The erotologist can tell us definitely that in marriage the erotic situation should be controlled by the husband, as the husband is in every case the cause of the good or evil outcome of the match. Masculinity is the unquenchable yearning to control the woman emotionally, erotically. Femininity is the insatiable desire to be erotically controlled. Everyone will admit that for a man to be erotically controlled by a woman does not represent the peak of masculine attainment and that a woman’s desire to control a man is, while common enough, not an expression of her love instinct but of her ego instinct by which women are just as much motivated as are men. The erotologist tells us (the main thesis of this book) that the sole solid bond of union in marriage is just this erotic control of the wife by the husband. It is not complete and perfect if it does not, in all activities strictly marital, supersede all egoistic trends. A woman may as mother of her children, as lady of the house, as woman of business, display in those spheres as many expressions of egoistic-social instinct as she has opportunity for or as circumstances allow; but as wife she is due only to constitute the controlled member of the complementary fusion of the marital pair. It is not without deep significance that the Anglo-Saxon word from which “wife” is derived is allied to the root WIB which means “to tremble.” It expresses an essential psychological truth. If the feminine element in the _binary_, as I have called the perfect marital union, is somewhat analogous to the surging sea on whose rocks or sand beaches it continues to break, we see in the rocks or the strand the solid, at least comparatively unwavering thing to which the surges conform themselves. There need only be a comparative steadiness on the part of the masculine element. He may tremble, too, but if only he tremble _less_ than she, he will be the masculine and she the feminine element. § 67 The precipitate husband is over-precipitate only if he is or becomes more so than his wife. There is no norm except a comparative one. He must have control (and yet at the right time he may relinquish it); but at all times he must have _more_ control over himself, and incidentally over her, than she has over his erotic reactions, or over her own. A woman in perfect control of her own erotic reactions, in the sense of control through expression and not through repression or annihilation, probably does not exist. But if she did she would make the perfect prostitute. Such a woman could give any man the deepest satisfaction of which he was capable—until he found that she, and not he, was controlling her erotism. But the egoistic-social impulse operates as a repressive factor even in the prostitute, and renders the completeness of her positive control impossible for her; the more civilized the community the more repressive the control.