I could go through all the weird scenes we’ve been involved in and try to show how each of them has been a growth experience for us, but I don’t know if there’s much point to it . . .
• • •
JWW: I had expressed some mild disbelief at the suggestion that sexual experimentation had been conducted primarily for educational purposes, and Bruce was trying to justify his position.
• • •
BRUCE: . . . So instead let me talk about our experiences with bisexual activity. I think it’s no exaggeration to say that everybody has problems with his feelings about homosexuality. Everyone has bisexual impulses in himself or herself, and it’s hard to work them out.
Neither Joanne nor I had ever had any homosexual experience—hell, we had had virtually no heterosexual experience, and homosexuality had never come up in our lives before we got into swinging. Joanne had a crush on a teacher in high school which she is now able to identify as a typical adolescent homosexual crush, but at the time she never thought of it in sexual terms at all and of course nothing ever came of it. I had no feelings about homosexuality except for the vague general repugnance which is the usual means of resolving unconscious homosexual desires and affirming one’s own heterosexuality. No one had ever made a pass at me, or if they did it was sufficiently subtle that I was never aware of it, not even after the fact.
Once we got deeply into swinging, we were frequently confronted with the prospect of bisexuality. As you know, a large proportion of the people in swinging are at least occasionally bi. This is particularly true of women, though there seem to be more and more bisexual men as well in recent years.
When we were first getting started, people were generally very tentative about bisexuality. When we were asked if we were bi we would reply in the negative, and that would generally be the end of it. Occasionally we would infer that the couple asking the question were bi, or more often that the wife was, but nothing was pushed at us and the subject was dropped.
Then occasionally when we were asked, we would answer, “No, we’re not bi ourselves, are you?” And the answer would generally be that the wife would be bi “occasionally, if the vibes were especially right,” something like that. People tend to try to be what they figure you want them to be, so if we announced ourselves as strictly heterosexual, they would accordingly minimize the extent of their own bisexual predilections.
A couple of times women would go on to say that they were attracted to Joanne, and would enjoy making it with her if she would like to try it out. The first few times this happened she refused. You can almost always do this politely enough, and swingers almost always accept refusals of this sort in good grace. One time the wife whom Joanne turned down was obviously disappointed, and afterward we talked about it, and came to the conclusion that, after all, it was something that certainly wouldn’t have hurt Joanne, and would have given this girl so much pleasure, so maybe it was silly to have refused her, especially since Joanne had no experiential basis for deciding she wouldn’t enjoy it, since she hadn’t tried it.
Now the fact that she was in so much proximity to bisexuality, that the question was coming up so frequently, made us both far more aware of the possibility of bisexuality than we had ever been in the past. On a couple of occasions we were in group scenes where two of the girls made it together, and we watched, and it wasn’t so much that Joanne found the watching exciting as that she found nothing off-putting about it. She could imagine herself involved in something like that without getting nauseous at the thought.
The upshot was that she decided she ought to have a bisexual experience. Not because she might like it—we recognized that possibility, but it didn’t seem that important one way or another. More that she felt, we both felt, that she would know more about herself and more about her sexuality if she went through with it than if she didn’t. The worst that could happen was that she would discover she didn’t like it, and then at least she would know that much and it would cease to be a problem.
Well, the next time we were with a couple where the woman had expressed an interest in Joanne, she asked if the offer still held. The other girl was pleased and not terribly surprised. Her attitude seem to be that all women get around to trying another woman sooner or later. They made it together, with the original understanding that Joanne would not be required to go down on the other girl, that it would be perfectly all right if it remained one-sided, but I think Joanne had already resolved that she would go the whole route and find out what it was like to eat another woman.
Anyway, they did it, and Joanne discovered she was bi.
But she discovered a great deal more than that, and continued to make discoveries in future bi encounters. I don’t know that either she or I can verbalize these discoveries effectively. There’s a difference between heterosexual lovemaking and female homosexual lovemaking, an entirely different tempo, a different sort of build-up of excitement, a more gradual ebb and flow of sexual tides. Joanne found new aspects of herself through this. She realized another side of her sexual nature through the experience of making love to other women. She found, too, that this sort of lovemaking could never be as important to her as male-female lovemaking. It could never stir her as deeply, it could never seem to her to be as serious or important a matter. It was nice, and she liked it, and there is an intimacy and sweetness to it that is perhaps greater in certain respects than she usually finds in sex with males, but it is definitely secondary and she is definitely more heterosexual than homosexual.
My own bisexual experience has been far more limited. Among the people we swing with, I would say that female bisexuality has become the norm, while male bisexuality is very much the exception. Most of the time, men would never come right out and ask if I was bi. There would occasionally be veiled allusions which would suggest that they might be interested.
For a long time I took it for granted that most of the men we met weren’t interested, and I also took it for granted that I wasn’t interested. After Joanne’s emergence as bisexual, I began to examine my own feelings more deeply. I began to wonder about myself.
At first this was rather uncomfortable, and I found myself going through a period where I was uneasy making love in the presence of other males, because I would find myself wondering if they wanted to have sexual relations with me, and wondering also if I subconsciously wanted to have sexual relations with them, and all of this put me off a little.
The first actual experience I had was at a group scene, with this fellow coming on to me and saying that he wanted very much to blow me. I said I wasn’t interested, and he said I was being silly, that he didn’t want anything in return, that a blow job was a blow job, that any refusal on my part to submit to it could only be evidence of a hang-up, that I could always close my eyes and pretend it was a girl’s mouth instead of a man’s. I let him go ahead and do it. I’m not sure whether I did this out of curiosity or because it was easier than arguing with him or what. As I said, it was a group scene, and while he was doing this I was manually and orally involved with a girl, so what he was doing was not much more than a purely physical thing. I can’t say that I enjoyed or didn’t enjoy it. It was sexually effective in that I had an erection and reached orgasm.
After that I began to find myself thinking more and more about performing fellatio on another man. I wanted to know what it felt like to perform the act. Not in the physical sense entirely but how it would feel emotionally, all of that. How I would feel about myself afterward.
I think one big aspect of this was the fear that I would like it too much. There was a definite fear of homosexuality involved, I’m sure there was. And this operates far more for men than for women, because of the general feeling that a woman is more female for virtue of being bi, whereas a man is less masculine in proportion to the strength of his homosexual impulses. I can’t explain why this feeling exists but it definitely does.
To make a long story short, I ultimately went down on other men on three separate occa
sions. Each time I found that I didn’t like it, that I felt no sense of intimacy, that I could only relate to it in a purely physical sense, an almost disembodied sense, and that I did not want to continue the act to the point of orgasm. My reactions in this respect were identical all three times, and I repeated the act the second and third time to see if this would be the case, and it was.
I’m very glad I tried it. I learned that this is not something I want, and hence that it is not something I have to be afraid of, which is certainly an important discovery. I suppose if I kept at it I might find certain degrees of pleasure in the act, but I doubt they would be likely to counterbalance the distaste I feel.
• • •
JWW: When I first interviewed them, Bruce and Joanne were once-a-week swingers. When I renewed our acquaintance, they had decreased the frequency of their swinging significantly, and at present they swing once a month, perhaps less. They engage in no correspondence. There are a few couples the see from time to time, and there is a bar they go to once in a while where couples meet one another for swinging purposes. Their explanation is that they have come to find swinging somewhat less useful with the passage of time, that they still enjoy it on an occasional basis but, as pure recreation, they would not want it to play so prominent a role in their lives as it previously did.
At the present time they characterize their own sexual relationship as excellent in all respects, and I see no reason to quarrel with their appraisal. They seem to be getting along very well, are very close mentally and emotionally, and have a marriage which gives every indication of being stable, fruitful, and rewarding.
Was swinging legitimate sexual therapy for them? The fact that they think so may be answer enough. I would say that they seem to have undergone a process which could be called therapeutic, and that swinging seems to have been the vehicle for that process.
Would swinging be valid sexual therapy for others? I would certainly not be inclined to prescribe it, but neither would I argue against it. I am sure some couples will find it of value, just as I am sure others will find it a huge disappointment.
Lay Analysis
“I didn’t even know what was happening at first. I was terribly depressed that day, very much convinced of my own worthlessness. I had been feeling like such a sexual doormat. As though every man in my life used me as somebody to wipe his cock on. I poured a ton of this out to him and I had some kind of catharsis and started crying, and then he was sitting next to me on the couch and stroking my forehead and comforting me and it was so nice to be held, so nice to be soothed by his hands and his voice.
“And the next thing I knew he was lying down next to me with his arms around me and he was kissing me, not a comforting fatherly kiss but a tongue-halfway-down-my-throat kind of kiss, and half of me was watching this whole procedure and was absolutely astonished at what was going down, while the other half of me was responding with my usual passion.
“So we necked for a while, and then we got undressed, and he fucked me. Just like anybody else, I kept thinking, this is my analyst, this is my shrink who’s fucking me, but at the same time he was just another man. And I also had the thought, ‘Well, baby, what did you expect?’ I mean all the men in my life get around to fucking me sooner or later, the butcher and the baker and the candlestick maker, and he was my shrink, and he was fucking me, and why not?
“When the fifty minutes was up I left, and paid his receptionist on the way out, the usual thirty-five bucks. And thought nothing of it. And for the next week and a half I went in every day at my usual time, and we would talk about various things including my feelings about him fucking me and everything else, and on the way out I would pay the money like the prize chump of the decade. Until one day it hit me that I was going there and letting this clown fuck over me the same way a whole world full of men was fucking over me, and then I was paying the son of a bitch. And I thought, hell, I had turned tricks for a period of my young life, I had been on the game, so I ought to be sending him a bill of my own, for Christ’s sake.
“And I also figured the hell with him. I stopped going. When I want to get laid I don’t have to get paid for it, but at least I can come out financially even. I don’t have to pay thirty-five dollars for forty minutes of conversation and ten minutes of sex.
“I ran into him about a year later and he asked me why I had stopped therapy so abruptly. So I told him what I just told you, except putting it lightly, more or less in a humorous way.
“‘But that was for your own good,’ he said. Dead serious, honestly. ‘I felt that that was what you needed very much at the time, someone who would comfort you and at the same time relate to you in a sexual manner. I felt you hadn’t experienced a fusion of love and sex, of authority and sexual love, and that it would be very valuable for you. I would never have initiated sex otherwise.’
“I don’t know if he believes it or not, I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I bet that kind of thing goes on a lot. Here you’ve got all these girls and women who don’t know what to do, they’re all fucked up, and they must be the easiest game in the world for a shrink. His word is God to them. When he says Open your legs it’s like a regular doctor saying Open your mouth, they’ve got to do it with no questions asked. Maybe it’s all very high purpose, all for the patient’s good, but it sounds to me like a convenient way for a man to get a lot of ass and get paid for it.”
• • •
JWW: While the woman quoted above did not experience actual sexual therapy, she was unquestionably sexually involved with a therapist. And it is just as unquestionable that this happens quite often, rather more often than psychologists and psychiatrists are wont to admit. The sexual seduction of female patients is a very simple matter for a psychotherapist. He is in a position of enormous authority. He is presumed by the patient to know what’s good for her and to be acting altruistically; in her own best interests. Furthermore, the phenomenon of transference, by means of which an analysand focuses love upon the analyst as a means of achieving recognition of the self, operates very much to his advantage.
That a substantial number of men in this position take advantage of such situations should not be surprising. One observes that men are men, that transference is a two-way street, and that men in this line of work are not all that stable to begin with. (The suicide rate for psychiatrists is four or five times that for the medical profession as a whole, and the profession has a high rate to begin with. And, while I’ve seen no data on this, my own observations suggest that the children of psychiatrists are, pound for pound, the nuttiest children an earth.)
Finally, it is not all that difficult for a therapist to become convinced that sexual relations with him is precisely what a particular patient needs. Freud has been widely quoted as saying of a particular patient that the best prescription he could give her would be Rx: Penis normalis, repetitur, although the good doctor never intimated that it was his own penis which ought to be employed. It is an almost universally held male notion that what any neurotic female really needs is a good screwing, and a therapist may be particularly inclined toward this diagnosis when the patient in question is singularly attractive to him.
This is no place for a discussion of the general topic of sexual relations between therapists and their patients. Indeed, the subject has been covered far better than I could do so. In The Love Treatment, Dr. Martin Shepard discusses quite a few cases of patients who have had affairs of one sort or another with their therapists, sometimes with favorable results, sometimes with extremely unfavorable results. Anyone with even a passing interest in the subject would do well to acquaint himself with Dr. Shepard’s book; he’s an extremely perceptive and sensitive man, and an extraordinarily skillful writer in the bargain.
What concerns us here, though, is the more specific matter of therapists who have attempted to deal with their patients’ sexual difficulties in the most direct manner possible—i.e., through the medium of sexual relations.
The reader will probably
not be surprised to learn that this is not an easy subject on which to gather data. I have been fortunate enough to become acquainted with two persons whose experiences in this area are instructive. The first is a young woman who received firsthand sexual therapy from her psychotherapist; the second a psychiatrist who has on several occasions dealt with female frigidity by having sexual relations with particular patients. The girl, Janice, was not a patient of the doctor, Bennett. (Nor was it Janice, or one of Bennett’s patients, who was quoted at the beginning of this chapter.)
I do not doubt that there are any number of female therapists who have occasionally attempted to cope with male sexual inadequacy in a similar fashion. However, I have no direct information regarding cases of this nature. In this connection, I would welcome correspondence from persons with direct experience along these lines, either as therapist or therapee, as it were.
First let’s hear from Janice. She’s in her late twenties, once married and once divorced, short, slender, waifish, at once a heavy smoker and a health-food addict. She went into therapy a few years ago, shortly after the breakup of her marriage.
• • •
JANICE: At this time I felt very much alone and quite desperate. I had always equated success for myself as a woman with success in marriage. Then I had a bad marriage for three years, and while it was over for both of us at about the same time, he was the one who wanted out. I was still too committed to the idea of remaining married because I thought a divorce would be such an open and unequivocal admission of failure.
My problem was sexual. At least the manifestation of my problem was sexual.
I was frigid.
Not completely frigid to the point where I couldn’t feel anything. I felt a certain amount of arousal. There were times when I enjoyed sex. I enjoyed a lot of the non-physical aspects of it very much. The sense of being close to a man, of pleasing him, of making him happy. The sense of having a hold on a man through sex. Physically I got a certain amount of pleasure but nothing like what I was supposed to be getting. I didn’t reach orgasm. At the time I entered therapy, I had never had an orgasm in my life.
The Sex Therapists: What They Can Do and How They Do It (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior Book 15) Page 8