As it is evident that in animal copulation whatever acme is reached is
reached simultaneously by both sexes, because of the briefness of the
act, it is reasonable to suppose that the man’s unconscious situation
contains the implication that his own erotic acme necessarily involves
the woman’s. In other words every man has an unconscious phantasy
that when he has completely satisfied himself his mate is completely
satisfied. Only after years of married life do some husbands begin to
suspect that something is missing from the marital relation.
If the male _subhuman_ animal is excused from any concern as to the
proper reaction of the female, that does not excuse any man and yet
in so far as he is animal he has no cause to act otherwise than take
his satisfaction without delay. The female animal is accessible only
in the rutting season. Human woman is at all times accessible to the
love expressed in true mating. Human sexuality has not only made a
fundamental distinction between procreative and erotic love episodes but
also has almost obliterated the periodicity in the sexual accessibility
of the woman. Therefore human love is _toto cælo_ different from animal
copulation.
Considerations of the matter of control lead to the conclusion that it
is possible only by means of the imagination, and because imagination
is only the reawakening with possible recombination of images of past
experiences, we are again confronted with the problem of explaining how
the experience to be imaged in advance and looked for and waited for may
be presented both to the men who have and to those who have not had sex
experience.
As one cannot control anything except according to a pattern, the pattern
of controlled action must be in the mind of any who intend to achieve
control.
The method then, by which the husband is to achieve control of his own,
and thus over his wife’s erotic reactions, is simply observation. He
absolutely requires fully to note the effect that what he does has on his
wife. If he succeeds in averting his gaze, figuratively, from himself to
his partner, he will find that his own reactions take on a lessened value
in his eyes. His own reaction, one of ecstatic pleasure is, in comparison
with his wife’s, highly concentrated on one detail of the love episode.
This is, of course, the most important one in animals and would be in
humans, if humans were animals, but the fact that they are not and that
erotic values have developed in humans that do not exist in animals,
makes the man’s erotic acme take on a much smaller significance and value.
Most husbands go through the love episode as if they were animals, merely
procreating progeny, while yet starting from no such purpose. The purpose
is, of course, in so many men solely the purpose to gratify themselves
and not anyone else, that, of course, any deliberate thought of ways and
means of gratifying any other, does not occur to them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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