The Taboo Breakers: Shock Troops of the Sexual Revolution (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior)

by Lawrence Block

  JWW: I see. Now I understand.

  BARBARA: And then, if the other girl and I want to try it on, we do. It doesn’t always happen. Just now and then.

  JWW: And do the males have homosexual contact too?

  ROY: Never.

  JWW: Any particular reason?

  ROY: I could probably think of a dozen. The obvious one, and the one you’ll see written up constantly, is that a man feels his manhood threatened by the thought of playing faggot games. I can see how that might apply, but I just don’t buy it as the major factor. We’ve all of us discussed this at some length. I’d say half the men had some sort of homosexual contact during early adolescence—mutual masturbation, generally. I never did that, but I remember a friend and I had contests, you know, to see who could come the fastest, and while we never touched each other I’m sure a psychiatrist would say that it amounted to the same thing.

  BARBARA: He’d say it was faggoty to enjoy watching another man with your wife, or to watch girls make it. Some psychiatrists say that anything you do proves that deep down inside you’re a faggot.

  ROY: True, but to get beyond that, I think a more important reason lies in the fact that there’s a very basic difference between the sexual nature of man and woman. For a man, lovemaking demands the presence of a female love-object. It is what she is and what he is doing to her that turns him on.

  BARBARA: And therefore—

  ROY: Let me finish. For a woman, I think it’s different. Her role is somewhat more narcissistic. It is what is being done to her that she finds exciting, the caresses she is receiving, the excitement her flesh is arousing in her partner. So when she embraces another woman, she is essentially caressing herself and receiving caresses from herself. Thus homosexuality is compatible with a woman’s basic sexual nature, while a man just finds himself turned off by the whole thing.

  BARBARA: You sound like a lecture, but I think you’re right. That’s why it’s far more important to a man that his partner be physically attractive, while a woman will be drawn strongly to a man who isn’t good-looking in any sense of the word. A lot of women will find a man attractive who is genuinely ugly, for instance. But I’ve never known of a man who is drawn to truly ugly women.

  ROY: How about me? I’m drawn to you, funny face.

  BARBARA: The comedian.

  JWW: I’ll have to think about it, but you may have a pretty good theory there. The fear-of-being-a-faggot argument does wear a little thin, when you consider that a good many swingers don’t draw the line at any sexual practice and still find male homosexuality repugnant. But to get back to lesbianism, could you tell me how you reacted to it, Barb?

  BARBARA: Favorably.

  ROY: That’s the understatement of your career, baby.

  BARBARA: You could be right. I’ll tell you about it, if you like. It was Sue who captured my elusive virginity, as it happened. It happened about two months after we joined the group. I had never even thought about it beforehand, not in connection with our group. During some of the meetings one girl would occasionally give another girl a long kiss, or cop a feel of her breasts, but I always thought this was just a form of kidding around. I didn’t think anybody actually did anything.

  Anyway, we had Greg and Sue over for an evening of fun and games, and that night we worked it a little differently from the usual routine. First Greg and I would take a turn while Sue and Roy watched, and then it would be our turn and they would watch. Toward the end of the evening it got to be a little more intense than just watching. For instance, Roy and Sue were playing Puppy Love. You know, dog style, and I got very excited and reached between his legs and caressed his testicles while he had her. And another time Roy kissed my breasts while Greg was Frenching me. We hadn’t reached the threesome stage yet, but we were heading in that general direction.

  Eventually everyone was pretty worn out, and Greg said something like, “Well, Roy and I are exhausted, girls. Why don’t the two of you enjoy yourselves while us men watch?”

  I didn’t think he was serious, but I looked at Sue and saw her blush. That astonished me. I mean, I never thought anything would make that girl blush. He asked me if I wouldn’t like to make love to Sue, and I said something, I don’t know what exactly. I made a joke of it, and that was the end of it for that evening.

  But the next day I found myself thinking of it, and the more I thought about it the more I decided that it wasn’t entirely a joke. There’s an expression for that, when you make a joke but it’s not just a joke—

  ROY: Kidding on the square.

  BARBARA: That’s right. I saw Sue that afternoon and I sort of mentioned it, said that it was really funny what Greg had suggested. And she blushed again, and I knew there was more to it than a joke.

  She said, “Don’t you ever wonder what it would be like?” I said I hadn’t, but I was beginning to wonder now. I asked her if she wondered. “I don’t have to,” she said. “I know.”

  It was the answer I had expected but it still shocked me. And she went on to tell me that it was no big thing with her, that she could take it or leave it alone, but that occasionally she found girls very attractive, and enjoyed making love with them. I asked her whom she had made love to from the group, and she told me.

  Then I blurted out, “Well, do you find me attractive that way?” She said that she did, that I was beautiful and she was strongly attracted to me. And I found myself thinking what a little doll she was with those eyes and those slender hips and those perfect breasts. Then I remembered the wild oral routine I had seen her perform on Roy, and I instantly imagined her doing that sort of thing to me, and I guess I blushed.

  She just looked into my eyes. It was as though her eyes were absolutely drinking me. And she said, “Would you like to, Barbara?”

  I said, “Now?” “Right now,” she said. “We’re all alone, the children won’t be home for hours, and no one will ever know unless you want them to. If you don’t like it at least you’ll know one way or the other, you won’t have to go on wondering. And however it works out, it won’t change things between us. I’ll always love you, Barbara, whether or not you want us to love one another physically.”

  ROY: Put the right melody line to that one and I think you’ve got a hit song on your hands.

  BARBARA: Be still, soulless man. It was a very beautiful thing she said. I’ll never forget it. I said I wouldn’t know what to do. She said I wouldn’t have to do anything, that she wanted to make love to me. I couldn’t talk. I just nodded. We went upstairs and got undressed, and when I looked at her body I knew that I wanted her. It was a very pure and clean and beautiful experience. She knew just what to do to excite me, and it was wholly different from being with a man. It was gentle and slow. It was never as powerful as it is with a man, but it was, oh, sweet.

  ROY: Getting back to what I said earlier, I think that fits in. Can you imagine two predominantly heterosexual men having a try at faggotry and thinking of it as sweet and beautiful? Women are different from men, that’s the real explanation.

  BARBARA: Well, vive la difference. I just know it was wonderful, and I know, too, that it unlocked desires I never knew I had. I wanted to give pleasure as well as receive it. I touched Sue, I kissed her breasts, I kissed her genitals, I did everything to her. Things I had never even thought about doing, and suddenly I was learning that it thrilled me to do them. It was . . . well, kind of jarring. And very grand.

  Of course, a private session like that is very different from having sex with another girl while the husbands watch. That’s pleasurable too, but there a large portion of the thrill comes in the excitement of the men and the sense of performing for them and all of that. When I’m alone with Sue it’s different. It’s a very profound sharing loving thing, and . . . my God, listen to me, I sound like a dyed-in-the-wool dyke.

  JWW: No, I think I understand you.

  • • •

  Roy and Barbara are particularly good examples of swingers who have married their sex lives to their
social lives. In a very real sense, they have no sexual contacts outside their circle of friends and, at least as significant, no important social contacts outside their sexual circle. Their group has remained essentially the same since they joined it; one couple left when the husband was transferred out of state, and two other couples have joined, but the membership is otherwise unchanged. The operation of the group is conservative in ritual and lacks the emphasis on far-out thrills which characterize many such organizations. While individual group members have their own sexual preferences—Sue’s oralism is one example, as is one male member’s special enjoyment of performing anal intercourse with women—varietism is more an added bonus than the reason for the group’s existence. Sadomasochism never plays a part, nor do transvestism, bestiality, obscene photography, or any of the other “exotic” characteristics of the swinging society.

  Roy and Barbara seem to be unequivocally delighted with the way their lives have worked out. I asked if they had any regrets, and Roy could think of only one—“That it took us this long to get started. We wasted a lot of years.” Barbara disagreed, pointing out that the frustration and sexual monotony of their early years of marriage have equipped them to appreciate what they have now.

  A great many problems and anxieties that beset the average swinger do not trouble the Hallidays. They engage in no correspondence, and thus have no fear of postal authorities. They limit their contacts to their friends, and need not worry about blackmail or public exposure. Nor is their version of swinging one in which greater and greater thrills are the goal; that sort of life often seems to be frustrating in the long run, when the inescapable discovery comes that there is nothing new under the sun.

  Finally, they seem to have no conscious moral reservations about the way they are living. “I am doing nothing immoral,” Barbara stated. “I am not cheating my husband; instead I’m helping him live a fuller and richer and happier life. If there is a God, and if he’s intimately concerned with the way I live my life, I can’t imagine how I could be doing something that would bother him. In a sense, I don’t even think of all of this as being extramarital. That means outside of marriage, and this is very much inside of our marriage, it’s a part of our marriage. You could even say that the seven couples are married to one another. Each of those men is a sort of husband to me, each of the girls is a wife to Roy. I cannot imagine a better way to live.”

  Then, I asked her, did she think everybody should live that way?

  “No,” she said, “Absolutely not, any more than I think everybody should have two children or dye their hair or live in Youngstown. This life happens to suit us. Other people have their own personalities, their own inhibitions, their own drives. A lot of them would be uncomfortable living as we do. I think there are a great many couples who don’t live the way we do and who would be better off if they did, but that’s something else again.

  “What I really think, what I know, is that everybody should live the way they want to and do anything they want to do as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else. Whatever it is. If people want to flog each other with whips, if that’s what they really dig, if they’re happier doing it than doing without it, then more power to them. I may not want to play their games, I may not want to have them over for dinner, but let them live their life.”

  “Absolutely,” Roy said. “And if a man happens to want an oriental girl—”

  “Right, lover. We’ll get a Chinese girl for you and if we’re lucky she’ll have a Negro husband, and we’ll all live happily ever after.”

  “Amen,” said Roy.

  If It Feels Good I’ll Do It

  The chapter’s title comes from a lapel button, and it is one of the more popular buttons throughout the country. I don’t know what sort of people buy this button. As far as that goes, I don’t know what sort of people buy any of these buttons. There is a button which reads Dracula Sucks, for example, and I have seen it offered for sale wherever buttons are sold, and I have never seen anyone actually wearing it, and I never hope to. Many of the button shops are located in hippie neighborhoods such as San Francisco’s Hashbury district and New York’s Lower East Side. I can’t believe that the hippies, who are generally penniless, would squander a quarter on a button. Maybe the tourists buy them and take them home and keep them hidden away among their souvenirs.

  Whoever buys the buttons, and for whatever obscure reason, some of them do express unusual sentiments in a particularly pithy fashion. If it feels good I’ll do it—seven words to live by.

  And Marcia Duffy lives by them.

  • • •

  Marcia will never stop traffic. She is a slender girl in her late twenties, about 5’7”, with small breasts and hips and thin, almost bony arms and legs. Her hair is a nondescript shade of light brown and she wears it quite long, sometimes loose, sometimes in a ponytail style that is several years too young for her. Her face is long, her mouth large, and her upper front teeth slightly bucked; the general impression is equine. She is at her worst in dresses and favors slack and sweaters, in which she looks moderately attractive.

  At first glance, then, she is a rather plain girl, not quite ugly but closer to ugly than beautiful. A longer look will leave one with a changed impression of Marcia. It is hard to analyze, but it comes, I think, from the light in her eyes, the set of her mouth. She projects a definite aura of sexual abandon, of constant hunger, of the willingness to experiment with sexual pleasure in whatever form it might take.

  Traditionally girls like Marcia have been popularly referred to as nymphomaniacs. Technically, though, this term is properly reserved for compulsively promiscuous women who, owing to partial frigidity, move from man to man in a rather desperate search for sexual gratification. Marcia does not fit this sense of the word. She reaches orgasm easily, finds sex extremely satisfying and fulfilling, and is about as frigid as a forest fire at the Equator.

  If labels are required, a more accurate one for Marcia Duffy is polymorphous pervert. This was Freud’s term to describe the sexual nature of the child who has not grown to view sex as a function of a certain type of relationship. This sexual attitude, normal in childhood, is considered abnormal in adolescence or adulthood. A psychologist could explain the nature of polymorphous perversion in several thousand polysyllabic words, but its essence may be rendered far more economically.

  If it feels good, the polymorphous pervert will do it.

  “Different people are born for different things,” Marcia told me. “Some people like to work hard at their jobs, really get hung up in their work and the success they’re going after. Others, their big thing is a well-furnished home and a batch of kids. Or wearing beautiful clothes, or traveling all over the world, or the intellectual bag, reading great books and listening to great music and grooving with their own private beautiful thoughts. I’m a simple sort of girl. I like to fuck.”

  Another time she expressed the same sentiment somewhat differently. “Some people just go through life as though it’s something you have to do on the way to the grave. I think a lot of people are like that, my first husband is a good example, they live like they’re putting in time at a boring job and when they finally die they can punch out for the day and go home. Others are lucky, they find the one thing in life that really turns them on. And when that happens to you it’s a blessing and a curse at the same time, because there’s this one thing that when you do it you’re alive and all the rest of the time you’re a walking corpse, and so you have to do it. Whatever it is, whether it’s dangerous or not, whether it’s right or wrong, it doesn’t matter. You have to do it because you know what it feels like to be alive and you can’t be satisfied with anything else. That’s why I can understand people who race cars and climb mountains, I know what moves them. Or people who gamble or drink or take dope. You can call it a hang-up or a habit or a neurosis or whatever you want, but that’s just a way of copping out. I’ve known a few heroin junkies well enough to know why they’re on the stuff, and it’s never once been b
ecause they can’t kick it. They’ll kick it a hundred times and start up again a hundred times, and the reason they stay on it is because they hate being straight and they love being high. Then they get to thirty-five or forty and heroin just doesn’t make it for them any more, they don’t mind being straight and they don’t get a kick out of being high, and then they kick it without any big thing about it at all, they just stop cold.”

  (This, incidentally, is quite true; while it is virtually impossible to cure a heroin addict, spontaneous remission of addiction is an extremely common occurrence among addicts in their late thirties, generally after fifteen to twenty years of addiction.)

  “For me, my thing is sex. It’s my version of racing cars or betting horses or shooting heroin. It turns me on. When I’ve got a cock in me I’m alive and when I don’t I’m dead and that’s all there is to it. You can tell me it’s wrong or it’s disgusting or it’s self-destructive or it’ll rot my teeth and make my hair fall out. None of that matters a damn. As long as it turns me on I’ll do it, and it always turns me on, and if it ever stops I’ll stop. But not until.”

  If it feels good, Marcia Duffy will do it. And it always feels good.

  • • •

  She was born and brought up in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Queens. Her father was an Irishman who had left the Church at an early age and who subsequently denounced religion with the special fervor of the apostate. He worked for the New York City Transit Authority, drank heavily, left home for long periods of time, and died of a liver ailment and general debilitation when Marcia was 13. Her mother, of mixed Slavic stock, ran a small stationery store. The family—there were two younger brothers—lived in rooms behind the store.

  “My father was a bum,” Marcia said, “but he knew what he wanted. He wanted to keep all the distilleries working nights and he did the best he could. When he was drunk he would curse the Church at the top of his lungs. I think he was convinced that religion was nonsense but at the same time he wanted to believe in it because he felt empty without it, and if I had to guess I would say that was what made him drink. Whatever it was, he drank himself to death.