The fact that of the thousands of egg cells produced by one woman no
two can fuse with each other, and that of the billions of spermatozoa
produced by one man no two can fuse together, but that any one male germ
cell can completely fuse with any one female germ cell is the prototype
of a perfect full marriage, and is the suggestion that probably no
couples need be unhappy; for happiness is a matter of fusion, and fusion
can be accomplished by the removal of ignorance due to tradition.
§ 89
The right of the wife to experience the erotic acme at every love episode
is only beginning to be admitted. Up to the present time the husband has
generally gone on the principle of taking his wife’s body for the fine
physical catharsis he fancies it produces in himself.
Taking a woman’s body, however, for the fine emotional catharsis, without
“considering too curiously” just how it strikes the woman is manifestly,
to any thoughtful man, merely a one-sided affair. It involves only as
a negative quantity the results of his action upon the woman, because
erotically the result is negative in her case. The most it can do is
to stir her emotions a little, leave her with more or less ungratified
desire, a tension which in the end is most harmful to her.
Only a man whose mentality is below par or undeveloped can feel himself
fully satisfied with an attempt at a purely physical love episode like
this. To his unconscious it can be but the stepping up a step that
isn’t there, a striking out at empty air. For the exaltation (which
would come from passion reciprocated) is indelibly registered on his
unconscious as a negative quantity. It is a dent in a surface intended
by nature to be convex. In the fully developed man all the sensibilities
registering response in the mate are present, and if they are not given
the opportunity to function, the lack of it is definitely recorded in the
unconscious. The man has as much right biologically to a response in his
wife as the wife has a right to be sympathetically handled.
In a time soon to come men will take into consciousness and into
conscious control all instinctive actions, and all these unconscious
lacks; and will so plan their love that the absence of response will
be avoided. The woman’s right to be made to respond will be finally
acknowledged.
§ 90
The right of woman to experience such stirring up of unconscious depths
of soul as is caused by the erotic acme of the love episode, and the
advantage to her health and general welfare coming from such stirring
are two separate questions. Havelock Ellis has admitted that the woman’s
right to love and all it can include is not a right in a political or
even an ethical sense, any more than the right to be happy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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