by Roy Blount
And I did. And I started tawkin’ like this. And shit, you know, it felt good. And me and Doyle Cathcart go out dynamitin’ fish and puttin’ up signs saying “Don’t Nobody Better Think about Buildin’ No Synagogues in This County” and readin’ the Closer Walk Industries Simplified Holy Word ever’ mornin’ about four A.M. and then I come home to my lot here and think for about twelve or fifteen hours about how great a country this is, and about how much greater it’s going to be after I go back up North for a couple of weeks and pitch scaldin water on ever’body I used to know that ain’t a Christian, which is ever body I used to know and specially that nun. She was awful. She’d do innythang.
I got to work on, not saying shit so much. It feels so good sayin’ it when you’re a conservative. But I know it’s a sin. And I got to stop bein’ tempted to read old Ezra Pound. It’s all right for the content, Brother Bodge says, the content is fine. There wasn’t no foolin’ Pound on social issues. But the form is Satan-inspired. You can tell that by comparin’ it to Billy Graham’s column in the paper.
Course Billy Graham ain’t no Christian. No more’n this William Barrett memoir is truly reactionary. Course it’s not something I’d buy anyway, being it ain’t put out by Closer Walk. But it sounds to me like this William Barrett has got a ways to go yet before he’s reely part of what’s goin’ on.
THE ORGASM: A REAPPRAISAL
IN THIS TIME OF revisionism and indictment, as sunshine stands accused of causing skin, cancer, marijuana of making men grow breasts, and Uncle Sam of giving LSD to soldiers, there has remained one sacred cow: the orgasm. You can tell people you had eleven of anything else last night—tequilas, heart attacks—and people will say, “Big deal,” or “No wonder.” Tell them you had eleven orgasms, though, and it doesn’t matter who they are—Henry Kissinger, Tatum O’Neal—they will say, “Wow!” Or, at the very least, “Aw, come on”—to which you can always reply, “Sorry, not this morning.”
Oh, there may have been those who argued people ought to put less emphasis on the climax and more on the horsing around, but that is just urging travelers to notice the scenery along the way; the basic assumption has always been they’ll only be happy when they get to where they’re going. Whatever the current credit rating of vitamins, Julie Andrews, the Easter Bunny, or college degrees, no one has ever arisen to deny that the orgasm, at least in its place (wherever, according to preference, that might be), is a good thing.
Until now. Two new studies have appeared which challenge the orgasm’s inviolate status. The first of these, a book entitled But My Head Is Bending Low, by the Wisconsin erotophysicist M. O. Naseberry, argues not only that orgasms are far less important, popular, and salubrious than they are made out to be, but that those people who do have them have them wrong. To wit:
The orgasm is not really ideal for everyone. “After all,” he writes, “orgasms exhibit the same problems as modern-day cities—they are loud, violent, and hard to govern. Many people would rather belch discreetly, or go off into the woods somewhere and scream.”
Lack of communication has generally been thought to interfere with orgasm—as when one partner cannot tell whether the other is exclaiming, “Quick, quick, quick!” or “Quit, quit, quit!” The orgasm, however, may also be something that interferes with communication. For instance, when one partner springs high into the air crying, “Holy sweetleapinggreatjumpingcrawlinghoppingmotherof Joseph and Mary! Ngah! Um! Whooo!” … or simply lies there and says something dumb, like “Gee whillikers”—the other partner may be put off, feel left out, and refuse to discuss the matter further.
Fish do not have orgasms, and, so far as we can determine, neither did the late J. Edgar Hoover. Whenever he was asked whether he did or not, he would just wink puckishly and have the questioner sent up the river on some especially sticky federal rap.
Government figures show that people who have orgasms commit almost 80 percent of those crimes the perpetrators of which law enforcement officials are able to apprehend (usually by staking out their molls). Furthermore, orgasm limits production. Almost no work was done by Americans last year in the twenty’ minutes following orgasm—excepting those achieved after 12:45 P.M. on weekdays in massage parlors.
Towns where orgasm is extremely common, even during city council meetings, were compared with towns where people had forgotten all about orgasm until the canvasser brought it up. People in the latter class of town seemed just about as well off, and far less exhausted, than people in the former. “I don’t know,” said a spokesman for Impassive, Montana. “Nobody around these parts ever goes anywhere much either, so it kinda balances out. There’s a sight of other things in this area to enjoy. Long walks. Sitting on the sofa. Rototilling. Torturing mice.”
Orgasm may not be harmful in itself, Naseberry concedes, “but all the facts are not in yet. There is no doubt, for instance, that it can lead to harmful other things, such as smoking in bed, raiding the icebox nude, and acrimonious property disputes after the earth moves.” He advises that people considering orgasm not rush into it but consult a physician first, and then “Dear Abby.” “And then count to ten. And then think of boils and warts.”
The second recent noteworthy assault on the orgasm is a study, which many regard as seminal, by V. N. Menander Spurgeon, professor emeritus of classics at DesPond Junior College, DesPond, Alabama. Spurgeon begins by looking at the word orgasm, which derives, he says, from Orgasmos, the Greek god of playing with dynamite, who lived way off back in a deep cave and only emerged to rain bad trouble and cold sores upon whoever had stirred him up (or was handy). Orgasm did not enter the English language, Spurgeon notes, until 1684—a full 884 years after cheese-lip, and 49 after grout. (Before 1684, apparently, what we call orgasms did occur, but people just said, “Ods bodkins!” or “What was that?”) Nor has the word always represented anything particularly great. Among the early written appearances Spurgeon cites are “When there appears an Orgasm of the humours, we rather fly to bleeding as more safe,” and “Vain, ah vain the hope / Of future peace, this orgasm uncontroul’d!” Only since Americans stopped studying Greek in high school, contends Spurgeon, has poetry begun “to treat the orgasm as a romp,” as in Personica Bumpers’s “Poem for Me”:
Orgasm, orgasm,
Right up my chasm;
Orgasm, orgasm,
Undo my Not!
I want to have a lot!
Clit’ral and vaginal,
Not to mention spinal,
Is not enough. I’ll settle
For that and also dental,
Ad’noidal and bipedal!
I’ll demand, I will stockpile,
I’ll
Steal and I’ll solicit ’em—
Orgasm!
Oroilum!
And orelectricitym!
Spurgeon’s argument, say his critics, is undercut by his imperfect grasp of present-day vulgar idiom: He speaks, with some distaste, of getting one’s socks off as a current term for orgasm. Few people, though, will look upon orgasm—their own, their loved one’s, or anyone else’s—in exactly the same light after being exposed to Spurgeon’s dismissal, syllable by syllable, of the very word itself: “Or is an indecisive, optional word. Gas is a vapor. And though m is, to be sure, a sound of pleasure, it is a very small one indeed.”
“That’s just ’cause you’re seventy-eight years old, fool!” cried a student heckler during Spurgeon’s controversial lecture at Notre Dame last month. Spurgeon retaliated by breaking off right there, fifty-five minutes into his scheduled two-hour talk, and starting all over again from the beginning.
Whatever the merits of this mounting new skepticism toward the orgasm, there is little doubt its impact is being felt. Anti-Excitement Leagues are already being formed on college campuses, and there is even talk of going further, all the way to the downplaying of all muscular contractions. As the saying goes, there is no delaying an idea whose time has … arrived.
I submitted this piece to various men’s magazines
, thinking their editors might find it amusing. None did. However, Cosmopolitan accepted it, added a few italics, and ran it. Several years later, I was asked to discuss it on Helen Gurley Brown’s cable television show. I was joined in the greenroom beforehand by an expert on male impotency, an expert on the myth of female frigidity, and an entrepreneur of sexual-enhancement items. When asked what I was there to discuss, I impressed them all, I believe, by saying, “The orgasm.”
But then I was taken aside by a producer, who said that he had just read my piece a couple of times and concluded that it was “a spoof.” It seems Ms. Brown had been thinking of it in terms of a series in the magazine—which my piece, unbeknownst to me, had inaugurated—on “The New Orgasm.” The producer wondered whether I would discuss the orgasm, specifically the new orgasm, in more “substantial” terms. I declined. I said I didn’t know what the new orgasm was. I said I didn’t think I had ever had one. I suggested that I just go on and be in an agreeable way, spoofy. The producer didn’t know how Ms. Brown would react to this. I suggested that he warn her. He didn’t think that was a good idea.
So I sat down next to Ms. Brown on-camera and we talked for a few moments cordially but at cross-purposes. Then she asked how it was that I had become an expert on orgasms, since “men don’t have them.”
If we had not been at sea before (mutually, but not at the same sea)r we were now.
“Men,” I said after swallowing hard, “… do.”
“Well,” she said, “I know they ejaculate, but …”
I looked at her. She looked at me. We both—in my case pleadingly—looked at the camera.
“Imagine!” she said. “Me talking to a male writer, on television, about something like this!”
I have worked with many a TV host, but never one more poised. She changed the subject to my book Crackers, which I plugged.
VALENTINE
When silverfish have eaten up
Your backless dresses’ fronts,
And frankly even what is left
Is not what it was once;
And a man approached with pity
Attacks you with his crutch—
You think life has no meaning,
Or at least not very much—
Oh then it’s time to rally,
Then it’s time to shine.
Then you might remember
You are my Valentine.
When both your fiancés depart,
And cite your double chins,
And what was ecstasy à trois
Is you, expecting twins;
And someone’s tied you to a chair
And no one hears you yelling,
And all the golden plans you’ve laid
Appear not to be jelling—
Oh then it’s time to rally,
Then it’s time to shine.
Then you might remember
You are my Valentine.
THE FAMILY JEWELS
In the garden of Eden lay Adam,
Complacently stroking his madam.
And loud was his mirth,
For on all of the earth
There were only two balls, and he had ’em.
THOSE WERE THE DAYS. Now everybody has balls, or claims to. Fellows used to seek ladies of sensitivity, gentleness and full blouses. Now the “ballsy” woman is in. The stereotype of gay men as people with exquisite taste in home furnishings is giving way to that of people with full baskets. There are even signs that ballsiness is regaining widespread acceptability in straight men. And it was no slur on Billie Jean King when people said it took balls for her to go on TV and admit to having had a lesbian affair.
In New York, the cable-TV personality who calls himself Ugly George—his own pair rendered clearly if unwelcomely evident by tight pants—roams the streets of Manhattan “looking,” as he mutters in voice-over, “for goils with balls.” Which is to say girls willing to pose naked for his TV show, which, whatever else may be said of it (yuck, ptui), has … balls.
Balls are a politically, morally, sexually neutral quality. Israel has them, and so does Qaddafi. Billy Martin and Reggie Jackson. Roy Cohn and Mother Teresa. Barbara Walters and Abbie Hoffman. J. R. Ewing and Dolly Parton. Balls’ wholesale dissemination may have begun in 1959, when Norman Mailer, laboring in the two-“fisted” shadow of Ernest Hemingway (who wrote often of castration), described Truman Capote as “a ballsy little guy,” and Capote began quoting Mailer on that point with high-pitched relish. Or maybe it was in 1960, when Jasper Johns executed a work called Painting with Two Balls, an encaustic and collage on canvas “with objects.” The objects were a pair of metal spheres stuck into a crevice of the painting. If a painting can have balls, why not a woman? Now an Australian New Wave group called Mi-Sex sings:
It’s got balls,
It’s got balls,
It’s written on the walls,
Graffiti crimes in the shopping malls.
There are dildos these days with balls you can fill with hot water and squeeze.
Nuts, grapes, stones, testes, testicles, cojones, huevos, gonads, the family jewels. Testis, the singular, is Latin for “witness.” The ancient Romans, it is sometimes explained, held their hands over their genitals when taking an oath. But if that were true, you’d think you’d run across, in perusing ancient texts, such expressions as “Cross my balls and hope to die” (testes meos traicio et mori spero) and “I swear on a stack of testicles” (per cumulum testium juro). Serious dictionaries prefer to speculate that testes got their Latin name from being deemed witnesses of virility. And yet what are balls shaped like? Eggs. It works out neatly, in a way. Balls have a feminine shape, and they send the male off in search of other feminine shapes.
Of course, Shere Hite has made the highly debatable assertion that it is only conditioning that makes men “feel that a vital part of being a man is to [ugh] orgasm in a vagina.” But there is no denying that each ball contains eight hundred convoluted, threadlike seminiferous tubules (altogether some eighteen hundred feet in length), wherein sperm are produced by the hundreds of millions. And between the tubules is interstitial tissue whose job is to secrete testosterone—a hormone that stimulates mustaches, aggressiveness and heavy muscularity, all of which have traditionally aided men in their quest for places to sow the sperm. Still rather neat so far.
But that is not the whole story. All those sperm cells, those teeming halves of little babies, impel the male not only to show up at female doors with corsages (incidentally, orchid is Greek for “testicle,” which may account for the pride with which girls used to wear them on prom dresses, sometimes called “ball gowns”) but also to kick ass, climb, wander, make money, jack off, outdrink friends, build high-rises, drive Alfa Romeos very fast, and force some less hairy prisoner to do the laundry. They impel the male to do nearly everything, in fact, except settle down and help take care of whole little babies. So things don’t always work out so neatly. Especially when women, too, get heavily into balls. (The average human testis weighs one ounce; fortunately for the underendowed, they are all but impossible to weigh. A sperm whale’s run around fifty pounds apiece.)
As a matter of fact, with androgyny all the rage, balls in straight men have lately been looked down upon. Macho, every bit as invidious a term as bitchy, has been used to take the bloom off of everything from shotguns to law enforcement. Alan Alda, a prime example of unpushy, sympathetic, increasingly boring seventies masculinity, has described machismo as “testosterone poisoning.” But androgyny has not always been regarded with favor. Herculine Barbin, a nineteenth-century French girl, was found at the age of twenty-two to have a woman’s urethra, and something approaching a vagina, and an organ that might have been a small penis or a large clitoris, but also two undescended testicles. So she had to be reclassified as a man, who eight years later killed himself. Balls, at certain periods in history, are identity. Now, once again, as Jimmy Carter has given way to Ronald Reagan, and social services to bombers, balls in the male have come back, al
ong with jelly beans. Moderates are called wimps in the Congress. Wayne Newton, mustached, throws his weight around in Vegas.
Meanwhile (even though Rosalynn has given way to Nancy), the macha woman continues to be, you might say, the nuts. In her book Machisma, Grace Lichtenstein hails “the scent of power, of female potency, catered to by advertisements for perfumes with names like ‘Charlie’ and ‘Babe.’ It is the reason for the television commercial that shows a young woman leaping in triumph after a racquetball victory over a man.” The “adventurous, ballsy, gutsy … voracious … fierce” macha woman, says Lichtenstein,
jumps at the chance to climb Annapurna. … She picks up the check at lunch with a male companion in an expensive restaurant and flashes a gold American Express card. … She subscribes to Field and Stream and hides Vogue in the bathroom. … She lets male campers know that her backpack is five pounds heavier than theirs. … She prefers Clint Eastwood movies to Dustin Hoffman ones. … She manages to let slip how many men she’s dated in the past week. The macha woman “goes for it.”
A touching tackiness in all that, as in a newly freed slave wearing spats. The macha woman should bear in mind balls’ down side. They can make you want to stockpile armaments, screw sheep, and pound the piss out of somebody for no good reason. What war boils down to is who’s got the most balls. “Get them by the balls and their hearts and minds will follow.” “Nuts.” “Eyeball to eyeball and they flinched.”
Hitler, he only had one ball.
Göring had two but they were small.
Himmler
Had something similar,
But Goebbels had no balls at all.
If people of every persuasion are going to go around having balls, then we had better examine the whole testicular concept rigorously, in the round. (Now, cough.) But gently!