Beyond Group Sex: Doing Their Own Thing (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior)

by John Warren Wells

  But that was nothing for me to worry about, because I never had one of those total experiences. I always held myself in check. In fact, I took a lot of verbal abuse from some of the other group members. “She won’t let herself open up, she won’t give of herself, she’s all filth and rot inside and won’t let the sunshine in!” You know the way those people talk. The true believers are absolute religious converts. In fact, I’m positive there’s a lot of faking of emotional response because people want so much to fulfill group expectations.

  Let me explain how the group helped me. It helped in two ways. First of all, this was happening during a very blah period in my own life. I had a college education and was wasting it on a boring and unproductive job. I had been married and divorced and regarded myself as having failed at marriage. I wasn’t dating anyone and had no close friends. I had never been very friendly with anyone in the sense of exchanging confidences. My mother had died recently, and a few months after her death I moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and not only didn’t I know anybody in the neighborhood, I didn’t know the neighborhood itself, the shopkeepers, anyone. I was about as personally isolated as it was possible to be, and I had been married and divorced and regarded the divorce as evidence of a personal failure. All I did was work and read and go to movies and concerts. There were a great many days when I did not exchange a word with anyone except at work, and there were weekends when I didn’t speak a word in the course of a day.

  I don’t suppose that’s all that rare. Not in New York. The loneliness in this town is indescribable, the extent of it. Take a walk in Washington Square and you’ll see hundreds of utterly solitary people sitting next to each other on benches and never exchanging a word. And if one of them does attempt a conversation, the other one usually moves to another bench, because everybody’s afraid to talk to a stranger in this paranoid town because every stranger is a potential kook or rapist or mugger or God knows what.

  The group gave me the sort of glimpse into other people’s lives that lonely people look for in any of the typical New York activities, but it was more thorough, and at the same time it was safe. For example, people go to night courses or study weaving or attend lectures and political-discussion groups to meet people, and during the activity itself everyone wears masks, and the point of going is so that you can meet someone and then see him elsewhere. Which was just what I didn’t want, because the last thing I needed or thought I needed was anything that would entail an involvement. I did take a course in art appreciation, for example, and I did get asked out for coffee afterward, and I always turned those dates down and shut myself off.

  In the group, these people opened up on a very personal level, told you all sorts of things about themselves, really showed all their hurts and wounds. And when the session was over they went their separate ways and had no contact until the next meeting. At least, that was the way it was supposed to go, although two men in the group did make overtures to me, and I know that one couple was having an affair. But this was a no-no. We were supposed to limit our mutual involvement to the group, so that no relationships developed outside of the group context could interfere.

  So I was able to participate in all their lives in a very real and personal way and at the same time remain aloof from them. And I found that I enjoyed this. I enjoyed it while it was happening, and I enjoyed it afterward, when I was able to spend time thinking about this woman or that man. I related to them and was involved with them in very much the same way that I will relate to and be involved with an interesting character in an absorbing book or movie. Except that this was so much more real. No, that’s the wrong way to put it. These people in the group were more complex; that’s what it was. No novel or film ever shows you a character as complicated and puzzling as almost any real person is. Novelists simplify. They have to. Otherwise a novel about a single day in a person’s life would have to run a thousand pages, to get in all the nuances and subtleties and perceptions . . .

  The other effect of the group was what I think is probably the most important benefit of this sort of thing, and that’s that you realize you’re not as different as you thought you were. That everybody is tied up in knots, and is ashamed of so many aspects of his character or her character. That we are all lonely and insecure and worried about what people think of us, and hung up about sex and dreaming of impossibly perfect love and hating failure and missing out on whatever success we have in mind.

  And you have to learn that. You have to learn it in your insides. It’s not enough to know it intellectually. I always knew it intellectually, the same way I know that E=MC2. I knew it without understanding what it really meant.

  If you don’t know this, you can’t come to terms with yourself. You have to know that everyone in the world farts and sweats and wakes up at three in the morning scared of dying. Once you know it, you can start to be the particular person you happen to be constituted to be.

  Part of the person I am constituted to be is a private person, a person who prefers not to open up. So that there was an interesting paradox: one of the revelations of the group-therapy experience was the realization that it would be wrong for me to have a big dramatic emotional breakdown in the group. Breakthrough, I mean. Though it amounts to much the same thing. For a while I had worried about the way I was remaining withdrawn, and then one night it hit me. Not at the group, but later that night when I was running everything through my mind. “To thine own self be true”—I was being untrue to myself if I opened up and cried and shouted and stripped my soul naked.

  I continued with the group for quite a few months after that, but without worrying any more that I wasn’t doing what I was supposed to be doing. And it continued to help me, but largely in a very voyeuristic way. I was conscious of this now, this voyeurism in the group context. And I was also able to accept it.

  I stayed with the group until it broke up. It was a once-a-week thing, and in all the time I went, I think I missed only one meeting, and that was because I was out of town on vacation. I’m pretty sure that was the only meeting I missed.

  The group ultimately broke up because our leader moved to the West Coast. Then we got another leader. That hardly ever works, because a new person coming in cold is very much an outsider, and the group tends to present a united front against him. This happened with us. Then we tried operating without a leader, which is not impossible, and a lot of groups do this, but we were used to functioning in a fairly structured way, and the absence of a leader made everybody uncomfortable. A couple of people dropped out, and the thing fell apart. A couple of times afterward I would get a note from a group member saying that a new group was forming, and inviting me to join, but I never answered these notes. I might have gone on indefinitely if the group had lasted, but once it broke up, it became a finished chapter in my life, and I felt no need to get back into something similar.

  I think it’s conceivable I will feel such a need sometime in the future, so I don’t rule out the possibility of joining another group sometime. I certainly don’t feel the need now. I’ve continued to grow and go through changes in exactly the same way now that I did during group therapy. It’s as if my experience in the group taught me how to develop, and now the development continues without the group.

  When I left the group, for example, I would have been utterly incapable of this conversation. I would have been just as incapable of running ads in an underground newspaper, as far as that goes, so you never would have known of me and never would have tried to interview me in the first place. But assuming you did, I would have refused to meet you, and if we did meet, I would have kept everything locked up conversationally.

  I can talk like this now, with you, only because you don’t know me at all, and I know you only through your books, and even before I got your letter I had this image of you as the detached and thoroughly professional and dispassionate researcher, and we’ll never see each other again. So I’m able to tell you things I haven’t voiced before. Which might make this a mean
ingful experience for me, a growth experience, which was something that occurred to me in front, incidentally. That was one of the reasons I agreed to this, that and the fact that I was curious as to what you would be like.

  I never open up like this to people I swing with. And so many of them will be full of questions, but the answers I give are all surface. Most of the time I turn aside questions about me by telling stories about other people I’ve swung with, and a lot of people can get off on this. Auditory voyeurism on their part, you could call it.

  • • •

  Her name is Katherine, and she is twenty-eight years old. Lower-middle-class Brooklyn background. Scotch-Irish father, mother of Welsh and German descent. Her parents ran a stationery store and lived in three rooms behind the shop. Her father was a sporadic alcoholic, drinking nothing at all for months at a time, then going on a total binge for a week or two. When Katherine was nine he died of a fractured skull in the course of one of these sprees, either as the result of an accident or through the offices of an overzealous mugger. Katherine’s mother continued to operate the store until her own death several years ago. She never remarried; always a distant woman, she became considerably more withdrawn after her husband’s death. Katherine, an only child with no close relatives outside of her parents, described her years in Brooklyn as “like living in an empty house.”

  The store was never more than marginally profitable, and the margin grew narrower as the neighborhood deteriorated. Katherine had hoped to go away to college, fantasizing that a change of scene would permit her to blossom and start a new life. While she could have qualified for scholarships or student loans, she felt her mother needed her to help in the shop, although the question was never openly discussed. Katherine attended Brooklyn College for four years, majored in English, got good but not exceptional grades, and graduated several months before her twenty-second birthday.

  I met her a bit more than six years later, six years during which she underwent considerable change and growth. I interviewed her on several occasions, first at my own apartment, then subsequently at her modestly furnished but immaculate two-room apartment in the Chelsea section.

  Katherine is about five-seven, dark-haired, light-complexioned, quite slender. She is infinitely more attractive some of the time than she is the rest of the time, depending on whether or not her face is animated. When she is involved in conversation her face glows and her eyes sparkle, and she is quite lovely. When she withdraws and shuts out the world, her face goes blank, and one thinks of metaphors involving veils and curtains and burned-out light bulbs. The difference is quite startling. At one moment she is almost beautiful, at another moment one would not give her a second look. She several times described herself as going through life wearing a mask, and the image is both figuratively and literally valid.

  I wrote to Katherine in response to the following ad, which I had noticed appearing every other week in one of the underground sex weeklies:

  LIKE AN AUDIENCE? Attractive, shapely brunette, 27, enjoys watching couples do their thing. Will participate if turned on, but no strings either way. Also enjoy watching male or female gay couples, male or female singles. Photo and phone, please.

  The ad contained a name—not her own—and a post-office box number. I wrote a letter expressing a desire to interview her, preferably in person but over the telephone or through correspondence if necessary. I received no reply, which is by no means unusual, but about a month later I saw her ad again and wrote her a second letter, stressing that I would respect any confidences and that she need not even tell me her real name or address, that I would not make tape recordings without her permission, and adding that, unlike a distressing number of persons who describe themselves as writers in soliciting sexually-oriented correspondence, interviews, and the like, I had published quite a few books on various aspects of the sexual underground. (Incidentally, the phonies are fairly easy to spot. The most obvious clue is an offer of payment for correspondence or interviews. With one exception—Tricks of the Trade—I have never paid for interviews, nor can I imagine how any writer could afford to make a habit of this. With Tricks I had no choice; call girls are as disinclined to talk free of charge as they are to do anything else. Another earmark of the fake writer is his tendency to urge his correspondents to be as graphic in their description of sexual acts as possible. And yet another tip-off to some of the “writers” I’ve sent letters to is mind-boggling illiteracy. It astonished me that people who cannot formulate a grammatical sentence attempt to pass themselves off as professionals in the field.)

  Katherine called me a few days later. She said that she had been familiar with several of my books before my first letter and had sought out others since then, had almost called me several times, and had in fact dialed my number once but hung up before it rang. She said part of her reluctance stemmed from a concern that she might find it impossible to open up in an interview and that she would thus be wasting my time, but she was now willing to try if I would accept that risk. We arranged to meet at a lunch counter in my neighborhood, where we drank coffee and discussed air pollution, the weather, and a movie critic whom we both found offensive.

  At my apartment, we talked for a period of several hours. I did not tape this or subsequent interviews with her, partly for reasons explained in this book’s introduction, partly because I felt certain the presence of a tape recorder would increase her already pronounced uneasiness.

  Our first interview was quite hesitant and awkward at the onset and became considerably looser as it went along. When she tightened up I interjected anecdotes about other persons whom I had interviewed. Katherine was a perfect listener at such times, and her face reflected her interest and enthusiasm. By the time the interview concluded she was sufficiently relaxed to give me her phone number, something she had refused previously.

  When I called several days later to suggest another interview, she invited me to her apartment. I still knew her only under the name she had used in her advertisement, and she replaced her own name on the apartment doorbell with this nom de guerre when I visited her. Later that day she told me her real name, and in similar ways became increasingly open and confident of herself in my presence.

  • • •

  I don’t really care for the word “voyeur.” I don’t know why. It’s better than “peeping tom,” I suppose. Almost anything is. But the word has a very decadent feel to it. Makes you think of jaded old men peeping through one-way mirrors in those Parisian bordellos.

  Sometimes when I want to put a label on myself I think of the word “watchbird.” There were books I read as a child. The author’s name was Munro Leaf. I think he did the illustrations as well. Very corny stuff designed to fill kids with the desire to eat their vegetables and pick up their toys and brush their teeth and do other socially acceptable things. “This is a watchbird watching a messmaker. When a messmaker makes a sandwich he gets jelly on his hands and on the table and on his clothes. This is a watchbird watching you. Are you a messmaker?” I was never a messmaker, and I always brushed my teeth and picked up my toys and ate my vegetables. Well, most of my vegetables. But I never got that watchbird out of my head.

  I’ve read a lot about voyeurism. I’ve read a lot of stuff about all sorts of sexual behavior, as far as that goes. Out of a combination of intellectual curiosity and prurient interest. I like to read about it in either fiction or non-fiction because it interests me, it’s something I want to know more about, to understand better. But I also get off on reading. Sexually, that is. I get excited.

  From what I’ve read, most voyeurs are supposed to have some childhood incident that set them off. They happened to see their parents screwing, for example. And they got excited, and thus they made the connection between watching sexual activity and being sexually excited.

  I suppose it’s possible that I had some sort of experience like this. If so, I’ve repressed it completely. I’ve tried to summon up a memory of anything along those lines, and I can’t. I don�
��t think my parents had much of a sex life. I was conceived less than two months after their wedding. My mother was in her thirties when they got married, and my father was twelve years older. I think they tried out sex and had me and then decided they didn’t much like sex and they could live without it.

  I’m sure my mother never experienced sexual pleasure. Not just that she never had an orgasm, but that she never got anything out of it at all, because she never had any interest in another man after my father died. And it wasn’t that they were enormously close. They rarely spoke to each other, nothing more intimate than “Pass the mustard.” I don’t think I ever saw them kiss each other.

  I think my father was a more loving person. I think he used to hold me on his lap and things like that, but I could be building this up, that is, I could have built it up in the years after he died. Making him more affectionate than he actually was. I can’t be sure. My mother, though, was completely loveless.

  I had childhood fantasies of being invisible. I would be able to go anywhere, inside people’s houses, anywhere at all, and no one would know I was there. I could see them and they could not see me. I don’t think the fantasies were sexual originally. I had them before I knew anything about sex. I didn’t even dwell on the idea of watching them get undressed or go to the toilet. It was more the idea of being able to invade privacy secretly than sexual discovery.

  Later on, though, when I discovered sex—that is, when I discovered what it was—my watchbird fantasies took a distinctly sexual turn.

  But then my whole childhood was fantasy. What a miserable childhood I had! Of course, everybody’s childhood is miserable, and if anyone ever enjoyed his childhood, you can be sure he won’t admit it. But mine was really wretched. When I think of how completely alone I was. And I made it happen that way. I learned how not to be noticed. It wasn’t that I got rebuffed. I’m sure I could have made friends. I never tried. I went to school and I sat there and I went home. I always did well on tests and wrote good papers, but I didn’t get as good grades as I might have, because I never raised my hand in class. I would answer if I was called on, but I never raised my hand.