The passionless love episode is no love episode at all as it lacks the essential of deep love. Putting more passion into his love for his wife is of course exactly what the man, whose woman’s world consists of only two widely sundered castes, is unable to do unless he succeeds in overcoming the early-fixed habit of his thought about what he knows as love. But putting more passion into his love for his wife is exactly what he must do to be fully a man and to control her erotic emotions.
One who is fully a woman latently, as are all with negligible exceptions, is never fully developed into a woman, actually, except by the man who can play on her, as on a violin, all the melodies of which she is capable. She will never know herself unless she is thus developed by man. She will be like an undeveloped photographic plate.
§ 197
The attitude of society toward prostitution is, as a whole, as unorganized and haphazard as could be, in all civilized countries. Both kinds of laws are made, prohibitive and regulative, neither of which has any more effect on men’s actions than would a law have which attempted to prohibit drawing breath or to regulate the number of inhalations per hour. In general the laws have been prohibitive and have met the same fate as any prohibitive legislation. It has been realized by a few deep thinkers that no prohibitions have to be made against what nobody ever thinks of doing, and that the existence of a prohibitive law is proof of a widespread tendency to do the thing prohibited. All prohibition is, from the point of view of both conscious and unconscious psychology, unscientific.
§ 198
A part of the motive that leads the husband to resort to the prostitute is the widespread notion mentioned by Ellis (op. cit., VI) that prostitution has a civilization value in adding “an element of gaiety and variety to the ordered complexity of modern life, a relief from the monotony of its mechanical routine, a distraction from its dull and respectable monotony.”
These are the arguments advanced for the use of alcohol also. While admitting, however, the desirability, indeed even the necessity, of variety in life which means the family life as well, we should not forget that the lack of variety in marital existence is mostly if not exclusively due to the infantility of the husband. Marriage is the most vital institution of society, but the one that has been most carelessly left to its own haphazard development.
For this abandonment of marriage to its own fate amidst the most hostile possible environment of rapidly developing egoistic-social impulses, the husband is solely to blame. His fault, however, is primarily due to his bringing up and chiefly to that feature of the mother-imago which leads him invariably to look for interest, variety and all good things from the mother.
The child’s frequent whine, “Mother, what can I do?” is here virtually repeated by the unimaginative husband, defended by the sexologist and answered by the prostitute. If, as has been intimated before in this book, age cannot wither woman nor custom stale her infinite variety, then the infinite variety, or enough of it, at any rate, to satisfy any husband, should be evoked from his wife.