The facts that control is neither annihilation nor repression, that control is of the very essence of personality and individuality, that biologically man’s control of woman is the only control needed in the erotic sphere, and that woman, not being able to control there (and feeling, if she be not controlled, a need which she unconsciously interprets as a need to control others)—all these are facts that are of slight importance, however striking they may be, compared with the fact that man, on the average, is brought up without knowledge of the erotic control he needs to assume in order to make both himself and his wife happy. The unsatisfied woman experiences the fact that she has bestowed upon her mate unutterable joy and bliss. A satisfied woman’s recognition of this fact, however, cannot occur at the same time that her own erotic acme takes place, for at that particular time she is as oblivious to anything save her own sensations as if she were the only being existing in the universe, and her sensations are as indefinite and infinite as though she were taking chloroform. She must, in all the processes leading up to her temporary psychic dissolution, realize that these processes are being accomplished for her by the being and doing of her husband-lover. She may not ever know exactly what he does do, but she is translated—and by her husband. § 145 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.