§ 141
Anesthesia is love-blindness. Love is pictured blind because he does not see defects. The worst blindness of love is its not seeing beauties. Most husbands’ love is blind. This is the anesthesia meant. When one is given surgically an anesthetic it is to make one insensible to pain. Love anesthesia is the insensibility to the love emotions which are stirred in every man by every woman.
Can a man be aware of these appeals, made by every woman, and choose to remain true to the woman he has married? What good would be done to him if the anesthetic to which, by virtue of conventional repression, we are all subject, should be suddenly removed? Would not such a man be irresistibly impelled to make love to any and every woman he saw? Where then would monogamy be? But if monogamy depended on anesthetics of this type it would be on a very insecure basis. It would not endure a week.
Yet most men are love-blind, are anesthetic to woman’s deepest erotic appeal. Furthermore the securest protection for monogamy is the removal of that anesthesia.
§ 142
This doctrine of the supremity of masculine erotic control will be objected to, and by the best of women. They will say that they get their joy in perfect marriage from the knowledge that their husbands are made happy. They will also say that it is only fair play if there is a give and take on both sides, and that the denial of woman’s control relegates them to an inferior position.
They misunderstand, however, the biological foundations of the marital state if they consider woman’s position of receiver and not giver as in any way implying inferiority. They confuse erotic control, which is demonstrably a one-way control, with egoistic-social control, which is quite as normally exercised by women as by men, by women over men, as by men over women.
They fail to see also that the secure establishment of the one-way masculine erotic control will so satisfy men that no dispute can arise as to the rights of women in the egoistic-social sphere. They fail to see also that the solid foundation of truly erotic control over them by their husbands will release for egoistic-social activities an enormous fund of energy which is now irrationally locked up in the erotic sphere. In other words if they are fortunate enough to be married to a man who is in perfect control erotically they will not need to worry about his approval of whatever they may find interesting to do in egoistic-social spheres of action.
§ 143
The excellent women who may on theoretical grounds, object to their husbands’ supreme erotic control, are merely echoing the sentiments of traditional convention, which are man-made sentiments, made by men centuries ago, dictating what was right and proper for women to do centuries ago.