Of course there are people who think it is wrong to enjoy anything,
but while overgratification from food or drink has a certain essential
sensuality about it and gluttony was one of the “seven deadly sins,”
there is no psychological principle according to which intense enjoyment
is rightly prohibited, providing the consumption of food does not exceed
the necessity of the body for growth and restoration of tissue. Up to
that point the more one enjoys one’s food the better for himself and
incidentally for everyone else. If, however, the enjoyment has to come
from an increase in the amount consumed or the cost of it, then a quite
unjustifiable element of unsocial action surely enters.
One should enjoy food, and the more enjoyment the better, provided the
enjoyment does not depend on the increase in amount or expensiveness of
it.
Similarly there is every good reason why both women and men should enjoy
sex and regard it as quite as necessary as food.
Instinctively both women and men would do so if their sexual instincts
were accessible. Those men and women to whom their instincts are
accessible do gain their greatest comfort if not their greatest happiness
through the uninhibited expression of the sex instinct.
§ 58
If the greatest happiness in life be something other than the emotions
incident to the fusion of man’s and woman’s beings in the love drama,
then, whatever that greatest happiness may be said to be, it is surely
conditioned on a happy marriage. Those who think otherwise are not
happily married and they need to become so before their words can have
any authority. Those not happily married have, of course, no means
whatever of knowing at first hand what is, or should be, implied in that
term.
§ 59
Instinct has taught the woman to expect strength, physical or spiritual,
or both, of the man. Let it not be forgotten that mental and spiritual
strength is a perfect substitute for physical strength. It does not
mean that intellectual ability is the equivalent of spiritual strength
as the former may be coexistent with an emotional undevelopment which
is the same as spiritual weakness. A man may, even a child may, be an
intellectual prodigy as a chess player or mathematician without implying
any emotional development in the direction of normal erotism.
In this the sexes are different, for woman’s instinct here guides her
rightly. Biologically she is unconsciously forced, against her will, and
quite without her knowing it to test her man continuously for some kind
of strength. For some women indeed physical strength is all-satisfactory
but in the majority of cases of civilized woman physical strength,
without an accompanying spiritual strength, which will insure the
necessary erotic control of her by her husband, will always leave her
disappointed and discontented.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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