The Harrad Experiment

by Robert H. Rimmer

  “I think we ought to try that for a minute,” Stanley said grinning. And we did! ... But pretty soon Stanley had edged his way back from my toes and was kissing me between the legs. “This is better, and more interesting,” he said. “You taste quite nice.”

  “I can’t get over the feeling that it’s not a nice thing to do,” I said.

  “You don’t like it?”

  “I didn’t say that. But the books give it such horrible Latin names.”

  “All the books say it’s quite normal marital behavior. Hey! You bit me!”

  “Only nibbled,” I chuckled. “But what I want to know is why? Why do you have the compulsion to kiss me that way? Nothing I’ve ever read explains why.”

  “You don’t feel the compulsion?”

  “A little,” I admitted. “But not so much as you.”

  “But you do like it when I kiss you?”

  “Stanley,” I shivered. “You don’t need an answer to that ... and if you don’t stop, this experiment is going to have a rapid conclusion. You still haven’t answered why?”

  “Aren’t most animals attracted into propagation by the male and female odor?”

  “Stanley . . . please, stop. I’m afraid I may have an odor.”

  “You do. You smell like warm hay drying in a barn. Very aphrodiciacal!”

  “Okay ... that does it! I’m going to read to you from Watt’s book.”

  Once again joined, I started to read but Stanley interrupted me. “The last chapter called Consummation is the best thing I have ever read on the male—female relationship.”

  “I agree,” I said fervently. “Listen to some of the things I have underlined: ‘This makes it the more strange that conventional spirtuality rejects the bodily union of man and woman as the most fleshy animal and degrading phase of human activity—a rejection showing the extent of its faulty perception and its misinterpretation of the natural world. It rejects the most concrete and creative form of man’s relationship to the world outside his organism, because it is through the love of a woman that he can say not only of her but what is other, “This is my body.” ... All this is peculiarly true of love and sexual communion between man and woman. This is why it has such a strong spiritual and mystical character when spontaneous and why it is so degrading and frustrating when forced ... Sex is therefore the virtual religion of very many people, the end to which they accord more devotion than any other. To the conventionally religious minded this worship of sex is a dangerous and positively sinful substitute for the worship of God. But this is because sex, or any pleasure, as ordinarily pursued is never a true fullfillment. For this very reason it is not God, but not at all because it is “merely physical” ... Sexuality is not a separate compartment of human life; it is a radiance pervading every human relationship ... A relationship of this kind cannot adequately be discussed in manuals of sexual hygiene ... Their use is consequence rather than the cause of a certain inner attitude, since they suggest themselves almost naturally to partners who take their love as it comes, contemplatively, and are in no hurry to grasp anything from it ... and to see that pleasure grasped is no pleasure ... According to Tantric symbolism, the energy of the Kundalini is aroused but simply dissipated in ordinary sexual activity. It can, however, be transmuted in a prolonged embrace in which the male orgasm is reserved and the sexual energy diverted into contemplation of the divine as incarnate in the woman ... Long before the male orgasm begins, the sexual impulse manifests itself as what can only be described, psychologically, as a melting warmth between the partners so that they seem veritably to flow into each other. To put it in another way, “physical lust” transforms itself into the most considerate and tender form of love imaginable ... Sexual love in the contemplative spirit simply provides the conditions in which we can be aware of our mutual interdependence and “oneness” ...

  “Stanley ...” I stopped reading and kissed him. “I think this man, Alan Watts, has given, in this book, the most important insights on sex and love I’ve ever read. It gives me goose-pimples to read it . . . a sense of identity with another person who thinks and feels the way I feel.”

  “There’s only one trouble,” Stanley said. “To achieve the heights that Watts says are possible requires a tremendous ability to surrender yourself to another individual. The key then is a high degree of education not only in sex as practiced this way, but also along the lines of philosophy, psychology in fact every aspect of education. What I mean is that two neurotic people could not make love this way. They simply wouldn’t know how to escape from themselves ... into the other person.”

  “Let me read a little more,” I said trying to ignore his happy kisses on my breast. “Listen: ‘One finds out what it means to simply look at the other person, to touch hands or listen to the voice. If these contacts are not regarded as leading to something else, but rather allowed to become one’s consciousness, as if the source of activity lay in them and not the will, they become sensations of immense subtlety and richness ... The point is to discover the wonder of simple contacts ...The psychic counterpart of this bodily and sensuous intimacy is a similar openness of attention to each other’s thoughts—a form of communion which can be as sexually “charged” as physical contact. This is the feeling that one can express one’s thoughts to the other just as they are since there is not the slightest compulsion to assume a pretended character. This is perhaps the rarest and most difficult aspect of any human relationship, since in ordinary social converse the spontaneous arising of thought is more carefully hidden than anything else. Between unconscious and humorless people who do not know and accept their own limitations it is almost impossible ... To unveil the flow of thought can therefore be an even greater sexual intimacy than physical nakedness ... If no attempt is made to induce the orgasm by bodily motion, the interpenetration of the sexual centers becomes a channel of the most vivid psychic interchange ... The marvellously overwhelming urge to turn themselves inside out for each other ... Rare as gaiety may be in cultures where there is a tie between sex and guilt, the release from self brings laughter in love-making ... The height of sexual love, coming upon us of itself, is one of the most total experiences of relationship to the other of which we are capable ... For what lovers feel for each other in this moment is no other than adoration in the full religious sense, and its climax is almost literally the pouring of their lives into each other. Such adoration which is due God, would indeed be idolatrous were it not that, in that moment, love takes away the illusion and shows the beloved for what he or she in truth is ... not the socially pretended person but the naturally divine.’” “Stanley . . . Stanley . . .” I whispered undulating in response to him. “We’ve done remarkable well for our first attempt. Don’t you agree?”

  Watt’s book thudded on the floor beside the bed.

  “Unquestionably, Sheila.” Stanley grinned at me.

  “Do you want to fall asleep this way?”

  “I’m afraid I’ve passed the point of no return.”

  I kissed him wildly. “Oh, God! Darling ... darling ... so have I. So have I!”

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF HARRY SCHACHT

  August, after the Second Year

  So I am writing this in jail. A few miles west of Province-town. In this first half day of incarceration the philosopher, latent in me, bubbles through to the surface. I can now prove something or other. Possibly, that males and females even after some years of familiarity with the pros and cons of each other need not necessarily lead dull and unimaginative lives. Or perhaps, like some other famous personages in history, Thoreau and Gandhi for example, I have discovered that the confines of a narrow cell are conducive to reflection.

  The truth is that in the past year the Tenhausen’s journal keeping project simply hadn’t dovetailed into the pace of the fast life I have been leading. Admittedly, calm appraisal in the jug and via the pen is somewhat difficult. I have two argumentative cellmates, Jack and Stanley, who feel that I should participate in their heated discussion ab
out the vagaries of destiny and fate, versus the general perversity of the human animal. Forsaking me, a scribbling idiot, they are now carrying on a long-distance discussion with Beth, Sheila and Valerie. Yes, our female compatriots are likewise imprisoned in this red jail house. They are out of sight, for propriety’s sake, in another row of cells at the rear of the building. But definitely, shrilly ... they are not out of hearing.

  The six of us, quietly baking, as a hot August Saturday afternoon sun beats on the flat roof of this dreary penitentiary, seem to be the only occupants of this steaming Cape Cod oven. Stanley, Jack and I have stripped to our shorts. In what state of undress our female mentors are is impossible to determine since we can’t see them.

  Tearful, rescue-us telegrams have been dispatched to my father and Phillip Tenhausen ... but as the sun sinks slowly in the west it seems quite obvious that no one is going to arrive to bail out the impenitent six before Monday. Beth, Valerie and Sheila have either been excoriating the plumbing or giggling and laughing hysterically as they recall the events that led up to our capture by the town constable, Ebeneezer Schnook. It really should be his last name! Now the girls are harmonizing ... “Write me a letter. Send it by Smokey ... care of this little ol’ Cape Cod pokey.”

  All of which brings me back to the facts of life. If my father arrives before Phillip Tenhausen, I am obviously going to listen to the longest lecture in the history of long lectures on the subject of Harrad College. The rest of my œllmates are indeed fortunate. Their parents live a considerable distance from this stronghold of Puritanism. I can only pray that Rachel and Jake are in the Catskills on vacation. If they receive their telegram before Phil Tenhausen, and after a mad dash to the Cape, they discover their only son’s pecadillo first hand; well, they may be able to laugh at the subject of yentizing around when a Jewish comedian on the borscht circuit makes a “funny” but as a practical family matter it quite obviously won’t be admitted as a fit subject for laughter.

  So please, Phil ... discover us before Jake (my father’s name is actually Saul but he tolerates Jake) arrives with his moustache bristling, and behind him my mother wailing; “Es passt nit! I told you Saul, Harry’s not too old for a potch before he becomes a paskudnick.”

  Before InSix (as we are now known) started out on this mad junket, I had worked the summer at Mass. General Hospital and then spent a week at home. Jake was pleased, and Mother with tears of joy displayed her future Doctor to all the ladies of Hadassah. She was careful to mention only Cambridge, Massachusetts as the locale of my endeavors, hoping, obviously, that by assodation her friends would assume her son’s pedagogical training was being acquired at a more venerable institution in the same area.

  Several times Jake corralled me for a man-to-man discussion. “Harry,” he said, “I’m worried about you. Why don’t you quit this Harrad College monkey shines and switch over to a regular college?”

  “Why?” I demanded. “Phil Tenhausen tells me that reports he has on me from “A” University are absolutely tops. All I have to do is keep in the same groove and I can walk into any medical school in the country.”

  ‘Oy, such a groove,” Jake sighed. “How can you keep it up, Harry? My God, a little piece of....” Jake smiled apologetically. “Well, sex is all right. A growing boy has to learn ... but everyday you are living with that little blonde meidele. Day in, day out. You’ll wear yourself out!”

  “Jake,” I grinned. “It’s like any muscle. It grows stronger wien exercise!”

  “Ha ... you make jokes. But I still say it isn’t healthy. I was reading yesterday about morals on the campus. All this sex so young. You’ll grow bored. I was never with a woman until I was twenty-two. Now ... everywhere you read, boys and girls in college going to bed in their college rooms, yet. And brassy enough to insist this is their right without having even earned it. Mach a leben and then you have the right. The world has gone to hell. Now a man can only “get himself security,” I read it ! ... In bed with a girl. Some security.”

  I knew it was hopeless but once again I tried to explain Harrad to Jake. “You are wrong about the boredom and security bit,” I told him. “You see, the stuff you have been reading is not Harrad.

  “It’s the way most colleges and universities are right now. Harrad accepts the male-female relationship as completely normal for men and women in their late teens and accepts sexual relations without the requirement of marriage. Harrad has simply leapt forward fifty or one hundred years. The colleges you are reading about and their sex problems are simply not equivalent to Harrad. At the typical college today, the kids are fighting for sexual freedom without social meaning. Sure they will become bored. By the time they are juniors in college many of them have settled into a kind of early monogamy without marriage. They seek love in a moral climate that says if pre-marital sex must exist, then it must ape monogamous marriage; that way it is still guilt ridden but it is permissible. I feel sorry for them. In this environment these students are in effect pretending marriage; playing at being husband and wife. They are discovering that neither the boy nor the girl can give the security or identity that they are demanding from each other. A broken engagement becomes a divorce.

  “Harrad students don’t do that. One of the common denominators the Tenhausens use in accepting students at Harrad is based on an early analysis made by Abraham Maslow; what Maslow labeled “a dominance feeling syndrome.” People of this type are “self confident, socially poised, relaxed, extroverted, have high self-esteem, are self assured, have a feeling of general capability, are unconventional, have less respect for rules, have a tendency to ‘use’ people, have freer personality expression, are somewhat more secure, have an autonomous code of ethics, are more independent, less religious, more masculine, less polite, and have a love of adventure, novelty and new experience.”

  I grinned at Jake who was listening to me in a state of semi-shock. “Not all the Harrad kids have these attributes, but they have some. After a year or two, they acquire more. As a result they don’t seek “security” from each other. In fact they don’t expect or demand anything from one another but a willingness to accept the other person as an amazing human being. It is an interesting side-light on Maslow’s study that people of this type when they are married, do not as a rule end up in divorce courts. They make the most successful marriages particularly when they mate with a person with similar attributes. Now place this Harrad student in an environment where sex is accepted as a quite normal enjoyment, and love is based on admiration and deep liking for another person as a person, you have something entirely different from the Western concepts of romantic love and passion. Because I love Beth and she loves me doesn’t exclude Shelia or Stanley, and other kids that may come within our orbit of interests. United, we stand to have more interesting and vital lives than we would performing independent love duets. With only two of us seeing our own reflecdons in each other’s eyes for a lifetime, a certain glazing would set in caused simply by overexposure ... not lack of love.

  “Oh, my God,” Jake exploded. “All you college kids do is spout words. Do you honestly know what the hell you are talking about?”

  “Sure,” I said, “but I can see that you don’t.”

  “look. son ... it’s an insane idea ... and now if I understand you, you are trying to tell that every one in your school is going to bed with everyone ebe.”

  “The males with the females, not the males with the males, or the females with the females,” I chuckled.

  “I should hope not,” Jake said sourly. “But you can’t do that all your life.”

  “Why not? A great many married people in this country are doing just that right now ... and it all ends up in divorce courts, or gets pretty messy.”

  “You are going to be a doctor. Who could trust a doctor who lived like you do at Harrad. You’d have no patients.”

  “You trust Doctor Neisner. I heard Mother telling a friend of hers that Doctor Neisner has a girl friend. His wife knows it and couldn’t car
e less. Old Jewish custom, really. Have you read the Old Testament lately?”

  Jake scowled at me and changed the subject. “So someday you are going to marry this blonde girl”

  “Her name is Beth.”

  “Will she change her religion?”

  “Who cares?”

  “I do. Your mother does. You will. If your wife does not change for you, you can never become a member of the congregation. A good Jew’s wife is an extension of himself.”

  “Not Beth. She will be herself.”

  “What kind of Jew will you be?”

  “A happy man first, and a Jew second.”

  “You would give up your faith?”

  “No. I have endless faith ... in man.”

  Jake looked at me puzzled. “So this is the kind of education I am paying for?”

  I hugged him. “This is what happens when you love ... as any good Jew knows.”

  If Jake was bewildered then, he’s going to be more bewildered when he finds his son arrested for indecent exposure, and on a morals charge involving orgiastic sex behavior. Ebeneezer Schnook just returned with our supper. Baked beans, of course, donated by the Women’s Auxiliary who are having their Saturday night supper and bingo game in the cellar of the church across the street. With Ebeneezer were two reporters from the local newspaper.