his cherished ideals, in the erotic sphere, seem to be reducible to two:  (1) He wishes to prove that he is “a man,” and he experiences what seems to him the pride of virility in the successful attainment of that proof; (2) he finds in the same act the most satisfactory method of removing sexual tension and in the ensuing relief one of the chief pleasures of life.  It cannot be said that either of these ideals is absolutely unsound; each is part of the truth; it is only as a complete statement of the truth that they become pathetically inadequate.  It is to be noted that both of them are based solely on the physical act of sexual conjunction, and that they are both exclusively self-regarding.  So that they are, after all, although the nearest approach to the erotic sphere he may be able to find, yet still not really erotic.  For love is not primarily self-regarding.  It is the intimate, harmonious, combined play—­the play in the wide as well as in the more narrow sense we are here concerned with—­of two personalities.  It would not be love if it were primarily self-regarding, and the act of intercourse, however essential to secure the propagation of the race, is only an incident, and not an essential in love.

Let us turn to the average woman.  Here the picture must usually be still more unsatisfactory.  The man at least, crude as we may find his two fundamental notions to be, has at all events attained mental pride and physical satisfaction.  The woman often attains neither, and since the man, by instinct or tradition, has maintained a self-regarding attitude, that is not surprising.  The husband—­by primitive instinct partly, certainly by ancient tradition—­regards himself as the active partner in matters of love and his own pleasure as legitimately the prime motive for activity.  His wife consequently falls into the complementary position, and regards herself as the passive partner and her pleasure as negligible, if not indeed as a thing to be rather ashamed of, should she by chance experience it.  So that, while the husband is content with a mere simulacrum and pretence of the erotic life, the wife has often had none at all.

Few people realise—­few indeed have the knowledge or the opportunity to realise—­how much women thus lose, alike in the means to fulfill their own lives and in the power to help others.  A woman has a husband, she has marital relationships, she has children, she has all the usual domestic troubles—­it seems to the casual observer that she has everything that constitutes a fully developed matron fit to play her proper part in the home and in the world.  Yet with all these experiences, which undoubtedly are an important part of life, she may yet remain on the emotional side—­and, as a matter of fact, frequently remains—­quite virginal, as immature as a school-girl.  She has not acquired an erotic personality, she has not mastered the art of love, with the result that her whole nature remains ill-developed and unharmonised, and that she is incapable of bringing her personality—­having indeed no achieved personality to bring—­to bear effectively on the problems of society and the world around her.