He soon learns to value this response and his own power, which enables him to evoke it, as the greatest accomplishment of his life, one compared with which the egoistic-social emoluments and distinctions are as nothing, a power of control greater than any other in the world in its good results, a power of control which once exercised over one person gives the possessor of the power the same or similar influence over others.
§ 107
If the husband’s concern is for his adult feeling of exaltation and power, his greatest concern is the complete overpowering of his wife in the realm solely of the erotic emotions. His study of her, and his refusal to study his own feelings, is the best method of arousing her to the pitch of excitement that glows almost to a point of luminosity. He should learn by reading, and by consultation with the best erotologists, how every effect on her is to be produced in the management of the love episode, failing which he is almost certain to arouse a degree of resentment in her, which, the more repressed, the more independently of her own control it develops, so that it may break out even years later in some act of anger or spite.
What he says, does and even thinks during the hours of the first love episode, beginning with the first mutual anticipatory thought or look and ending with the last reverberating memory image of what he has been through with her, every act, word and thought of his own has an effect upon her total physical and mental reactions, his mental expressions on her physical reactions quite as much as his physical or her mental.
He can be absolutely confident that what she most desires, whether she knows it or not, is to be completely dominated by him in the sphere of erotic action, and the amazing thing is the number of husbands who do not seek this domination of the erotic sphere of their wives’ life, but who seek merely their own relaxation of tension which they could get mechanically and autoerotically any time, if that was all there was to it.
She cannot desire to dominate him. It is a biological impossibility. She may be so twisted and muddled in her thinking between social-egoistic ends and erotic ends that she consciously wants to dictate to him in everything; but if he properly master her here, she will not continue to do so.
She cannot desire to dictate to him, except to gain egoistic ends, and these are largely conscious ones; while the true erotic aims, in every woman, are deep in the unconscious, and need to be liberated therefrom by her husband, for the mutual development both of herself and of him.
§ 108
A correspondent of Ellis (Vol. III, p. 210) writes that, one cause, serving to disguise a woman’s feelings to herself and make her seem to herself colder than she really is, may be looked for in “the masochistic[22] tendency of women, or their desire for subjection to the man they love. I believe no point in the whole question is more misunderstood than this. Nearly every man imagines that to secure a woman’s love and respect he must give her her own way in small things and compel her obedience in great ones. Every man who desires success with a woman should exactly reverse that theory.”
The unsatisfactory nature of this communication comes from the ambiguity as to small things and great things. What are small and what great? The answer is that the small things are those concerned with egoistic-social impulses, the great things are the erotic. From the truly erotic point of view no egoistic-social impulses lead to great, valuable or important actions. A man may defer to his wife’s judgment in all kinds of every-day affairs, unless this deference is unmistakably due to an actual lack of confidence on his part, because confidence of all kinds is based on love confidence.