Nothing could seem further from the truly American ideal of a good “sport” than that there should be men who will take all and give nothing. No excuse is accepted of men who enter a game, and, as soon as they are in, become paralyzed and unable to do a single thing except shout about their membership on the team. But that is exactly what the average husband does in his marriage. He marries mostly to get something for nothing in sex life and he finds out later that the something turns out to be nothing. Who is to blame but himself?
He makes innumerable excuses for his failure, excuses sometimes handed out to him by physicians. He is a man and men are known to be hasty in the love episode. Civilized men always are and have been. There is no help for it. Their wives must make themselves content with the crumbs that fall from the husband’s table. It is injurious for men to change in any way or degree their instinctive reactions. Postponement or doing without their own erotic acme acts in such a way as to constitute a strain on the man’s nervous system. All these false statements have been made by different people at different times.
The necessary control on the man’s part is possible to attain, and once attained it is easy to maintain. But it depends upon a fundamental rearrangement of all values for the man such that the greatest value for him is not in the pleasurable sensations that he himself gets out of his relations with his wife but in the gratifications, totally different in sense quality, that come from the sense of triumph over resistances that is experienced by him when he has for the first time attained, or finally has secured, such control over himself that he can thereby control the emotional specifically erotic reactions of his wife.
If a man’s deepest unconscious satisfactions came from being emotionally controlled by a woman he would never learn to control hers. The unconscious satisfactions invariably are felt when control over the woman’s erotic responses is held by the man.
Nevertheless there is a level of unconscious reaction causing feelings of gratification that even in men come from being controlled. More will be said about this later. Instinctively in many boys this control is thrown off. They rebel against paternal authority. They scorn being managed by girls. They prefer to be themselves and act their own acts and derive satisfaction from the effects of those acts upon the persons or things of the external world.
Yet the fact that all individuals of both sexes, when infants and children, are dependent, and can gain satisfaction and relaxations of tensions of desire never by means of their own acts but only by means of the acts of others, makes it quite evident that there will be a tendency, stronger in some than in others, to get in post-pubertal life their satisfactions via the old route—the satisfactions that come from having things done to them and not from doing things for other people and observing the results.
There are two sources of satisfaction in every human, the infantile one which may be called passive and the adult male which may be called the active source or the source of satisfaction from the effects of one’s own action.
§ 27
It is not to be overlooked that the satisfaction derived from the effect of one’s own action may be due to an unconscious magnifying of these effects. Those who have a slight degree of discriminative ability will think that their acts and the results of their acts are fine, whether they are or not, and may remain in the same illusion throughout their lives. They may never become disillusioned. I may continue to believe that the effects produced on my readers are deep and far-reaching whether they are or not. But if I were content to read books and listen to lectures and felt no desire to write and to influence others or to persuade them to see things as I see them I should derive all my satisfactions via the route of passive experiences.
There is a fundamental difference, then, between the essentially masculine and the essentially feminine type of character, according as the individual gets his satisfactions—the relaxations of his tensions of desire—via the route of feelings caused in him by the action of others or via the route of feelings caused in him by the true and illusionless perception that he has produced effects in other persons or in other things.