It is inconceivable that any should be so thoughtless as to advocate a man's bringing the hideous fruits of his licentiousness into the marriage relationship. Intercourse with different women is well known to morbidly increase desire, while married life bridles it and keeps passion under proper subjection. The husband who has a clean record and a mind free from stain is far more apt to have perfect ease and perfect love for his wife; but indulgence in promiscuous fornication of course excludes the feeling of love, which is a physiological necessity in a true sexual relationship; and one who has been a fornicator is bound to have a soiled imagination, and perhaps a diseased body as well.
Purity of life is the greatest incentive to marriage; and the lusting man, fortunately, does not feel much impulse to marry, finding elsewhere the opportunities to act a part which he considers natural, and being poisoned in his inner nature at the very sources from which true love springs.
Through "the association of ideas, trivial circumstances, as is well known, may produce impotency in men, so that they may have, in greater or less degree, a horror femince, or loathing for all or for certain women; or perhaps they may be compelled to create stimuli ideally in order to be potent. That this should be so is hardly to be wondered at when we consider that the sexual orgasm is attended with the most intense nerve excitement, and that the cerebral centres which preside over the emotions are in a state of intensified susceptibility during the act of copulation, so that the brain-cells, upon such occasions, are peculiarly liable to have permanent impressions firmly and ineradicably fixed upon them.
So intense is sexual excitement in some individuals that many of the frequent deaths of elderly men in bawdy-houses are attributed to syncope while in the sexual orgasm. Male insects usually die after sexual congress ; and some animals are so rapt in ecstasy during the act that they can be mutilated without their paying the slightest attention. Even under the usual degree of intensity of excitement which is experienced during the consummation of the act, it is not to be wondered at that mental impressions which are then prominent become deep and lasting. Accordingly, if sentient men fornicate with the coarse, the low, the vicious, the strongly perfumed, and the voluptuously attired harlots, they may render themselves mentally soiled, and perhaps at a remote date be impotent for copulation with their pure wives, unless they resort to some sham or mental trickery.
There is an extraordinary importance attached to certain accidental factors impressed on the mind of many a debauchee which are essential to his successful accomplishment of the sexual act; thus, some men are impotent with blondes, some with brunettes, and some with naked women, while others can copulate only if their peculiar fetich is either ideationally or actually present; i.e., their idiosyncrasy may compel them to imagine themselves to be in some fantastic relationship with the woman, or she must be attired with some special article of apparel, or possess some quality of odor, or peculiarity of manner, or other indispensable prerequisite, the importance of which is inconceivable to a normal man.
De gustibus best disputandum. Such an association of ideas is of course pathological, but it often affects a man who has been promiscuous in his indulgence, especially if he be of a nervous temperament, or of a vicious ancestry. It is an acquired taint, making him one of "Nature's stepchildren", and ever afterward coloring and playing an active part in hi psycho sexual life. Men who enjoy sexual pleasure witl many women indeterminately are not capable of real love, the great satisfaction of which consists in the possession of the beloved one body and soul, and in being possessed by her in the same way, so that the two souls are knit together, each confident of the other, and each representing to the other the sum total of possibilities of sexual pleasures.