Man’s lack of erotic control is due also partly to a certain anesthesia on his part, taking the word in its etymological sense of a failure to perceive.
He fails to perceive that his function in married life is giving and not receiving. He also fails to perceive the difference between woman’s spontaneous reactions and those suggested to her by her environment. He fails to perceive that woman’s resistance has a deep biological cause and that she is unconsciously forced to test him hourly. He fails to perceive that she inevitably confuses erotic and egoistic-social instincts.
§ 146
The man to whom the love episode is only an animal sex act, a swift and dizzy whirl, is one who, so to speak does not in advance plot out the trajectory of this flight, does not let the component factors enter his consciousness for long enough to observe them and devote some conscious love to them. These innate associations are there in his unconscious; but his training has repressed them. Such a man to whom the love episode is like a swift gulping of strong liquor has no time to reflect upon its various bouquets and glints in natural and artificial light.
The ideal enactment of the love episode, if permitted to enter consciousness in the proper manner, enables one to prolong it, because this admittance of new factors into consciousness, that were all along in the unconscious, gives a reason for stopping and taking account of the phases of it as they occur. The most important phases are those where the husband takes note of the effects of his being and doing upon his wife. The hasty husband is the one who has no regard for any other’s feelings save his own. If his own were the only ones that existed, he would of course have no reason to retard his own erotic acme. With an insensate spouse he might go through the love episode as often and as rapidly as he wished.
It must be kept in mind always that there is a definite biological cause for the slow progress of woman through the phases of the love episode—the inescapable necessity that she shall assure herself continuously and beyond the slightest doubt of the erotic strength of her partner.
It is probable that the women who are not slow in this progress are in a sense degenerate, if that term have any real meaning. They would be the ones who would not, unconsciously, of course, express that biological need for impregnation by the strongest male, which is expressed by the average woman in her slowness. They would tend to reproduce what might be called a lower order of humans in which the erotic in itself, the hypersomatically or spiritually erotic plays a much smaller part, an order of humans that were nearer the animals than those humans who have amplified the erotic factor.
The hasty husband, as will later be shown ([§ 158]), unconsciously reasons that his own speed demonstrates his quick and masterful control over his wife’s erotic emotions. This unconscious fallacy is made worse if the wife has followed the doctor’s advice to simulate an erotic acme in order to preserve the marital peace.
If the effect on her of his mere presence were so overwhelming, and if, as soon as he embraced her, she soared into the empyrean of ecstatic bliss, his mere embrace might have the effect at once of producing, in her, her own erotic acme. This would, however, imply either that she was herself weak, judged by the standard just given, or that she had assumed, without testing, his superior strength in the erotic sphere.
This assumption is an exceedingly rare one, depending on an inference from mere physical muscular strength, or from the fact of a great egoistic-social reputation. In other words such a woman might think that because her husband was or is an athlete his physical strength implies erotic strength, or that because he was a famous man he would be a great lover.