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When this control is properly assumed by the mentally and spiritually virile husband, real mutuality begins in the marital life. The husband now conquers his unavoidable initial autoerotic habit of mind and thought, and at the same time becomes a truly social being, realizing that by his own self-control alone, in the love episode, which absolutely assures his wife’s complete erotic affiliation with him, he is securing the only kind of mutuality worthy of the name.

It is obvious that this mutuality is reciprocal in a sense entirely different from any mutuality that could be attributed to the relation during the honeymoon stage. He knows now what erotically emotional effects he can produce on his wife during the love episodes, and exactly how he has produced them. Beyond any doubt whatsoever, he also knows from the most intimate experience that the production of these effects is the only real mutuality.

An effect, in the erotic sphere, produced in a husband by a wife, is one from which all truly virile men realize they gain only autoerotic pleasure. To this effect they contribute themselves nothing. In the end the wife gets nothing of the emotional catharsis which is the sine qua non of true marital living. In such circumstances the wife gives and the husband receives, certainly a gross disgrace if it be continued, a disgrace abhorred by all men. There is no mutuality in such a gift which but impoverishes the recipient.