It happens that this unimaginative paucity of merely twofold division of
women unfortunately involves almost without exception the unconscious
assumption that his sexual gratification is the function of the
prostitute and is both absent from and not supplied by the woman of the
angel type, from which stratum of society he naturally selects his wife.
No wonder then that many men consider their wives “oversexed” if they
show any great passion. “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.”
This type of man who rigidly demands that his wife shall be an angel
(as, when an infant, he thought that his mother was) makes, or tries
to make out of her a sexless worker or butterfly while he goes to the
prostitute weed for the satisfaction of his imperative sexual needs.
He is unable to act as if his wife had exactly the same human body as
himself, the same or homologous glands and identical sexual needs with
himself, the denial of which is the cause of much if not most of the
nervousness of women and accountable for a good part of their ill health
and weakness.
§ 195
The boy of five or less has no means of knowing that his mother has any
sexual needs, jealous though he may be of his father. The same boy when a
man of thirty, if he keep the same childish viewpoint that women of the
angel type are as angelically sexless as his mother was to him, will,
unless he picks out a woman of the other type for a wife, which is, of
course, exceedingly rare, never be wholly free from inhibitions against
the full development of the true love episode with his wife. Regarding
the prostitute as of another caste, he thus avoids with her alone the
inhibitions caused by his childish separation of all women into two
diametrically opposed castes.
It is obvious that this early-formed association of mother (and of
course, later, wife) with absence of sexual interests or even instincts
may in some men be a large factor in causing the repression of the
majority of the components of the love episode. One component, however,
alone, is impossible for the man to repress, though he may later find to
his supreme satisfaction that he can control it and retard it; namely,
the final relaxation of all his erotic tension.
If he continues love episodes with his wife and has a fixed but
unconscious idea that with a wife all varieties of preliminary love
actions, in brief, every component but the one to him absolutely
essential component of dropping his burden of erotic tension,—which by
the way he might just as well drop elsewhere—are actions more appropriate
in a brothel than in a home, he will tend more and more to avoid with his
wife all but the essential, as he virtually conceives it.
§ 196
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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