Woman’s idea of happiness is a sort of ecstatic bliss. She is looking for perennial joy and beauty, for a joy as only the angels know. Hence when she learns to know the illusory nature of the heart’s greatest desire, when she makes the discovery of the futility of this desire, the wine of life grows sour. She becomes self-centered and selfish. The fountain ordained to yield such perennial sweets is soon drained and she bestows all her feminine faculties upon mere inanities. Hence the astonishing aspect of restlessness, and agitation which we now behold in her mania for dress, her indulgence in drink and nerve-deadening drugs, and in her quest of other vain luxuries in which she desires to drown the emptiness of her heart and her spiritual isolation. CHAPTER XIV EROS, LIBIDO, JEALOUSY _Eros and libido._—Eros and libido are the two components of sensual love and are also integral parts of sentimental love, by which the latter differs from pure friendship. Libido represents the material pleasure enjoyed by the contact; eros represents the spiritual enjoyment experienced by the knowledge of loving and being loved. Hence libido is of a somatic nature, eros is a psychic phenomenon. The libidinous individual has an increased desire for sexual gratification, the erotic looks chiefly for love. The erotic individual loves with its mind, it is a craving for love by a particular individual, or by a certain class of individuals, e. g., actors or actresses. The libidinous individual is satisfied with any partner and even with other practices, serving sensual gratification, such as contrectatio, stuprum manu, paederastia, tribady, bestiality, etc. The erotic individual never thinks of the sensual pleasure, the libidinous desires to wallow in sensual enjoyment and lust. Libido is more a masculine sex trait, eros more a feminine. For the ordinary man the libidinous part of love is of primary importance. When this emotion has been destroyed by some accident, he considers himself emasculated. He will never reveal the loss of his testicles, while a woman will openly and freely talk of ovariotomy, performed upon her, although the loss of the ovaries generally produces the impotence of experiencing orgasm, as in men the loss of the testicles. She seems not to mind this loss, provided, always, that her eros has remained intact. In this indifference for sexual libido, so often found in women, lies the cause of woman’s superiority in sensual love. The woman rules over the man as long as he is in love. That man is henpecked who from the beginning, by reason of his excessive sexual needs, came under his wife’s authority and is continually kept under her rule by the same sensual needs. A man’s dependence upon his wife can only be explained upon a sensual basis. As soon as the man’s power and intelligence gain the victory over his sensual impulses, his independence is secured.