§ 48
Adult sexuality is not an egoistic-social expression in any essential sense. While the gratification of sexual desire is at first entirely selfish, starting as it does in every individual before puberty in autoerotic practices, it never becomes thoroughly adult until, in the case of the man, he has secured in his mate her perfect satisfaction on which his own depends. He can never marry in the deepest sense if he retains his autoerotic tendencies. A man’s satisfaction on attaining solely his own erotic acme without reference to that of his mate, is in every case an autoerotic satisfaction. The woman, in this instance, is merely an impersonal object or instrument by means of which he produces an effect on himself. In this respect his woman is no more personal than his food.
It may be said that a man’s satisfaction is none the less selfish, even though it be conditioned on a woman’s. But the self-satisfaction which excludes that of the woman must be greater in selfishness and actually less human. In fact this reciprocal self-satisfaction is the distinguishing human trait without which the sex life of most marriages, like all prostitution, is not other than animal heat.
A man frequently thinks he has to make a conscious choice between courses of action that are predominantly egoistic-social or erotic. He thinks of the erotic life as taking time, and incidentally money in the time lost alone, to pay enough attention to a woman to develop her erotic possibilities, and many men acting under this false impression that erotism weakens practical accomplishment, have decided that the egoistic-social path was the more attractive. But even they can never free themselves from the promptings of the erotic impulse.
Such men, thinking erroneously that all sexual acts are erotic, making as they do no distinction between the two, believe that they have somehow fulfilled an erotic need by keeping a woman, either a wife or a mistress. This travesty of the truly erotic by a man who acts mainly from egoistic-social motives is self-deception. The two are not only not the same, but never can be made so.
§ 49
Many a young man making a success of his business, paying off his debts and beginning to pile up money, lets up a bit from the strain of business and begins to look about him for amusement keener than the ordinary recreations.
He meets an attractive young woman, puts her down mentally as not quite up to his social scale, but finding her responsive determines to go as far with her as she will let him. Of course this is starting wrongly, on the basis of not so much making her an integral part of his own personality as trying to find in her an objective and nearly impersonal means of procuring autoerotic pleasure for himself. Not how he pleases her is his ultimate thought but how she pleases him. It has possibly not occurred to him that he likes her because he likes the effects she produces in him and that no matter how much money he lavishes on her, it is barter for certain privileges she permits him to take with her. These privileges are not the highest and greatest he could avail himself of, with a woman he would make his wife, the chief privilege being that of developing himself through her and incidentally of developing her to the highest degree of which she is capable.
On the contrary he does not take a great deal of interest in any section of her personality except her body. He may think her cute and amusing or enigmatic if he is interested in solving puzzles; but he is not likely to find any of her mental characteristics engaging, although she probably has such, even if she allows him liberties he might consider impossible in some other women. He will probably not introduce her to his mother or sisters, as he holds them as a different class of women; and with the secretly followed woman he feels on a different social plane, no matter how personally neat and attractive she may be. If she engages with him in any erotic preliminary play, she ostracizes herself in his eyes from the class of women to which his mother and sisters belong, women who would not do that. This comes from his youthful propensity to bisect everything into absolutely good and absolutely bad. Women are thus divided into the mother class (which includes of course sisters and cousins) who are supposed by him to be non-erotic in a sense. Chief goddess in this class of erotically pure women is the mother-imago or angel-imago described in another section.