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CONTENTS
Preface xxii
Acknowledgments xxix
About the Authors xxx
vii
Organizational Commitment 37
Perceived Organizational Support 37
Employee Engagement 38
Measuring Job Satisfaction 38
Approaches to Measurement 39
Measured Job Satisfaction Levels 39
What Causes Job Satisfaction? 39
Job Conditions 40
Personality 41
Pay 41
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) 41
Outcomes of Job Satisfaction 42
Job Performance 42
Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB) 42
Customer Satisfaction 42
Life Satisfaction 43
The Impact of Job Dissatisfaction 43
Counterproductive Work Behavior (CWB) 43
Understanding the Impact 45
Summary 46
Implications for Managers 46
Try It—Simulation: Attitudes & Job Satisfaction 46
Personal Inventory Assessments: Core Self-Evaluation (CSE)
Scale 46
Exercise 54
Age 54
Sex 54
Emotional Labor 55
Controlling Emotional Displays 55
Emotional Dissonance and Mindfulness 56
Affective Events Theory 56
Emotional Intelligence 56
Emotion Regulation 58
Emotion Regulation Influences and Outcomes 58
Emotion Regulation Techniques 58
Ethics of Emotion Regulation 59
Watch It—East Haven Fire Department: Emotions and Moods 59
OB Applications of Emotions and Moods 59
Selection 59
Decision Making 60
Creativity 60
Motivation 60
Leadership 60
Customer Service 61
Job Attitudes 61
Deviant Workplace Behaviors 61
Safety and Injury at Work 62
Summary 62
Implications for Managers 62
Try It—Simulation: Emotions & Moods 63
Personal Inventory Assessments: Emotional Intelligence
Assessment 63
Self-Monitoring 72
Proactive Personality 72
Personality and Situations 72
Situation Strength Theory 73
Trait Activation Theory 74
Values 75
Watch It—Honest Tea: Ethics–Company Mission and Values 75
Terminal versus Instrumental Values 75
Generational Values 76
Linking an Individual’s Personality and Values
to the Workplace 76
Person–Job Fit 76
Person–Organization Fit 77
Other Dimensions of Fit 77
Cultural Values 78
Hofstede’s Framework 78
The GLOBE Framework 79
Comparison of Hofstede’s Framework and the Globe
Framework 79
Summary 81
Implications for Managers 81
Personal Inventory Assessments: Personality Style
Indicator 81
Summary 118
Implications for Managers 118
Try It—Simulation: Motivation 118
Personal Inventory Assessments: Work Motivation Indicator 119
Summary 263
Implications for Managers 264
Try It—Simulation: Organizational Structure 264
Personal Inventory Assessments: Organizational Structure
Assessment 264
§ 64
From the earliest ages seers and poets have glorified Love. The
Bible says God is Love. Love as the perfect erotic control of the wife
by the husband will be a strange concept to some minds that have
been accustomed to the theory that woman is the Queen of Love,
and to the ideas of men brought up under the Madonna influence.
This control is indeed the opposite of the attitude that many
husbands have adopted (or in which they have been trained) toward
their wives, to whom they act as they would toward idealized
mothers, not of their own children, but of themselves.
A conviction derived from intimate knowledge of the marital
relations of many people forces the conclusion that this current
attitude not only is a false one, but is also one that gradually renders
a husband impotent to take the part which a true male should take,
in the highest type of human mating.
Love is the work of art of an entire lifetime. The calf love of the
adolescent, the adoration of the betrothed and the first passionate
outburst of the honeymoon are but preludes or overtures to an
opera or drama that should continue as long as the two partners live
together, and in which the husband is the protagonist.
§ 65
To denote the highest type of special scientific student of the art
of love, the term erotologist is suggested in preference to the word
sexologist, which would imply the study of only the physical side of
sex.
If a modern erotologist can tell us that husbands using toward
their wives one form of behaviour are themselves unhappy, and have
too many children, or too few, we should certainly be broad-minded
enough to admit that the chances are, we ourselves shall be
unhappy if we do the same things in the same way.
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.
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.
A man married to any woman who is in better control of herself
than he is of himself is married to (but not mated with) a woman
who is to him a prostitute by whatsoever proportion of control she
exercises over herself more than he does over himself or over her.
This is true both of the negative control of repression on her part
and of the positive control of expression. For evidently if her
repressive control makes her cold to his advances she is of the
common prostitute type as far as he is concerned. He evokes no
more real response from her than from the casual woman of the
street. However much simulated responsiveness the prostitute may
show, he knows unconsciously its unreality, and feels proportionately
disgusted. In the wife who is cold because of environmental
influences in her youth which the husband has not removed by his
wholesome treatment of her, the objective result is the same as in
the prostitute who is unresponsive from indifference or fear, or from
the repression referred to.
§ 68
Quite as obviously if the wife shows a greater control over the
erotic situation than the husband, a control through expression, he
will be unconsciously repelled by this unnatural factor in the
situation, no matter how much pleased he may be consciously by
the rich, warm femininity he has discovered in her.
It is this positive or expressive control of the erotic factor which
gives to some women the reputation of being designing, gives them
the appearance of being more erotic than the husband or lover, and
in some instances repels the man.
The possibility of greater erotic control on the part of the woman
than the man possesses should be a provoking thought to all
husbands who are overhasty in their handling of the love episode.
Any husband controls his wife erotically, if he actually does, only
by means of controlling himself. At minimum his control of himself is
just enough to secure his wife’s erotic acme preceding or at least
synchronizing with his own. That is the one and only way by which
he can attain and maintain marital success.
§ 69
The love drama is the term that applies to the relations of one
man and one woman for the time when they devote themselves to
each other. It may be an hour or a lifetime, but the hour-long period
surely is a pitiful experience, a one-act farce, compared with the
grandeur of the lifelong relation. A man who thinks he prefers a
succession of short periods with different women condemns himself
unnecessarily to a course of action which resembles the career of a
tea-tester. He may become a connoisseur in various flavours but he
cannot learn much about women. He is a narrow specialist with
really no wide knowledge. Moreover such a man almost never tests
his own effect on women, but merely the different effects of women
on himself; and is therefore merely autoerotic, merely playing with
himself; and his various instruments are virtually impersonal.
§ 70
Man is instinctively embarrassed upon rousing a woman to full
passion, and finding it plays so much greater a part in her life than
in his, and that it requires so much more attention on his part than
he feels he has time to give.
That may explain why some men are so easily satisfied with a
woman’s half love and shy from it when it begins fully to develop.
They run from one woman to another, shirking the labour of drinking
because they have not the stomach to drink love to the lees.
“Sippers,” they might be called, or “tea-testers.” The tester is
doomed to a sample. He not only never consumes a full cup but
never swallows a drop. He has not the power to hold out. No man
could drink a hundred cups of different consignments of tea. Nor can
one man thoroughly experience more than one woman. The sippers
of women would be as disconcerted as a tea-tester who should be
ordered to drink full cups of tea to report on a hundred samples, if
they were expected really to know the women they sample. Their
disconcertment would amount to an actual impotence.
§ 71
The essential unsatisfactoriness of the promiscuous sex life is
experienced poignantly by most men who attempt it. One wealthy
man who kept numerous mistresses, seventeen at one time, to be
exact, came to an analyst to see if he could not get some help in
unifying his life. It was not that he had any troubles coming from
any acts on the part of the women. Most of them knew of his
relations with the others, and professed, at any rate, to be free from
jealousy. This is enough to show that he did not love any of them.
Half consciously he realized that he had lost or never learned the
truly erotic art and though he attended to the large businesses he
owned, he felt a complete dissatisfaction with his own life not
because it was sinful and criminal but because it did not give him
any real sense of accomplishment. He was unmarried and among his
large acquaintance of marriageable young women there was one,
whose femininity, he recognized, was so rich that while, for many
reasons he would have liked to propose marriage to her, he knew he
would be unable to control her erotism.
Knowing full well that he controlled the erotism of not a single one
of his seventeen mistresses, he correctly inferred that his methods
were faulty, and sought confidential help from the analyst to bring
into full consciousness the reasons for his attempting in the future to
cultivate a true and deep love for one woman.
His methods were shown to be faulty because of the fact that his
clandestine relations with the numerous women were on a plane
exclusively or too predominantly physical. He was made to realize
that love is not love that does not include the entire personality of
the lover, physical, mental and spiritual.
§ 72
The confrontation of a shallow sipper like this with really profound
femininity is a test of virility in the highest erotic sense. The man
perverted by traditional views of masculinity, which overvalue the
physical side, and unenlightened by the modern psychology of love
is face to face with a situation for which he is utterly unprepared.
A man’s so-called satisfaction, then, with the superficial surrender
of a woman up to the point where she consents to let him try to
control her erotism is not, however, satisfaction at all but a
withdrawal from a test of virility. This primary consent on the
woman’s part is not a submission but merely in effect a consent to
examine or as it were to make a survey of his manliness. Of this she
is, of course, entirely unconscious. If she were conscious of it she
would have one of the traits of the promiscuous woman. But even if
it is unconscious in her it is just as operative as if it were conscious.
And the result of the test is also unconscious in the woman, if the
test shows that the man is found wanting.
Her reaction to the man found wanting is as various as is the
upbringing of women, from the immediate rejection in divorce on
the grounds of incompatibility to the lifelong slavery in which she
gradually withers.
Under the present inanely stupid method of bringing up women in
total ignorance of sex, and in blindness to the truly erotic, a woman
has no means whatever of estimating a man’s erotic virility before
marriage and practically no standard of judging him after. If she had,
she might do something to get him to learn of the existence of true
mating.
And if she could know and could tell her husband how he failed,
she would then have a chance of becoming happy. No really human
man will choose the greater of two evils or refuse the greater of two
good things, no matter when or how that choice is offered to him,
although to him it may be humiliating whether first or last, to have it
laid before him by the woman.
§ 73
But no whole man will be other than fired by this consent to test.
If he is cloyed by it, his being so demonstrates his inadequacy; it
proves his anesthesia, his insensibility, his blindness to the future
possibilities of complete binary love-living.
To him this failure of his, this revulsion of feeling at the precise
moment when he has entered the very lists of love, this slacker’s
attitude, seems not a desertion on his part, not a failure of his, but a
sudden loss of charm on her part. She is, upon trial, not what he
had expected and longed for. But the failure, the loss of charm are
his, not hers. He ought to be the charmer. He ought to have been
informed that it is his privilege and power to attain the pleasure of
putting his woman into another world of sheer exuberant joy—that
his own pleasure in life can be attained by no other means; and that
the consent of the woman to be his wife is a consent not to take one
step with him, and then have him vanish, but to travel the path of
life-love to its end—a path that is long and joyous, a path from
which no seeing man, no man with eyes of love, can ever wish to
depart. For with him is happiness personified and before him and
leading him on is light.
§ 74
The acts and scenes and various episodes and strophes of this
lifelong drama are never more than parts, and are organically related
each to the other and to the whole life poem. No matter what one’s
egoistic-social impulses and activities are, the racial theme, i.e.,
emotional culture and development, should be as far as possible
continuous and its phrases related. The racial theme is organic,
emotional. The narrower national, or sectional, theme in life is the
intellectual one.
For the so-called sexual act the term love episode has been
substituted in this book. Like a duet on an operatic stage it should
be just as much a combination of the melody of the emotions of
each of the two partners, and the harmony of both of their
orchestras of emotions, as are the melody and harmony arranged by
the composer of an opera score. The husband should be the
composer.
It will be replied that the ordinary man is not of the intellectual
calibre of the Wagners, Gounods, and Verdis, and that if the love life
is to be so exalted in the ordinary marriage it would be a hopeless
task, for so few men have the intellectuality to create a work of art
of such dimensions.
But the greatness of composers and poets consists in their
approaching so near to life with media so inorganic as sound and
sight; and while music is enjoyed by most people, different styles
and grades of music have the characteristic of bringing the melody
and harmony to a definite and gratifying end. Music therefore
essentially consists of the art of producing a tension and finally a
relaxation of human emotions by means of sound.
Love as an art consists of the same production of tension and
relaxation in a rhythm whose first pulsation begins even in childhood
and whose last is coincident with the final heartbeat of the
individual.
§ 75
Love, in the sense used above, practically includes every action of
the husband or wife in relation to each other, from the beginning of
the first act of love-living to the end of their joint life.
The love episode is not a violent activity for a brief space of five or
ten minutes. In its highest form it begins when either of the pair
thinks of any part of it. A true work of erotic art will progress from
these thoughts, through all the phases of verbal mention, or actual
carrying out of any preliminary—all the various verbal and other
endearments, all the caresses and changing contacts, in
multitudinous variety of external circumstances. It will progress
through the purely physical part of it, or that part which is regarded
as purely physical (but which never is, exclusively), and will continue
for an hour to a day after the erotic acme.
During this post-acme time all the thoughts and emotions of each
will be referred to the past episode and not to any future one. In the
interim between the evanescence of these thought-reverberations,
and the growing tension of another approaching love episode there
may be a space of some hours or a day or two, but, where there is a
fully expressed love life, never more than that.
§ 76
There is an unmistakable sign when the union of the two natures
of a man and a woman has taken place. It is not the procreation of
children, it is not living together only, it is not a joint bank account or
any mere superficial unity or congeniality of external (egoistic-social)
interests; but it is an emotional reaction at a time of intimate
physical communion, a flood of feeling of an absolutely unique
character, which, once experienced, leads true lovers to say that
nothing in the world they have ever heard of could be in any respect
like it—a flood of feeling, which, like the perigee tide, enters and fills
every nook and cranny of the being of each, just as the waters of an
estuary rise and fill and overflow when the sun and the moon both
pull together and the wind blows into the river’s mouth.
And the first time that emotional flood tide is experienced is
nothing to what later psychosomatic communion may attain. Man
and wife looking back on their honeymoon thirty years before realize
poignantly how infinitely more exalted and overwhelming is their
present-day love communion than were the unsteady, brief and
trembling, uncoördinated embraces of their early married life. True,
they looked at each other with eyes of love long years before, but
such simple, ignorant, artless infantile eyes, that looked without
seeing half there was to see. They have learned each other as they
never could have learned any two, much less three or more, of the
other sex. Each has learned how to give, and that riches consist only
in power to give, and that power to give is developed only by giving,
just as skill in swimming comes from swimming and not from
standing on the shore.
So they immerge each day into the invigorating ocean, and glory
in the rise and fall of its surf, in its colour and in its refreshing
coolness; and when they become too old to swim, they will sit by
the open fire and exchange sweet reminiscences of bygone plunges,
until their spirits together breast the waves of infinity and eternity
forever.
§ 77
One of the factors of the general marital muddle that constitutes
most marriages is the ignorance of husband or wife, or both, about
whether their sex life, if they still continue it, is normal. What are the
evidences that the consummation of marital life has taken place as
satisfactorily as could be wished, or as could occur with the pair in
question, or (as is supposed at any rate) takes place with the newly
married lovers on their honeymoon?
It is not enough merely to be able to say they are happy, for they
will sometimes say so whether they know they are or not, and they
will in some cases not know. In fact few people in or out of the
wedded state know whether they are truly happy or not or how to
become happy if they are not so.
If a husband and wife are happy together they will have begun to
make their marital life a love drama, by the frequent enactment of
the love episode as described in these pages and their outlook upon
life will be buoyant and positive.
§ 78
In The Secret Places of the Heart, H. G. Wells has plainly indicated
that the love episode has taken place between Sir Richmond Hardy
and Miss Grammont. He writes only of the calm which follows the
emotional storm, and in these words (p. 253):
“At the breakfast table it was Belinda (Miss Grammont’s
companion) who was the most nervous of the three, the most
moved, the most disposed to throw a sacramental air over their last
meal together. Her companions had passed beyond the idea of
separation; it was as if they now cherished a secret satisfaction at
the high dignity of their parting. Belinda in some way perceived they
had become different. They were no longer tremulous lovers. They
seemed sure of one another and with a new pride in their bearing.”
§ 79
Some husbands treat their wives with a satisfactory erotic
technique from the first, and a few continue it through their entire
married life. Others err from the first, through ignorance, and still
others are backsliders in the pursuit of the erotic art; and true love
departs from these.
There have been others who by accident have found after years of
wedded life the key to marital happiness, or have been instructed by
some erotologist—some physician who knows or some intimate
friend.
The story of one husband who happened to discover for himself a
secret that had escaped him for years is here given:
It was in the twentieth year of their marriage. Their son was
eighteen and their daughter sixteen. Another daughter was not yet
born.
They were off for a week in the month of August in the
Adirondacks. All the morning they had tramped over the hills until
they came to a lake, solitary, shut in by forests, a mountain
overtowering the side opposite them—reflected green and blue in
the waters that met their eyes as they approached a beach of fine
white sand.
Sitting awhile they rejoiced in having found so fine a place to eat
their lunch. They were miles from any human habitation. A heron
floated majestically through the air. A kingfisher hurried noisily
athwart their view. A fish jumped out of the water a dozen rods
away and made a circle of waves which slowly enlarged until it
became lost to sight.
Instinctively they both threw off their clothes and stepped down to
the water’s edge hand in hand.
“I’ll beat you in!”
“Let’s swim to that little island.”
In they splashed and swam the first few yards under water, he
leading the way, she following, but his eyes closely watching for any
indication on her part of fatigue.
“Stay near me, Matey, there’s nothing but water where I am.”
“All right, Naiade, put your hand on my shoulder and rest awhile.
We’re almost there!”
He felt her warm hand on his shoulder and her thumb on the back
of his neck, and the warmth of the sun on his rapidly drying hair—
there in the pure water almost arrived at the wooded islet. He felt
the impact of the water on his flank stirred by the leisurely motions
of her other hand and arm as she made as if to help him tow her to
shore.
They climbed up and sat on a mossy bank out of sight of every
living thing, looking from a shady spot at the lake shimmering in the
sunlight.
“Our lunch is over there. We should have brought it with us.
Nevertheless I’ll feed upon thy lips, Corinna.
“What an experience this is! I never had a swim like this before. A
perfect day and a perfect place. Isolation complete. Thou beside me
singing in the wilderness, but this is a very Eden and we are
undisputed owners of it for this hour. I’m rich in time. I’d just as
soon stay here till sunset. An absolutely perfect place to rest and
play. I feel as if I could do anything—omnipotent as the gods of old,
dependent on nothing. It thrills me to think of myself—just me—and
you—just you—the only humans in all the world we see. If I were a
magician I’d turn this moss into a magic carpet and we’d fly through
space.”
“Oh, Matey dear, I feel as if I were flying! Tell me more like that.
Continue the story. Tell it softly close in my ear.”
“Up, out from this islet we are flying, without deafening roar of
airplane engine, but just soaring, soaring, wheeling in the air like
eagles, you and I together. Far subtler motion than the intermittent
strokes with which we paddled to that green islet now so far below
us. Blue sky all about and sunshine warm upon my shoulders and
your breasts. See down below us now a cloud. See our silhouette
dotting the grey mist of it. And look, dearest! That rainbow of which
our shadow is the centre. It makes a complete circle. Did you ever
seen the whole circle of iridescence like that? You never could on
earth. Look again, for soon we shall pass that cloud. A perfect circle
of perfect rainbow colours—symbol of infinite beauty.”
“Stop, Matey, this flight of yours is too thrilling. Take me down to
earth.”
“Matey, dear, in all our twenty years of love, I never knew you till
this day. Why did you not teach me about you before this?”
They were now slowly swimming through the placid waters of the
lake toward the beach of white sand whence they had adventurously
departed two hours before. The sun warmed their heads and the
cool waters of the lake caressed their glowing bodies.
They stepped upon the sandy beach again.
They devoured their lunch with eagerness.
They now, while eating, having dried in the sun, by force of habit
put on their conventional incumbrances of sex-differentiating
toggery, took up their staffs and turned their backs upon the lake
with its silvery waves and white sandy beach and slowly wended
their way hand in hand through the forest, to the road leading to the
inn.
As they walked along the mountain road slipping on stones and
gravel each saw in the other’s eyes a new flame of love never lighted
there before.
“I wonder, Matey, what it was that made this day’s adventure the
grand adventure of my life? I never saw you look so fine before. I
never felt closer to you than I do this minute. Why have you never
before told me a story like that, that fired my imagination as yours
seemed to be?”
“I suppose I never felt fired just that way myself. Ideas occurred
to me I’d never had before. Besides, I’ve done a pile of thinking
lately—and reading, too. I think I’ve succeeded in piecing out a
pretty good fairy tale about us. It makes me much more interested
in your view of the world than ever I was before. But I can tell you
other stories now. I think I’ve learned how to fire your imagination.”
“You have, indeed! I’m eager for the next. When will it be?”
“Almost any time we have an hour or two alone. We need time to
get up steam, so to speak. We don’t need to swim in a mountain
lake every time either. I think you got your particular thrill because
you had me and my mind absolutely all to yourself.”
“Can I ever get that again?”
“Surely, dear heart, for when I saw for the first time that look in
your eyes, which was not joy alone but pure fire, I learned
something about you I never knew before. I realized that you
yourself are a far more complex and interesting personality with
infinitely more potentialities than ever I had dreamed of. Do you
think now I would ever stop telling you stories like that?”
“I don’t remember a word of it except the perfect rainbow circle.
The rest was silence. But it had somehow a world of meaning for
me. I know we swam. I know we couldn’t fly, but you made me
think we did, which is quite as good for me.”
§ 80
“Dear, why has it taken us twenty years to love each other as we
do now?”
“It was our ignorance, which was so dense that it did not know it
was ignorant. That’s the blackest kind. What we knew was that we
had affection for each other, and for our children, but the lack of
passion was not clearly sensed, because there was no article in our
creed of love that declared passion to be a necessary factor in our
marriage. We knew the phrase ‘all in all to each other’; we identified
ourselves in countless superficial ways in addition to the really solid
identification represented in our children, but while we did it with
our intellects we really did not do it with our hearts. We have not
been truly united, truly fused, until this day.
“It needn’t have taken us twenty years, or even one year, for there
are people who instinctively soar in the same ecstatic flight in their
honeymoon, that we achieved only after twenty years of external
devotion and watchfulness. But those whose early married life is
instantly complete in total physical and emotional fusion think
everyone else is the same as they are and they don’t know what
they have any more than we did not know what we did not have. A
colour-blind man in a world of people all colour-blind would not
suspect his affliction. Possibly it wouldn’t be an affliction. He might
only laugh at the extraordinary persons who say they can see
colours in things visible, just as we now consider people freaks who
say they can see colour in sounds.”
“Do you think, dear, that most people are blind to the kind of love
we see now?”
“I do, for the vision of the circular rainbow on top of the cloud is
something that really requires a certain fine sensitivity that is the
product of civilization, and depends on the many factors of civilized
life. I could not, as my remote ancestors could, carry you off your
feet in a literal sense, and dominate you by sheer physical strength,
which would have been the only earthbound flight possible with men
of that age. Civilization has transmuted physical strength into
mental, moral and spiritual strength. And just as physical strength
was sensibly evident in every action and motion of the body, so now,
in our present state of civilization, it is obscured or obliterated and
every mental reaction to our environment is taking its place. To
some women the strength of this mental reaction is invisible, and
even today they can love with passion only the physically perfect
man. But the majority of women now have been educated to the
point of realizing that physical strength may be present in men
whose mental and moral development is very small and that mental
and moral strength may exist even in the men whose physique is
slight and even frail.”
“Do you think you’re so much stronger mentally, morally and
spiritually than you were? Did you cultivate that strength
consciously? Could you tell others how to do it?”
“Yes, dear one, to all three questions, and so are you. The thing
that finally touched off this day’s passionate union was our
realization, helped by the increasing frankness forced by modern
science on all vital matters, that sex life is a part of the love life, and
that not only is sex not exclusively physical, but it is more mental
than physical. Men as ancient as Ovid knew that love is an art, but
they did not know it as well as we do today. If it is an art, it can be
taught, it must be taught. The reason it has not been taught is the
taboo on sex. But that is being lifted gradually and people are
beginning to realize that sexless love is as impossible as birth is
impossible without the fusion of male and female germ cells. The
ancient love manuals were all composed by men to enable men to
get greater physical pleasure out of what they called love. The
modern idea is that man and woman together are each to contribute
an equal and complementary part to a spiritual fusion comparable to
the fusion of two human germ cells, and that as the male cell causes
a reaction on the entirety of the female cell, so the female cell
causes a total reaction on the entirety of the male cell. To say that
either absorbs the other is quite misleading. They stand side by side
and merely melt together, forming another different cell which is the
combination of all the properties of the two. This idea of love implies
that the two lovers be equally frank and open in every way,
concealing nothing of their own feelings from each other.”
“But, dearest, some women, I’m sure, are unable to express
themselves, and others instinctively avoid revealing their true
feelings, fearing perhaps to reveal because they may be giving away
something it might be to their advantage to keep. They think that if
they let any man, even their newly married husband, know how
much they love him, they will cheapen themselves in their husband’s
eyes, where they desire to be valued the most.”
“Do you think you would love me less if you felt you owned me
less? If you did, your love has possibly too much of ownership in it.
Love is not possession, any more than it is the inability to possess.”
§ 81
The erotic acme is the detumescence following a tumescence
which activates, in order to secure, a repose which can exist in
consciousness only by contrast with the intense activity, vivification
and vitalization of spheres of experience otherwise remaining
without or beyond one’s ken.
A kiss which is ever so little retarded, a youth laying softly his lips
on those of a fair maiden, and, for the period of a breath or two not
taking them away, feeling that not alone the lips touched hers nor
yet only his arms embraced her, is filled with a natural response
which tingles through his frame to his very fingertips and makes soft
and undulating the sea crag on which they stand. More of her at
once would be too keen a pleasure, would make him faintly dizzy
with a joy to which he is unoriented.
The halo of that first kiss fades not in a day but lingers through his
sleep, recurring poignantly like the after image of the sun caught by
chance directly in his eyes.
All his being is pervaded by the sweet breathlessness of that virgin
experience of a maiden’s lips, a touch that spreads like fire through
his body and craves quenching by another kiss which but extends
the influence of the first.
“Our lips have met, a touch compared with which our hand-clasp
was a grinding of rocks in the mad surging of the ocean surf.
“Our lips have met, a fragrance above the honeysuckle and the
roses of the hedge.
“Our lips have met, our breasts have asked us too, why should not
they repose on one another. Our hands have known each other’s
sides, and flanks have questioned why they also might not have the
soft contact.
“Why should not all the remotest parts of us clamor to share in
this meeting of two lovers’ lips? Each of us is whole and every part
fired to yearn for what every other part feels.
“I look into your eyes and see the world. All that invites to do and
feel and learn. There’s not a drop of blood within my veins that does
not hurry on its joyous course, to tell the uttermost confines of me,
that here in you I find a counterpart, for every region of my living
self.
“We cannot part for hours. This sandy shore, warm with an
August sun, shall be our couch, remote from interruption. You are
mine and I am yours for now and evermore. Not till I know you all,
and you feel me pervading all the regions of your soul, shall we be
able then to take anew the threads of our existence in the world and
weave with them a common robe for both in which enclosed we act
toward our fellows, a single person binary in form.”
“My breathing now is calm like yours; our blood is throbbing softly
in our veins, we two went through a fire together, keen, that welded
our two spirits into one—inseparable, self-contained, at rest.
“Are other men and women thus close fused, each through the
other’s eyes beholding life? If not, dear one, the only other joy, not
yet by us slow tasted, is to look and see how we can make them
also feel the deep-down inner satisfaction pierce the very roots of
their own being too, without which we should lack companionship,
and feel ourselves unique and lonely. Thus, by throwing this same
brilliant light of life with which we have ourselves been newly filled,
about us, we can see what ne’er before we saw back in the times
when naught we knew of this glad melting each in other’s soul here
on the sandy rock-bound ocean shore, where wave and gravel
mingle, air and sea and sun and sky; one universal touch and
penetration of each other’s heart. Now we are whole that fragments
were before.”
§ 82
The rationalistic thought may occur to some men that a woman’s
all can be taken at one love episode. It may come from her uttering
words to the effect that she is all his. If his means with his
destructive mark on it she is utterly his, to be sure, if he has ruined
her. But by a perfect love episode one can ruin only the egoistic-
social value of this woman for some other man. For any other man
her sexual value would be only increased by the proper kind of love
episode.
But her erotic value is something that can exist only for the man
whom she loves and who loves her. The first properly erotic love
episode can never destroy or ruin but only create, or begin the
creation, of a woman out of a gynecoid female. A true woman
according to the use of the term in this book is a female who has
become fused with a male. Then she becomes a woman and he a
man. The nature of this fusion has been discussed elsewhere.
§ 83
As a woman’s all cannot be taken at one love episode, except that
“all” which is constituted by her strictly egoistic-social property value,
it follows that in the true erotic sense, nothing is taken unless
possibly as one should chip a piece of marble from a block out of
which one was to carve a statue of the Goddess of Love. The
fragment of marble chiselled away at the first stroke of the hammer
is no part of the statue.
§ 84
The thought that the husband is getting an egoistic-socially
valuable possession by the exercise of his rights at the first love
episode is therefore quite absurd. He is performing an act which is in
the nature of a creation, if rightly carried out, but which is
destruction if he does not himself hold his instincts under absolute
control.
That the love episode does not take away from woman anything
that makes her poorer is indicated by the fact, noticed by Ellis and
others, that woman’s erotic nature is deeper and stronger than
man’s. For the development of this great erotic nature it is as
absolutely necessary for her to be controlled by a man quite master
of his own sex instincts, as it is necessary for an ovum to be met by
a zoösperm, if it is going to develop any further than its ovum
condition.
At a single love episode, neither can the woman’s all be taken by a
man nor can her development be completed. The first episode is
only the beginning of a development, that needs the entire excess
energies of her man for the rest of their joint lives. In the sections
on virginity it will also appear that except in a superficial egoistic-
social sense, her psychical virginity cannot always be terminated at
the first love episode.
§ 85
The thought that she has given her all to him is worked out still
further in the irrational conclusion, which comes to some men’s
minds, that there may be nothing left for himself for a future
occasion. Therefore he will not take all this time, so as to leave a
little for next time.
Possibly getting all of her at one stroke may be the root thought in
Don Juanism. Jus primæ noctis may have originated from the idea
that the noble lord should get all there was in the vicinity to get; and
he was exercising his right to own and get everything in sight. The
men who cool in their affections (or whose passions cool)
immediately after the possession of the persons of their love objects
may be inspired by exactly this egoistic-social thought, that there is
a possession that may be acquired by means of one love episode,
after which the woman has no more to give.
§ 86
In phantasying, in his own ecstasy, the complete surrender of the
woman (cf. § 158), a man may also phantasy her being exhausted,
dry like an eaten orange, or, like a flower, drained of its honey by a
bee; not realizing that the beginning of a woman’s love is only the
beginning of an infinite growth, which he alone is able to develop for
himself, and which no other man can develop for him—that, in short,
a man who deserts one woman after another is simply showing an
essentially perverted appetite.
What any one of these tasted and rejected women might later be
developed into, in the shape of a full-blooded rich, warm femininity,
he has not the intelligence to conceive. Possibly the cynical roué
might say—look at the older women, are many of them attractive?
To which we should reply no, but the reason they are not is simply
that they were not properly loved into a state of full erotic
development, in which they would have preserved the attractiveness
of youth.
§ 87
The only true human love drama is one that has an organic
relation to a whole lifetime of love. To the Don Juan type of ravisher
of virgins the love episode, as part of a life drama with unity in it,
does not exist. He satisfies himself with beginnings, with staking out
foundations for other people to build and live in the homes
constructed by their hands, not realizing, for his imagination is poor
and weak, how soon his little stakes will be pulled up and thrown
away by the first workers on the house, even if they do not entirely
reject his plan’s outlines.
The only true love of a man for a woman is that in which he
studies her reactions to his own behaviour, and cultivates that power
of his, which is the innate power residing in any whole man, to
control the entire emotional life of one woman, let her intellectual
life be what it may.
“Why,” the man of the world may say, “should any man be
satisfied with only one woman, when, if he has personal
attractiveness, he may find hundreds of women ready to fall into his
arms, and may drink the love life to the dregs?” What Enobarbus
said of Cleopatra may be said of any woman, if she be developed by
a man, as she should be.
§ 88
No human male, however, can completely man more than one
woman, any more than one gonad can unite with more than one
other germ cell. Complete fusion of two cells requires the entirety of
one cell uniting with the entirety of another. This is the type of
physical and psychical immortality. The union of two single cells
contains the potentiality of development of all the qualities inherent
in both, but in new combinations.
In the psychosomatic union of two individuals there is the same
possibility of infinite variety in the physical and mental reactions,
only if the union between them is, like the fusion of the two single
cells, a complete total and exclusive union each with the other.
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.
But for the existence of the relation of a higher type of erotism to
health of body and mind physiological science is piling up proof
every year. There is a positive relation, a direct connection, of cause
and effect. Only the fullest use of all the faculties makes the fullest
and therefore the happiest life.
Response as an actual manifestation on the wife’s part may be
absent while there is a repressed response present. In other words
the desire and gratification of it may both occur in her, but below the
level of consciousness. A previous attraction which drew her toward
her husband when he was her lover may have been repressed by
some gauche behaviour of his. Desire, even after conscious passion
has cooled, may nevertheless remain in the unconscious. If
consciously accepted, desire is accompanied by a perceptible
physical condition of tumescence. If not consciously accepted, either
the tumescence does not enter consciousness or it is not in the
same organs it would be in if one were consciously entertaining
desire.
In the absence of the proper or suitable substitute gratification,
the increase of blood supply to specific organs gradually diminishes
and the desire gradually subsides; but there is still left a nerve
tension that is closely bound up with various ideas, images and other
predominantly mental states.
Sex desires may be aroused and even if not appropriately
gratified, will subside of themselves. An automatic relaxation of all
tensions regularly takes place in children, who also are much more
facile than adults in the acceptance of substitute gratifications.
§ 91
But after the sexual synthesis of puberty the desires are not only
much more insistent but much more definite and specific. Still they
can be and are repeatedly repressed by many men and most
women. That they can be so repressed is the reason why asceticism
has been so emphasized by many religions. The religious views of
many people render uncomfortable the actual emergence, into
consciousness, of any sexual desires whatever.
If the training of the individual has not been such as to render
conscious the manifestation of the sex desire, it then does not
appear as a tumescence in the genital region, in many cases, but as
a swelling or a pain, or a hardness somewhere else, or as an
emotion of disappointment, disgust or hate. Some deeply religious
people seem to prefer these emotions, in spite of their destructive
nature, to the constructive emotions of truly erotic love.
And we are impressed with the irony of fate which condemns
innocent people to accept an unwholesome in place of a wholesome
emotion, and makes some people think they are justified in telling
others what emotions they shall have.
§ 92
The right of woman to experience the erotic acme would be
immediately conceded by every man, if he could in any way get into
his mind a visual image of mangled feelings. The tortures of
Tantalus, Ixion and Sisyphus of Greek legend should be kept in
mind, and the erotically unsatisfied woman regarded as a living,
present human being, thirsty and standing in the middle of a pool of
crystal water, which constantly recedes from her parched lips as they
bend to drink; or tied to a wheel which, as it is rotated, makes her
sick and dizzy; or with huge effort rolling a heavy stone up a hill that
has no ending.
The right of a woman to satisfaction even if not conceded by a
hypothetical monster of selfishness, her husband, might be admitted
if he should be made aware of the detriment to his own psyche
received from her condition. It is surely not an exaggeration to say
that to be in daily relations with any human being who is so twisted
and bent by unrelaxed tensions that she can hardly be called sane,
is a fate that no man would choose unless he perversely wished to
drive himself mad. He might see his own advantage, if not her right,
an advantage which he quite clearly recognizes in all egoistic-social
spheres. He will insist on having his material environment as perfect
as possible through his own personal effort or supervision. He will
insist on having the plumbing, wiring and every other installation of
house, garage, shop, store and factory in the finest possible
condition; realizing that any imperfection will reflect directly upon
himself. But he commonly does not see that the reactions of his wife
in the most intimate relations of marital life should be made, not by
mere supervision as of a physician but by his own personal acts,
absolutely perfect in every respect, and that his chief responsibility
in life is to do this very thing, without which all his other forms of
efficiency are of negligible importance.
§ 93
One’s wife is the closest part of one’s objective ego. She is at least
that. Many men are of course careless of their own bodies and
personal appearance. They recognize, however, that the
responsibility for these is their own and no one else’s. But their
wives are above all things their complementary bodies, and