In the love episode, at the time when contact is deepest and most intense, one sees, if one reasons biologically, that the time that would be chosen by nature for the injection of spermatozoa (of the millions of which only one is to be chosen by chance to be united to the single ovum ordinarily developed each month) is the time when the container which is destined to be the seat of the future life was either most open or most turned toward the source of the spermatozoa.
As it is believed that the woman’s erotic acme is either coincident with or associated with this change in shape of the innermost organ, we have here a prototype giving more rationally the pattern for carrying out this phase of the love episode.
In other words the wife is to be prepared for an emotional cataclysm on the part of the husband. Just as the organs of any two animals have to come together simultaneously so not only is this apposition necessary in humans, but in them there is a psychical apposition, a rapport of purely spiritual quality needed in order that the real spiritual fusion may take place.
§ 98
In animals simultaneity is gained by the same mechanism as that which arranges for cross fertilization of some plants, i.e., the time for the impregnation is short or instantaneous in one sex and long in the other. In animals the female is ready only for a short time, the male always. The female animal is prepared by physiological changes, the female human by psychical development. In humans the female is supposed by some men to be always ready until by their ignorance and diabolical treatment they find their women never ready. That which occurs in an animal is a purely physiological heat. In women it has dwindled into almost vestigial proportions in comparison to the psychically caused excitement. This psychic element is enough, however (if rightly understood and managed by the man), to make it safe to say that a woman may always be made ready, even though by her own constitution and upbringing she may never know it and so not admit it. The female animal never suffers the male’s approaches except in her estrual period. Man has it in his power to cause in woman the psychic analogue of the estrus at any time.
§ 99
Ellis (op. cit., III, 251) remarks that the sexual impulse tends to involve, to a greater extent in women than in men, the higher psychic region. Therefore sex, tending in men to be exclusively physical, needs in them to be raised to the erotic level of the psychical, in order to give man the master key to the situation. Thus the rapport (which is psychical and not physical) can be established. The greater psychic diffusion of love instincts in woman gives man the opportunity for a complete dominance over her erotism as soon as he learns to exercise it. In woman’s sexuality “lies the earth, all Danaë to the stars,” symbolizing the direction from which man should approach woman, from a psychically more exalted position, and not from below, like mephitic air from a cave.
As one cannot put a finger into a ring, unless a ring is there, so in the love episode the husband must be sure that his emotional power will not, like a blow wasted in the air, fall upon a situation most inappropriate, unreceptive and unproductive of the end sought. A blacksmith must be sure the anvil is in place before he takes up his hammer.
It is obvious that, if the relaxation of erotic tension on the man’s part is to do the work, which it certainly has to do, it must have a condition which is appropriate for the most telling effect of this work. One of the best ways in which this condition can be produced in some women is outlined in the following section.