Women confuse the control on the egoistic level with that on the erotic level, because the latter prompts them to keep testing their men in the unconscious attempt to assure themselves of their own security. This testing is done on both levels. When it is done on the upper or superficial level of egoistic-social acts it takes the form of all varieties of fantastic and capricious behaviour. The most “temperamental” woman is using her moods only to try the steadfastness of the man concerned, although she is quite unaware of the unconscious motive. She either cannot explain her actions or she assigns reasons that are pure rationalizations. When the testing is done on the erotic level it sometimes assumes the form of coldness or anesthesia.
Women will later come to see that their use of egoistic-social tests is only an indirect manner (and never a reliable one) of assuring their erotic security, but they will attain this insight only after they have made the distinction between the two groups of motives and have given to the erotic its true superior value.
If the young bride has had the good fortune to be enlightened on sexual matters, and thus to be prepared for a descent upon her of an expression of force which otherwise is easily too great a shock, she may even welcome its impetuosity.
If on the other hand, as is almost universally the case, she is ignorant of sex, her reaction to an uncontrolled husband will be one of utter despair. The majority of educated women today have been brought up with all the inhibitions which crass ignorance of sexual psychology produces. As a precautionary measure many of them were instructed by their mothers that boys and men are uncontrolled brutes and should not be allowed to touch girls, who are destined to become married mothers.
Therefore the majority of women enter the married state with faces at least slightly averted from sex, just as some religious sects train their believers to wash in the dark and never under any circumstances to look at their bodies undraped, much less any other persons’.
So the chance is that the husband will have as his first duty to eradicate this sex inhibition, for which his wife is in no way to blame, for as a child she started in the right direction, and was misdirected by her parents, guardians or teachers.
If a man is constitutionally unable, or has trained himself to be unable, to control his own emotional catharsis, and must see to his own satisfaction, before (or even instead of) his wife’s, the prognosis of happiness, if he gets a woman with the sex inhibition, is negative.
§ 138
That the soul as well as the body of the newly married, in their first love episode, should be inexplicable and unreservedly “blended with the only other soul and body in all the world for him” certainly requires a mental ante-nuptial preparation that has rarely been attained in the past. It implies the belief on the man’s part that the woman should have from the first exactly the same true physical and psychical ecstasy that he expects himself. How many men think that?