To the ideas, opinions, beliefs and other spiritual and intellectual characteristics of his clandestine “love” he pays little attention. Believing again, and again erroneously, in the utter bisection of human qualities, he does not know that supreme erotic attainments demand the highest intellectual abilities, or the utmost freedom from traditional superstitions about conventional morals. He does not know that his own greatest intellectual development is conditioned on his own fullest erotic development, which he can achieve only by the deepest and most searchingly passionate pursuit first of the soul and second of the body of his inamorata. His tendency toward gross bisection makes him accept the common shallow opinion that physical and spiritual are far as the poles asunder. He does not know that what he thinks the keenest physical pleasure is, as physical pleasure, far inferior to what it might become for him if he treated his evening love to the full illumination of his intellect and his reason. He also thinks and still erroneously that he can purge away all earthly love from the woman of the mother-imago class and find for his wife, whom he will later love spiritually after he has satisfied his physical passions, a woman absolutely pure of all human passion.
He makes the serious mistake of thinking he can love on a sort of departmental plan, a plan that may work well in his business or in any other egoistic-social sphere, but in the erotic is an utter failure.
He thinks, in other words, that he has passions that should be called base, and that he can gratify these desires with one type of woman. That their baseness is only a matter of the autoerotic mode in which he gratifies them has perhaps never occurred to him. Nor has he ever known that no passion can rightly be called base if gratified allerotically, which is the opposite of autoerotically. For allerotism is the passionate love not of self but of another. No one could be called in any sense unethical who gratified his own desires only through the gratified desires of another. But that is not the state of the well-to-do young man with a clandestine “love” affair.
The hardest thing for this young man to see is the fact, which is quite patent to the unconscious both of the young woman and of himself, the simple fact that his interest in her is merely autoerotic. Some indeed will say that they are fully aware that they are keeping up secret relations with women for purely selfish reasons. They see that, in their day life, business is business and one has to sell and buy; and they wrongly suppose that the selling and buying of women’s bodies is no worse than business. The woman gets well paid for her services. Indeed they may, if they have read him, quote Ellis, who contrasts the reward of the average wife and the average demimondaine, and says that the prostitute is much better paid than the wife, and does far less for the economic reward she gets.
But the young man who thinks for a moment that there is anything really erotic in the relations between himself and the young woman whom he disdains to make his wife, knows no more of erotism than a butterfly does of the depths of the ocean. His case is simply that of an undeveloped embryo. His autoerotic love is a wasted gonad that has never met the cell with which alone it could completely fuse and grow into an individual of its appropriate species.
Not all sexual acts are erotic. Many are no more truly erotic than smoking a pipe or chewing gum. The man who for egoistic-social reasons refuses to confine his love to a woman he has married or intends to marry, and thereby removes all chance of the vivifying effects of true erotism being caused in his extra-marital life by the depth of his marital love, is starting in the wrong direction every time. He has left undeveloped the truly erotic part of himself, which, thus banished into the unconscious, will nevertheless, through its indirect manifestations, completely warp his sex life. He will have no love life whatever. In spite of its frequent occurrence in men in general, sex life without love life is a monstrosity.
Erotism, then, may be defined as the highest expression of sex, from which all autoerotic impulses have been removed, or in which they have been so much subordinated that they play an almost negligible part.
§ 50
In our competitive economic social structure of yesterday and today the egoistic-social factor has been stressed to the utmost, almost, indeed, to the breaking point for all civilized people, quite to the breaking point with many of them. This egoistic tendency has evidently changed if not perverted much of the pure love instinct. It has, for instance, caused woman to judge man by his success in economic competition and also to adopt for herself a competitive modus which has spread itself over so much of her activities as in many cases to make her his rival in the activities in which for the time he happens to be engaged.
No work that has to be done in the world is any more peculiarly or properly the work of one sex than that of the other. All work, implying as it does duty, is egoistic-social. No work is erotic; and nothing erotic should be work and so have in it the effort that is connected with duty. Anything looking like work that enters into the erotic sphere is just so much egoistic-social activity. Erotism is the play side of life. “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” needs to be reworded into “all egoistic-social strivings and no erotic living makes Everyman (and Everywoman for that matter) an emotional moron.”