§ 132
But control is not annihilation nor is annihilation control in any sense whatever. If you cannot train a horse by shooting him dead, you cannot drive him by poisoning him. If you do you haven’t got him.
If you kill your love impulse you haven’t got it. You cannot kill it, but you can knock it in the head so that it is unconscious. Ascetics have done it. Society would as lief you did it yourself.
Your love impulse, not the Sunday school variety but the full red-blooded variety of woman-loving (or man-loving) impulse is not only the most individual thing about you because it is capable of the most complex development in your case but it is the most valuable dynamo you have generating endless power whose source is the sun itself.
Control of the love impulse therefore, and not annihilation of it, is the individual’s most personal advantage.
§ 133
An essential difference obtains between the average man’s control and the average woman’s chiefly in that the woman’s is a control by repression, virtually, of course, no control at all; while the man’s control wherever it exists is a control through expression.
It accords with the nature of masculinity and femininity that the control of the woman’s erotism, if it be a control through expression, is the control exercised over it by the man. Any control she may obtain over it cannot but be the control by repression. In other words no woman has any control over her own erotism except the ability to refuse to express it, and even that she may lose if she meets the right man. And no control is exercised over her erotism except by her true mate, if she is thus developed by him.
The man’s control over his own erotism is a real control only after he has succeeded in freeing his psyche from the mental autoerotism in which he has been born, and has achieved a real allerotism. No consideration need be given to the objection possibly raised here by some; namely, that the double standard of sexual morality that obtains so widely may have given the man a taste of allerotism, and may thus have given him a control through expression. But it must be clearly understood that no clandestine liaison of any sort whatever, except where there is a true love of one woman, to the social recognition of which there is some insuperable barrier, has any real value as an erotic control through expression.
Finally in the differentiation between masculine and feminine erotic control it may be said that the woman needs and can, by the nature of the circumstances, have no control through expression herself. She needs no release from her own natural autoerotism. Her love problem is toto cælo different from man’s.