way her husband fingers his tie while he talks to her or to a friend, or by his habit of knocking his pipe out against the iron of the grate, or by his manner of clearing his throat, or by any other peculiarity which, twenty-four hours previously, she was not even aware of having noticed particularly.

At first she is a little alarmed and suppresses her feeling of irritation. She feels that it is unfriendly, and that he does not deserve a rebuke for something so ridiculously trifling. Very soon, however, after she has continued to note the exasperating peculiarity for four or five days, her irritation begins to choke her, and she feels she must express it. The next time she observes him doing the fatal thing, therefore, she snaps sharply at him with a “Don’t, Harry, you fidget me with that constant noise!” or “Don’t, Harry, you always finger your tie in that ridiculous manner when you are talking—why do you do it?” etc.

She has not the faintest suspicion that this irritation and exasperation over a trifling aspect of her husband’s behaviour is only a surface ripple of a very much deeper and more bitter exasperation, down somewhere in her body; and the young husband, who is even less conscious of the matter than she is, turns to her in a manner utterly dumbfounded, and wonders what on earth can have happened.

He sees that she is serious. He has noted the strain of bitterness in her rebuke and its threatening note of anger, and, if he is a man of spirit, he points out to her that if she is out of sorts she had better go to bed, but that it is absurd for her to start now, after four years of marriage, rebuking him for something he has done regularly every day of their married life.

This discussion may end in a serious quarrel—the first serious quarrel in which words very much more stinging than “selfish” and “unselfish” are used freely for the first time; and both may retire to bed utterly bewildered by what has happened.