The confrontation of a shallow sipper like this with really profound femininity is a test of virility in the highest erotic sense. The man perverted by traditional views of masculinity, which overvalue the physical side, and unenlightened by the modern psychology of love is face to face with a situation for which he is utterly unprepared.
A man’s so-called satisfaction, then, with the superficial surrender of a woman up to the point where she consents to let him try to control her erotism is not, however, satisfaction at all but a withdrawal from a test of virility. This primary consent on the woman’s part is not a submission but merely in effect a consent to examine or as it were to make a survey of his manliness. Of this she is, of course, entirely unconscious. If she were conscious of it she would have one of the traits of the promiscuous woman. But even if it is unconscious in her it is just as operative as if it were conscious. And the result of the test is also unconscious in the woman, if the test shows that the man is found wanting.
Her reaction to the man found wanting is as various as is the upbringing of women, from the immediate rejection in divorce on the grounds of incompatibility to the lifelong slavery in which she gradually withers.
Under the present inanely stupid method of bringing up women in total ignorance of sex, and in blindness to the truly erotic, a woman has no means whatever of estimating a man’s erotic virility before marriage and practically no standard of judging him after. If she had, she might do something to get him to learn of the existence of true mating.
And if she could know and could tell her husband how he failed, she would then have a chance of becoming happy. No really human man will choose the greater of two evils or refuse the greater of two good things, no matter when or how that choice is offered to him, although to him it may be humiliating whether first or last, to have it laid before him by the woman.
§ 73
But no whole man will be other than fired by this consent to test. If he is cloyed by it, his being so demonstrates his inadequacy; it proves his anesthesia, his insensibility, his blindness to the future possibilities of complete binary love-living.
To him this failure of his, this revulsion of feeling at the precise moment when he has entered the very lists of love, this slacker’s attitude, seems not a desertion on his part, not a failure of his, but a sudden loss of charm on her part. She is, upon trial, not what he had expected and longed for. But the failure, the loss of charm are his, not hers. He ought to be the charmer. He ought to have been informed that it is his privilege and power to attain the pleasure of putting his woman into another world of sheer exuberant joy—that his own pleasure in life can be attained by no other means; and that the consent of the woman to be his wife is a consent not to take one step with him, and then have him vanish, but to travel the path of life-love to its end—a path that is long and joyous, a path from which no seeing man, no man with eyes of love, can ever wish to depart. For with him is happiness personified and before him and leading him on is light.
§ 74
The acts and scenes and various episodes and strophes of this lifelong drama are never more than parts, and are organically related each to the other and to the whole life poem. No matter what one’s egoistic-social impulses and activities are, the racial theme, i.e., emotional culture and development, should be as far as possible continuous and its phrases related. The racial theme is organic, emotional. The narrower national, or sectional, theme in life is the intellectual one.