The art of sound pictures (1930)

FEELINGS AND EMOTIONS 165 or the emotion accompanying erotic enslavement of one individual by another. Captivation, as experienced by men toward women, is a mixed emotion largely made up of dominance. In its purest form, however, it is dis- tinctly a feminine characteristic. Did you ever stop to ask yourself why a woman’s body and personality should be able to control a man so com- pletely, and arouse in him self-surrendering passion? And did you ever consider the difference between love power and force power? Negro slaves in the early days of this country, and Greek and Roman slaves in ancient times, were controlled by force, just as are convicts and other people legally compelled to work without recompense for dominant masters. Their emotional response is one of compliance. They work to avoid unendurable suffering which would otherwise be imposed upon them. They are slaves of force power. Love power is of precisely the opposite nature. The only way in which one person may exercise love power over another is to offer him greater pleasure, through his submission to the controlling person, than he could ex- perience in any other way. Woman exercises this type of captivation power, which is a part of her very nature. Her body and her personality offer man greater pleasure than he could obtain in any other experience. He there- fore yields to this attraction and control voluntarily, and seeks to be thus captivated. This process of submitting to a captivatress is, moreover, accompanied, as we have seen, by erotic passion. The process of captivating, or gaining love control over, a man is pleasant in itself to the captivatress, who ex- periences the emotion of erotic captivation. In order to