Sexual passion

“ But when the sex passion submits to the great purposive passion, then you have fulness. And no great purposive passion can endure long unless it is established upon the fulfillment in the vast majority of individuals of the true sexual passion. No great motive or ideal or social principle can endure for any length of time unless based upon the sexual fulfillment of the vast majority of individuals concerned. ”

“ It is only in the higher animals that we see a more or less durable sympathy develop between the two sexes. However, here also and even in man the sexual passion intoxicates for the moment all the senses. In his sexual rut even man is dominated as by a magic influence, and for the time he sees the world only under the aspect inspired by this influence. The object loved appears to him under celestial colors, which veil all the defects and miseries of reality. Each moment of his amorous feeling inspires sentiments which it seems to him should last eternally. ”

“ In writings exhibiting but little good taste, though all the more temperament, they emphasize again and again one side only of the sexual life, to wit, the sexual impulse, the force of which is intentionally exaggerated to a high degree, so that it is described as a mighty current of passion, which may with great pains be held in check for a season, but must ultimately break loose, and with devastating rage must overwhelm everything which has hitherto been regarded as discipline and good morals. ”

“ The proper aim for whose attainment the sexual impulse in woman strives is by no means (as is asserted in some quarters) the fulfilment of “the impulse toward motherhood,” but is merely the complete satisfaction of sensual passion by intercourse with the male. Still, the sexual impulse is often satisfied by the minor degrees of sexual gratification in the form of the mutual contact, so agreeable to the sense of touch, of portions of the body, and even by the play of imagination and illusion under the dominion of love. ”

“ Sexual love is the passion which unites the sexes. The stimulating impressions produced by health, youth, and beauty, and ornaments and other artificial means of attraction, are all elements of this feeling. The antipathy to sexual intercourse with individuals of another species, and the horror of incest, belong to the same phenomenon. ”

“ Other experts produced by the defense testified that the book emphasizes the profound 'idea that a sensual passion is only truly experienced when it is associated with the emotion of love' and that the sexual relationship 'can be a wholesome, healthy, experience itself,' whereas in certain modern novels 'the relationship between the sexes is seen as another manifestation of modern decadence, insterility or perversion.' In my view this proves nothing as to social value. ”

“ How intoxicating indeed, how penetrating—like a most precious wine—is that love which is the sexual transformed by the magic of the will into the emotional and spiritual! And what a loss on the merest grounds of prudence and the economy of pleasure is its unbridled waste along physical channels! So nothing is so much to be dreaded between lovers as just this—the vulgarisation of love—and this is the rock upon which marriage so often splits. ”

“ Nevertheless the moment the other love and all that goes with it is realised the natural sexual love has to fall into a secondary place—the lover must stand on his feet and not on his head—or else the most dire confusions ensue, and torments æonian. ”

“ The other opinion is that Love, true love, ideal love, or, as it is sometimes called, sentimental love, or platonic love, has nothing to do with sexual desire, with sexual attraction. Indeed, people holding this opinion consider love and sexual attraction—or lust as they like to call the latter—as antithetical conceptions, as mutually antagonistic and exclusive. ”

“ But what is love, even in its most sublime form, but the supreme refinement of the sexual impulse? And how are we to understand love, and to develop and enrich the background from which it springs, unless we comprehend the vital force behind it? ”

“ Gradually she finds herself allowing her new tenderness and concern for her husband to become a part of the meaning of her sexual embrace. She sees and feels the pleasure her sexual thawing brings him, and this process becomes circular, his increased pleasure giving her more pleasure. And with his pleasure in mind she now seeks out more and more those things that please him, and her exploration leads inevitably to the discovery that what pleases him most, outside of his own sensations, is her pleasure. ”

“ In all men who have reached a certain grade of evolution, and certainly in almost all women, the deep rousing of the sexual nature carries with it a romance and tender emotional yearning towards the object of affection, which lasts on and is not forgotten, even when the sexual attraction has ceased to be strongly felt. ”

“ Whatever the real benefits, and there is no occasion for questioning them, of the sexual order thus established, it becomes clear that in certain important respects it had an unnatural and repressive influence on the erotic aspect of woman’s sexual life. ”

“ I will not go into these well-known details, for the psychical position is clear enough: to the man whose heart is filled with the love of good and the spiritual love of woman, sensuousness will appear as dangerous and perilous, and will have at the same time the glamour of the demoniacally-sexual. It is the diabolical element of dualistic consciousness in the sphere of eroticism. ”

“ These comparatively simple curves represent what I would postulate as the normal spontaneous up-welling of natural desire in woman. These are the foundations on which the edifice of the physical expression of love may be built. It must not be forgotten, however, that, particularly in modern luxurious life, there are innumerable excitements which may stimulate sexual feeling, just as there are many factors in our life which tend to inhibit or retard it. ”

“ The chapter on love is infinite, and its relations to the sexual appetite make it still more complex. We shall confine ourselves to indicating two more of its irradiations, peculiar to each sex, but having for each a physionomy corresponding to its own mentality. ”

“ Thus the seeker of love, too, though in a restricted sense, may be regarded as a metaphysical erotic, for he loathes sexuality—his portion—and yearns for a higher form of love. He shares this attitude with the slave of love, who is also a sensualist and a would-be lover. The slave of love imitates the attitude of the worshipper, but he infallibly sinks into the sexual sphere. ”

“ All that we can say in a general way concerning the complex entanglement of our sentiments and instincts is that, the most deeply rooted characters in human nature are at the same time, phylogenetically speaking, the most ancient.
Among the most profound instincts of sexual life, we find moral and intellectual incongruities. Along with excitement of the sexual appetite in the male by the odor of the female genital organs, or by the sight of erotic pictures, we find the most touching conjugal love, and life-long devotion of one conjoint for the other and for the children. ”

“ It is the bond of our existence; it is the wheel of our fortune; it is our guiding star; and it may be our loadstone to crime and premature death. Passions leading to love, true and gentle, or jealousy, hate, revenge, murder and suicide, all hinge on circumstances connected, directly or indirectly, with the sexual. ”

“ And in the second place, you have spoken too exclusively of Lust, as if it were the normal condition of sexual feeling, and the only one properly to be called sexual. But the great relation of the sexes is Love, not Lust ”

“ I again emphasize the fact that in normal women, especially young girls, the sexual appetite is subordinate to love. In the young girl love is a mixture of exalted admiration for masculine courage and grandeur, and an ardent desire for affection and maternity. She wishes to be outwardly dominated by a man, but to dominate him by her heart. This sentimentalism of the young girl, joined to the passive role of her sex, produces in her a state of exaltation which often borders on ecstasy and then overcomes all the resistance of will and reason. ”

“ Sexual activity, we see, is not merely a bald propagative act, nor, when propagation is put aside, is it merely the relief of distended vessels. It is something more even than the foundation of great social institutions. It is the function by which all the finer activities of the organism, physical and psychic, may be developed and satisfied. Nothing, it has been said, is so serious as lust—to use the beautiful term which has been degraded into the expression of the lowest forms of sensual pleasure—and we have now to add that nothing is so full of play as love. ”

“ Disharmonious because it cannot be too strongly insisted upon that the completely satisfactory realization of the sex act involves the participation of every side of human nature, spiritual and physical, and is the outcome of an intense desire for perfect unity with the beloved. Hence mere bodily satisfaction of sensuous desire must have a disharmonious and deteriorating effect, because it ignores a basal fact of man, namely spirit, and leaves that side of him starved and unsatisfied. And the same is true of all sexual aberrations and perversions. ”

“ In the second half of the eighteenth century there appeared—timidly at first, but gradually gaining in strength and determination—a tendency to find the sole course of every erotic emotion in the personality of the beloved, a longing no longer to dissociate sexual impulse and spiritual love, but to blend them in a harmonious whole. Personality should knit body and soul together in a higher synthesis. ”

“ The achievement of this eagerly desired unity, which would be synonymous with the victory of personality over the limitations of body and soul, is the great problem of modern time in the domain of eroticism. The characteristic of this third stage of eroticism is the complete triumph of love over pleasure, the neutralisation of the sexual and the generative by the spiritual and the personal. The physical and spiritual unity of the lovers has become so much supreme erotic reality, that the line of demarcation between soul and senses is completely obliterated. ”

“ No act can be quite so intimate as the sexual embrace. ”

“ Until I was past 16 years my desire was simply for coitus, girls and women attracted me only as affording the means of gratifying this desire; but when I was nearly 17 I began to regard girls as beautiful objects, apart from this, and to desire their love and companionship. At the same time it dawned upon me that life held much of joy in the love of women and in domestic life—so henceforth I regarded them in a higher and purer light, and apart from sexual gratification. ”

“ The sensual pleasure is not greater than with prostitutes, whose kisses and embraces excite me extraordinarily; but I can experience lustful pleasure with him at any time, and for him I have a feeling that is wanting for women. ”

“ In love we project what is good in us, and so having created a good and an evil image we are more able to compare and value them.
Lovers seek their own souls in the loved ones, and so love is free from the limits I described in the first part of this book, not being bound down by the conditions of merely sexual attraction. In spite of their real opposition, there is an analogy between erotics and sexuality. ”

“ After what we have just said, and especially if we take into consideration the numerous observations which have been made in biology, we can hardly doubt that the sentiment of sexual attraction, or the sexual appetite, has been the primary source of nearly all, if not all, the sentiments of sympathy and duty which have been developed in animals and especially in man. ”

“ Thus we have two schools of thought, one attributing to woman an intense sexual impulse, even greater than in man, the other holding her sexually frigid by nature and erotic only by pretence or accident. ”

“ And now, taking a still further step, we may say that it has a spiritual value in relation to our whole conception of the sexual impulse. Our attitude towards the naked human body is the test of our attitude towards the instinct of sex. If our own and our fellows' bodies seem to us intrinsically shameful or disgusting, nothing will ever really ennoble or purify our conceptions of sexual love. Love craves the flesh, and if the flesh is shameful the lover must be shameful. ”

“ This love soon becomes tinged with a very strong erotic feeling connected with the little one’s growing sensuality, which, as we have seen, is centered on her clitoris.
Now, it is necessary for humans to love and to have erotic feelings centered on others. But clearly, if this early love situation did not change at some point, the little girl would grow up to have women as her erotic centers of interest. Nature intends no such end result. She intends these erotic feelings to become ultimately very much man-centered. ”

“ But because of the more or less clear consciousness that sexual intercourse is really what is most desired in love, and because of the lack of courage openly to admit it, attempts are made to justify it from a social standpoint. ”

“ Sexuality with its various manifestations has existed from the beginning; the ultimate object of sexual intercourse is pleasure; but here and there, and parallel with sexual pleasure, there have been, in varying degrees of intensity, instances of spiritual love. ”