Psychic virility of the husband in the marital relation is the only
factor that can insure the permanence, except superficially, of any
marriage. “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.”
There should be alteration in love, but it should be caused by the
progressive development of the husband’s love. This is the theory of
relativity applied in the erotic sphere. Love should not alter when—that
is, because—it finds alteration; but it should make changes in the
reactions of the wife, so that each year finds the married lovers more
completely fused physically and spiritually than the year before.
From the woman’s point of view, she is invited by marriage to a banquet,
at which she may reasonably expect to find a variety of comestibles all
of adult characteristics. If at this banquet she is served by her husband
only with milk or pap she is rightly revolted, and will not eat. Milk
alternating with pap in successive courses of marital banquet would be
cruelty and adequate cause for separation, if their exclusive presence
could be attributed to the voluntarily malevolent choice of the husband.
But in most cases it is merely his ignorance for which his parents and
teachers are the blameless cause.
§ 20
Is there any clearer truth than that all autoerotic practices in
the marital union are unmanly? And is there any statement more
incontrovertible than that the average husband who has not taken
the trouble to know and control his wife in the erotic sphere is
unequivocally autoerotic mentally?
Can it be doubted that the average woman has no possible means of knowing
whether her suitor will, after marriage, be an autoerotic boy or virile
man? Can we blame her if she is forced by our crazy laws to make this
a trial marriage, divorce him if she can, and make another trial? Can
we blame anyone for taking food if she is starving and call her act
stealing? Not unless we have made it perfectly plain to her how and
where she may legitimately obtain food. But we can blame the man, for
he is, he always has been, and he always will be the provider of erotic
power. A man has no right to undertake the erotic support of any woman,
and then proceed to starve her and incontinently to fatten himself upon
her. Universally such a man is scorned and always will be, except by
women whose erotic instincts have been overgrown and overwhelmed by the
egoistic-social impulses of conventionality. These do not scorn a man
who resorts to prostitutes to feed his autoerotic appetites, or who keeps
mistresses or has other illicit liaisons for the same purposes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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