In the creation and maintenance of mutuality in the early married life the young husband is the only one concerned. If there is real mutuality caused by a perfect response in his bride, he can maintain it only if he knows how he has gained it. If it was gained by merely instinctive actions on his own part, and if he is impressed by the beauty of the mystery, and repeats to himself how wonderful it is, and how inexplicable to have so warm a response, he will not have a good chance of continuing it. He will have to do what he has not yet done. Consciously, and purposefully, he will observe his wife’s reactions during the entirety of the love episode; that is, from the beginning of one quite through to the beginning of the next one, not merely the period of the highest level of erotic excitement.
It is the privilege of woman to remain autoerotic in her reactions. She may or may not rise to allerotic action during her entire life. But man can never succeed in the marital life if he remains autoerotic. His first reactions to the marital situation are necessarily autoerotic. He cannot avoid that. His previous experience with women, if any, and particularly with prostitutes, gives him at first little if any opportunity to be with his wife other than essentially autoerotic in his reactions. A man’s first experience of a woman in an attempt at a love episode is invariably a bath of absolutely new sensations, a plunge into a sea of diverse stimuli, a medium in which many men flounder for the remainder of their lives, gaining each time no more than an uncoördinated congeries of external excitement in which they act in no controlling manner. Such men never mate a woman in the highest sense. They only supply her with a child in the guise of a husband. There is no mutuality between the surf and the bather who is helplessly tossed about in the breakers and is finally washed up on the shore and left breathless by his contact with the countless laughter of the sea.
Mutuality in the love episode depends solely on the husband’s ability to control the situation. There is no real mutuality in a relation where the wife is merely a dispenser of physical delights to a husband that neither knows nor cares what he himself contributes to the situation, who immerses himself totally in his own sensations. He is deaf, blind and otherwise anesthetic to what he himself can accomplish in the line of studied and foreplanned effects of his own, self-initiated (not merely instinctive and automatic reflex) actions upon his wife. True, there are many women who expect no more of a man than just this automatic autoerotism. But, sooner or later, even though unconsciously, they perceive a lack of “some amorous rite or other” and their own passion cools, if it has had any warmth. There is no mutuality here.
§ 22
Mutuality does not exist where the wife has no alternative other than the autoerotic reaction of the husband. But in spite of an unchanging autoerotic disposition of the wife, mutuality may be absolutely secured by the instructed husband. As indicated below, the average honeymoon should see the beginning of the end of mental autoerotic reactions on the part of the groom.
Even the groom that has had previous sex experience is in his early marriage in an erotic situation which is essentially new to him—a situation that contains elements the like of which he never could have experienced before. The inevitable novelty of these new elements is a condition, on his part, of perceiving all new sensations, practically of having unprecedented things done to him.
The things done to him are more numerous and newer than anything in all his previous experience. In this sense, then, he is by force of circumstances placed upon an autoerotic level, from which it is his imperative duty to ascend in order that by his control of his own erotic reactions he may control those of his wife. No apology is needed for an initial autoerotic response on the newly wedded husband’s part.
It might be said that in the situation of bride and groom each having things done to them by the other, rather than positively doing things to each other, there might be a situation of perfect mutuality. But if it is, it never remains any longer than the duration of a honeymoon, for the essential femininity of the woman demands that in the erotic sphere alone, she be led, and with no uncertain guidance.
The honeymoon ends automatically when this point is reached; and the condition of true mutuality in perfect marital relations ensues if the husband has a virile love of his wife and takes the lead. If his love is not virile, but merely autoerotic and puerile, he never assumes this leadership, and his wife becomes more and more unresponsive to him, simply because the only type of activity to which she can respond is an erotic virility, a true manliness that contains the real essence of masculinity which is the imperative necessity to control the entire erotic life of one woman.