The man of the twentieth-century type gets his supreme gratification, not from anything that is done to him, nor yet from any sensations which his activities produce in him, which indeed he could get blindfolded from any living woman of similar proportions and somatic reaction, but from the knowledge his own visual and tactual sense gives him of the effect of his acts on his partner, the physical and psychical effect which his being and doing have not on himself directly (which is the ordinary autoerotic procedure) but indirectly on him through the body and soul of his mate.
The analogous statement cannot be made about the woman. To be sure, she both is loved and loves, both is desired and desires, but she can herself do nothing that gives the man other than autoerotic pleasure. His joy, on the contrary, comes not from what she does to gratify him directly. His appreciation and response to any artful action on her part is a feminine reaction, and while excusable in egoistic spheres of action is inexcusable in the erotic.
For he neither wants her, nor does she want, essentially and biologically, to be the active, creative factor in the love episode, just because this factor is the exclusively masculine factor. Her unconscious reaction to this reversal of masculinity and femininity may amuse her for a while, as a variation; but it cannot continue. Conscious purposive action on her part gives neither her nor him a lasting gratification, as it is a step in the direction of psychic autoerotism on his part to receive such satisfactions.
Her reactions on the contrary should have such a degree of spontaneity and unreflective artlessness as to give him assurance of their being true unmeditated responses as sure and inevitable as the chemical action in an opening flower, but as purely hypersomatic (spiritual) as they are inevitable.
Otherwise, he will never be able to know her as she is. He will know her as the traditional suggestion of her environment has taught her to be. This pervasive influence of environment, which is well enough in egoistic-social impulses, is wholly out of place in the erotic sphere.
The truly modern husband will wish more than any other thing to know his wife as he himself alone can know her, and will more and more consciously resent, as the century grows older, any egoistic-social conventionality slipping into the purely erotic.
In order for him to gain his greatest joy from marriage with this particular woman, she will have to be made sui generis. The only means toward this end is her utterly unpremeditated, spontaneous response, unclouded by the suggestions of tradition as to how she ought to respond.
A woman thus rendered sui generis by her husband’s erotic control will more than fulfil any requirements or specifications of a pattern of romantic love. Such a woman, thus known by a fully percipient husband, takes on for him a value, transcending far those of the ordinary so-called loves of the every-day, mildly contented variety, and becomes for him alone, incandescent with vitality.
The considerations offered in the preceding paragraphs point to the conclusion that the average man’s lack of erotic control is due first of all to his mental autoerotism.