If the erotologist tells us that a million husbands have used a certain
technique in their erotic lives and have become supremely happy, and have
had just as many healthy children as they wanted and no more, we should
certainly be wise, if we could find out what was the felicitous technique
of the happy million. If we saw their wives retaining their youth and
beauty and vivacity, and being both loving wives and proud grandmothers
at the same time, we should not let envy of these men inspire us with
hatred and prejudice enough to say that their methods are iniquitous,
and not mentioned in the Bible; but we should inquire exactly what these
husbands did, to keep their wives and themselves so young and happy.
We should at the present day inquire mostly in vain. A good part of the
million do not themselves know what they do that is different from the
practice of the other millions. They just love their wives and them
alone.
The erotologists, however, have been quietly studying the marital
situation for some decades. They have compared, weighed, correlated
and investigated thousands of cases. Some of the sexologists have been
unscientific and biased with ancient superstitions. A few erotologists,
notably Havelock Ellis and Dr. Marie C. Stopes of England, Dr. W.
F. Robie of Baldwinsville, Massachusetts, Dr. H. W. Long of Peoria,
Illinois, and some of the psychoanalysts, are scientists, ready and
willing to look at facts as they are and not as they might wish them to
be.
The erotologists have actually discovered definite facts about the more
intimate nature of the marital relation. It implies the interaction, in
every married pair, of four sets of tendencies: the husband’s conscious
and his unconscious trends and the wife’s conscious and unconscious
trends. Anyone looking only at the conscious factors is naturally puzzled
by almost all the external phenomena of marriage, e.g., why they fell in
love, what either could see in the other, why another pair fell out, what
on earth was the matter with them.
§ 66
To the observer not looking beneath the surface with the scientific
instrument of precision constituted by the study of the unconscious, the
actions of two married people are as unaccountable as those of a tack
sliding uphill on a piece of smooth paper. The erotologists have looked
underneath and seen the magnet in the hand of another person and are not
surprised.
To the erotologists marriage is in no sense a lottery, but a situation
in which the causal factors are just as clearly natural as they are
either in a twelve-cylinder automobile that runs smoothly or in one that
snorts along with a couple of cylinders working. Anyhow a lottery is only
a matter of chance; and chance is only cause to which we either have
blinded ourselves or have not yet become sentient.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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