If you are the average husband, there have been
times when you've itched to
give your wife a good, old-fashioned spanking. The chances are, everything
considered, that you never actually did it, but I’ll
guarantee you've wondered whether it would not have been a good idea.
In some ways, it might, BUT–
Women — as I realize I am not the first man to
note — are a funny proposition, though thanks to psychology, they are not quite
as mysterious as they once were.
“I think Fred’s the nicest man I
know”, said an attractive girl to me the other day. “We’re thoroughly
congenial, and have marvelous times going out together, but I simply could not
marry him. I can’t stand the way he lets me push him around.”
Being a psychologist, I skipped the
obvious question: “What makes you push him around, then?” For my young friend
was just showing one more facet of the age-old contradiction in the feminine
mind which has probably done more than anything else to make a woman’s mental
processes seem incomprehensible to the bewildered male.
You see, no matter what else she may
want, the average girl wants to make sure the man she marries is essentially
stronger than she is. The need is based equally on the atmosphere she was
brought up in, and her own, originally childish wish for “somebody to depend
on.” But the only way a girl can be sure of a man’s strength is to test it,
which she generally does by finding out just how much she can get away with.
Paradoxically, the less she succeeds, the harder she tries; and yet if she
really succeeds, she loses all interest in the man who has been proved a
weakling.
Naturally, girls have different
ideas of what constitutes a strong man, but few of them have entirely out-grown
the feeling that sheer physical superiority — demonstrable by force if
necessary — lies at the bottom of it. And while the law does not permit this
superiority to take the form of violence, as it once did ( the old common law
allowed a man to beat his wife provided he used a stick “no bigger than his
thumb”), there are few women for whom the idea of violence does not have at
least a little fascination.
John Barrymore has his foibles, and
there are four women, anyhow — the four wives who have sued him for divorce —
who have sworn that he is pretty hard to live with. But so far as making a hit
with the fair sex goes, not many men can match his record. And John never has
made any secret of his readiness to “treat ‘em rough” when necessary. In fact,
the immediate occasion for the break-up of his latest marriage was the spanking
he gave Elaine Barrie in the last performance of the play, “My Dear Children,”
in which they appeared together.
True, the spanking was ostensibly
part of the business of the play — Barrymore, in the role of his wife’s stage
father, was called on to use the oldest of all forms of discipline upon her —
but this time he acted so over-convincingly that it was said Elaine had to
choose her chair with caution for several days afterward. Not was this the
first time he had “laid a hand” — or anyway, a foot — on her: she testified in
a previous divorce suit that he had a way of kicking her under the table, even
when they had guests, if she said or did things that annoyed him. Yet that
evidently did not destroy his attraction for her, since she withdrew the suit
and remained married to him for another two years.
Of course Barrymore is the soul of
light-hearted and normality, and never could be accused of being cruel for
cruelty’s sake, but psychology has developed its own terms for those persons
who derive a thrill from practicing or suffering violence, especially in
love-making.
Those who have an urge to hurt the
objects of their passion are called “sadists”, from a famous Frenchman, the
Marquis de Sade; while those who (believe it or not!) derive the most intense
pleasure from being hurt are called “masochists,” after a character in a morbid
German novel. And though either of these types of abnormality is relatively
rare in its extreme form, traces of them are found in most people. Most women,
especially, show signs of some degree of masochism, sometimes in the rather
obscure form of what is called a “martyr complex,” and sometimes in direct
sensuous enjoyment of roughness or ruthlessness from the man they love.
“Jimmy” Cagney is another actor who found women
are thrilled by rough treatment — it was a scene in which he threw a grapefruit
at his wife at the breakfast table that made him the idol of the feminine
move-goers, and inaugurated a new screen fashion. Though in fact, the
fashion was not so new as they called it; before Cagney there was the original
“Sheik,” Rudolph Valentino, whose subtly sadistic role, though acted by a man,
was the creation of a woman author and reflected the innermost yearnings of
millions of feminine hearts.
But where did this yearning come
from?
Like most of our mental secrets, it
goes back to childhood — to those first impressions of life which have such a
powerful effect upon our mental processes forever after. As is now known, many,
and perhaps most children learn a great deal about the so-called facts of life
in their earliest years than their parents imagine. They pick up the
information, partly from observing animals (this is true particularly of farm
children) and partly from watching their fathers and mothers at times when they
are supposed to be asleep, or “too young to take notice”. A lot of these
observations seem to be forgotten as the children grow up, but that does not
wipe out the impressions they created.
In particular, the average child’s
impression of adult love-making is that it is an attack upon the female, in
which the male is both ruthless, and apparently furious. Thus a girl — without
the least idea why — may feel after she has grown up that a man who never “gets
rough” or loses his temper is not a real man. Most girls, of course, would deny
any such feeling, but the fascination of the caveman for most members of their
sex proves its existence beyond question.
Some months ago I discussed the
dangers of hypnotism with a world-famous psychiatrist, and he pointed out one
danger which most people never thought of. “It is quite true,” he agreed, that
even in the hypnotic trance a person will do nothing that is contrary to his
essential nature, but, at least in her unconscious mind, the average woman has
a wish to be ravished which an unprincipled man could easily take advantage
of.” And while in most women this wish is so deeply buried they never know it
exists, it often reveals its presence by the craving to be “mastered” — by
violence, if necessary — by the man whom they love.
Certainly the converse impulse exists in men,
and essentially for the same reason; but with us Americans it generally has
been smothered more or less effectually by the years of “petticoat government”
to which we are subjected, both in school and at home. At heart, most of us are
too much in awe of our wives to be capable of showing violence toward them
except under the stress of such overwhelming rage that we are likely to go to
far with it. And the situation is still further complicated by the fact
that theoretically the
American woman is too busy trying to prove her equality with men to admit her
masochistic yearnings — except in her choice of movie heroes.
On the whole, then, while a lot of wives would
probably be happier if their husbands gave them an occasional spanking, a
psychologist can hardly recommend the practice. Except in the course of
something like a psychoanalysis, the primitive feelings of both men and women
are best left in the dark corners of the mind in which civilized life has
confined them. As a modern husband, your best plan is probably to make your
wife feel that you would not be afraid to spank her if you felt that she
deserved it, but love her too much and are too chivalrous to do it except under
extreme provocation. A hint of ruthlessness in love-making is another matter;
the man who is too weak or too timid to achieve that will both disappoint his
wife and frustrate part of his own manhood.
