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

by Lawrence Block

  But this column certainly ought to fill a similar role. While it’s true that there has been an emphasis on various aspects of the New Morality, I’ve also been getting letters regularly from married couples who have found ways to enhance their marital relationship among themselves. If Ralph and Sally have such a good thing going, it seems only decent for them to tell the rest of us what they do. That’s how the column works.

  Speaking of which, some of you may recall the letter from Dean, a rubber garment enthusiast looking for sources of rubber and vinyl clothing. Here’s a letter in reply to his query—and a letter, incidentally, which shows how two long-married people learned to spice things up entirely in the context of their own marriage.

  Dear Mr. Wells,

  A couple weeks ago my washing machine broke down and I had to use the laundromat until it was repaired. While at the laundromat I came across the November issue of Swank and read your column. Well, I had never read anything like it. A couple days later while shopping at a bookstore I bought the January issue. Now I am a woman in her mid-forties and have been married over twenty years and can see so much more good than harm coming from a column like this.

  Now concerning your letter from Dean and your comments on rubber clothing and the question “What’s so thrilling about rubber clothing?”—I have a little story to tell you on that subject. I try to be all woman and wear a dress at all times, and while working around the house I always wear an apron. Now these aprons are as much for looks as protection and I have what some people might call a fetish for pretty ones. At first most of my aprons were plastic. One day Jim (my husband) told me about the pretty rubber ones his mother used to wear so I made it a point to buy some like that.

  I remember the first time I had one on Jim went out of his way to hug me or to run his hands over the smooth, soft, thin rubber material of the apron. One night he offered to help me with the dishes and I jokingly took my rubber apron off and had him put it on. Well, Jim did the dishes while I put the kids to bed but he kept that apron on all evening and I could see he enjoyed wearing it.

  Later that night we had sex and as always we were both naked but this night I put that rubber apron on—and it was all I had on. I took the on-top sitting position so I could more or less drape the thin rubber material on his chest. I just could not find words to describe the look on his face as I did this.

  Sometimes when he came home from work in the morning and after the kids had gone to school I would don a pretty rubber apron, sit on the couch, and ask him to sit alongside of me. I would then masturbate him and the contented look on his face—well, then he used to look like a little boy who had just gotten some candy or something for being extra good.

  Jim used to make remarks about how pretty a smooth shiny rain cape or coat some woman would be seen wearing (these rain capes or coats would be vinyl) so as could be expected I had several such pieces of rainwear. I later found out where I could buy an all-rubber rain cape and the first time I wore it while shopping, well Jim had his hands on me every time he had a chance and I could see he was so proud of me. I bought a similar cape for him and often if it was raining we made it a point to go shopping in a big city close by so we could both wear our capes in public together.

  I later found out where to buy other pretty things in rubber such as underwear, dresses, skirts, etc., and our sex life improved so much when I was dressed in such a manner. Now as for rubber garments being tight-fitting: this I do not know about, but I do know that thin smooth rubber, like silk and satin, is feminine. (I failed to mention that I also have a black patent-like dress and coat set that Jim likes to see me in.) If any woman who reads your column like I did wants to put a little more in her married life by dressing feminine in vinyl patent-like or rubber outfits, there are a few places where such items can be bought.

  Trying to answer an article in a magazine is a new experience for me . . . I do hope you can use my personal experience in your column. Again, thank you for being so frank and outspoken.

  Respectfully yours,

  Full-Time Wife (and loves it that way)

  And my thanks to you, Mrs. Full-Time Wife, for being so frank and outspoken yourself. Letters like this one make me very happy. I’ve known of so many cases in which a husband or wife has a particular sexual preference that never gets indulged, either because of fear that the spouse will disapprove or because the spouse knows of the desire but refuses to go along with it. Mrs. F.T.W. comes across as remarkably perceptive and thoughtful, and obviously gets a good deal of pleasure out of her husband’s enthusiasm for the rubber garments she wears.

  In recent columns there’s been a certain amount of discussion of the various causes of fetish behavior, but when all is said and done I don’t see how they make a whole hell of a lot of difference. The important question, it seems to me, is less how we got where we are but where we go next. Why bother rooting out the origin of a fetish when one can so much more easily and profitably find a way to use it not as a hang-up but as an element for expanding the horizons of a sexual relationship?

  Here’s another letter, written not to the column but in response to Women Who Swing Both Ways, a book which has drawn an unusually high volume of mail in the few months it’s been out. The woman who wrote it has been expanding her own sexual horizons lately, and describes what she has gone through in extremely articulate fashion:

  Dear Mr. Wells,

  I just finished reading two of your books: Three Is Not A Crowd and Women Who Swing Both Ways. I was quite impressed with your unsensational handling of a much misunderstood subject.

  I have enclosed an article concerning Motherhood and the Gay Woman. I thought you might be interested in tackling this subject at some future date. I became involved with the Lesbian Mothers Union several months ago . . .

  My husband and I have been married for almost seven years and have a two-year-old son. About two years ago my husband told me he was gay. When we were first married he had told me he had been “dismissed” from a private boarding school when he was sixteen because he got caught making it with another boy. From what he told me then, this was the only incident. I didn’t have reason to suspect otherwise, but nevertheless I did think there was more to it than he was telling me. When he finally told me that he’d been this way all his life and was still attracted to men, I wasn’t that surprised.

  Up until that time I had not had a sexual experience with a woman, with the exception of a few childhood situations of playing “doctor” and the like. I had for a number of years, even for two or three years before we were married, imagined myself having a physical relationship with another woman and wanting it at the same time. I bought a couple of books on lesbianism when we were first married, and although Alan and I have always been quite open with one another, we didn’t discuss it too much.

  Once I knew that this wouldn’t threaten the marriage, I decided to find out about myself. Up until this point my ideas of marriage and being faithful could have been taken out of a fairy tale. I was brought up as a Catholic in a very inhibited family. Nothing having to do with sex was ever mentioned in my presence. In fact I didn’t even know how babies were made until I was about 14 or 15!

  But now that things were out in the open, I could discuss all the things that were bothering me. Of course I wanted to meet someone with whom I could have a relationship but my husband couldn’t help me find anyone. Finally I answered an ad in an underground newspaper. Most of the ads are for couples and singles wanting to swing (which I definitely wasn’t interested in) . . . Fortunately there were also a couple of ads for women who wanted a friendship type of relationship which might develop into a physical relationship at some point. This is exactly what I wanted and I was lucky to meet a very nice woman. We weren’t attracted to each other physically but have remained friends since our first meeting. She brought me to a Gay Women’s Liberation meeting, actually an encounter group with eight or ten members. I started attending these meetings regularly and eventually asked
one of the women (to whom I was attracted) over for dinner. (My husband encouraged me to go to the meetings and we discussed them when I got home. Our relationship both physically and otherwise was getting better and better. It had always been good anyway.)

  Unfortunately Joan was attracted to Alan and he to her. My relationship to her turned out to be one of friendship only. She used to come over to the house quite frequently and would often spend weekends with us. After about four months she and Alan finally went to bed together. I did not find out about it until a couple of weeks afterward. My feelings toward her didn’t change and I wanted to keep her as a friend, but for some reason her relationship with Alan left her very uncomfortable and she told me she couldn’t separate the two of us in her mind and couldn’t see me without unpleasant memories of what had transpired between the two of them. I was hoping time would cure that somehow, but it hasn’t. Now I think perhaps I was foolish and that she used our friendship only so she could see Alan.

  During this time I came out. I was getting so frustrated at one point that I finally picked someone up in a gay bar. It was a one-night-only affair.

  I also got involved in a three-way with my husband and another member of the gay women’s group. That too was only one time, but I have remained friends with this woman and we do see each other occasionally. I did not enjoy the three-way in this instance or in two others that have occurred since then. I just can’t relate to more than one person at a time. I do think if all three people loved each other equally, it might be completely different.

  Within the next year there were several women in my life, all of whom I have remained friends with . . . There have also been a few men that Alan has been involved with, but the affairs have all been casual and he has lost track of all of them. I guess this is one of the basic differences between men and women in general . . .

  Lest August I fell very deeply in love with a woman I had met. We even talked about living together. However one of the conditions would probably have been that my son stay with Alan. As much as I cared for her, I told her in the end I would probably stay with Alan and the baby. I became very confused about myself and what I wanted at this time, started to see a psychotherapist and eventually left Alan for a few months and lived with some straight friends . . .

  The relationship between Alan and me deteriorated almost completely, at least on a physical level. I got to the point where I didn’t even want him to touch me any more. Although my psychotherapist got me to accept my feelings about other women as being good, there was no progress about my being able to respond to Alan. More and more I considered myself gay. Yet what I wanted most was to live with and be able to respond to Alan and find a woman who could love and live with both of us in a group marriage. Alan’s philosophy has more or less reverted to what mine used to be—just being faithful to each other. So he cannot at present see this type of situation developing.

  Within the past couple of months there was one woman that I was seeing that Alan became extremely fond of. In fact when I was seeing Carole, the woman I wanted to live with, Alan would be out with Ruth. For awhile I thought things might really work out the way I’d dreamed. But I wasn’t in love with Ruth and although she liked us both very much, she wasn’t in love either. After a few weeks jealousies arose and I think she began to play us off one against the other . . . and the relationship has finally been more or less terminated.

  I started getting more and more concerned about my son, about what would happen if Alan and I did break up permanently, what to tell him as he grew up about my need to be emotionally close to women . . . So I joined the Lesbian Mothers Union. Unfortunately most of the women involved right now are 100 percent gay and are living alone or with other women. I personally know of many married women in the same situation that I’m in, but they don’t seem to be quite so concerned as the single women do. Nevertheless I think it is something of great importance and that if the general public could accept the fact that lesbian mothers are just as fit and capable of taking care of their children and just as concerned about having them develop into happy, well-adjusted human beings, capable of loving anyone, that life would be much easier . . . Since reading your two books, I’m more back to thinking of myself in terms of being bi not gay. I’ve been back with my husband for two months and things are somewhat improved. In fact the only real problem seems to be a mental block in my being unable to respond to him physically. I just never feel like it. If he initiates something, I want him to quit, but I eventually reach a point where I do get stimulated and am able to reach orgasm. When a woman I care about just touches me, the feelings I get envelop my entire body. I just don’t understand the difference.

  I’m still seeing Carole. We stopped being lovers a couple of months ago, but are very close. I love her just as much as I did before and I guess I think maybe someday when my son is old enough that I will be able to live with her and that she will feel free to love me in return. And yet I love Alan, too. If there was only some way to cut myself in two . . .

  Sincerely,

  Rachel

  While most of the letters in response to Women Who Swing Both Ways have been from women, I have also had some correspondence from men. Here are two that I found particularly interesting, one from a bisexual male, another from a man anxious to develop bisexual expression on his wife’s part.

  Dear J.W.W.,

  I have been reading your column in Swank for several months and have tried without success to locate back issues of your earlier columns . . . I also read what I believe is your latest book, Women Who Swing Both Ways, and that is what prompts this letter.

  My interest centers on the last chapter in the book concerning the bisexual male, his experiences with group sex, discovery of his own bi tendencies, etc., and the unfortunately frustrating life he leads now. I say this because I too am a bisexual male, although it is only recently that I have been able to admit this to myself.

  I am forty-seven, married, have three children in their teens, work as an executive with a food store chain. I’m sure on the surface I strike people as a fairly representative specimen of what Mr. Spiro Agnew calls the Silent Majority. A typical pillar of the community never involved in a scandal in all my life, and yet for the past thirty years I have had occasional homosexual contacts almost on a regular basis.

  The reason I say that I have only admitted my bisexuality to myself in recent years is that until that time my homosexual contacts took one form and one form only. In plain words, I would pick up some “queer” and let him suck my cock. On rare occasions—I don’t think it has happened more than a dozen times in all those thirty years—I would meet one who wanted to be fucked in the ass, in which case I would oblige him. This was always distasteful to me at the time—I never practiced the act with a woman and never much desired it with a male either. But since recognizing the real truth about myself I have come to enjoy it, and have also come to wonder what it would be like to be fucked in the ass by another man, although I have yet to try the experience.

  My feeling for so many years was that there was nothing queer on my part so long as I was the one on the receiving end of a blow job. I felt that a proper blow job was the most utterly exquisite sensation a man could experience, and I had found that no woman could possibly perform it with the artistry of which homosexual males are capable. My wife is willing to perform fellatio but is simply not good at it and never will be. I have received blow jobs from female prostitutes and although they at least know what the hell they are doing, there is still no comparison. When I read of women saying that no man can perform cunnilingus as well as another woman can, I do not find the statement at all surprising. It has been my observation that you have to possess a penis in order to really know what to do with one, and I think it stands to reason that the same thing would hold true of a clitoris and vagina . . .

  Nevertheless, I did feel much guilt from these homosexual contacts. While I don’t recall worrying that I might be “queer” myself, the distinct
ion, real enough in my own mind, was not likely to be appreciated if I were arrested or blackmailed or anything along those lines. Periodically I would swear to give up this secret form of sex, occasionally doing without it for months on end, but sooner or later I would always find myself returning to it. I suppose my contacts averaged one a week over the years, although sometimes there would be long stretches with no homosexual relations at all and at other times I would have such relations virtually on a daily basis . . . How the change came about I really do not know, but there was a time when I admitted to myself that I wanted to know what this act (a blow job) felt like from the other end of things. I was certain that I would be very good at it; after having been the recipient of so many blow jobs, it only stood to reason that I would know how to perform capably . . .

  Still, it was some time between knowing I wanted to do this and having the nerve to go through with it. Ultimately I took the great step. I believe you mentioned in a book or perhaps in one of the columns the idea that it is better to try something than to spend your life wanting to try it. This is more or less what I had decided. Finding the thought nagging at me constantly, I had to try it and find out once and for all.

  The experience was as I had thought it would be. Enormously thrilling and satisfying to me, and I am sure the man I had it with had no idea he was my first . . . Afterward there was much shame and swearing to myself I would never do it again. This same shame and everything recurred each time I performed the act for several months, until I gradually grew into my new self-image.

  I recognize now that I am bisexual. I have read the nonsense that there is no such thing and that bisexuals are really homosexuals who can’t admit it to themselves and thus go on having sex with women to prove themselves. This is a lot of out-and-out crap as I am sure you know. I find my wife exciting and enjoy sex with her for its own sake. I also occasionally patronize a call girl, not in this town but on business trips . . .