The Sex Therapists: What They Can Do and How They Do It (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior Book 15)

by Lawrence Block

  We didn’t even have that. In my own case, I came from a deeply religious fundamentalist background. I went to a small denominational college and originally began studying for the ministry. Somewhere in the course of my sophomore year I lost my faith. That’s an expression you don’t hear much any more. It happened. I went through a very difficult period, lost my faith, found myself having doubts about everything, questioning everything. But I didn’t go all-out and become the campus atheist. Our college didn’t have a campus atheist. I just found myself going through the motions, staying in school, even taking a certain number of religion courses and keeping my doubts to myself.

  Now, for all the jokes about ministers’ daughters and wild goings-on at bible colleges, the fact remains that it’s very damned easy to come out of one of those places a virgin. I certainly found it easy. By the time I graduated I had rejected almost everything I had been taught, and would have been damned glad to go to bed with any female who would have me, but the opportunities were almost non-existent and the social pressures, instead of pushing you toward sexual experimentation, held you back.

  At the same time, even while I was rejecting the religious trappings, I had substituted a different sort of illusion. I believed very deeply in True Love. I felt that the way my life could have meaning would be for me to meet the right girl, for me to be pure for her and for her to be pure for me, and for the two of us to love each other deeply and completely, to grow through our love for one another, and to live happily ever after. Joanne, who did not have a similar religious background, shared this particular myth. It’s something that one is very much predisposed to at that age, especially if one has not been a rampaging social success all through life. You read a lot of crap like The Prophet, and you’re young enough to believe it all means something. It’s much later on that you attach some significance to the fact that Kahlil Gibran never balled anybody . . .

  To get down to cases, I met Joanne shortly after I graduated. I had fancied myself in love once or twice before, during college, but the relationships were never very profound, either emotionally or physically. Joanne had been in love once, with a boy who had done some heavy petting with her, and they had broken up largely because she refused to go “all the way” and have intercourse with him. We were very much ready for each other. We met, we fell in love or at least thought that what existed between us was love, and before very long we decided to get married.

  We could have gone to bed together before the wedding. We did discuss it, and if I had wanted to enough it probably would have happened. But there was this feeling on both our parts that it would be somehow better for us if we waited. As a matter of fact, I’m sure things would have been just about the same if we had made love during our courtship period. I know quite a few couples who did, so that what it amounts to is that for both of them the extent of their premarital experience was with each other. Jumping the gun thus didn’t make any enormous difference; they wound up in very much the same situation as we did.

  Our wedding night wasn’t particularly traumatic. In that I guess we were very lucky, as I’ve heard and read a great many horror stories about what happens when two virgins wind up in a marital bed together. But it all went, oh, well enough. And our sexual relationship seemed to be developing well enough. We had sex several times a week and we both enjoyed it a great deal.

  Actually, however, it was a rotten relationship. Only we didn’t know it at the time.

  That sounds like a contradiction, doesn’t it? You could argue that if two people think their relationship is good, then it’s good by definition. That sounds good, but it doesn’t say the whole thing. There were a lot of times when I couldn’t get excited, couldn’t get an erection. The first time this happened I worried about it, but I managed to read enough to learn that this happens to everybody now and then, and that at least got me over my worries. Other times I would ejaculate too soon. In a sense I always ejaculated too soon, in that Joanne almost never had an orgasm. She thought she was having orgasms, she was reaching a sort of peak of sensation and this would be followed by a lessening of tension, but she wouldn’t have a full and complete orgasm. Also, we were doing only the most ordinary things sexually. I would caress her body, stroke and kiss her breasts, then touch her genitals briefly and unimaginatively, and then we would have intercourse. We almost always used the same position, the standard missionary position, man on top. We sometimes experimented with other positions but that was infrequent and we usually found them either uncomfortable or strange and went back to the usual way.

  It’s impossible to say exactly when we became aware that this wasn’t all it could be. It happened gradually. We both began reading some books on sex and had a few really good discussions on the subject, the two of us, and we decided to try experimenting a little. We experimented with oral-genital sex. This was enormously exciting, but at the same time it was vaguely unsatisfying because neither of us was sure of what the hell we were doing and we had difficulty telling each other what we were doing wrong. Also, we used this just as a prelude to intercourse, and learned much later that each of us would have liked to go all the way with it, but for some reason we were inhibited about mentioning it to each other. I wanted desperately to have Joanne really get down to business and suck my cock, I wanted to come in her mouth, and instead she just did a certain amount of kissing and tongue-caressing, licking it, and I didn’t want to say No, dammit, you’re doing it wrong because it would have seemed like such a put-down, for one thing, and also because I didn’t entirely know in my own mind what I wanted her to do, or how she would go about doing it, or how to tell her what I thought I wanted.

  Also, each of us thought the other didn’t really like to perform the act. I thought she could only go down on me for my benefit, that she couldn’t get pleasure out of it, and vice-versa. She wanted me to keep on eating her all the way to orgasm, and I would have been glad to, but for some misguided altruistic reason she always stopped me just as she was getting excited and indicated to me that I should have coitus with her.

  • • •

  JWW: It would seem that this stage of experimentation would have led to a great improvement in the quality of the sexual relationship existing between Joanne and Bruce. In a sense the relationship may have improved, but in another sense it deteriorated, in that now each of them began to grow more and more conscious of the potential of a sexual relationship—and thus more aware of the way their relationship failed to fulfill this potential. They came to recognize more intense sexual expression as a goal, and each innovation they introduced, however pleasurable and novel it might be, only showed them that they were still falling short of ultimate sexual and emotional satisfaction.

  The ideal they had once shared—the monogamous union of two persons who had been previously inexperienced—had by now lost all its charm. Both of them began to regret, not so much that they had waited to indulge in sex until they were married, but that they had not had sex with other persons prior to their meeting so that they could have learned more about how to satisfy each other. They thus began to regard sex with a variety of partners as a specifically educational experience likely to have positive benefits in an ultimate monogamous marriage.

  It was in this mental framework that the idea of swinging began to appear attractive. Let us see how Joanne discusses this stage in their development.

  • • •

  JOANNE: The first time I was ever really aware of swinging, except in the sense of Sunday-supplement sensationalism, was when some friends of ours started joking about it at a party. Not the sort of jokes where somebody was trying to get something started, but just a general joking discussion of what was then called wife-swapping. Jokes about throwing keys in a hat, you know the sort of thing I mean.

  Before then, I had had some very private thoughts about having sex with another man. This was strictly in the realm of fantasy. The idea of an actual love affair with another man never had any real appeal. But, keeping it pure fantasy,
I could conjure up some sort of Dream Lover who would do everything right, who would know ways to excite me that Bruce didn’t know, that I didn’t know myself, and under his touch and guidance I would magically know just what to do, and sex would reach a level of intensity that Bruce and I had not been able to reach.

  After my awareness of swinging came about, this became my dominant fantasy. I read a great deal of books on the subject, books and magazine articles as well. A large portion of the books were obvious fakes, and I recognized them as fakes at the time. By this I mean that they would be set up as collections of case histories, but once the writer got the ball rolling all he did was describe sexual encounters in the strongest possible detail, who did what and how to whom, all of that, with the object being to turn the reader on sexually. Well, let me tell you, it worked! I got very much turned on by the whole idea.

  It was obvious to me that Bruce was also getting turned on by these books, and by the whole idea of swinging, because otherwise he wouldn’t have been bringing these books home in the first place. Even so, for a long time neither of us was willing or able to bring the subject out into the open. Part of this was the underlying feeling that swinging was not decent or wholesome. Another part was the suggestion implicit in the desire to swing that one wanted another sexual partner. By telling Bruce I was interested in swinging, I would in effect be telling him that I wanted to fuck another man, and thus that he wasn’t enough to satisfy me. Well, he wasn’t enough to satisfy me, and I wasn’t enough to satisfy him, but neither of us could come out and say so.

  The Dream Lover of my fantasy had changed now; he was a half of a swinging couple, and being with him would not be disloyal to Bruce because even as I was in the man’s arms, Bruce would be with the man’s wife. In a great many of the books I read, the same scenario took place; a couple would be initiated into swinging, and they would both have a great time, and then they would go home together and make love in spite of how many times that night they had already done so, and it would be exciting for them as never before, and they would share the new tricks they had learned, and they would be closer to each other than they had ever been in their lives.

  Needless to say, this was my most treasured fantasy.

  Eventually Bruce and I found ourselves discussing swinging. I don’t know what brought it up. There was a period of fencing around with it as a topic of conversation, making passing references to it, and then one night we were in bed and we began talking about it, and we got enormously excited, physically excited, a shared excitement that we were both enormously conscious of. We made love, and discussed swinging some more and our own feelings about it, and made love again.

  All of this seemed to be telling us something. Bruce picked up one of the correspondence magazines and we went through it together night after night, checking out ads, picking ad copy and photos of people who seemed appealing. We “read” that magazine together until it was ready to fall apart. It became sort of a sexual fetish for us. When one of us was in the mood, we would signal it by getting in bed and picking up the magazine, and the other would read along, and pretty soon we would be having sex.

  Then we decided that swinging wasn’t for us, and we stopped even talking about it.

  We just dropped the subject completely.

  • • •

  JWW: Bruce and Joanne offered a variety of explanations for the abrupt dismissal of the idea of swinging. In my experience, quite a few couples go through a similar stage where the idea is renounced. Perhaps it is impossible to sustain an idea in the realm of pure fantasy forever; perhaps sooner or later one must either go ahead and transform the fantasy into actuality or drop the fantasy altogether. In this particular instance, I suspect that the two of them sensed they were reaching a point where they would have to “shit or get off the pot” and were afraid that what was acceptable in fantasy would be somehow undesirable in reality, for one reason or another.

  Not long afterward, their entire sexual relationship seems to have deteriorated to a marked degree. Bruce found himself frequently impotent. Joanne not only failed to reach orgasm when they did have intercourse, but often either failed to respond altogether or was left high and dry at its conclusion, frustrated as she had not been frustrated in the past. The strain which all of this placed on their marriage led them to consult a marriage counselor. Counseling was presumably “successful” in that their marriage continued, but the situation does not seem to have been improved to any significant extent.

  In this context, the idea of swinging once again surfaced, and the rationale for it now was perceived less as excitement or the enlargement of sexual horizons and more as a form of sexual therapy.

  “We were in a bind,” Bruce explained. “We felt inadequate in a very definitely sexual sense. I felt that I could not satisfy my wife, that I could not perform adequately, that I was a sexual failure. Joanne had similar feelings about herself. Also there were unvoiced but very real doubts we had concerning each other. For example, I would worry that perhaps it was Joanne’s fault, that I could be happier and more effective with another woman. And she felt the same doubts about me. If a program like Masters and Johnson’s had existed at the time, I’m sure we would have gone for it. It would have had enormous appeal for us.

  Joanne echoed these sentiments, and discussed the manner in which they made the decision to experiment with sex with another couple.

  • • •

  JOANNE: Around this time we were both having private thoughts about swinging again, as we discovered later. Finally I brought it out into the open. I said, “Look, our relationship stinks, and although it was better before, it was never perfect. We had something that would have been good enough for us if we didn’t know that anything better could exist. But now we’re able to visualize a better relationship, a deeper involvement with sexuality, and we’re not able to reach it. And it doesn’t look as though we can find it with each other, and here we are, two people who have never made love to anyone except each other, and maybe that’s the trouble.

  The conclusion we came to was that swinging couldn’t hurt us. If it did nothing for us, at least it would have the positive effect of showing us that it wasn’t the answer.

  • • •

  JWW: This, incidentally, is a good argument for the acting out of any number of sexual fantasies; it often seems to me that, when any desire reaches the level of a preoccupation, it is better to act it out than to remain forever captive of it, if only to get it off one’s mind. This of course presumes that the acting-out process is not specifically dangerous or destructive.

  • • •

  JOANNE: So we went through the ritual of picking up swinger magazines again and reading ads. One thing that worried both of us was that we were inexperienced and might not make desirable sexual partners. We visualized swingers as enormously knowledgeable and experienced, almost jaded, and we were a little frightened that we would be a disappointment to them. I think I worried more about being physically unattractive, which is probably a more natural female reaction, while Bruce worried about being impotent or otherwise being a poor lover, a more natural male fear.

  For this reason, and out of fear of rejection, we did not reply to any of the ads but decided to write an ad of our own. I don’t remember the exact language of it, but we stressed that we were beginners, that we didn’t know an awful lot, but that we were willing to learn and wanted to experiment with anything and everything. In this sense we were probably too outspoken, because we got a lot of replies from people with pretty far-out notions of what constituted an interesting experiment, people who wanted to stick pins in us or do other things that were a long ways off from what we had in mind.

  We also got a good number of extremely sympathetic responses from people who understood what we were all about and wanted very much to meet us on those terms. It hadn’t occurred to us at the time, but the idea of initiating a couple new to swinging has a tremendous appeal to certain people. Not to everybody—many couples w
ant to associate only with people who have reach a similar level of experience, and are put off at the thought of playing teacher to a pair of semi-virgins. But our inexperience was a turn-on to some people in the same way that a virgin is a turn-on to some men. I don’t know if the reason is the same, but it seems to work in about the same way.

  We were both very determined not to let this opportunity slip away. We selected one couple of the dozen or so suitable replies we received, and I called their home one afternoon while Bruce was at the office. The woman who answered was much easier to talk to than I had supposed she would be. Of course she had been through this once herself, or more than once, had played the role of the newcomer, and was aware of all the hesitation and awkwardness that I felt. We made arrangements to meet them that Saturday on “neutral territory”—at a restaurant for dinner—and if all went well we would go to their home with them.

  We had a pleasant dinner with them, and we all hit it off well enough. They were a very nice couple, quite attractive and well-mannered. They were several years older than us. I don’t know if we consciously sought older partners or not at the beginning, but I’m sure it was somehow important to us that they be older than us. I think we would have been uneasy if they were younger, even though they might have had infinitely more swinging experience. You just want your teachers to be older, and this was very much a teacher-student kind of relationship that we were seeking.