[CHAPTER XIV]
EROS, LIBIDO, JEALOUSY
Eros and libido.—Eros and libido are the two components of sensual love and are also integral parts of sentimental love, by which the latter differs from pure friendship. Libido represents the material pleasure enjoyed by the contact; eros represents the spiritual enjoyment experienced by the knowledge of loving and being loved. Hence libido is of a somatic nature, eros is a psychic phenomenon. The libidinous individual has an increased desire for sexual gratification, the erotic looks chiefly for love. The erotic individual loves with its mind, it is a craving for love by a particular individual, or by a certain class of individuals, e. g., actors or actresses. The libidinous individual is satisfied with any partner and even with other practices, serving sensual gratification, such as contrectatio, stuprum manu, paederastia, tribady, bestiality, etc. The erotic individual never thinks of the sensual pleasure, the libidinous desires to wallow in sensual enjoyment and lust.
Libido is more a masculine sex trait, eros more a feminine. For the ordinary man the libidinous part of love is of primary importance. When this emotion has been destroyed by some accident, he considers himself emasculated. He will never reveal the loss of his testicles, while a woman will openly and freely talk of ovariotomy, performed upon her, although the loss of the ovaries generally produces the impotence of experiencing orgasm, as in men the loss of the testicles. She seems not to mind this loss, provided, always, that her eros has remained intact.
In this indifference for sexual libido, so often found in women, lies the cause of woman’s superiority in sensual love. The woman rules over the man as long as he is in love. That man is henpecked who from the beginning, by reason of his excessive sexual needs, came under his wife’s authority and is continually kept under her rule by the same sensual needs. A man’s dependence upon his wife can only be explained upon a sensual basis. As soon as the man’s power and intelligence gain the victory over his sensual impulses, his independence is secured.
This is the reason why the woman is continually bent upon keeping the man’s libido alive. Her constant desire is to influence him by her charms. Her passivity, says Marro, is the passivity of the magnet, which in spite of its apparent immobility and rest attracts the iron, be the latter willing or not, and in a way enslaves it. An intense energy lies behind such passivity, says Ellis, an absorbed preoccupation in the end to be attained. But for her passivity and cunning coyness she would become the real slave of brutal force, and nothing short of adoration of her lord and master would satisfy him. As it is, she keeps the man in due bounds, even in countries where her legal status is not much higher than that of the real slave. The pride of the woman, says Kant, to keep at a distance all the importunities of men by the respect she inspires and the right to demand respect for her person, even without merits, belong to her by the title of her sex. The man has to woo for her favor even where he could command. The indulgence with an unwilling or unreciprocating mate is not satisfactory to the normal man. This is the reason why the mere satisfaction of the physical appetite in meretricious venery is so unsatisfactory to him.
Eros is a purely psychic phenomenon. It is the transcendental attraction of the two sexes, even when lust is not thought of. In being attracted to one another, the sexes seem to obey a higher will, unknown to either of them. The attraction probably emanates from the spermatozoa and ova. The little cells know what they want and take it. But their will is unknown to the lovers themselves. Their attraction appears to be as mysterious as the attraction of the two poles of the magnet, which no scientist has yet been able to elucidate. This mysterious erotic attraction is healthy and invigorating. While so attracted, the sexual glands increase the secretion of the testines or ovarines, and these chemical products have a tonic effect and make the individual happy. This accounts for the happy excitement the sight of a perfect specimen of the opposite sex, or even its conception in the fantasy, is able to awake in the heart of the individual.
Two desires of eros.—Eros consists of two desires, to love and to be loved. The man is more anxious to love, the woman to be loved. She desires to feel that she is admired or rather coveted by men. That woman withers who, in all her life, was never once loved by some man. Even the woman who for moral or morbid reasons renounces libido, will still have the desire to be admired and loved. In her day-dreams the girl pictures to herself an ideal man by whom she wishes to be loved, the man portrays in his imagination the girl he wishes to love. When he meets with his ideal he knows his own mind about his love. He recognizes the goddess upon whose altar he intends to burn his choicest incense. The girl has first to ask her oracle. She plucks the petals of her marguerite, lisping: “He loves me, he loves me not.” The man, more concerned about his own love, wears his heart on his sleeve and feels eager to have the beloved see how passionately it throbs for her. The woman, having first to discover the man’s love, will try to conceal her own emotion in the innermost recesses of her bosom, lest the lover discover her feelings prematurely. The woman is, therefore, a comma, in love affairs, the man a full stop; here, you know where you are; there, read further.
The woman is anxious to be loved by the man of her choice, the man mainly asks for the privilege to love her. This difference is mainly based upon the different value love possesses in the eyes of the two sexes. With the man the imagination does not need to come into play before he can look for joys and sorrows, hopes and fears that make up the sum and substance of love. The woman gives far more than her body, she gives her soul, her very self, her all. Another reason for the woman’s desire to be loved lies in her feminine vanity. In the relations of friends the one who desires to be loved rather than to love, is the more egotistic. The preference of the passive part of love to the active unquestionably springs from the root of egotism in human nature. In the relation of the sexes, the desire to be loved arises more or less from the wish to satisfy personal vanity. It is tacitly, although, as a rule, among civilized men erroneously, assumed that personal excellence is the cause of a particular individual of one sex being loved by the other, and that one sex is the better judge of the excellence of the other. Hence the person most deeply loved must of necessity excel his rivals. He must at least possess greater sexual charms which men and women are chiefly proud of. Vain men, for that reason, will boast of the large number of their love affairs and the many hearts broken. For the same reason a woman’s vanity is flattered to be openly preferred and loved by a good, respectable man. In present society only matrimony can satisfy her vanity. For free love can only be clandestine, and clandestine love satisfies only her libido, but not her vanity.
Jealousy.—The desire for the satisfaction of personal vanity and the commonly erroneous assumption of the better judgment of one sex about the excellence of the other, are of the greatest importance in the psychology of jealousy.