André Tridon

“ I dream of a world in which the spirits of women are flames stronger than fire, a world in which modesty has become courage and yet remains modesty, a world in which women are as unlike men as ever they were in the world I sought to destroy, a world in which women shine with a loveliness of self-revelation as enchanting as ever the old legends told, and yet a world which would immeasurably transcend the old world in the self sacrificing passion of human service. ”

“ Their stormy jealousy was more akin to hatred than to love. There was no tenderness in it but a good deal of sadism, of cruelty, and they used it in order to torture their mates on whom, in the course of their jealous scenes, they could heap up abuse, which they would not, under any other circumstances, dare to voice as freely.
Many a husband would like to insult a wife he detests. Neurotic jealousy supplies him with an excuse which he might not find elsewhere. ”

“ Why was it that those women idolised men they were supposed to hate as enemies and accorded sexual favors to them? Why was it that they did not enjoy more completely the victory of the males of their race and jeer at the defeated foes? Those women were neurotics who, unable to enjoy the embraces of victorious, superior males, felt themselves superior in the arms of defeated and humiliated men. ”

“ Many a time when beholding some miserable female from the slums wrecked by repeated childbearing, dwarfed in mind, deformed in body, I have felt that sexual relations between her and her mate had probably reached the level at which they could only by an unusual stretch of one's imagination, be even distantly connected with love. ”

“ Love and Mother Love
Is the perfect mother a perfect wife? Is the perfect mother, in every case, the result of mental perfection and ethical superiority? Or is there a hidden strife between love and motherhood? Is mother love always the enchanting image presented to us by poets and intimidated sons? Or is it an alloy of higher qualities, biological necessity and egotistical neurotic cravings? ”

“ Now and again I have come across the like, sweet and feminine and daring women who have done things as brave as that, and even much braver because more complexly difficult and always I feel my heart swinging like a censer before them, going up in a perpetual fragrance of love and adoration. ”

“ However loving and worshipful the neurotic's mate may be, he or she cannot hope to save the neurotic from further love entanglements. One of the most striking neurotic traits is a craving to disparage everything and everybody in his environment.
The praise of the most affectionate husband or lover, wife or mistress, is insufficient to raise the neurotic's self-esteem. With all neurotics, familiarity breeds contempt and it must be from the lips of a new man or new woman that they must hear their praise sung before their feeling of inferiority is deadened and allows them to enjoy that praise. ”

“ To the lovers who are not unbearably normal and whose slight pituitary instability causes them to do and say the unexpected, love owes its poetry, the love life its charm and its inspirational power.
All other things being equal, when a slightly sadistic male, seeking as his mate the image of a pliant mother, meets a slightly masochistic female who seeks the image of the powerful, domineering father, there are many chances that the match will, for a long period of time, retain its original qualities. ”

“ What is the gospel in this matter of sexual emancipation for men and women in the new world where love has actually come of age? It is surely the complete economic independence of women. While man is economically free and woman still a slave, either physically, financially or spiritually, mankind as a whole must act as if blindness, maimness and deafness constituted health. ”

“ He will have to remain her lover in order to hold her. No wife will be able to make the home hideous and, at the same time, brandish over her husband's head the certificate of enslavement called a marriage license. She will have, in order to compete with the free women whose personality will impose itself upon her environment, to remain his mistress.
Every step ahead which the world takes fortunately proves a new step which love takes in the direction of completeness and freedom from sordidness and ugliness. ”

“ The old-fashioned woman, who always assumed the passive role in life and who, supposedly indifferent to the pleasures of the flesh, ran away, actually or figuratively, from the brutal pursuer, played a preposterous dual part in the pre-love skirmishes. Who has never encountered the woman who wears in a public place some dress which reveals a great deal of her bust, and yet who pretends to be offended if some man stares at what she has exposed in order to attract his stare? ”

“ The modern woman who is expected to be, not merely a sexual mate but a social and intellectual mate as well, a companion in our athletic diversions, a comrade-at-arms in the world's battles, and many other things, can no longer allow chance to interrupt her developmental strivings, to handicap her in the friendly race she is running with the mate of her choice for intellectual accomplishment by unexpected, unwelcome, inconvenient pregnancy and child bearing. ”

“ But I can testify that among women brought up amid the feminist movement of the second half of the nineteenth century there was a revolt against maternity which went deeper than that revolt against excessive maternity which has led to birth control. These more thoroughgoing rebels objected to the whole process, from the occasional event itself to the more permanent conditions it imposes. It is easy to dismiss this as monstrous and silly, but the modern conception of creative evolution forbids us to dismiss any development as impossible if it becomes the subject of an aspiration. ”

“ Finally there comes Havelock Ellis, usually less panicky, who thinks he has noticed a distinct degeneration in the young man of today. "These weak-chinned, neurotic young men are no match at all for the heavy-jawed resolute young women feminist methods are creating. The yielding to women of masculine rights is a symptom of declining virility. Equality in all things yielded, pride in himself, in his work, gone, he will descend to the state of the decadent savage who keeps as many wives to work for him as their work for him enables him to keep." ”

“ De Sade's literary output, which is devoid of any artistic merit and is only of interest to the student of abnormal psychology, bears the stamp of hopeless intellectual inferiority trying to justify itself by representing the entire world as a combination of a brothel and a torture chamber and mankind as a herd of blood-thirsty and sex-crazed lunatics. ”

“ But let there be no lies, no deception, the indispensable foundation of modern marriage is boundless sincerity and friendship, the deepest trust, affectionate devotion and consideration. That is the best safeguard against adultery. Let him, however, who is, nevertheless, overtaken by the outbreak of it, console himself with the undoubted fact that of two real lovers, the most noble minded and deep seeing friend will always have the preference. ”

“ In love the conqueror feels like a conqueror and is a hard adversary to defeat. Like the amorous bees which can reach, physically speaking, heights which they would never dream of exploring when out of love, the successful lover can rise to infinite heights physically and mentally.
The Unsuccessful Lover, on the other hand, may be, in extreme cases, a pitiful individual to contemplate.
The humiliation of defeat and the fear of other defeats, the starvation of all the senses which the love object would have gratified, produce a depression which stops temporarily all the life activities. ”

“ When children are the outcome of any form of union, however, the psychoanalyst, broad as he may be, is compelled to remember the pitiful stories he has heard in his office. No neurotic ever had a pleasant childhood. No neurotic was the child of a father and mother united by real love and manifesting within the family circle the mutual tenderness which is the poetry or the music of the home. ”

“ No one can deny that under our social system, woman, burdened as she is, by many physical and social handicaps, is easily driven to the wall in times of stress and compelled to sell her body. Nor is there any doubt that under a system assuring every one a livelihood, regardless of business conditions, many women would be saved from adopting such a disgusting form of labor. ”

“ What We See in Our Mate. The many handsome men whom we have met, and who are mated to homely wives, the many wives we have observed, mated to impossible husbands, and whose affection for their unprepossessing life partner is genuine and in no way dictated by sordid considerations, the many triangles we know of, in which a very inferior lover or mistress is preferred to an admittedly superior husband or wife, are evidence of the involuntary, nay compulsory, character of the love choice. ”

“ Intense jealousy may be the projection of our feelings into another individual and be a symptom of paranoia. On the other hand, the entire lack of jealousy of a husband who enjoys the sight of his wife caressed by another man, certainly reveals a most morbid masochism.
Hunger, thirst, erotism always find their satisfaction at some time. Intense pain deadens itself thru its very intensity. Jealousy on the contrary feeds on itself. It can be aroused by the unseen as well as by the obvious. In fact, like many neurotic [Pg 134] elements, it thrives best on the invisible and the unreal. ”

“ Even as economic exhibitionism prompts people to spend at show eating places sums in no way commensurate with their hunger, or to buy diamonds which are not in any way beautiful but only symbolical of the wearer's indifference to returns on his investments, egotism causes many men to pretend sexual cravings which they do not feel. Many stage women, actresses, singers, dancers, etc., are kept by men whose sex life is at low ebb but who parade their "conquest" before their associates or perfect strangers to demonstrate their sexual and financial powers. ”

“ The Successful Modern Woman is Rather Conceited. Some of the things I said about female artists applies in a great measure to the woman who in business or in a profession has managed to make her mark.
After struggling years for a certain object which she has at last attained, she is naturally loath to surrender her personality to the average husband of the self-styled masculine type.
She at times resorts to homosexualism in an effort to retain her independence and yet satisfy her love cravings without submitting to a domination which she feels to be unjustified. ”

“ Prostitution, as I stated in a previous chapter is one of the results of the overthrowing of sex by the ego. The craving for food and power triumphs over all the sexual cravings and compels one individual to pursue apparently sexual goals which are no longer sexual as far as that individual is concerned. The female prostitute lends her sexual organs to many men for money (food, power) , not for her own gratification or to reproduce her species. ”

“ Love among the Artists
Frequent are the divorces in the artistic world. Platitudinous moralisers explain that fact with the stupid statement that the morals of the stage are "loose." Like the Freudians, they always seek in sex the origin of every disturbance in human life.
Sex in the life of an artist, however, plays an infinitely less important part than egotism, the desire to be above.
The so-called normal man, who works, eats, sleeps, reproduces himself, and, at his death leaves the world exactly as he found it is probably subnormal. ”

“ But the real old-fashioned girl was of the absolutely sordid type, who could allow a more or less repellent suitor to spend considerable sums to amuse her but would express genuine indignation at the thought that the man could be as sordid as she was, and expect some caresses in return.
The modern woman, made independent financially by her non-sexual activities, can remove from her love all taint of even mild commercialism, returning favors in kind, or accepting presents, no longer as a bribe, but as a token of affection on the part of a man she loves. ”