Читать книгу A Plea for Monogamy - Wilfrid Lay - Страница 21

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Virile love is the only love that a man should have—the only feeling a real man can have—for a woman. Indeed, it is the only way a man loves a woman if he is truly to be said to love her. Any so-called love depending on being charmed by a woman is essentially effeminate, not virile. The moment he surrenders to her charm, he is not a man but an autoerotic[7] child. He should absolutely and positively charm her. There is no disgrace, no lack of true femininity in a woman’s yielding to the power a man must exercise over her erotic instincts. The power is strictly a one-way power, exerted by the man upon the woman if, and only as long as, he remains man and she remains woman. The bisexual nature of both man and woman often permits a couple to reverse this direction of power influence.[8]

If the wife’s charm is the only binding factor in a marriage the marriage is doomed to dissolve actually or potentially. And in order to maintain this merely superficial charm, which no real man needs to feel in a woman, she is obliged to resort to all varieties of artifice from the lip stick and the exotic perfume upward to the forced attempt to be intellectually frank and interesting. Woman as woman has no need for this artifice to maintain charm for primordial man.

It may be that man at the present day is not primordial superficially. But fundamentally he is and so is woman primordial woman, and for all the civilization which is only conscious, the ninety per cent more or less of unconscious action and being in the man acts upon and is inevitably and automatically reacted to by the woman; and any survey of the totality of the relations between them is incomplete if it does not recognize and control the almost unlimited energy of the primordial man and woman beneath the surface. The difficulty is that this recognition is a task; and most married couples attempt to hide it both from themselves and from each other. In such actions of the woman as are dominated, as most conscious acts are, by the egoistic-social[9] impulse, any artifice, great or small, as the case may be, is inevitably registered, to the woman’s detriment, in the unconscious records of the man.

“Does she,” the unconscious says, “really need these embellishments, or does she only think she needs them? If she really needs them, I have reels of mental moving pictures of women who do not. If she only thinks so, what have I failed to do that should inspire her confidence, or prevent her from unconsciously trying to attract the autoerotic glances of other men? I must adjust her up to a greater height of erotic exaltation. Possibly that is the fundamental reason. If she were actually my erotic counterpart the idea would not even unconsciously enter her mind to improve herself in this showy manner. I must remove this tendency from her.”

Of course the husband likes to have his wife appear attractive to him; but that does not require any branch of the cosmetic art except what she can do without drugs, pastes, powders and other mechanical aids. Of course he wants her to interest him mentally but that does not require her to do or say anything spectacular or anything that has any “news value.”

In her own femininity (which by the way is never enhanced but only lessened by strenuous efforts to appear charming either to himself or others), he has the field which he can, and will, in proportion to his psychic virility, cultivate into his own particular Garden of Eden. In her own essential womanliness he has the ground where he can plant and build, without external aid, the garden and the mansion, the work of his own hands, according to his own design, the outward expression of all that is fine and masculine in his own imagination. Any failure in the execution of this plan is due to the shaking of his own hand, the lack of attention on his own part to the necessary details.