Well, things do look different in the morning. Me, I had wanted to leave that night instead of sleeping over, partly because I dreaded waking up all smelly and brown-mouthed and having all of these assholes around. Noblesse oblige, kiddo; I figured it wouldn’t really be fair to split until the party was over.
• • •
Final impressions: shit, man, I don’t know. I think Jeremy’s a tool, I despise him, and yet I can see how none of this would have come off without him. Because what it comes down to is that all of these people wanted to cut loose and lose themselves in twenty-four hours of sexual experimentation, and they couldn’t just go and do it, they had to have the excuse that it was for their emotional health. I think one of the married couples had done a teensy bit of swinging with another couple before, and I gather that some of the singles had made an occasional group grope scene of some degree or other, but no one had been into anything like this before and they couldn’t have gone through with it without some sort of excuse.
So maybe it’s good for them that way. Or bad for them that way. I don’t know.
I guess I’m glad I went. You know me, love—I like to try new things, and I enjoy them even when I don’t enjoy them, if you follow me. (I’m not even sure I follow me.)
Well, that’s all she wrote. Do something creative with it, will you, dear?
Let Them Cure Each Other
David is tall and thin, with graying hair and a small, neat moustache. He is a clinical psychologist, and marriage counseling constitutes a substantial portion of his very successful practice. He was one of the first persons in his area to use the Masters and Johnson techniques; indeed, he had begun to develop a program of therapy along similar lines before the St. Louis researchers first published their findings on the treatment of sexual dysfunction.
I found David extremely cooperative and very easy to talk to. I was able to speak with him on several occasions. We had dinner together one evening and sat drinking and talking far into the night. We have also corresponded at considerable length.
Much of our discourse centered, not surprisingly, on the subject of sexual therapy. David spoke quite freely about his theories and experiences in this area. He disagreed with certain aspects of the Masters and Johnson approach, and was most critical of their program of sexual surrogates; his alternative approach to the problem of sexual therapy for a person without a regular sexual partner is particularly interesting.
What follows is a distillation of David’s remarks.
• • •
DAVID: Over a period of time I came to the conclusion that the sexual element was a major component of virtually every troubled marriage. When sexual disharmony was not a prime cause of marital difficulty in the first place, it was almost invariably present eventually, with a faulty sexual relationship serving as an effective metaphor for a faulty marriage.
On the other hand, when two people have a good thing going in bed together, their other discontents don’t seem to matter a hell of a lot. If a man and woman can make good satisfying love several times a week, they may have other problems with each other but these problems are usually ones they find they can live with. Part of this is undoubtedly physical. There is simply no tranquilizer that can hold a candle to good honest fucking. On top of that, these people are inevitably inclined to believe that the quality of their sexual union indicates their marriage is of value. “If I enjoy fucking him-her this much, I must love him-her.” That kind of thinking.
In marriage counseling, the immediate object is the preservation of the marriage. That’s what they come to you for. If at least one of them did not want the marriage to go on, they wouldn’t stop in my office first. They’d go directly to a lawyer.
Now there are certain things a counselor can do. Often his function is that of referee. Here you have two people who want to fight and they don’t know how. You have to teach them to fight fair. He has these criticisms of her and she has these criticisms of him and you get them out into the open and make them say the real thing that pisses them off about the other person, and you get some communication building. Sometimes that’s all the battle right there. They don’t know how to talk to each other. They live under the same roof and share the same bed for years and they’re still strangers, keeping their real feelings masked.
In a lot of these relationships, you come up against people who would be a lot more at ease in a world that only contained one sex. I don’t mean that they’re homosexual. Not at all. But there are men married twenty years who act as though women are a separate species entirely. And women who are the same way about men. Their whole social interaction is with members of their own sex. He goes bowling, she plays canasta, and at mixed parties he sits on one side of the room talking cars and pro football while she sits on the other side of the room talking baby-sitters and clothes.
This is all breaking down with the kids nowadays, and I think it’s an enormously healthy thing. Teenagers have genuine friends of the opposite sex to an extent they never did twenty years ago. This is a marvelous thing. Adolescence is supposed to be a time when you learn how to function as an adult. Old-school dating patterns taught you a certain amount of social ease and surface calm, but they also taught you to approach the opposite sex as a foreign country. In the best marriages, husbands and wives are friends, so the skill of friendship with the opposite sex seems worth learning.
It’s not going to change that many people’s lives that there are now male students at Vassar and female students at Princeton. The significance of this lies in the fact that the kids are so oriented that these schools have had to become coeducational. That shows just how much their attitudes have changed—and while I’m old-fashioned enough not to applaud every manner in which youth’s attitudes have developed, in this instance I approve wholeheartedly.
In marriage counseling, then, one tries to bring problems into the open, to get them to find out for themselves what bugs them and share this discovery with one another. And a lot of the time that’s all there is to it. Remember, they’re largely predisposed to save the marriage, or they wouldn’t have turned up in my office at all.
The more stubborn cases proved to have sexual difficulties as a common denominator. These people were not having a good time in bed and it was coloring every other facet of their relationship. Sometimes they didn’t know that was the problem, didn’t recognize that their sexual relationship was all that lousy. He’s convinced that he can’t stand her mother visiting them all the time and she’s positive that they’re fighting all the time about money and they’ve both lost sight of the fact that during their first year of marriage they were screwing like maniacs and nowadays he can’t get it up or she can’t get it off or it’s just so little fun that they don’t get around to doing it more than five or six times a year.
What I found quite a while ago was that once they were enjoying sex again—or enjoying it for the first time, because contrary to popular opinion a hell of a lot of marriages don’t turn sexually stale, they start off that way from the wedding night—once they were enjoying it, almost magically the mother-in-law ceased to be such a pain in the ass and money problems were no longer worth fighting about.
This doesn’t mean that everything is going to come up roses for the rest of their lives. There are too damned many people around who should never have married each other in the first place. This doesn’t mean that they should therefore terminate their marriage. They may want to stay together for any of a number of good reasons, and they may manage to do so, but that won’t necessarily make them Romeo and Juliet. As far as that goes, if Romeo and Juliet had gone ahead and gotten married, within ten years they’d have been saying nasty things about their in-laws.
• • •
JWW: David’s initial approach to sexual therapy was largely educational. He found that a distressing number of his clients were sexual illiterates, men and women who did not know what to do in order to satisfy one another. Thus his first chore was to instruct them in the
simple mechanics of mutually satisfactory lovemaking.
• • •
DAVID: The extent of ignorance among long-married couples is sometimes staggering. She thinks all she has to do is lie there and he thinks all he has to do is stick it in and come as quickly as possible. He doesn’t know he’s supposed to do something to make her come and she doesn’t know she’s supposed to feel anything overwhelming. Women will say that sex is obviously more important to men because men have orgasms. They honestly don’t realize that women are also capable of orgasm.
Now this ignorance is much less widespread than it was ten or fifteen years ago. The accessibility of popular literature dealing frankly with sex has had an enormous impact. This has had a great positive effect, and I’ve been able to see the results in my own practice. People of all ages know more about what to do, and, just as important, they’re trying it.
Ten years ago, most of the couples I counseled had never attempted oral sex with one another. Nowadays, almost all of them have at least tried it. I’m not implying that oral sex is the indicator of a good marriage—though the lack of it is a damn fine indication of a bad one. This change is a good sign, though, of all the changes the average person’s sexual attitudes have gone through. I used to see so many cases where both parties had wanted to go down on each other and neither of them dared to mention it. You hardly ever come across that any more.
This is excellent. It’s so valuable that material on sex is available to the general public. I’m old enough to remember when the only candid writing on a lot of sexual practices could only be found in medical books, where the “hot stuff” had to be printed in Latin. Now we’ve gone to the other extreme, and I’ll defend all of it, even the rankest pornography. Dirty books serve an educational purpose, you know. Sometimes I wish the authors had a more complete grounding in physiology, but even so I’ve long been convinced that any form of erotic literature does infinitely more good than harm. There are people who will read pornography and learn from it—and profit by what they learn—who would not get around to reading this material in any other form. So of course it ought to be available to them.
At the same time, there is a result of this informational explosion about sex that is not so ideal, at least at first glance. And this is that people are aware of the true possibilities of pleasure afforded by sex and are thus inclined to realize just how far their own sex lives fall short of what they can envision. They recognize that they have sex problems. This is good in that they then gave a chance to do something about it. It’s bad to the extent that they look for the answer in the wrong place.
It’s my feeling that a lot of the unfortunate extremes of sexual behavior derive from the failure of a sexual relationship to be as great as people can wish it could be. People expect sex to prevent cavities and cure cancer, and as far as we know it has neither of those properties. So when it’s not the parade of starbursts they think it could be, they begin following some strange paths.
This outburst of swapping and group sex is one side of sexual freedom that I don’t care for. I know our attitudes differ on this point, Jack, and that you think this sort of experimentation can have beneficial results for many of the people engaging in it. You may well be right. I know, though, that I have a very negative reaction to the entire notion. I’ve said I’m old-fashioned in certain ways. Perhaps this is one of those ways.
• • •
JWW: David went on to explain how he helped his clients get their own sexual desires out into the open, and how he helped them educate themselves sexually. He did this last both by providing information directly and by giving them books to read on the subject. He encouraged them to increase the frequency of their sexual relations and to enhance its romantic aspects.
• • •
DAVID: When she goes to bed with her hair in curlers and he staggers up belching after a night of guzzling beer in his undershirt in front of the television set, you can’t expect them to spend ten or twenty minutes on sexual foreplay. Given the circumstances, if they do it at all they’ll want to get it over with as quickly as possible.
Improving both the understanding of sex and the attitudes of the partners toward each other can do a great deal for a sexual relationship, and hence for a marriage. Where it falls short, though, is in the area of sexual dysfunction, of sexual inadequacy.
All the wine and soft music in the world can’t do the trick if a woman still fails to reach orgasm time after time, and all the lovemaking manuals can’t help if a man still ejaculates seconds after penetration, or has frequent difficulty in getting or maintaining an erection. Sometimes these difficulties were recent in origin and seemed to exist largely to reflect the deterioration of the marriage; when other problems were cleared up, sexual functioning improved. In other cases the problems were longstanding ones, and conventional therapy did not seem to hold much promise of alleviating them.
Over the years, I found myself inclining more and more to the idea of sexual therapy. For husbands with periodic impotence, I recommended methods for the wives which might help in encouraging their husbands’ potency. I also advised the husbands to practice satisfying their wives through non-coital means on occasions when they were impotent. This not only guaranteed that periodic impotence would not mean the cessation of sexual relations, but also served to lessen the actual incidence of impotence. The men felt under less pressure to perform, since they could bring their wives to orgasm regardless, and the absence of pressure helped them function better.
When Masters and Johnson published the details of their program, I began employing their techniques immediately. I was astonished how successful they had been and at the relative simplicity of dealing with problems I had always regarded as difficult. Premature ejaculation, for example, has been a complaint they have treated with almost one hundred percent effectiveness. This technique of the woman’s retarding ejaculation by squeezing the penis—such a simple thing, and what an extraordinary boon to marital relations! Previously I had tried a great many things, most of them aiming at dispelling the man’s concern over his shortcomings and at rooting around in his subconscious to dredge up the anxieties likely to have interfered with his ability to prolong intercourse. This helped in some cases and had less effect in others. Masters and Johnson published their findings, I put them into practice with my own patients, and I was delighted to find that they worked. You could argue that it seems too simple. Well, it is simple. So’s the wheel. The greatest discoveries usually are.
My work with couples very much followed the Masters and Johnson line. There were some differences in approach, of course. For one thing, my clients were not in a rush. They did not have to leave their homes and jobs and families and spend a couple of weeks in St. Louis. Even so, I found that it worked best if the course of therapy or counseling or whatever you want to call it was as condensed as possible, if only because the effect was most beneficial if the results could be achieved as quickly and dramatically as possible. But there was no deadline, and couples were initially encouraged to think that successful therapy would take more time than I actually anticipated it would take. Then, when progress came faster than they had been led to believe, their own self-confidence increased markedly.
• • •
JWW: There were other minor points on which David was in a certain amount of disagreement with Masters and Johnson. In the main, these related to the supportive talk therapy by a male and female therapist which leads and reinforces the Masters and Johnson program. David has his own ideas about psychotherapeutic technique and has developed ways to wed his approach to the physical side of M and J.
A greater departure, and one in which David has been something of a radical innovator, has been in the area of sexual surrogates.
• • •
DAVID: Masters and Johnson developed the sexual surrogate program for the benefit of patients who were unmarried or who could not persuade their husband or wife to accompany them to St. Louis. I say “husband or wife,�
�� but as I understand it the program has been essentially confined to males. Young women were enlisted as sexual therapists to function in the capacity of surrogate wives for these men.
When I learned about this, I assumed at first that they were employing professional prostitutes. This put me off immediately. Then I found out that they were doing something which to my mind was even worse—they were taking girls who presumably were not prostitutes previously and were making prostitutes out of them by paying them to have sexual relations with strangers.
Let’s pass over the possible legal implications of this which, incidentally, cannot be all that easily dismissed out of hand. But ignoring them, look at the ethical side of it, the moral side. It is all well and good to talk about these sexual surrogates as practical therapists. It is fine to say that they have been carefully screened and that one is certain they will have no compunctions about what they are doing. But, damn it, you can’t say that. You can’t predict with any guarantee of accuracy that they won’t suffer from severe guilt feelings some time in the future over what they have done. You can’t say that the men whom they will ultimately meet and marry will be as sanguine over their beloved’s having worked as a sexual therapist as if they had spent the same amount of time as a nurse or secretary.
In my own practice, I saw early on that the most serious cases of sexual inadequacy were cases involving unmarried individuals, individuals with no steady sexual partners. Their situation may not have had the urgency of married persons in the same bag, but this didn’t make it less problematic for them. I felt, just as Masters and Johnson had felt, that these persons deserved to be helped. I agreed that the techniques which worked with married persons ought to work as well with single ones. And I further agreed that such techniques could only be applied if some sort of surrogate partner was enlisted.
The Sex Therapists: What They Can Do and How They Do It (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior Book 15) Page 14