Taking a woman’s body, however, for the fine emotional catharsis, without “considering too curiously” just how it strikes the woman is manifestly, to any thoughtful man, merely a one-sided affair. It involves only as a negative quantity the results of his action upon the woman, because erotically the result is negative in her case. The most it can do is to stir her emotions a little, leave her with more or less ungratified desire, a tension which in the end is most harmful to her.
Only a man whose mentality is below par or undeveloped can feel himself fully satisfied with an attempt at a purely physical love episode like this. To his unconscious it can be but the stepping up a step that isn’t there, a striking out at empty air. For the exaltation (which would come from passion reciprocated) is indelibly registered on his unconscious as a negative quantity. It is a dent in a surface intended by nature to be convex. In the fully developed man all the sensibilities registering response in the mate are present, and if they are not given the opportunity to function, the lack of it is definitely recorded in the unconscious. The man has as much right biologically to a response in his wife as the wife has a right to be sympathetically handled.
In a time soon to come men will take into consciousness and into conscious control all instinctive actions, and all these unconscious lacks; and will so plan their love that the absence of response will be avoided. The woman’s right to be made to respond will be finally acknowledged.
§ 90
The right of woman to experience such stirring up of unconscious depths of soul as is caused by the erotic acme of the love episode, and the advantage to her health and general welfare coming from such stirring are two separate questions. Havelock Ellis has admitted that the woman’s right to love and all it can include is not a right in a political or even an ethical sense, any more than the right to be happy.
But for the existence of the relation of a higher type of erotism to health of body and mind physiological science is piling up proof every year. There is a positive relation, a direct connection, of cause and effect. Only the fullest use of all the faculties makes the fullest and therefore the happiest life.
Response as an actual manifestation on the wife’s part may be absent while there is a repressed response present. In other words the desire and gratification of it may both occur in her, but below the level of consciousness. A previous attraction which drew her toward her husband when he was her lover may have been repressed by some gauche behaviour of his. Desire, even after conscious passion has cooled, may nevertheless remain in the unconscious. If consciously accepted, desire is accompanied by a perceptible physical condition of tumescence. If not consciously accepted, either the tumescence does not enter consciousness or it is not in the same organs it would be in if one were consciously entertaining desire.
In the absence of the proper or suitable substitute gratification, the increase of blood supply to specific organs gradually diminishes and the desire gradually subsides; but there is still left a nerve tension that is closely bound up with various ideas, images and other predominantly mental states.
Sex desires may be aroused and even if not appropriately gratified, will subside of themselves. An automatic relaxation of all tensions regularly takes place in children, who also are much more facile than adults in the acceptance of substitute gratifications.