A consideration favouring the erroneous belief that the seminal products should not be ejaculated too freely is the phenomenon of a certain lassitude and inactivity following the love (?) episode as it has been hastily put through by many men. On the contrary the perfectly balanced love episode cannot have this unpleasant result. It ensues only when the episode has been imperfect either through too great haste or through the lack of suitable response on the wife’s part. If both share equally, i.e., if the husband reserves his own acme, the result is perfect. It cannot be perfect in any other way than that perfectly shared in flawless mutuality. The evocation of the suitable response on the wife’s part lies wholly in the husband’s self-control. Whether the effect is caused principally by psychical or by physical causes, it is he that in all cases is responsible. Without his proper conducting of the love episode, she is impotent and anesthetic. She cannot feel what he does not do. She cannot see what he does not show her. Who can blame her if her unconscious passion, over which she has never had, has not now and never will have any control, is magnetized by the really superior conduct of another man?
In brief, divorce is in the power of the husband to render imperative or impossible. The wife has essentially nothing to say in the matter except that she has found in her husband a rover among women, a beast that treats her brutally or an ignoramus who is not competent to be either a good husband or a good father.
§ 150
Some men are always delighting the conscious life of women by the intensity and frequency and rapidity of their emotional relaxations. Such men seem so generous in their spending of the small change of emotion. But they are always maddening the unconscious of their women, whether these women be wives or mistresses, for they are repeatedly, almost universally, taking in the woman’s presence, and through the instrumentality of her presence, what she cannot herself get, and what she has biologically an expectancy, if not a right, to have. Such men are practically annihilating the chances of their own and their wives’ happiness.
The woman that is governed by the egoistic-social instinct unwittingly plans for the man’s hasty emotional relaxation, the while completely holding her own emotional reactions in check, under perfect repressive control. In the average civilized woman brought up under sex inhibitions this control by annihilation is the only control she has. The ability thus to annihilate the finest possibilities of erotic reaction in herself is the result of the only training many women get. It is the fine art of the prostitute, but not all of hers, however. The rest of it is to simulate a loss of control on her own part in order to effect the aggrandizement and unconscious sense of superiority on the part of her patrons.
This conscious retaining of erotic control is, to be sure, based on the biological necessity of man testing. The best of women cannot of themselves let go their own erotic control. It has to be taken from them by men who are emotionally their superiors in strength.
In so far as it (woman’s tendency to lie) is “almost physiological”[25] and based on radical feminine characteristics, such as modesty, affectability and sympathy, which have an organic basis in the feminine constitution, and can therefore never altogether be changed, feminine dissimulation seems scarcely likely to disappear.
Woman’s tendency to dissemble is dependent on her unconscious reaction of testing the male. But she must test her male for the deeply biological purpose of finding out whether he is strong enough for her. He needs to be, for her purposes, only stronger than she is, to be strong enough; although, when this motive is sometimes transferred to consciousness, she may become a fortune hunter or vampire, and throw away any man for the next egoistic-socially stronger she finds available. This does not of course refer to physical muscular strength but to psycho-sexual strength. If physical strength were enough there would be almost no divorces and no marital unhappiness.
§ 151
Her testing her male, therefore, whether it is in pre-marital egoistic-social relations or after marriage erotically, is a resort to the negativism (which is indeed a characteristic of infantility). This negativism is seen in the critical attitude which is so intense in some of the later incidents in married life. And in the first love episode any coolness on the bride’s part is a tacit resistance which seems to say: “I am not yet fully mastered. Any opposition I present to you is no more than what as a man you should be able to overcome. You may be my superior in physical strength but there are numerous kinds of strength. I did not obviously marry you for your physical strength much as I appreciate, value and need it. But the love episode,” she continues unconsciously, in blushes, averted gaze, occasional paleness, interspersed with impulsive advances, all of which are here set down in their equivalent words, “the love episode consists in far more than physical violence. In fact for many centuries physical violence has formed no essential part of it. It has on the other hand a tendency to fluctuating, wavering, more or less trembling behaviour, that to the uninitiated appears contradictory or inanely silly. If you are upset or disconcerted audibly or visibly by any of the obstructions I am placing in your way, you are really not strong enough for me. By my instinctive need for being controlled, I am impelled to see how much strain you can bear, how strong your mental and spiritual nature is, for I need that control more than anything else in the world. I hope you will not fail me at this juncture, for I want above all things to find a firm base to which to attach the wavering, vacillating, fluctuating algæ of my emotions.”