Marriage Quote by Havelock Ellis

Ellis is doing something sly here: he presents male sexual entitlement as if it were merely an anthropological artifact, then quietly indicts it as a living ideology. The clause stacking matters. “Primitive instinct” offers men the alibi of biology; “certainly by ancient tradition” snaps that alibi in half, reminding the reader that what feels “natural” is often just old power dressed up as fate. He’s not neutral about it, either. “Regards himself” frames the husband’s posture as self-authored belief, not objective truth. It’s a psychology of permission.

The word “active” does heavy cultural lifting. In Ellis’s era, sex is organized around a gendered script: man as initiator, woman as terrain. Calling it “active partnership” smuggles in a political hierarchy while pretending it’s a division of labor. Then comes the sharper pivot: “his own pleasure” as “legitimately the prime motive.” “Legitimately” is the pressure point. Ellis exposes the moral infrastructure that turns desire into entitlement and entitlement into marital norm. It’s not just that husbands seek pleasure; it’s that the culture grants them a license to treat pleasure as purpose.

Contextually, Ellis sits at the crossroads of early sexology and Victorian domestic ideology. He’s cataloging the mechanics of sexual belief the way a scientist pins an insect: not to celebrate it, but to show how the specimen survives. The subtext is feminist-adjacent without being explicitly activist: if male primacy is tradition masquerading as instinct, it can be unlearned, and marriage can be reimagined as mutuality rather than sanctioned self-interest.