Doing It! - Going Beyond the Sexual Revolution (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior Book 13)

by Lawrence Block

  The underground press is similarly the most accessible means of contacting other persons sharing your interests. I don’t put people in touch with each other, either through this column or otherwise, so please don’t anybody ask.

  I wonder if the psychiatrist’s explanation of the origin of Dean’s rubber fixation is all there is to it. Although it does seem as though most fetishes arise because of a coincidental linkage of an artifact or substance with the first realization of sexual desire. Somehow a lot of those explanations strike me as a little too pat.

  Dear Mr. Wells,

  . . . In The Male Hustler, you say that many hustlers, particularly the rough trade type, consider themselves heterosexual and only go with men for money. In Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask, it says that the one thing no male hustler will do is have any form of relations with women, and that they are homo all the way.

  Who is right, you or Dr. Reuben?

  Sanford

  I am.

  A lot of Dr. David Reuben’s remarks on homosexuality have drawn harsh criticism, especially from militant homosexuals. And a lot of his facts on the subject sound an awful lot like opinions. This one particular fact is utter nonsense. There are some male prostitutes who are exclusively homosexual, but there are certainly a great many who are not.

  I don’t know how the good doctor came up with that answer. Maybe he wasn’t sure . . . and was afraid to ask.

  I’ve had unusually large correspondence on The Male Hustler, esp. considering how short a time the book has been on the stands. Either it’s selling well (which would be nice) or it’s reaching a lot of people who need a chance to open themselves up on the subject. (Which would be nicer still, come to think of it.) Several have offered further correspondence, so you may be reading about them here in the near future.

  If you read Group Grope’s debut in the October ’71 issue, you may recall a letter from Alfred, who was interested in sharing his wife with another man. I’ve had another short letter from him since, and he’s still been unable to find a likely third wheel. Here’s another letter in much the same vein—

  Dear Sir,

  I have read with interest your column . . . I have reference to the gentleman who expressed the desire to observe his wife during sexual involvement with another male.

  My wife too has confessed to a desire for an experience of this kind—during moments of intense sexual arousal. Following such moments, the impulse seems to subside, unfortunately.

  Would your experience suggest some useful strategy that might be employed to persuade her to fulfill this desire in actuality?

  Please, if you are able, put me in contact with the proper channels in Canada where suitable arrangements can be made.

  M.J.T.

  The channels, such as they are, are the same as described in my reply to Dean’s letter above. There are several tabloids published out of Toronto and Montreal that contain columns of personal ads you might find useful. Generally speaking, the easiest contact to find is a single male for a threesome. Of course this is no guarantee that you’ll get what you want. Such guarantees don’t exist.

  How do you talk her into it? You might first consider whether you really want to talk her into it. A great many women are able to entertain fantasies during “moments of intense sexual arousal” that lose their charm when cooler heads (among other organs) prevail. You could try helping her to realize that you won’t think less of her for engaging in such sexual experimentation. But first of all make sure you won’t; what seems good to you in fantasy might shake you up more than you think in real life. And then again it might not. Witness another letter on the same theme, this one in response to a book:

  Dear John,

  My wife and I just finished your book Three Is Not A Crowd and we both got a big charge out of it. I don’t know what you would call us but we are both in our early fifties and our kids are all grown up and seemingly happily married, so we have an apartment and really enjoy ourselves.

  Of course as you get older, I suppose, you delve into more fantasies, and as one wears thin you dream up another. When I met my wife she had been running around with some of the older college boys, and I knew they got around, so she interested me. I always had hot nuts but the only thing I had ever done was “beat it,” shoot on a few girls’ bellies, and screw around with a couple of my younger sisters. I was still looking for my first piece.

  Well, we met and both of us liked to dance and drink so we got along fine. We still argue whether I balled her the first night or the second but we balled every chance we got. We tried everything from buggering to going through all the positions. She has always been terrific at everything including plating it, as the English say. (i.e., fellatio—JWW) Rain, mud, shit or blood, she’d screw.

  I got interested in her past experiences so, to get me hot, she’d tell me about the guys she’d balled clear back to the time a schoolteacher broke her cherry. She told me about a plumber who used to come to the house when she was real little and would play with her clitoris but he never tried anything else.

  When we got married she knew I didn’t care if she got balled from time to time, so when we were moving into our first apartment a guy was going to fix a table for me so he took my wife along. He banged hell out of her and her old pussy was throbbing and dripping when she got home and of course she wanted more so she went through all the details and I finished the job.

  During the war one of her school buddies that always liked her (but they had never got together) came to visit. We drank up a storm and the talk got dirtier. I undressed her and put her nude in his lap and away we went taking turns. She liked this, and I did too, so it set up a pattern. She knew I didn’t care, in fact I got a big charge out of it, and she felt free to ball on the slightest provocation . . .

  I had a job that took a lot of entertaining and my wife was very helpful. Of course we never broke the rule—“Never get your meat where you get your bread and butter”—but we were in with the in crowd of all the other businesses. We’d be sitting at a bar with our buddies at a hotel and all of a sudden she’d disappear with one of the boys and be back in a while. One ad salesman caught on and the two of them had a blast quite a number of times.

  Toward the end of our drinking career she took an interest in blacks . . . Altogether she’s had seven blacks and wants more . . .

  She’s broken in a lot of young men in her day and really likes to train ’em. We had friends in the west where we went for the last two winters and we’d stay over at their place at times. She was crazy about the seventeen-year-old boy and as soon as everyone got to bed those two would get at it. We just got a letter from his parents and they told us he was starting to get interested in the girls. Ha—my wife says he can ball like a mink and she loves it. I don’t know what kind of animal I am but it sure is my bag. Lots of times with different men I get to watch and we trade off . . .

  We went down to Mexico and the night guard would stop by and ball the old lady all the time. On the way out of the country a guard wanted to go through our trailer and she went with him. It took so long I asked her what the hell was going on and she asked me what the hell I thought was going on. She said he screwed the ass off her.

  We’ve been off the booze for four years now but we still like our screwing. I guess I’m nuts or something but I can count on my right hand the number of stray pieces I’ve had in my life. We switched with one couple one time and I’d like to do more. Maybe you could get me information . . .

  My wife’s really interested in balling it with another woman, too. She was interested before, and your book convinced her she wanted to try it. The closest she’s ever come to anything like it was her and her cousin playing with each other’s twats. Let us know what you can. You’re invited over to ball the old lady any night you’re in town . . .

  One night our fantasy was listing all the guys she balled and we stopped at 60, including the hound dog we had that she screwed for years
. . . Another night we added up the number of stray pieces she had and it was well over 250 not counting me or the dog—and I want to screw all the time . . .

  By the way, if she wants a continuous or long orgasm she gets out the old Niagara hand massager, puts a little Vaseline on her twat, and goes to town. She still acts shy about things but I think she might become sexually liberated one of these days. She’s weighed a hundred pounds since the day I met her. Not too much of any tits, but a nipple to nibble on and an ass that snaps . . .

  You think she might become sexually liberated one of these days, do you?

  Uh-huh.

  I just don’t know if the world’s ready for her. I mean, uh, she sounds fairly unchained as it is . . .

  There was quite a bit omitted from this letter, as the dot-dot-dot sequences indicate. This was largely for space reasons but also because a certain amount of material was frankly obscene. As I’ve said before, I like horny mail as well as the next man, but there’s a limit to what deserves to be in print. It seemed evident to me that George got much the same kick writing the letter as he does from his wife’s activities, which is all well and good, but this column does have a veneer of reputation to maintain.

  Interesting how this differs from similar cases we’ve discussed here. George never had to talk his wife into sexual experimentation. Instead she seems to have been what Freudians used to call polymorphous perverse, and she was the more experienced one of the pair, initiating him sexually as she now enjoys initiating other boys. (I’ve read in several places that this sort of relationship is found more often than any other among swingers. This has emphatically not been my observation; I’ve found it rather rare, with most swinging couples consisting of husbands who talked their wives into it, sometimes with virtually no resistance, sometimes with quite a bit.)

  You may wonder how much of all this is true. I would myself on the basis of what I’ve printed, so let me add that it was accompanied by semi-nude photos of George and his wife, each of them posed rather originally on top of a small coffee table with arms outstretched. The letter also included a street address and phone number, neither of which I’ll give out, so please don’t ask.

  I may be in touch with George, and may visit him if I’m in his area, though whether or not I’ll accept his invitation in full I don’t know. Rest assured, faithful Group Gropers, that I’ll keep you posted.

  Speaking of keeping posted, I’ve had another letter from Margaret, a woman in her fifties whom I interviewed and reported on in the November ’71 column. Briefly, she had never been married although engaged ten times, had had affairs with most of her fiancés, discontinued sexual activity completely ten years ago when she quit her job in New York to keep house for her invalid mother. A late-night radio interview of the author of a book on group sex made her aware of the sexual revolution for the first time, and she began reading everything available on the subject, going to porno movies around Times Square, and doing everything but take the final step of making an actual contact. The interview concluded with Margaret quite undecided as to whether or not she should carry her program any further.

  Here’s her letter:

  Dear Mr. Wells,

  No, I haven’t forgotten you (I had dropped her a note to find out what was new with her—JWW) but I’ve been in the midst of my mother’s attack of facial palsy. It’s so disheartening to see a beautiful woman become disfigured without any symptoms. Constant care and her face has returned to 95 percent normal.

  Yes, this miracle helped me to stay square and not pursue my temptations.

  Many thanks for your time.

  Margaret

  Proving, I guess, that one man’s disaster is another man’s miracle. I wonder whether Margaret’s story ends there, or if there will be more to it. It should be interesting to find out.

  Meanwhile, here’s one for the Department of Unusual Ideas to be Tried at Your Own Risk:

  Mr. John Warren Wells,

  Here’s a piece of oddball information that may be of interest to you in your sex activity research. For the past fifty years I have been an avid disciple of sodomy. The happiest days of my life were in the Navy and Coast Guard. My idea of heaven is to have my rectum filled with a big hard penis.

  Here’s the bit that I thought you might be interested in. My anus and rectum has been stretched to such an extent that I can take a bottle three inches in diameter. Usually I set the bottle on the floor and, squatting over it, I lower myself on it and push it in until it hits bottom. Then I rapidly raise and lower myself on it one hundred fifty or two hundred times. I am a senior citizen now and my lovers are few and far between so this is how I satisfy my yen to be screwed.

  My woman can push her hand into my rectum to the wrist bone. She presses her thumb and fingertips together and slips it into me.

  I don’t know if an anus that can be stretched to three inches is unheard of or not but it must be unusual.

  Currently I am using a pint-size Heinz vinegar bottle that is only two-and-three-quarters inches in diameter!!

  Saul

  It seems to me that I ought to be able to make some sort of smartass remark about no-deposit bottles and ecology and all, but I don’t think I’m going to.

  A thought occurs to me, admittedly not for the first time. I frequently receive letters similar in type to Saul’s, recounting a relatively uncommon sexual practice. Many of them are the sort which can be engaged in for a lifetime without being known by anyone but the person who practices them. (Consider Dean’s letter, for example; for years he thought he was the only rubber fancier in the world.)

  Not too long ago, when sexual idiosyncrasies were discussed only in medical books, and then often in Latin, the handful of marriage manuals that were then available confined their scope to the most ordinary possibilities for heterosexual copulation, and only a few of the most daring ones went out on a limb and said that oral-genital relations were all right if neither party found them distasteful, and so long as they were not carried to extremes.

  (How, incidentally, are you supposed to carry them to an extreme? By biting? I never did understand what they meant.)

  The New Freedom and all it embodies is responsible for the change in general popular media coverage of sex, both in its common and relatively uncommon forms. Group Grope obviously exists because of this new openness, and is in turn a part of the New Freedom by virtue of its existence.

  The New Freedom does have results I’m not unequivocally thrilled about. The quantity of really rotten pornography is not something I can look on as a literary renaissance. I’m not objecting to it on substance, but that it is so unutterably bad. Why should it have to be so boring? So thoroughly dull?

  Understand, I don’t think rottenness is justification for censorship. I don’t think any of the arguments I keep hearing for censoring make any substantial sense. I’m just amazed that customers for the real garbage still exist. Just plain porn in and of itself will turn a great many people on for a while, but sooner or later most of us become selective. But evidently there is a body of readers out there who never get glutted and go through life buying books the pages of which they turn with one hand.

  Strange.

  To get back to the subject, I think all of what’s on the market, the crud included, justifies its existence every time it clues someone in on the fact that he’s not the only shoelace freak in the world, or the only person who likes to pour melted chocolate on his wife’s navel and lick it out (I just made that one up, but I’d say eleven-to-five somebody out there does it twice a week) or, oh, you name it.

  You wouldn’t believe how many married persons, male and female, go on masturbating regularly even when they have standing opportunity for coitus. Nor would you believe how many of them think it’s unusual and abnormal and that it makes them one in a million . . .

  Dear Mr. Wells,

  I have just read your column Group Grope in Swank Magazine, October issue, 1971. I am writing immediately to say that I enjoyed it and
found it very interesting. I hope you will go on to write the column for many years. (Me too—JWW)

  Here is a letter you may publish, bearing in mind your policy of changing names. I note you guarantee to reply to all letters received whether used in your column or not. You may print this letter or throw it away but do not feel you have to reply as I am sure you are currently being flooded with mail. Well maybe this will be interesting enough to pay for the time you spend reading it.

  My wife and I tried swinging and gave it up because of neither of us liking it if she was with another man. She liked to see me with another woman and I liked to see her with a woman, or for the two of us and another woman to be in a threesome situation.

  But this is easier said than done. We have some threesomes we have arranged through the magazines but for the most part it is couples looking for a girl, not a girl looking for a couple. As we are in our late forties and prefer girls younger than ourselves you can see it is not a satisfactory situation for us nine times out of ten.

  I will tell you how we have solved this, which may be something new to you. Or for all we know it could be very popular although we have heard of no other couple doing it. Simply it is that we use prostitutes.

  This was my wife’s idea which I immediately pooh-poohed when she first brought it up. I had had some experience with prostitutes though admittedly not much. Also it was some time ago when I did so and they were the streetwalker types and not the call girls of today.

  It was my understanding that prostitutes would refuse to have sex with a couple or to engage in lesbian activities unless they happened to be lesbians themselves, as I know some are said to be. Or else that they would charge more for this than we could possibly afford.

  My wife said they would do anything for money, and to make a long story short she was right. I would make a date with a girl on the phone and my wife would wait downstairs while I told the girl what we wanted. If she agreed as almost always happens I would go down and bring my wife up and we would go to it. Many girls have said they prefer this to the run of the mill “trick” but that can be taken with a grain of salt, for they might say so in an effort to get us to come back. But it does show that they are happy to have our business!