Table of Contents

Introduction

More Like a Nurse than a Hooker

The Right Not to be Gay

Swinging as Therapy

Lay Analysis

A Good Excuse for an Orgy

Let Them Cure Each Other

In Praise of the Electric Toothbrush

About the Author

The Sex Therapists

John Warren Wells
Lawrence Block

copyright © 1972, 2012, Lawrence Block

All Rights Reserved

Introduction

In the following pages you will make the acquaintance of:

A prostitute who accepts referrals from psychiatrists and thinks of herself as more like a nurse than a hooker . . .

A psychiatrist who helps homosexuals function as heterosexuals . . .

A couple who engage in group sex to learn how to be better lovers . . .

A couple of psychotherapists who seduce their female patients . . .

A self-appointed guru who runs orgies and calls them encounter groups . . .

A clinical psychologist who pairs off patients for sexual experimentation . . .

And a woman who found her way to sexual fulfillment with an electric toothbrush.

And you just might wonder what in the hell they’ve got in common.

Well, I certainly wouldn’t blame you for wondering. What puts all of these people between the covers of the same book is that their experiences all illustrate various facets of the topic of sexual therapy.

Sexual therapy is a relatively recent phenomenon. In one sense it’s been around forever—or at least as long as there have been some people whose sex lives have been less than ideal, which I would certainly presume dates from the expulsion from Eden. But until fairly recently, the methods of dealing with various forms of sexual dysfunction seemed to be more concerned with causes than treatment. Conventional psychotherapy operated more or less on the premise that some aspect of a personality was responsible for a person’s inability to function in the sexual sphere. Through various forms of talk-therapy, the patient was encouraged to understand how previous experiences had created inhibitions of one sort or another, with the idea in mind that understanding would lead to resolution of the underlying problems, and hence to amelioration of the sexual difficulty. Sometimes this worked and sometimes it didn’t.

In recent years, many responsible persons have come to the conclusion that, whatever the underlying causes of emotional discontent, the first step toward improvement lies in dealing with precisely those problems which beset the patient here and now. According to this school of thought, if a man has a morbid fear of raincoats, the first thing to do is cure his fear of raincoats. With that out of the way, one may inquire into the origin of the fear. Or one may not bother inquiring into the origin of the fear, simply contenting oneself with the knowledge that the poor fellow no longer goes into an anxiety attack every time he sees a yellow slicker.

The value of this orientation is especially apparent in the area of sexual problems. If a man is sexually impotent because he hates his mother, his feelings toward her are not his main problem; his main problem, and the thing most likely to interfere with his enjoyment of his life, is that he cannot get an erection. Investigate the origins of his hatred for his mother and he may still remain impotent. Cure his impotence, render him sexually adequate, and he very well may go on hating his mother—a sentiment which may be unfortunate, but which is a hell of a lot easier to live with than impotence.

The major breakthrough in dealing directly with human sexual problems was achieved by the Masters and Johnson clinic in St. Louis. After an extraordinary investigation of human sexual response, Masters and Johnson turned their attention to the problems of sexual dysfunction and acted on the premise that it was possible to cure sexual problems simply by curing them, that specific techniques could be applied to specific problems and that successful results could be achieved in this manner.

We won’t examine Masters and Johnson at length here if only because there are several books available which cover the subject far better than I could. The interested reader would be well advised to consult the second Masters and Johnson book, Human Sexual Inadequacy. If it proves difficult reading (as it does for most people) there are several books available which, in essence, translate M and J into basic English. In addition, the reader might wish to familiarize himself with The Couple, by an anonymous husband and wife who took their sexual problems to Masters and Johnson; the program is explained very intelligibly, and if one can get past the mild nauseating style in which the book is written, it can be valuable. Also revealing is Surrogate Wife, by Valerie X. Scott as told to Herbert d’H Lee, the former a pseudonym for a sexual surrogate employed by Masters and Johnson, the latter a pseudonym for a successful novelist. I’m not sure how strictly accurate the book is, but it’s very much worth reading for its insight into M and J methodology, and it’s well written.

This book concerns itself with various ways other therapists have adapted M and J techniques to suit their own therapeutic practices. It deals, too, with approaches of other professionals to the idea of sexual therapy, and with ways in which individuals have attempted by themselves to deal with their sexual problems.

•  •  •

An important point:

I am not a psychiatrist, a psychologist, a psychotherapist, or much of anything other than a writer. I do not endorse or condemn any of the techniques or therapeutic approaches discussed in the following pages. I do have my own opinions, and I’m sure they will be detected fairly easily in certain instances, but these are the opinions of a layman and should not be considered as endowed with authority.

•  •  •

Another point, which holds true for all of my books but is particularly pertinent here:

All of the names in case history material have been deliberately altered, and physical descriptions and geographical data have been reworked to the point where identification of any of these people is absolutely out of the question. I have taken particular pains to render the professional persons interviewed and/or discussed utterly unrecognizable. Furthermore, I will not under any circumstances divulge the identities of any of these therapists, nor will I recommend therapists to anyone. If you want therapy, please don’t ask me where to go for it. Should you have specific ideas on the type of therapist you want—and you have that right, certainly—you may consult any psychologist or psychiatrist and tell him what you have in mind; if he’s not the right man for you he’ll probably know it, and he’ll probably be able to put you in touch with someone who is.

More Like a Nurse than a Hooker

Edith is a tall, slender girl with severely cropped dark brown hair which she frequently covers with a dark brown wig. Her hands, with long narrow fingers, are an arresting feature, as are her alert and direct brown eyes. She is about thirty, an attractive and well-mannered young woman with a well-modulated speaking voice and an excellent command of the language. She lives alone in a spacious three-room apartment on Manhattan’s East Side just a few blocks from the official residence of the Mayor of New York. She keeps, appropriately, a pair of Siamese cats; their sleek grace and air of aloof mystery complement the personality which she herself projects.

She was married for three years and has been divorced for almost seven. Shortly after her divorce she began working as a call girl, visiting men’s hotel rooms or turning tricks in her own apartment. A little over a year ago she began the metamorphosis from call girl to sexual therapist.

•  •  •

EDITH: It’s very nice being a professional person. Of course prostitution is supposed to be a profession, isn’t it? The world’s oldest, I understand. But it’s just not accorded the respect of the other professions.

I didn’t make a sudden decision to stop accepting the usual sort of dates. It happened gradually. Not because of any desire to escape from prostitution, I don’t think. There were other factors. Convenience, for one. My therapy practice, if I may call it that, was building up to the point where I had quite a few hours of the day booked in advance. And Johns tended to call trying to book those hours, and I found myself more and more frequently in the position of having to turn down dates because they conflicted with my appointments.

Another factor was security. This operated in two respects. First of all, as I began to see more and more patients and to get referrals from a greater number of doctors, I was reaching a point where I just didn’t need tricks from a financial standpoint. Even if I was only seeing one patient, I was earning enough to live on. I get five hundred dollars a week, or more often a thousand dollars for a two-week course of treatment. I’ve earned as much as three times that as a call girl, but I’ve also had stretches when the phone simply refused to ring, so I had always felt myself under pressure to earn money whenever the opportunity presented itself.

I feel I ought to take in fifty thousand dollars a year. Of course that’s an enormous amount of money and one shouldn’t have to earn that much, but I’m very future oriented. I want to retire by the time I’m forty at the latest, and I want to be financially independent when I do. That means saving thirty thousand dollars a year, which is no problem at all if I earn fifty thousand. As a matter of fact, I’ve noticed that I’ve been saving a larger proportion of my income since I stopped ordinary prostitution. I suppose there are a few explanations for this. Henry would say that I’m experiencing less guilt and that in the past I compensated for guilt or attempted to expiate it by financial irresponsibility. It may be simpler than all that. It’s a simpler life, more ordinary, an easier routine, and I think that may have made it easier for me to regulate my expenses. But I wouldn’t want to disagree with Henry. He has a habit of being right.

Another way that security comes into play is in a physical sense. Prostitution, especially with strangers, can be a very frightening way of life. You hear a voice on the telephone and you have to make a snap judgment. A man tells you that Joe from Kansas City gave him your phone number, and you have to decide on the basis of that whether he’s all right or if he’s a potential sex murderer or blackmailer or undercover cop. I’ve never had a really bad experience that way, but I’ve heard and read enough horror stories to realize the amount of danger involved. One Jack the Ripper is all you need.

So I found that, as my therapy practice began to build up, I was turning down dates unless the callers were old customers. That was the first step. Then gradually I began weeding out some of the old customers. I became more selective. The ones who made a habit of showing up drunk, the ones whom I found personally obnoxious in one way or another. I never said I was getting out of the business, just that I was busy. Not many of them were very persistent. I would give out other numbers, a couple of girls I knew who would take tricks. Finally I saw that what I really wanted to do was drop all of my ordinary tricks, so I called a few steady customers and told them I was getting out of the business, then had my telephone number changed and gave out the new number only to the doctors who were referring people to me.

Most of the time now I’ll be seeing two or three patients at a time. Once I had four patients at once, and that was a little hectic. Not that the sexual pace was that intense. There have been times when I’ve turned as many as a dozen tricks in a day. With patients, though, it’s different. You have to get personally involved with them. It’s not just a matter of spending more time with them than with a John. You have to expend more of yourself. Seeing four men at the same time was exhausting for me, and I also felt that I might be cheating them. With an ordinary trick you can turn yourself off and function on a purely mechanical level, but in sex therapy you have to do just the reverse, you have to turn yourself on, mentally even more than physically, and four was too much. I’ve set three as a maximum, and ultimately I’d like to raise the price to $750 a week and cut down to a maximum of two at a time. What would be absolutely ideal would be to see only one man at a time and charge a thousand a week or two thousand for a two-week session, but I’m a little worried that I might just succeed in pricing myself out of the market.

Here’s something amusing. At least I find it amusing. Even after I stopped taking any outside tricks at all, even after my business was one-hundred percent therapy referrals, there was a time when I still thought of myself as a prostitute with a gimmick. I felt that I was a therapist the same way those girls at the massage parlors are masseuses, that it was a useful euphemism and nothing more. Gradually I began to see myself more as therapist and less as prostitute. No blinding flash of light, just a growing realization. I came to see that I was performing essentially a medical function, a psychotherapeutic function. I was playing an important role in helping men overcome sexual dysfunctioning.

I’ve almost reached the point now where I can feel free to proclaim myself a sexual therapist in social situations. At a party, for example, when someone asks me what I do for a living. I identified myself that way in a conversation just the other week. I said I was a sexual therapist, and this fellow said he felt very much in need of therapy, and I said I only took referrals from psychoanalysts, but he interpreted all of this as cocktail party chatter and I let it go at that.

I got into a discussion with Henry on this subject. He came up with some interesting observations on the idea of identity as a function of perception of self. In other words, you are what you think you are.

I’m not sure just how much of that I buy. To an extent you are what you think you are, but there’s a point where self-perception becomes self-deception, and the mental hospitals are full of men who think they’re Napoleon. That doesn’t make them Napoleon. You’re also the person you are in existential reality.

I do know, though, that I feel a lot more like a nurse than a hooker.

•  •  •

JWW: It was Henry who recommended that I see Edith, just as he has recommended other men see her for other purposes. I’ve known Henry for several years. He is an established psychotherapist with a rewarding practice. In recent years his practice—and, indeed, his own interests—have tended to focus increasingly upon the general area of sexual performance.

•  •  •

HENRY: I began to agree more and more with Masters and Johnson. Their argument is that sexual inadequacy is its own problem. From my own experience, that’s indisputable. A man comes into my office because he can’t get an erection, let’s say. Well, that’s his problem. He could spend five years in intensive talk therapy finding out why that’s his problem, and he might trace it back to some childhood incident, some improper resolution of the Oedipal situation, some unorthodoxy in toilet training, whatever. And this tracing might or might not be accurate, and it might or might not help him to know how it all started, but all he cares about and all he really ought to care about is that he can’t get an erection, he can’t get it up. If you can cure that, you’ve solved the greater portion of his problem. If you can cure his impotence, it’s very often the case that you’re justified in forgetting about the sources of his problem. The various neurotic defenses that he’s thrown up over the years can be left undisturbed. As far as that goes, it’s often best to leave them undisturbed. I know of all too many cases in which analysis has had a devastating effect upon people. You peel away all those defenses and they die of exposure, and too often that death is literal—just consider the syndrome of a person making an enormous breakthrough in an encounter group and committing suicide shortly thereafter . . .

The work Masters and Johnson did was enormously impressive to me. Here they were actually curing problems—impotence, premature ejaculation, frigidity. Not by a few years of talk but by a week or two of specifically sexual therapy. I found all of this tremendously exciting and immediately looked for a way to use these breakthroughs for the benefit of my own patients.

The first and most obvious way to do this was by sending people to Masters and Johnson. I did refer several couples, and the results were uniformly excellent. But this wasn’t the answer in all cases. There were several difficulties. Cost was one of them. Not merely the price of treatment—which is high—but the need for the patient to spend a couple of weeks in St. Louis.

This was particularly a problem when the patient was, say, a husband who for one reason or another was not prepared to take his wife along to St. Louis. Perhaps she has an orientation which would preclude her participating. Perhaps the husband’s main interest is not in performing with her but with his girlfriend. Whatever the reason, I found that in a large proportion of cases it was impossible to pack off husband and wife and send the pair of them to St. Louis.

Now, Masters and Johnson have a program designed for such instances, what they call sexual surrogates. What this amounts to is that the man, whether he’s single or simply unwilling or unable to bring his wife along, is supplied with a paid sexual partner who has been trained by Masters and Johnson to replace his wife in his course of therapy. The sexual surrogate program seemed like a good one to me, but it also seemed to me to have certain built-in disadvantages. The surrogates were not prostitutes, for one thing, but instead were young women whose moral outlook permitted them to participate in this program for compensation without thinking of themselves as prostitutes.

I thought—and still think—that there were great dangers in this, dangers from the standpoint of the sexual surrogates themselves. Essentially they were being turned into amateur whores, and the potential for emotional damage to them seemed considerable. In addition, the St. Louis operation goes through an elaborate routine to ensure that the male patient will not know the name or address of his sexual partner, that he will not be able to contact her afterward, and so on. I felt that the security could not be one hundred percent effective, on the one hand, and at the same time felt that the artificiality of the encounter could have a detrimental effect upon the male patient. Consider: he goes off to St. Louis, he spends a week or two with no real social contact except the artificial contact with his surrogate partner, he knows her under a false name, and then he emerges from this false situation into the real world he’s always been living in. Also, he’s probably had to invent some reason for his wife why he has to be out of town and virtually incommunicado for two weeks, and when he returns with his sexual problems presumably solved he has a choice of inventing an explanation or telling her the truth ex post facto, either of which can be difficult.

I began looking for a way to duplicate the Masters and Johnson program here in New York, and to resolve some of my own objections and reservations in the bargain. With couples, this was not difficult. I simply duplicated the program here, talking with husband and wife both together and separately, schooling them both in the techniques which they would employ to deal with whatever the sexual problem happened to be. I’ve had very good results this way, and incidentally have saved people the bother and expense of going to St. Louis, as well as the rather high fee of the M and J program.

For individuals, I also used elements of the M and J program, but with some variations that I felt were valuable. For single females, for example, I’ve found that a lot of the techniques outlined in The Sensuous Woman are often very useful. The problem of achieving orgasm for the female is often an educational one, and if a woman can reach orgasm herself through masturbation she can usually learn to reach it in intercourse sooner or later.

It’s different with men. Impotence is a very different thing from frigidity; most males with secondary impotence can manage erection and orgasm via masturbation, and this helps them not at all in performing with a female partner. Premature ejaculation is a great problem for males, and one for which there is no female equivalent. A man who has his climax prematurely is sexually inadequate, while a woman who comes almost immediately is considered more than adequate, and of course is capable of continuing intercourse until her partner is satisfied.

Thus some sort of sexual surrogate was necessary in cases of this sort, and I came to the conclusion that the ideal surrogate would be a professional prostitute. However, not just any prostitute would do. The girl would have to be emotionally stable. She would have to be intelligent and sensitive, with nothing specifically whorish about her.

At the time, I had several call girls as patients. A great many of them enter therapy at one time or another, as I’m sure you know. Not because they’re necessarily more disturbed than other women, I don’t think, but because their profession is such that they have the time and the money.

Of the prostitutes with whom I was professionally acquainted, Edith was the obvious choice. She was well educated, poised, intelligent, and extremely sensitive. While there was a certain ambivalence in her attitude toward men, it did not approach the love-hate syndrome which characterized several of the other girls. Also, and perhaps most important, she had a very strong social motivation, the very same drive which leads other women to choose such careers as nursing, teaching, social work, etc. As a matter of fact, her own personal discontent stemmed largely from the failure of her life at that time to resolve this undercurrent. For a variety of reasons, after her divorce she had decided to live only for herself. She was determined to live well, to earn as much money as possible and save a substantial portion of it.

This led to a conflict within her. She was suppressing the need to perform socially useful work, and as a result she was defeating herself to a degree in certain respects. For example, she tended to spend money unnecessarily. She had a closet full of expensive dresses which she never wore. She wanted to have money, but at the same time the money was a source of guilt and she had a need to divest herself of it. As I said, she was relatively well adjusted, so this need did not manifest itself to the extent it does with a compulsive gambler or a whore who turns over everything to a pimp.

It struck me that functioning as a sexual surrogate would be very much to Edith’s advantage. And this, I felt, had to be a prerequisite. I felt it would be unethical for me to recruit a sexual surrogate simply because a particular girl would be capable of fulfilling the requirements of the job. It would have to benefit her as well. And here, incidentally, was where I felt Masters and Johnson might well be making a mistake. By deliberately not using professional prostitutes, they were teaching non-prostitutes to play the whore, as it were. I, on the other hand, would be taking a prostitute and leading her to fill a less prostitutional role, which would presumably have an ego-enhancing rather than an ego-damaging effect.

Of course this is largely theoretical. What’s more to the point is that Edith has functioned admirably as a sexual surrogate, and that she seems to be a happier and better adjusted person for it.

I discussed the program with her, not during her therapy hour—which would have been unethical in quite another way, using time she paid for to recruit her for my own benefit—but after hours, at her apartment. When I made arrangements to see her, I learned afterward, she was more than a little concerned that I wanted to lay her, which was not quite how she expected her therapist to relate to her! Thus there was a certain amount of awkwardness at first, but this was soon overcome. I explained the program and the role I had in mind for her and she was interested from the start. We discussed Masters and Johnson at some length. I gave her some literature to read and got in touch with her again after she’d had a chance to go over it. We talked some more and she was enthusiastic about participating in the program. We worked out procedural details, fees, other matters.

Within a week I sent her her first patient.

•  •  •

EDITH: I can’t imagine how a girl who hasn’t been a hooker could possibly handle all of this. Even assuming that she’s sexually emancipated, that she’d done all sorts of things with men, that she’s free from hang-ups about the idea of having sex without emotional involvement. I would say that prostitution is necessary training, if only in terms of our own mental attitude.

I’ve read, for example, about girls who were enormously put off because they were assigned to partners whom they didn’t find sexually attractive. I can see where that would be a natural reaction. Actually, when I first started tricking, I would occasionally be put off if a man was fat or old or ugly or coarse. In short, if he wasn’t someone I would be likely to select voluntarily as a sexual partner. Well, you either get over this in a hurry or you go into some other line of work.

A prostitute is also no stranger to the whole concept of sexual inadequacy. Impotence is something she deals with day in and day out. In fact, sexual inadequacy is often what motivates men to go to prostitutes. They can’t make it with their wives, or with girls they meet, or else the worry that they can’t make it puts them off. The challenge that a call girl faces every working day is to take a man and excite him and make him have an orgasm.

There are big differences between this and sexual therapy, however. When you’re tricking, the only thing you really worry about is turning the guy on and then getting him off. You do whatever you have to do to bring this about. What this usually comes down to is fellatio. I would say that nine out of ten Johns wanted this, either as a prelude to intercourse or as an end in itself. They didn’t necessarily ask for it, mainly because they didn’t have to. Very early in the game I learned to go down on a man immediately. If he didn’t stop me, I finished him that way. If he wanted to finish via intercourse, fine.

Sometimes a man would lose his erection when he tried to have intercourse, so it would be back to sucking again. When that happened I would make sure to finish him orally. If he objected, I would explain that I had gotten carried away because it was so exciting to suck his cock. This is the sort of thing a man enjoys believing, and usually afterward I would always be allowed to fellate him to orgasm “since I liked it so much.” Often the man would basically prefer fellatio anyway, but would want to perform coitus because it meshed more with his image of masculinity.

Other cases of impotence would yield to other treatment. A vibrator is very good, for example. Used properly, a vibrator will make a man have an orgasm even if he never does get an erection. I’m sure a lot of these men came to me in the hope that they would be fantastically potent, that they would get an erection the minute they walked in the door, screw me non-stop for an hour and a half, and then have an orgasm that would leave them an inch short of cardiac arrest. But if they had any sort of an orgasm, they had gotten what they paid for, and they had no complaints. Naturally, unless I specifically disliked a John and didn’t want to see him again anyway, I always tried to make it as good as possible for him. But the major goal, every prostitute’s major goal, was simply to induce orgasm.

In the same way, premature ejaculation was not considered a problem. On the contrary, it was considered a blessing, in the sense that the sooner a man came, the sooner he went. So this was another attitude that was turned around completely in sexual therapy. The object was to take men who had sexual problems of one sort or another and teach them to get erections automatically and hold onto them until they were ready to come, which meant, say, ten or fifteen minutes. If a man can keep it up for fifteen minutes, he can keep it up as long as he wants to, really.

The main technique in dealing with premature ejaculation is the squeeze. This is a Masters and Johnson technique. When the man feels that he’s about to come, I grip his penis just below the head and squeeze it. At first I was very reluctant to squeeze hard enough. You really have to give it a hell of a squeeze, and I was afraid of doing some real damage to a man’s organ. It doesn’t take long to learn how much pressure to apply, though.

I also tell men to practice in urination. This they can do on their own; I don’t have to be there to help them pee. What they do is begin urinating, then they try to stop, then start and stop over and over again. The muscles you use this way are the same ones you use to keep yourself from having an orgasm, from ejaculating. Men who really practice this can reach a point where they never have an orgasm unless they want to. They can always hold it back.

At the beginning, I would see a man several times before we actually had intercourse. This was very much in line with the program developed in St. Louis.

Then Henry changed the schedule.

•  •  •

HENRY: When I’m dealing with a couple, I stay very close to the Masters and Johnson program. When I’m employing a sexual surrogate, however, I depart considerably from their routine. That’s because the situational aspects are so different. If I send a man to see Edith, for example, he’s leading his usual life twenty-two hours of the day and spending the other two hours with her. The rest of the time he’s doing his job, riding a commuter train, lying in bed next to his wife, whatever. He’s not controlled the way he is in a hotel room in St. Louis.

Thus I felt there were modifications that had to be introduced. It struck me that there had to be less time spent on preliminaries and more time spent on all-out screwing. It wouldn’t do to spend a couple of days on non-genital contact and non-orgasmic petting, for instance. In the first place it would be too damned frustrating. The guy would walk out of the surrogate’s apartment and go home, and he’d have a desire to screw his wife, or to assert himself sexually in one way or another, and he’d also tend to feel that here he was spending big money and he’d only managed the neat trick of spending two hours with a call girl and not getting the reward of a climax.

According to the standard program, the treatment ends when the patient is cured. When he reaches the point where he can easily attain and retain an erection, then he’s sent home to his wife. I saw almost from the beginning that this was a bad idea, because he’s no sooner attained a skill than he’s deprived of the opportunity to practice it under optimum circumstances.

This is especially true of unmarried men, who comprise a large portion of these referrals. Some are bachelors. A larger proportion are divorced. In the vast majority of cases, they have no regular sexual partner at the moment. After their discharge, they have to find someone who will go to bed with them, and while they’re looking, they have fears returning that they won’t be able to make it with anyone except Edith, or that the cure was temporary and they’ll lose the ability if they don’t keep in practice. And I suspect this last fear is often true, that if they don’t begin having regular sex in fairly short order the fear will nullify the progress they’ve made.

If they’re married, it’s still putting them under a lot of pressure to send them straight home to their wives. Suppose a man goes through a course of treatment successfully, goes home to his wife, and nothing happens. It certainly helps if he can go back to his surrogate the next day and, in non-technical language, fuck her eyes out.

As I’ve modified it, the program for impotence and premature ejaculation—and these are the complaints in the overwhelming majority of surrogate referrals—runs like this. First of all, the patient has an orgasm the first day and every day thereafter. By the end of a week of treatment, he is capable of functioning sexually, of becoming erect and maintaining the erection for a quarter hour or longer.

At this point, he has the option of discontinuing treatment. But both Edith and I will strongly recommend that he continue the program for another week. This recommendation is almost invariably accepted. We make it easy for the patient to accept because he’s told at the beginning that the course of treatment runs two weeks and costs a thousand dollars. Thus he’s prepared for this expense, and at the end of a week he’s not being asked to spend more than he planned, but is being given the opportunity for a refund while he’s being advised to pass it up.

Besides, you have to appreciate that he’s generally having a physically satisfying relationship with a woman for the first time in his life, and he’s enjoying himself no end, so he’s thus very much predisposed to continue that relationship.

The second week is designed to accomplish two things. First of all, it gives the patient the opportunity to practice his new skills to the point where he is supremely confident of himself. Secondly, it facilitates the transition from therapy with the surrogate to sexual functioning under more normal circumstances. If the man’s married or has a steady sexual partner, he’s encouraged to have sexual relations with her whenever the opportunity exists. But he’s not under tremendous pressure to perform, because he’s spending two hours a day in bed with his therapist. Perhaps largely because of this lack of pressure, most men do have satisfactory relations with their wives during this second week. Naturally, this is tremendous ego-food for them. Here you’ve got a guy who’s screwing his brains out for two hours with Edith, and then he goes home and fucks the daylights out of his wife, and he knows he’s satisfying two women when before he couldn’t satisfy one, and he has to walk around glowing with pride as a result of this accomplishment.

Still another function of the second week is educational. In other words, now that he’s able to screw, it’s time for him to learn how. And by this I mean all manner of plain and fancy sex. Fourteen hours is ample time for a man to learn a great deal about different positions and techniques. Chances are he’s had fantasies over the years, different things he’s always wanted to try, and now he has his chance. By the time the week’s up, he’s ready for a graduate certificate.

When I first began studying the Masters and Johnson surrogate program, it struck me that a man could wind up spending a great deal of time remembering the joy he had achieved in the arms of the surrogate and wishing he had a way to get in touch with her. This could have a variety of ill effects. He might wind up convinced that successful sex was only possible with her, for example. He might actually try to get in touch with her afterward, and for all their vaunted security precautions, I’m sure this wouldn’t be that difficult for a strongly motivated man to accomplish.

With the program I’ve developed, such a man can readily contact his therapist, and can in fact have sex with her. Because the girl is originally a prostitute, she’s not inclined to object. But if he wants to see Edith again, he doesn’t see her as an ordinary customer of an ordinary prostitute. Instead he goes through what’s described as a ‘booster course,’ which is to say that he pays five hundred dollars and sees her two hours a day for a week. Thus he has to be pretty strongly motivated. He can’t just decide that he wants to throw it to her once for old times sake.

•  •  •

JWW: I asked Henry how closely he supervised the two-week program once it was instituted. Masters and Johnson supervise their patients quite closely, with concurrent talk therapy an important part of the regimen.

•  •  •

HENRY: I am considerably less involved with the patient during the two weeks of sexual therapy. Masters and Johnson have considerably more opportunity for this than I do; they’ve got the man available around the clock, while my patient is adhering to his normal routine throughout. He’s already spending two hours with his surrogate partner and would probably be hard put to spend another hour on the couch. Also, Masters and Johnson are dealing with patients whom they haven’t known prior to the therapy and probably won’t see much of after. They have to do their talking during the course of treatment. I, on the other hand, am dealing with men whom I’ve already seen over a significant period of time, and whom I will see again after the sexually active phase of therapy is completed.

I do keep in touch with them. They call me daily at a specified time and we discuss briefly their progress. I also speak to the surrogate once a day and discuss the patient or patients she has seen that day. I keep apprised of their progress but don’t function in a direct therapeutic role during the two-week process.

•  •  •

JWW: Edith and I discussed several of her cases, the various experiences she had had, the various techniques, both mental and physical, she found particularly useful. All of what she said was useful and interesting, but what I wanted most was a sense of the day-to-day progress of a two-week session. She suggested with a smile that the best way to acquire such an understanding would be for me to go through the program myself, and that I could surely write off the fee as a business expense. While the notion was by no means unattractive, I told her I would have to pass.

“Actually,” she said, “I’d have trouble fitting you in.” At first I interpreted her remarks physiologically and was somewhat puzzled, but she went on to explain that she had a full load of cases booked for the rest of the month. Then she suggested that she might take one of her patients and make notes each day on the course his treatment had taken. I told her this would be ideal, and she agreed to get in touch with me when her notes were ready.

She did so in due course, apologizing that the notes themselves were in rather rough form. “I just jotted things down each day right after he left,” she said. “But you’ll probably be able to work them up into something elaborate.”

I have no doubt that I could work Edith’s notes up into something more or less elaborate, but I’ve decided not to do so. In any interviewing situation, the interviewer inevitably functions to a greater or lesser degree as a filter, altering reality by virtue of his own perceptions. Thus whenever possible I try to minimize my own role in these processes, reproducing letters more or less verbatim, rendering material insofar as possible in a subject’s words. Here, then, but for the deletion of a very small amount of totally extraneous matter, are Edith’s notes as I received them.

•  •  •

EDITH:

Day One.

He called me this morning to confirm his appointment, arrived precisely at 11 a.m. Always exciting to answer the door and see what he’s like. I know something about him from Henry. He’s 28, tax lawyer, divorced. Marriage fell apart a year ago. Sex contributed to the breakup. Since then he’s had a few affairs, nothing serious because of his sex problems. Which are: periodic impotence, periodic premature ejaculation, infrequent but occasional inability to reach climax in prolonged intercourse. Diagnosis: general sexual insecurity. Has told Henry he can’t count on it, can’t be sure he’ll be able to perform well. Which is what he wants.

He’s good looking, medium height, about ten or fifteen pounds overweight. Jewish. We sit on the couch, drink coffee. Neck a little. He has soft hands, a nice touch. Very breast-oriented. Very tentative about touching my cunt. Not fear. Nervous about proceeding too fast? Maybe.

We get undressed, sit around naked then go to bed and play with each other. He gets an erection almost immediately. Doesn’t try to do anything with it—that’s not the program yet—and it goes away almost immediately. He says this happens a lot, he’ll get excited, then lose the erection early, and be unable to get it back. I tell him we’ll cure this and not to worry.

We play with each other for a long time. He eats me a little, not too expert though. I ask him to masturbate me. We lie on sides, facing each other, eyes close together, under instructions to maintain eye contact. I take his finger and finger myself with it, getting the rhythm for him, then let him finger me while I lie there digging it. Nice little come, no need to fake it, and I tell him how good it was. I play with him and get him hard. Then squeeze him and it softens. Then get him hard again, squeeze again, soft again, then hard again. “See how easy? Each time it goes away and each time it comes back.” He begs to fuck me but I say not on the agenda for today. I play with him and he has a nice firm hard-on, no danger of coming prematurely. I say “Now we’ll come, touch me so we can come together.” We’re side by side facing each other and playing with each other and just as he’s about to come I fake one as I pull him off. He moans beautifully as he shoots on my stomach. We lie there saying how good we feel and I get a gob of his come on my finger and gobble it up, making yummy sounds and saying how much fun we’re going to have together.

Day Two.

More of the same. He’s a little surer of himself this time. His penis is half erect when we get undressed and hardens the instant I touch it. I let him keep the erection for a while, then squeeze it away.

He eats me a little. I teach him, not by saying anything but by letting him learn my response, moaning and panting when he does it right, cooling off when he doesn’t. I perform fellatio, turning him off each time with the squeeze when he gets close to a climax.

At the end I mount him. His erection softens when it’s inside me. I use my muscles and it comes back again. Then I have him lie very still while I fuck him: I slow down each time he starts to get excited. Eventually I sense he’s about to come so I fake a fit of passion and pretend to come when he does. He wasn’t able to hold it back, but thinks he held out since I came when he did. Afterward I suck him a little, enough to get him hard, then squeeze him soft and send him on his merry way.

Day Three.

Oral time. Devoted almost the whole session to an endless sixty-nine. Each time he was about to come I squeezed him. He regained his erection automatically. I barely had to take him in my mouth, and toward the end he seemed to have no trouble holding out indefinitely. Then I told him this time he was going to come in my mouth. Just as he was about to, I gave him the squeeze again, really putting the pressure on, and at the same instant going into a delicious come that I didn’t have to fake an inch of. I told him I had gotten greedy and wanted him to fuck me. Which he did, me on top, and lasted a long time.

Day Four.

He no longer has any trouble getting hard. Today we practiced him holding it back himself. I jerked him, sucked him, then fucked him with me on top, and each time he held it back. The urination exercises are paying off. He lost his erection a couple of times when he held it back, but the other times he maintained it, then took a breath and went right back to work. He had a nice orgasm when I told him it was time. Then we played around and he got hard again and we did it with him on top. I told him this time to see how fast he could come. It took him ten minutes!

Day Five.

Maybe I should make notes on another case instead. He’s too easy. We spent almost two full hours fucking. He had an orgasm early on but it didn’t faze him and he got hard again and we got it on again. He’s going to be a wonderful lover. I knew from the beginning he would be good because he has such a divine sense of touch. By now he’s learned to really groove on my body. I gather he was never really at ease with female bodies before. He appreciated them but didn’t understand them. He said today that he had never understood a cunt before. I thought at first he meant he had never understood a woman, but found out he meant the sex organ per se. He did not know what a cunt was all about.

He’s certainly learning.

Well, therapy is halfway over. Reading through these notes, I’m dissatisfied, wondering why they don’t seem to have the sense of progress which was present in actuality. Perhaps I’m just better at fucking than writing.

Tomorrow and Sunday he’s on his own. As he is single and lives in Manhattan he could see me seven days straight, unlike commuters and family men who can’t get away, but a girl needs her rest. Also now he is supposed to try to make it on his own. Tomorrow night he will be seeing a girl he fucked once before, and Sunday he will try to pick someone up. And Monday he will come back here and fuck his brains out some more.

Day Six.

He was quite pleased with himself. He had a date Saturday night with the girl he’d told me about. Didn’t try to fuck her, though. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. He had a good time with her and is seeing her again tomorrow night. Sunday he went to a singles bar and scored. Says he was never good at bar pickups in the past, but made out this time, perhaps because of increased self-confidence. Or perhaps because he was so determined, as it was like a homework assignment for him to go out and get laid on his own.

Either way, I guess it went well enough. He picked up a young girl, took her back to her apartment and screwed her. According to him, he was Superman. Said she kept telling him he was fantastic.

He was certainly not bad today. I taught him a couple of new positions. He also suggested we try doggie-style, which we did. I pretended to enjoy it more than I did. Now is the time for him to make the suggestions so that he gets into the idea of directing things.

Day Seven.

More of the same. He’s really becoming very good.

He expressed a desire to fuck me in the ass. I told him I was afraid he was too big. I fully intend to have him that way before the week is over but I’d rather make him wait a little.

He’s seeing Claire tonight, the former fuck whom he took out Saturday night. I hope he didn’t leave the whole thing in the gym, as he got off twice this afternoon. Actually, that makes no difference. If you’re really together, you can fuck no matter how much you’ve done a few hours ago. Within reason, anyway.

Day Eight.

He spent the night with Claire, fucked her twice last night and once this morning, and I gather he was in top form. He had had a brief affair with her previously and his performance then was so-so, impotence a couple of times, nothing terrific. Claire told him this a.m. she had never realized what a wonderful lover he was. He saw no reason to tell her that his talent was a recent development.

We made it, and then I suggested that we eat each other. He said something about didn’t I want to wash up first, and I told him come wasn’t dirty. He was a little hesitant at the idea of eating his semen out of me but also a little turned on by the idea.

I like to blow minds. I really do. That is undoubtedly one of the satisfactions of this. Henry was a little uncertain when I first started introducing things like this. He felt there was a difference between developing sexual adequacy and expanding sexual horizons. I agree that there’s a difference. But believe the two go together. It’s all a part of being sexually liberated.

At any rate, the two of us ate each other with considerable enthusiasm.

Tomorrow’s bondage time!

Day Nine.

Last night the pupil turned teacher. He and Claire screwed, then he suggested they eat each other. According to him, she was really disgusted at the idea, but went along with it. And enjoyed herself before it was over.

Today I told him we would play a game. I was going to tie him up and try to make him come, and he should try to go the entire hour without coming or losing his erection. He asked what his reward would be if he lasted the entire hour, and I told him he could then tie me up for the second hour.

It was nice and freaky. I don’t do this with many of my patients. I have to be able to trust them enormously, because it is very scary being unable to move and having someone coming on sexually with you. If I have any hesitation whatsoever I never bring the subject up. But he’s a pussycat, I knew he’d be all right.

I don’t know if he could have held out if I gave it everything I had, but naturally the object is to let him win. Even if he’d lost I’d have let him tie me up for the second hour, but I did a few things to keep him from losing. Like when it seemed as though he might not be able to hold out I varied the rhythm of what I was doing to give him a chance to get hold of himself.

Then he tied me up and drove me nicely crazy. It’s fantastic that I get paid for this sort of thing.

On the way out I told him it might not be a bright idea to rush Claire into a bondage situation. He agreed that it would wait until the two of them knew each other a whole lot better. Right now he’s considering having Claire live with him, but he wants to wait on that until he’s had some experience with other girls. I told him I thought that was a good idea.

Fortunately he doesn’t seem to be falling in love with me. Men in his situation, recently divorced, aren’t as likely to as some of the others. Especially the married ones. This can be something of a problem. They have a wonderful time balling me, and then they go home and ball their wives, and they perform brilliantly with their wives, and they still don’t really enjoy it very much, because when all is said and done their wives still bore the piss out of them. So they figure that I’m the significant variable and they’re in love with me. This often happens if they’re not used to cheating. I’m always able to handle it, and also I report it to Henry, who reinforces the idea in their minds that this is a business relationship and that I’m not about to get personally involved and they’re only getting involved because of a head trip they’re on.

The funny thing is I hate it when they think they’re in love with me, and when a guy like this one obviously isn’t in love with me, then I find myself getting faintly jealous. Fortunately I have enough sense to laugh at myself when this happens.

I think he’ll ultimately marry Claire, but I just hope he’ll have the brains not to rush into it.

Day Ten.

The last day, and it’s as always, both a relief and sort of sad. Because on the one hand we’ve done just about everything you can do, and the discovery part is over, and after a much longer relationship the fact that we have no emotional thing for each other would begin to be a drag. Also once a case is concluded it becomes part of the past, it’s a personal success I can lock up as a memory, and there’s a feeling of great satisfaction in that.

Still, it’s sad when anything comes to an end.

He buggered me today. I suggested it and he said he thought he was too large for me, and I said I thought I could handle it. I said he might want to do it to good ol’ Claire, and he ought to know what he was doing first.

He’s not really particularly large. About average. Ninety-five cocks out of a hundred are more or less the same size. Of course I always make a big fuss over a man’s cock. I learned this years ago. Every man has a hang-up about his penis. Even if he’s hung like a horse he worries it’s too small, too short or too narrow or too ugly or what-the-hell. If the first thing that happened to a man every morning was for a beautiful girl to whisper in his ear, “You have the most beautiful cock in the world,” I’m convinced he would sail through life without a care in the world.

He had a little trouble getting into me, but not too much, and then he came after three or four strokes. He was a little disappointed, but I acted as if it was taken for granted that would happen. Told him it was good he was getting some practice at it, and when he did it a second time he was in control. I didn’t care for it much—I generally don’t, unless I’m in an extremely passionate mood—but it wasn’t too bad.

When the two hours was up I did something I invented. He was dressed, and we had had a graduation drink together and said our good-byes, and when he had one foot out the door I stopped him and groped him a little.

I said, “I’m not really supposed to do this, but are you feeling strong? Because I’d dig it if we could make it one last time?”

Henry has told me not to do this if there is any danger of the guy fancying himself in love with me. There wasn’t in this case, so I did it. The way I see it, it’s an excellent way to convince a man that his fucking is genuinely desirable and enjoyable. Which in this case it was.

That’s ten days of it and I really don’t know what else to put down. I don’t know if it’s right to say that he was typical or not. Nobody is typical, they are all different people with different heads. I learned a lot about him, about what was on his mind, about his background, all of that. I haven’t put any of that down here. Professional ethics??? Maybe, or just that it’s been difficult enough just making a few brief notes on what happened.

My final impressions: he’s a nice decent guy who never got himself together sexually, and his wife may or may not have been a bitch, it’s hard to say, but the marriage was never good sexually and he had a lot of hang-ups to get over and a lot of things to learn, and I think he’s in good shape now, and I had something to do with it, and I’m glad.

•  •  •

JWW: I let Henry have a look at Edith’s notes, after first determining that she had no objection to his doing so. He offered the following comments:

HENRY: She’s become very good at this and doesn’t need much direction. She has an excellent sense of character. During the first week she always stays fairly close to formula, but in the second week she uses her imagination and suits the program to the individual. I favor this, since one of the purposes of the second week is to encourage the patient to take charge of situations.

I’m sure that some of the things Edith does are for her own benefit. Her techniques of mind-blowing, or expanding sexual horizons, come under this heading. At first I was a little reluctant to endorse this wholeheartedly. Now, in addition to seeing some real advantages to the patient, I also feel that there is the distinct advantage of Edith’s enjoyment; in other words, the fact that she’s getting genuine pleasure out of this can’t help but work to the client’s benefit.

Another advantage lies in the fact that the experimentation of the second week takes the whole course of treatment out of the specifically therapeutic area and adds a dimension of pleasure-for-its-own-sake to it. I think this has value, also.

Of course not every girl functioning as a sexual therapist would be capable of what Edith describes here, any more than every prostitute would be capable of functioning as a sexual therapist. That should go without saying.

As far as Edith is concerned, I think all of this has been of enormous benefit to her. My own bias can’t be completely dismissed; naturally it would please me to think so. Nevertheless, I’ve observed her all along, and she’s much better-adjusted and has a far happier and more positive outlook as time goes by. I suspect that it will not be long before she finds herself to have evolved out of the role of sexual therapist, just as she earlier evolved out of the role of prostitute. From a selfish standpoint I’ll be sorry to see this happen. She’s good, and in that sense I’ll hate to lose her as a therapist. But I think as time passes she’ll find herself capable of a deeper and more permanent relationship with a man, and as this comes to pass she’ll find her financial goals and her desire for personal independence less commanding in importance.

JWW: Does Henry have any qualms about sending patients to Edith? Does he sense any ethical conflict?

HENRY: He shook his head. None. Let me say, though, that at the very beginning I was a lot less certain on this score. Even now, I’ve no assurance that what I’m doing is legal. It would be possible to make a case that I’m functioning as a pimp, aiding and abetting prostitution. I can’t really conceive of being faced with criminal prosecution, but at the same time I certainly wouldn’t welcome publicity.

Personally, I’m convinced that sexual therapy of the sort which Edith presently performs will be a very common feature in the future. I can’t see why it shouldn’t.

The Right Not to be Gay

The Gay Liberation Movement has been getting a lot of attention recently. It’s my feeling that they’re accomplishing a great deal for homosexuals, not only in terms of changing society’s attitudes but in raising the self-esteem of homosexuals themselves. The message, to gay and straight alike, is that homosexuality is a matter of choice, of personal preference, and that the concept of “curing” the homosexual should be abandoned as a relic of a bygone era.

I think this is very good, I think the positive effects are enormous, but I’m not sure it’s entirely valid. What is lost sight of is the fact that there are any number of male and female homosexuals who might be described as being gay in spite of themselves. It’s all well and good to talk about their having the right to be gay, but this ought to be just one of their options. At the same time, I would argue that they have the inalienable right not to be gay.

Because, as I’m sure you are aware, many people suffer greatly as homosexuals. As much as the Movement shouts at them that Gay is Good, that Gay is Beautiful, they do not believe this, and they find little that is good or proud or beautiful in their own sexual lives. They are not liberated. Quite the contrary. They are generally “closet” homosexuals, very anxious to keep their sexual tastes a secret from all their acquaintances, not merely for fear of social ostracism but also because they themselves are ashamed of the desires which move them and the acts which they perform.

•  •  •

JWW: Lester is a mild-mannered bearded pipe smoker, a clinical psychologist in his forties with a practice about equally divided between private and group therapy. I learned of his treatment for homosexuals from a friend of one of his patients.

At first he was very reluctant to be interviewed. He made excuses, pleading that he simply could not spare the time. When I persisted, he told me that he very definitely wanted to avoid publicity, that he already had a more than full caseload, that the journalistic media invariably sensationalized when they ran material on the treatment of homosexuals, and that he preferred not to be a party to any of this. I assured him that I wrote books, not magazine pieces, and that I was no more inclined to give him personal publicity than he was to receive it. I would change his name and sufficiently alter circumstances in the cases he might acquaint me with to render any specific identification impossible and preserve full anonymity for all concerned.

With this understood, he became quite eager to cooperate. I saw him on several occasions and found him a very good subject. The remarks which follow were distilled from our conversations.

•  •  •

LESTER: At the beginning, I was very reluctant to make any attempts to “cure” homosexuals. I find the phrase itself objectionable enough. Homosexuality is not a sickness, it is thus not to be “cured.”

Further, I have many of the same objections as the Gay Liberation people have to some of the lines of “treatment” for homosexuals which one hears of. There is a doctor, for example, who has made quite a name for himself by sexually conditioning male homosexuals. He uses a sort of Pavlovian technique by means of which his patients are shown photographs of nude males which are accompanied by unpleasant electrical shocks. By various comic-opera devices of this sort he presumably conditions them to have negative reactions to the stimuli they had previously learned to find erotic, and in similar fashion he uses photographs of nude females in order to channel the sexual impulses in a heterosexual direction. Not only does this whole method seem to me to have the barbarism of the course of treatment in A Clockwork Orange, but I seriously doubt that it could work as well as he insists it does. It would seem to me that a person so conditioned would have difficulty enjoying any sort of sex at all.

And yet how was I to overlook the fact that there were many homosexuals who did not want to be homosexual? On the one hand, I never failed to acknowledge that many homosexuals are well-adjusted, that they are capable of leading productive and fulfilling lives, that they may engage in short- or long-term relationships which can be fully satisfying. They may even constitute a majority. Nevertheless, for others, homosexuality is never satisfying. It is not merely a source of guilt but is genuinely unsatisfying.

Consider a man, for example, who can have sexual relations only with strangers. He haunts public lavatories, he kneels in hallways to fellate men he has never seen before and will never see again. He risks disease, blackmail, arrest—and even if he escapes all three, he is leading a life which is hellish. His estimate of self is low, his guilt is ever-present, his fears are often overpowering.

Add to this the fact that the man wants, desperately wants, to have what he frequently refers to as “a normal life.” He wants to fall in love with a woman. He wants to be a husband, a father. He wants, in short, to be someone other than the person he has somehow become.

I came to regard such persons as involuntary homosexuals. You are of course familiar with the concept of the transsexual, the female soul in the male body or vice-versa. I came to see that the homosexual I have described is similar to the transsexual in certain respects. He is, in a sense, a heterosexual soul trapped in a homosexual life style.

But how to deal with this? A transsexual could at least fly to Denmark for a sex-change operation. It seemed that some equivalent form of psychic surgery ought to be available.

One question I asked myself was why a person who was so uncomfortable in the role of homosexual should have found himself in that role in the first place. There are a great many explanations rooted in childhood, family situation, etc. Rather than concern myself with their validity, I looked for somewhat less profound answers. And came to several conclusions.

First of all, it seemed to me on the basis of my own experience and much of the literature with which I made myself acquainted, that many persons of this sort functioned as homosexuals because it was easier. It is simply easier for an individual, especially a male, to find partners for casual homosexual acts than for similarly casual heterosexual acts. One has an infinitely greater chance of finding a partner at a gay bar, for example, than at a heterosexual singles bar. Nor is there any heterosexual equivalent of the Turkish baths or public rest rooms where homosexual contacts can be achieved effortlessly.

This applies, perhaps even more forcefully, to adolescent males. Perhaps they were seduced by an older male. This happens very often. Assume further that they had had no heterosexual experience before that time, and that they are introverted and generally ill at ease with females. They find that homosexual relations are physically satisfying—an orgasm, after all, is an orgasm, however and with whomever one has it. They find, too, that homosexual relations are easily accessible. It does not take long for the pattern to establish itself, and I am convinced that this can and does occur even when there is nothing in the background or personality of the individual which would specifically foster homosexuality.

•  •  •

JWW: Lester went on to discuss this point at considerable length. He added that a period of homosexual behavior could have the effect of making the individual regard himself as a homosexual, and that, in the absence of successful prior heterosexual experience, this homosexuality would be perceived as exclusive.

•  •  •

LESTER: A man says to himself as follows: I am engaging in homosexual acts. Therefore I am homosexual. Therefore I am incapable of functioning heterosexually. He may or may not attempt to refute this by having sexual relations with a female, at which time the prophecy is apt to be self-fulfilling; he expects that he will fail, and his expectations in and of themselves serve to guarantee failure. This reinforces his original conviction, and he now says: I tried to have sex with a woman, I was not able to do so, therefore I am definitely homosexual and will so remain for the rest of my life.

At the same time, one realizes that homosexual acts do not necessarily make a man homosexual. The obvious example is among convicted criminals. Men in prison will very often engage in homosexual relations constantly while incarcerated, then abandon the practice entirely upon their release, only to resume it if and when they again find themselves behind bars. These are men who are able to tell themselves that their homosexual behavior is merely a convenience, a response to a set of special circumstances, and that they are basically heterosexual in spite of it.

I then decided to try to define homosexuality, and the definition I worked out was not the usual one. I decided that a homosexual, the sort of homosexual whom I might be able to assist, was best defined not by the fact that he performed homosexual acts but that he did not perform heterosexual ones. This struck me as a very important way of looking at things. In this light, the idea of conditioning a patient against homosexual desires was obviously absurd. One simply had to make him capable of functioning heterosexually. If he could do this, if he could make love to a woman and find the experience enjoyable, it hardly mattered whether or not he continued to respond sexually to other males. Once he was capable of functioning as a bisexual, if you will, then he had the option of being gay or not being gay. He could be bisexual, he could be exclusively heterosexual, he could do more or less as he wished.

A great many people in the field are increasingly inclined to regard bisexuality as the ultimate state of healthy sexual expression. According to this line of thinking, either exclusive homosexuality or exclusive heterosexuality is thought to be, if not neurotic, at least limiting. I feel this is a moot point. From a pragmatic standpoint, it’s necessary to realize that one simply does not see patients who are unhappy because they are only able to have heterosexual relationships, while one definitely does see people who are miserable because they are only able to function homosexually.

•  •  •

JWW: Lester talked at length about the emergence of bisexuality as a legitimate sexual life style. He said this trend is especially evident among the young, an observation which my own experience definitely confirms. He stressed that an awareness of the possibility of bisexuality ought to do a great deal to lessen the incidence of the syndrome he describes, the person who finds himself a homosexual in spite of himself, by reducing the tendency of the individual to assume that, because he can function homosexually, he perforce cannot function heterosexually.

Lester talked, too, about the way in which his therapeutic approach to homosexuality gradually developed, from his recognition that certain homosexuals ought to be schooled to function heterosexually to the ultimate development of a course of treatment. While I found this therapeutic odyssey absorbing, I think it will be better for our purposes to move directly to an account of an actual case which well illustrates Lester’s approach.

•  •  •

LESTER: Paul was twenty-six when I first saw him. He was referred to me by his regular physician after a suicide attempt; sleeping pills. The official diagnosis was an accidental overdose, but Paul admitted to me immediately that he had intended to kill himself. While he had never actually attempted suicide previously, he reported that he had felt intermittently suicidal for years and had often thought about various methods of killing himself. It’s said that contemplation of suicide gets all of us through a lot of bad nights, but when one starts acting out these thoughts, it’s a fairly clear sign that something is very wrong.

I saw Paul regularly for several months. Then he dropped out of therapy for over a year. When he returned, he said that his situation had not improved at all, that he was experiencing frequent depression of a severe order along with anxiety attacks and identity crises. His life had evidently turned quite chaotic in the intervening year. Before he had held a good position in the art department of an advertising agency. He had quit that job and drifted around, working in jobs for below his capacity, clearing tables in a cafeteria, working for a messenger service, that sort of thing.

He thought, and I agreed, that group therapy might be valuable for him. He had always been very shy, had trouble relating to people. Group therapy is often specifically useful in such situations. Also, he was not now in a position to afford individual therapy. Group, naturally, is considerably less of a burden financially.

He responded quite favorably. In ideal circumstances, group therapy can be successful in much the same way that organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous are successful; the individual derives strength from the knowledge that he is in some way responsible for the well-being of others, who in turn are concerned about him, have things in common with him, care about him.

Paul’s history was not extraordinary. His family situation, while hardly inconsistent with the development of homosexuality, was by no means a guarantee of it. There was a certain love-hate ambivalence with his mother and a lack of closeness with his father, who died while Paul was at college. Paul was very good at examining his childhood and finding all sorts of elements in it which would make him grow up gay. His reasoning was quite perceptive.

However, I very quickly concluded that his homosexuality was far more circumstantial in origin. He was not born to be a homosexual—and although that’s not a popular concept, I believe certain persons are predisposed in that direction almost from the moment of birth; there are just so many eases of men and women who vividly recall being attracted to their own sex or identifying with the opposite sex as early as three or four years of age. Nor did I feel that he had been raised to be a homosexual. Instead, several incidents and circumstances combined to facilitate this development.

The most obvious causative events were the homosexual experiences he began having in adolescence. His first homosexual experience was not a matter of seduction, at least not in the usual sense. He and another boy, a good friend, began engaging in mutual masturbation, then performed fellatio upon one another. Paul was thirteen at the time. The relationship went on for several months, until the school year ended and the other boy went away to summer camp. There he drowned in a swimming accident. This was tragic, not only for the boy who drowned, but for Paul as well. He immediately interpreted it as a sign, divine retribution for their sins, and went through a period when he fully expected that he, too, would be struck down in some unspecified way as punishment for what he and his friend had done. He never confided this fear to anyone, incidentally, but instead spent the better part of a year in quiet terror.

But for the drowning, there’s every likelihood that Paul and his friend would have outgrown their relationship. Adolescent homosexual experiences of this nature are extremely common in the sexual histories of men who go on to lead exclusively heterosexual lives. In certain environments, specifically the British public schools, adolescent homosexuality is a norm.

In Paul’s case, the relationship didn’t have a chance to wear itself out. The abrupt termination, the guilt, all made him withdraw and made him dwell on what he and this other boy had done.

Physical factors and personality elements also worked to his disadvantage. Paul was tall, slender, fair-haired, and fair-skinned. He was also studious and artistic. In short, he conformed in several ways to the popular image of the homosexual. Now I could argue that the image has no basis in fact, that athletes are as apt to be gay as scholars, but all of these elements of Paul’s appearance and personality worked to engender a self-fulfilling prophecy effect. In two ways—he was enabled to regard himself as “typically” homosexual, and he was also perceived as a likely prospect by homosexuals looking for sexual partners.

This last point is very relevant. I’m quite convinced that a great many young men who never have homosexual experiences owe their abstinence to lack of opportunity; homosexuals are not drawn to them, and thus they are not solicited sexually. Others, who do attract homosexuals, are far more likely to have gay experiences even though they may be no more personally disposed in that direction.

Paul’s developing sex life followed predictable lines. His first contact with a stranger took place at a Greyhound bus station. He did not actively solicit the contact, but did visit the men’s room there because he had heard that it was a place where homosexual contacts could be made. Over the next several years he frequented the terminal and other similar areas, where he would meet a stranger, fellate him and/or be fellated by him, and then swiftly depart. Each occasion was a source of guilt, yet he found it impossible to refrain from such contacts.

During this time he had virtually no social life. The few casual relationships he had with other boys were allowed to decay, probably because he feared the development of a friendship such as he had had with the boy who drowned. He did not date at all and acquired a reputation as a square and a loner. He believes some of his classmates may have known or suspected that he was homosexual, but there was never any scandal, and if rumors about him were circulating, he never heard them.

By the time I saw him, Paul had established a sexual life style that was extremely unsatisfying for him. There is certainly such a thing as a well-adjusted homosexual, but he was the furthest thing in the world from being one. The thought of any physical contact with a male partner, aside from specific oral-genital contact was repugnant to him. He became physically nauseated, for example, at the thought of kissing another man on the mouth. He did not want to know his partners’ names or for them to know anything about him. The most nearly satisfactory form of contact for him, he told me, was the “glory hole.” These are holes a couple inches in diameter bored in the partitions between adjoining toilets in a public lavatory. One inserts one’s penis in the opening and is fellated by the person next door; the two “partners” never even set eyes on one another.

Paul’s relationships with women had been extremely unsatisfactory. On several occasions he had attempted sex with prostitutes. In each instance he was unable to get an erection until the prostitute fellated him, at which time he became erect and had a climax. This seemed to him proof of his homosexuality, as he could only function by engaging in a form of sex which he identified as homosexual. He also found he disliked these prostitutes and found their company depressing, which hardly seems surprising, and took this as further evidence of his fundamental homosexuality.

Twice, after he settled in New York and began working as a commercial artist, he became involved in dating relationships with women. One was a woman several years older than him whom he met through his work. They attended concerts together, occasionally dined together. The relationship was completely asexual. Paul assumed the woman was a lesbian, and assumed she knew he was homosexual himself, but this aspect of their lives was never discussed between them.

Later, he began seeing a girl his own age. As he perceived it she fell overwhelmingly in love with him largely because he never attempted to have sex with her. He wanted very much to have a sexual relationship with her but was afraid of failure. Ultimately they did go to bed together, apparently at the girl’s suggestion, and Paul was predictably impotent. In an emotional scene he confessed that he was homosexual, whereupon the girl wept and announced that she always seemed to be forming relationships with male homosexuals. They agreed that they would continue to be friends, but from that point on he found her company extremely unsettling. Subsequently the news that she was going to be married helped to precipitate his suicide attempt.

It was quite clear to me that Paul was not homosexual but was merely participating in homosexual acts and failing to participate in heterosexual acts. He did not find men sexually attractive but sought their sexual companionship because it was not threatening, he had no fears of failure, and he found sex as such attractive. He was not impotent in homosexual encounters for much the same reason that he was not impotent in masturbation—there was no threat, no danger of failure, no pressure to perform.

In a sense, Paul’s problem was not so much impotence as frigidity. He was uneasy with women, afraid of them, unable to relate to them, and saw them as posing an impossible challenge to him. And it seemed to me that the most important aspect of “curing” him simply involved curing the problem of sexual dysfunction. If Paul was heterosexual at root, as I had come to conclude, the best possible course of therapy lay in supplying him with a physically and emotionally satisfying heterosexual experience.

Group therapy played an important role in readying him for such an experience. In the group situation, he was for the first time in his life really talking about himself and really hearing other people talk about themselves. More to the point, he was being placed in a situation where he had to relate to women—and where he could do so in perfect safety. He had always held himself back in all conversations, and particularly in conversations with women. By this I don’t mean that he stuttered, or avoided talking to women at all, or was shy to the point of silence. Actually he was capable of a great deal of charm. But it was never really Paul talking. He had become completely guarded.

In the course of the group sessions, and through some supportive individual discussions, Paul’s perception of himself began to change. He came to see himself less as a homosexual and more as a sexually inadequate heterosexual—and one whose inadequacy could be ultimately dealt with. He found his homosexual contacts increasingly unsatisfying and unpleasant. Before long he realized that the compulsive drive to seek out these contacts was virtually gone, that his occasional cruising had become more a matter of habit than desire. Once he saw this, he stopped homosexual relations entirely.

At the same time, I encouraged him to masturbate, and to give free rein to his fantasies during masturbation. I further encouraged him to employ pornography, both written and visual. I had him purchase a female mannequin and an artificial vagina, and instructed him to make love to the mannequin.

I was unsure at the time whether this last technique was really a good one. My idea was that such exercises would help to prepare him to be at ease with a female body. By stroking the mannequin at such times when he was himself sexually excited, I hoped to make him familiar with the idea of making love to a woman. Because, you see, he had never really made love to anyone in his life. He had never touched a body, male or female, with the idea of giving it pleasure or getting pleasure from the act.

He began dating casually. His state of mind had improved by now, and he had again secured a position in advertising art. He started going out with girls, seeing them socially, but not making an attempt to have sexual relations. I specifically instructed him not to have sex with any of them for the time being, even if he felt they would be agreeable. The knowledge that he was required to refrain from sex freed him from fears over his performance, or fears of rejection, and made it easier for him to enjoy being in female company in a social situation.

The next stage, actual sexual therapy with a partner, involved some deliberate deception on my part. I told Paul that a female patient of mine suffered from frigidity as a result of trauma experienced when she was raped as a child. She wanted very much to enjoy sex but became impossibly anxious when in a sexual situation. I said that my therapeutic prescription was a very gentle course of sexual intimacy with an anonymous stranger, and that it had occurred to me that it would be very valuable for him if he played this role in her treatment.

As it happens, the girl was a call girl who was a patient of mine at the time. I didn’t tell Paul this partially because I felt the idea of sex with a paid performer would have a negative effect on him, and also because it seemed important that he play an aggressive and assertive role, that he feel he was acting for this other person’s benefit, that he not even realize all of this was being performed exclusively on his behalf.

He used the back room of my office. The girl was waiting there at the appointed time, and as instructed he seated himself on the couch beside her and began touching her body through her clothing. She remained entirely passive throughout, and neither of them spoke.

On the following day he undressed her and himself, and again she lay passive while he caressed her. While I had told him that it was only necessary that she learn to relax when he did this, of course he assumed that the mark of success would be if he excited her into a genuine sexual response.

Thus, you see, he was making love to her, he was trying not to excite himself—which is a difficult thing to order oneself to do—but to excite her, his partner. The girl had been well-coached, and now would occasionally make appreciative sounds or tell him that a certain caress felt good.

Amusingly, at the conclusion of that session he confessed to me that he’d had a rather urgent erection for a portion of the time; and had been worried that she might notice it and find it frightening.

On the third day she took a more active role. She touched his body while he petted her, handled his penis. They kissed one another. He manipulated her clitoris, and she let herself become passionately aroused. She’s a good actress; she would have to be in her line of work, and as a matter of fact she’s acted professionally on occasion. I believe she’s done some television work.

She got very excited and told him she had almost had an orgasm. He touched her again, and this time she did have an orgasm, or pretended she had. She told him over and over how much pleasure he had brought her and insisted she wanted to bring him pleasure in return. She got him to show her how to bring him to orgasm with her hands.

Before their next meeting, Paul had sexual relations with one of the girls he had been dating. While I had purposely advised against this, I had done so with the hope that he would ultimately see fit to ignore my advice. In recounting the episode to me, he stressed that it had not been his intention to go that far with her. However, he recalled the intimacy and warmth of mutual masturbation with his presumed patient, and wanted to have similar warmth and intimacy with this girl he was dating, whom he found attractive and of whom he was quite fond. He only planned to pet for a while, but one thing led to another as will happen at such times, and the two wound up copulating. He had no trouble getting an erection and evidently acquitted himself quite well.

I had him meet four or five more times with the call girl. On each occasion he made slow, gentle love to her, culminating each time in coitus. He did not have the slightest difficulty in performing adequately.

The results in this case are very dramatic, as you can see. In an extremely short period of time Paul was functioning quite competently and happily as a heterosexual. He seems to have no inclination to resume homosexual relations to any extent whatsoever.

•  •  •

JWW: Lester took pains to stress that Paul’s case, while serving as an ideal illustration of his therapeutic technique, could not properly be described as typical. Few of the persons he has treated have so perfectly exemplified the homosexual-in-spite-of-himself as Paul. However, many of his patients have had histories similar to Paul’s in many respects, are ill at ease in homosexual acts and derive little satisfaction from their performance, and respond in much the same fashion to a similar therapeutic regimen.

Another type of patient Lester has dealt with is the homosexual who wants not to be “cured” so much as to be able to function bisexually.

•  •  •

LESTER: With a man who wants to become bisexual, assisting him is rarely a difficult matter. Generally speaking, his own motivation is at least half the battle in and of itself. Some men in this category are capable of fulfilling homosexual relationships. They may want the greater stability possible in a heterosexual marriage or they may want the improved self-image which bisexuality can afford them.

In some cases, I have done little more than furnish supportive therapy to reinforce in their minds the idea that their sexual enjoyment of males does not preclude their enjoying females as well, that they are not less manly or less likely to satisfy a woman than men who are exclusively heterosexual.

I saw a fellow recently who had a long history of homosexuality. He had met a young woman, fell in love with her and wanted to marry her. They were having a sexual relationship. He was able to perform more than adequately and found relations with her extremely enjoyable. And he had told her about his homosexuality, and she seemed able to accept it.

Nevertheless, he came to me because he was hesitant to marry the girl, fearful that his homosexual desires would make such a marriage a difficult proposition for both of them. Although he had been sexually faithful to his girl since the onset of their relationship, he still found males attractive and still found himself strongly drawn to the idea of homosexual contacts. He was anxious that, if he married the girl, he would either ultimately yield to temptation or find exclusive heterosexuality increasingly a source of frustration.

I insisted on meeting with him and with his girl, both separately and together. The position I took with them was that bisexuality was a legitimate sexual life style, that there was no hard and fast either/or line between heterosexuality and homosexuality. It was to be expected that, however satisfying his relationship with this girl and however genuine his love for her, he would continue to find the prospect of homosexual relations attractive. By the same token, an exclusively heterosexual male does not perforce lose the desire for sexual relations with other attractive women simply because he is married and loves his wife. He may make the decision to forego extramarital affairs, or he may engage in them without it reflecting adversely on his feelings for his wife. The course he takes will be very much a personal matter dependent upon any number of individual variables.

For a genuinely bisexual male, however, the likelihood of strict fidelity seems slimmer, perhaps because homosexual partners can offer a kind of sexual relations unavailable to him with his wife. At the same time, I pointed out, such a man’s affairs with male partners seem to constitute somewhat less of a threat to his marriage than would the affairs of a heterosexual male. There is far less chance of his falling in love in a way that would compete with his marriage, for example. Furthermore, it is often easier for a wife to regard with equanimity her husband’s sexual relations with other men—perhaps because she feels less threatened for some of the reasons already cited, perhaps because such extramarital ventures seem to be less of a rejection of her and more a pure expression of a need for sexual variety.

In this instance, the girl had very little difficulty in accepting the possibility that her future husband would have occasional sex with male partners. The fact that she knew of his homosexuality and accepted it early on in their own relationship had suggested to me that this would likely be the case. In the course of a three-way discussion of their situation, the man confided that he had for some time fantasized a sexual threesome involving himself, his girl, and another bisexual male. He had been fearful of confiding this fantasy to her previously, and was surprised to discover that it was by no means without appeal for her. The life style they ultimately evolve may well be an unorthodox one, but I see no reason why they should fail to have a viable marriage.

•  •  •

JWW: I asked Lester if he had had comparable experiences with lesbians. He replied that he had not had a single case of a woman coming to him to be cured of homosexuality, although a certain number of women with homosexual histories had sought his help in enabling them to respond more completely to male sexual partners. None of them had felt the need to root out lesbian impulses in order to function heterosexually. He added that he did not know whether this indicated a basic distinction between attitudes pertaining to male and female homosexuality, or whether it was merely coincidental; the size of his practice was not such as to facilitate conclusions on this point.

Swinging as Therapy

Over the years, I seem to have written more about swinging than anyone ought to have to read, let alone write. At one point I defined swinging as “consensual mutual adultery for recreational purposes.” While that’s not the sort of phrase-making I expect to find immortalized in the next edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, it seems concise enough, and it does the job.

Note the word “recreational.” Swingers exchange mates, or engage in group sex, because it’s fun. There may be an additional motive for getting into swinging in the first place, to be sure. A great many wives indisputably start swinging because they’re tired of refusing an activity which seems of such paramount importance to their husbands. A great many couples turn to swinging after having made the presumably disheartening discovery that a certain amount of novelty goes out of a monogamous sexual relationship after a certain number of years. And other couples become swingers in order to preserve their marriages—though most swingers will argue that swinging cannot preserve a relationship that is determined to deteriorate, any more than it can impair one which was viable in the first place.

These initial motives notwithstanding, those persons who continue to participate in swinging or some form of group sex for a considerable period of time do so because they enjoy it. It gives them pleasure. It makes them feel good. It somehow fulfills them.

Consider, then, a couple whose approach to swinging was somewhat different, a couple for whom it was consciously embraced in the hope that it would have a sexually therapeutic effect.

Consider Bruce and Joanne.

They are in their early thirties, suburban, college-educated, fashionably dressed. Bruce does something involving computers; his sideburns extend to the bottoms of his ear lobes, and he periodically considers growing a beard. Joanne takes adult-education courses sporadically, investigating such topics as gourmet cooking, Far Eastern philosophy, and air pollution. She also reads thick forbidding books on child development and psychology; in spite of this, their three children seem reasonably well-adjusted. If the couple has one outstanding characteristic, it is probably their sincerity, which might be described as painful.

I met Bruce and Joanne in connection with another book, one dealing with group sex and swinging in general. At the time this present volume had not even been conceived. My conversations with the two of them, while generally illuminating, did not lead me to incorporate their specific experiences in what I was writing at the time. More recently, when I began investigating the various aspects of sexual therapy, I remembered Bruce and Joanne, and it occurred to me that their approach to swinging had been fundamentally therapeutic, not in the more usual sense of aiding a sexual relationship which had gone stale, but with the aim of making them, both individually and as a couple, more sexually proficient.

I referred to my notes, then got in touch with them and interviewed them more fully in this context. Further thought has led me to the suspicion that what was a conscious primary motive for them may well be an unconscious or secondary motive for a great many other couples who turn to swinging.

But did this sort of case constitute sexual therapy as it is understood in this present book? It seems to me that therapy is no less therapy for having been designed and undertaken by the patient without outside assistance.

But let’s hear from Bruce.

•  •  •

BRUCE: We were both virgins when we got married.

I suppose this is absolutely unheard of now. It seems as though all young couples live together before they get married. I would certainly hope my own children will do so. In fact, I hope I’ll have enough sense to advise them to do just that. Fifteen years ago, it was a lot less common for unmarried couples actually to live together. It was likely that they would have intercourse, but without living together it’s hard to have a really intense sexual relationship. Especially if you’re young and live with your parents and have a problem finding privacy, so that your premarital experience is limited to parked cars.

We didn’t even have that. In my own case, I came from a deeply religious fundamentalist background. I went to a small denominational college and originally began studying for the ministry. Somewhere in the course of my sophomore year I lost my faith. That’s an expression you don’t hear much any more. It happened. I went through a very difficult period, lost my faith, found myself having doubts about everything, questioning everything. But I didn’t go all-out and become the campus atheist. Our college didn’t have a campus atheist. I just found myself going through the motions, staying in school, even taking a certain number of religion courses and keeping my doubts to myself.

Now, for all the jokes about ministers’ daughters and wild goings-on at bible colleges, the fact remains that it’s very damned easy to come out of one of those places a virgin. I certainly found it easy. By the time I graduated I had rejected almost everything I had been taught, and would have been damned glad to go to bed with any female who would have me, but the opportunities were almost non-existent and the social pressures, instead of pushing you toward sexual experimentation, held you back.

At the same time, even while I was rejecting the religious trappings, I had substituted a different sort of illusion. I believed very deeply in True Love. I felt that the way my life could have meaning would be for me to meet the right girl, for me to be pure for her and for her to be pure for me, and for the two of us to love each other deeply and completely, to grow through our love for one another, and to live happily ever after. Joanne, who did not have a similar religious background, shared this particular myth. It’s something that one is very much predisposed to at that age, especially if one has not been a rampaging social success all through life. You read a lot of crap like The Prophet, and you’re young enough to believe it all means something. It’s much later on that you attach some significance to the fact that Kahlil Gibran never balled anybody . . .

To get down to cases, I met Joanne shortly after I graduated. I had fancied myself in love once or twice before, during college, but the relationships were never very profound, either emotionally or physically. Joanne had been in love once, with a boy who had done some heavy petting with her, and they had broken up largely because she refused to go “all the way” and have intercourse with him. We were very much ready for each other. We met, we fell in love or at least thought that what existed between us was love, and before very long we decided to get married.

We could have gone to bed together before the wedding. We did discuss it, and if I had wanted to enough it probably would have happened. But there was this feeling on both our parts that it would be somehow better for us if we waited. As a matter of fact, I’m sure things would have been just about the same if we had made love during our courtship period. I know quite a few couples who did, so that what it amounts to is that for both of them the extent of their premarital experience was with each other. Jumping the gun thus didn’t make any enormous difference; they wound up in very much the same situation as we did.

Our wedding night wasn’t particularly traumatic. In that I guess we were very lucky, as I’ve heard and read a great many horror stories about what happens when two virgins wind up in a marital bed together. But it all went, oh, well enough. And our sexual relationship seemed to be developing well enough. We had sex several times a week and we both enjoyed it a great deal.

Actually, however, it was a rotten relationship. Only we didn’t know it at the time.

That sounds like a contradiction, doesn’t it? You could argue that if two people think their relationship is good, then it’s good by definition. That sounds good, but it doesn’t say the whole thing. There were a lot of times when I couldn’t get excited, couldn’t get an erection. The first time this happened I worried about it, but I managed to read enough to learn that this happens to everybody now and then, and that at least got me over my worries. Other times I would ejaculate too soon. In a sense I always ejaculated too soon, in that Joanne almost never had an orgasm. She thought she was having orgasms, she was reaching a sort of peak of sensation and this would be followed by a lessening of tension, but she wouldn’t have a full and complete orgasm. Also, we were doing only the most ordinary things sexually. I would caress her body, stroke and kiss her breasts, then touch her genitals briefly and unimaginatively, and then we would have intercourse. We almost always used the same position, the standard missionary position, man on top. We sometimes experimented with other positions but that was infrequent and we usually found them either uncomfortable or strange and went back to the usual way.

It’s impossible to say exactly when we became aware that this wasn’t all it could be. It happened gradually. We both began reading some books on sex and had a few really good discussions on the subject, the two of us, and we decided to try experimenting a little. We experimented with oral-genital sex. This was enormously exciting, but at the same time it was vaguely unsatisfying because neither of us was sure of what the hell we were doing and we had difficulty telling each other what we were doing wrong. Also, we used this just as a prelude to intercourse, and learned much later that each of us would have liked to go all the way with it, but for some reason we were inhibited about mentioning it to each other. I wanted desperately to have Joanne really get down to business and suck my cock, I wanted to come in her mouth, and instead she just did a certain amount of kissing and tongue-caressing, licking it, and I didn’t want to say No, dammit, you’re doing it wrong because it would have seemed like such a put-down, for one thing, and also because I didn’t entirely know in my own mind what I wanted her to do, or how she would go about doing it, or how to tell her what I thought I wanted.

Also, each of us thought the other didn’t really like to perform the act. I thought she could only go down on me for my benefit, that she couldn’t get pleasure out of it, and vice-versa. She wanted me to keep on eating her all the way to orgasm, and I would have been glad to, but for some misguided altruistic reason she always stopped me just as she was getting excited and indicated to me that I should have coitus with her.

•  •  •

JWW: It would seem that this stage of experimentation would have led to a great improvement in the quality of the sexual relationship existing between Joanne and Bruce. In a sense the relationship may have improved, but in another sense it deteriorated, in that now each of them began to grow more and more conscious of the potential of a sexual relationship—and thus more aware of the way their relationship failed to fulfill this potential. They came to recognize more intense sexual expression as a goal, and each innovation they introduced, however pleasurable and novel it might be, only showed them that they were still falling short of ultimate sexual and emotional satisfaction.

The ideal they had once shared—the monogamous union of two persons who had been previously inexperienced—had by now lost all its charm. Both of them began to regret, not so much that they had waited to indulge in sex until they were married, but that they had not had sex with other persons prior to their meeting so that they could have learned more about how to satisfy each other. They thus began to regard sex with a variety of partners as a specifically educational experience likely to have positive benefits in an ultimate monogamous marriage.

It was in this mental framework that the idea of swinging began to appear attractive. Let us see how Joanne discusses this stage in their development.

•  •  •

JOANNE: The first time I was ever really aware of swinging, except in the sense of Sunday-supplement sensationalism, was when some friends of ours started joking about it at a party. Not the sort of jokes where somebody was trying to get something started, but just a general joking discussion of what was then called wife-swapping. Jokes about throwing keys in a hat, you know the sort of thing I mean.

Before then, I had had some very private thoughts about having sex with another man. This was strictly in the realm of fantasy. The idea of an actual love affair with another man never had any real appeal. But, keeping it pure fantasy, I could conjure up some sort of Dream Lover who would do everything right, who would know ways to excite me that Bruce didn’t know, that I didn’t know myself, and under his touch and guidance I would magically know just what to do, and sex would reach a level of intensity that Bruce and I had not been able to reach.

After my awareness of swinging came about, this became my dominant fantasy. I read a great deal of books on the subject, books and magazine articles as well. A large portion of the books were obvious fakes, and I recognized them as fakes at the time. By this I mean that they would be set up as collections of case histories, but once the writer got the ball rolling all he did was describe sexual encounters in the strongest possible detail, who did what and how to whom, all of that, with the object being to turn the reader on sexually. Well, let me tell you, it worked! I got very much turned on by the whole idea.

It was obvious to me that Bruce was also getting turned on by these books, and by the whole idea of swinging, because otherwise he wouldn’t have been bringing these books home in the first place. Even so, for a long time neither of us was willing or able to bring the subject out into the open. Part of this was the underlying feeling that swinging was not decent or wholesome. Another part was the suggestion implicit in the desire to swing that one wanted another sexual partner. By telling Bruce I was interested in swinging, I would in effect be telling him that I wanted to fuck another man, and thus that he wasn’t enough to satisfy me. Well, he wasn’t enough to satisfy me, and I wasn’t enough to satisfy him, but neither of us could come out and say so.

The Dream Lover of my fantasy had changed now; he was a half of a swinging couple, and being with him would not be disloyal to Bruce because even as I was in the man’s arms, Bruce would be with the man’s wife. In a great many of the books I read, the same scenario took place; a couple would be initiated into swinging, and they would both have a great time, and then they would go home together and make love in spite of how many times that night they had already done so, and it would be exciting for them as never before, and they would share the new tricks they had learned, and they would be closer to each other than they had ever been in their lives.

Needless to say, this was my most treasured fantasy.

Eventually Bruce and I found ourselves discussing swinging. I don’t know what brought it up. There was a period of fencing around with it as a topic of conversation, making passing references to it, and then one night we were in bed and we began talking about it, and we got enormously excited, physically excited, a shared excitement that we were both enormously conscious of. We made love, and discussed swinging some more and our own feelings about it, and made love again.

All of this seemed to be telling us something. Bruce picked up one of the correspondence magazines and we went through it together night after night, checking out ads, picking ad copy and photos of people who seemed appealing. We “read” that magazine together until it was ready to fall apart. It became sort of a sexual fetish for us. When one of us was in the mood, we would signal it by getting in bed and picking up the magazine, and the other would read along, and pretty soon we would be having sex.

Then we decided that swinging wasn’t for us, and we stopped even talking about it.

We just dropped the subject completely.

•  •  •

JWW: Bruce and Joanne offered a variety of explanations for the abrupt dismissal of the idea of swinging. In my experience, quite a few couples go through a similar stage where the idea is renounced. Perhaps it is impossible to sustain an idea in the realm of pure fantasy forever; perhaps sooner or later one must either go ahead and transform the fantasy into actuality or drop the fantasy altogether. In this particular instance, I suspect that the two of them sensed they were reaching a point where they would have to “shit or get off the pot” and were afraid that what was acceptable in fantasy would be somehow undesirable in reality, for one reason or another.

Not long afterward, their entire sexual relationship seems to have deteriorated to a marked degree. Bruce found himself frequently impotent. Joanne not only failed to reach orgasm when they did have intercourse, but often either failed to respond altogether or was left high and dry at its conclusion, frustrated as she had not been frustrated in the past. The strain which all of this placed on their marriage led them to consult a marriage counselor. Counseling was presumably “successful” in that their marriage continued, but the situation does not seem to have been improved to any significant extent.

In this context, the idea of swinging once again surfaced, and the rationale for it now was perceived less as excitement or the enlargement of sexual horizons and more as a form of sexual therapy.

“We were in a bind,” Bruce explained. “We felt inadequate in a very definitely sexual sense. I felt that I could not satisfy my wife, that I could not perform adequately, that I was a sexual failure. Joanne had similar feelings about herself. Also there were unvoiced but very real doubts we had concerning each other. For example, I would worry that perhaps it was Joanne’s fault, that I could be happier and more effective with another woman. And she felt the same doubts about me. If a program like Masters and Johnson’s had existed at the time, I’m sure we would have gone for it. It would have had enormous appeal for us.

Joanne echoed these sentiments, and discussed the manner in which they made the decision to experiment with sex with another couple.

•  •  •

JOANNE: Around this time we were both having private thoughts about swinging again, as we discovered later. Finally I brought it out into the open. I said, “Look, our relationship stinks, and although it was better before, it was never perfect. We had something that would have been good enough for us if we didn’t know that anything better could exist. But now we’re able to visualize a better relationship, a deeper involvement with sexuality, and we’re not able to reach it. And it doesn’t look as though we can find it with each other, and here we are, two people who have never made love to anyone except each other, and maybe that’s the trouble.

The conclusion we came to was that swinging couldn’t hurt us. If it did nothing for us, at least it would have the positive effect of showing us that it wasn’t the answer.

•  •  •

JWW: This, incidentally, is a good argument for the acting out of any number of sexual fantasies; it often seems to me that, when any desire reaches the level of a preoccupation, it is better to act it out than to remain forever captive of it, if only to get it off one’s mind. This of course presumes that the acting-out process is not specifically dangerous or destructive.

•  •  •

JOANNE: So we went through the ritual of picking up swinger magazines again and reading ads. One thing that worried both of us was that we were inexperienced and might not make desirable sexual partners. We visualized swingers as enormously knowledgeable and experienced, almost jaded, and we were a little frightened that we would be a disappointment to them. I think I worried more about being physically unattractive, which is probably a more natural female reaction, while Bruce worried about being impotent or otherwise being a poor lover, a more natural male fear.

For this reason, and out of fear of rejection, we did not reply to any of the ads but decided to write an ad of our own. I don’t remember the exact language of it, but we stressed that we were beginners, that we didn’t know an awful lot, but that we were willing to learn and wanted to experiment with anything and everything. In this sense we were probably too outspoken, because we got a lot of replies from people with pretty far-out notions of what constituted an interesting experiment, people who wanted to stick pins in us or do other things that were a long ways off from what we had in mind.

We also got a good number of extremely sympathetic responses from people who understood what we were all about and wanted very much to meet us on those terms. It hadn’t occurred to us at the time, but the idea of initiating a couple new to swinging has a tremendous appeal to certain people. Not to everybody—many couples want to associate only with people who have reach a similar level of experience, and are put off at the thought of playing teacher to a pair of semi-virgins. But our inexperience was a turn-on to some people in the same way that a virgin is a turn-on to some men. I don’t know if the reason is the same, but it seems to work in about the same way.

We were both very determined not to let this opportunity slip away. We selected one couple of the dozen or so suitable replies we received, and I called their home one afternoon while Bruce was at the office. The woman who answered was much easier to talk to than I had supposed she would be. Of course she had been through this once herself, or more than once, had played the role of the newcomer, and was aware of all the hesitation and awkwardness that I felt. We made arrangements to meet them that Saturday on “neutral territory”—at a restaurant for dinner—and if all went well we would go to their home with them.

We had a pleasant dinner with them, and we all hit it off well enough. They were a very nice couple, quite attractive and well-mannered. They were several years older than us. I don’t know if we consciously sought older partners or not at the beginning, but I’m sure it was somehow important to us that they be older than us. I think we would have been uneasy if they were younger, even though they might have had infinitely more swinging experience. You just want your teachers to be older, and this was very much a teacher-student kind of relationship that we were seeking.

Over coffee they asked us if we would like to come back to their place, and Bruce and I exchanged glances and agreed that we would. We drove back in separate cars, and Bruce and I hardly exchanged a word all the way there. I felt very excited, and very apprehensive, all at once.

We had a couple of drinks to break the tension. Then the wife asked Bruce if he would like to see the upstairs of the house, and they went off together, and I found myself alone with a man other than Bruce for the first time in my life. It could have been a very nervous situation but he didn’t give me a chance to be nervous. He sat next to me on the sofa and began to make love to me.

The kissing was the strangest part, probably because I had not spent that much time visualizing it. In my mind I guess I had dwelled more on the more obvious aspects and had not wondered how it would feel to be kissing a strange man. At first it just felt funny. Then it felt marvelously exciting in a way kissing hadn’t been in years. When you’ve been married to a person for a long time, kissing by itself is just not that exciting a thing. You’ve done it so many times, and so often it’s just a loving gesture with no sexual implications, a kiss good-bye before he goes to the office, that sort of thing, completely asexual. And even when it’s a passionate kiss, after a while it’s just a prelude to lovemaking and it’s not really exciting. But this was like kisses with Bruce early in our relationship, before we were married, before we had been physically intimate, because the man I was kissing was a man with whom I had not yet been intimate.

He made love to me on the couch in the living room. He was a very slow and thorough lover, undressed me an article of clothing at a time, told me over and over again how beautiful I was, how much he was attracted to me, how he liked the various parts of me. “You have such magnificent tits,” he said. I remember him saying that over and over.

It was very exciting to know that I was attractive to him. While he still had his clothes on he took my hand and put it on his cock. He had an erection, and this thrilled me beyond belief, not just the excitement of his hard cock but the confirmation that I really was exciting to him.

When I was nude he got out of his own clothes and I looked at him and thrilled at the sight of his body. His penis was actually slightly smaller than Bruce’s, but at the time it looked larger to me, probably because I was seeing him as the essence of manliness, of virility, and I associated this with a large sex organ, and so his penis appeared larger to me than it actually was.

He began making love to me again, and I felt the most extraordinary freedom. I don’t know exactly how to explain this so that it’ll make sense. I felt that I wasn’t supposed to be experienced, that he was the teacher and I was the pupil, and so I was able to relax completely and just follow his lead. I could go with his lovemaking instead of worrying about what should happen next.

Also, I wasn’t afraid of failing. And this surprised me, because up to this moment I had had a great many fears along this line. But now the fear was gone. Maybe the evidence that I had excited him was reassurance enough.

He made very slow, sensitive love to me. He moved from one stage of lovemaking to the next very smoothly. He spent a long time kissing my breasts, then moved his hand to my loins, then gradually did more there with his hand and less on my breasts with his mouth, then almost before I was aware of the transition he was going down on me.

He ate me for ages, and it was fantastic. It felt wonderful, and at first I just enjoyed it, and then I was waiting for him to mount me and have intercourse. Then I realized he wanted to make me come with his mouth, and I tried to hurry myself along to a climax, and of course that’s self-defeating.

He looked up at me with this very gentle smile and said, “Just let yourself go with it. Just float with it and let yourself enjoy the way it feels.”

And all of a sudden I was free. All I had to do was enjoy his tongue on my clitoris and his hands inside me, his finger in my ass and his other fingers in my cunt, all I had to do was feel all of this and enjoy it, and I managed to get out of my mind-prison and into my body in a way I had never entirely managed before, especially during oral sex, and without even knowing it was coming I had an orgasm that absolutely rocked me. It was just like the books said it was supposed to be.

I had had orgasms with Bruce by this time. I had even had orgasms that may have been as powerful and complete as this one. But I had never had an orgasm that took me so completely out of my consciousness, that let my body take over so thoroughly, that represented so much a surrender of will, of ego, of self. I had never before had an orgasm I was so utterly involved with.

Then he fucked me. Long, slow strokes. It was tantalizing. He would fuck me in one position until I came, then get me in another position for a while, and so on, all the while holding himself back. When he finally did come he roared like a bull. It was very thrilling for me to know that I had brought him so much pleasure.

•  •  •

JWW: Bruce recounted a similarly gratifying experience with the man’s wife. He, too, was greatly excited by her excitement and found it enough of a spur to his potency to more than counteract the effects of his anxieties. He was further pleased by the ease with which she reached orgasm, after having had so much difficulty over the years in inducing a climax for Joanne. In addition, he had always had the usual unvoiced fears that his penis was “too small,” and was understandably delighted to be assured by his new partner that he was “hung like a horse.”

•  •  •

BRUCE: When we finally left them, Joanne and I were at first a little hesitant with one another, both reluctant to start talking about what we had just done. This was what is called “closed” swinging, of course; I was upstairs with the wife all the time, and Joanne was downstairs with the husband. Most first times are like that, and I think it’s probably a good idea, easier to get into . . .

Once we did start talking about it, the words came in a flood. We both wanted to establish how very good it had been, and how very good we had been. Joanne talked about the climax she had had while she was being eaten, not so much in terms of what an educated tongue the guy had but that she had found a way to let go, to get out of herself. I had experienced something vaguely similar, a feeling I had at one point in the evening of being in complete control. By this I mean that for probably the first time in my life in the course of lovemaking I didn’t really have to think about what I was going to do next. I just did it without thinking and knew that it would be the right thing to do, whatever it was. I was so tuned in to this woman’s body and to my own body that the right action came automatically, without conscious thought.

We had not been terribly worried that swinging would affect our feelings toward one another. I think that was a big worry the first time we were contemplating swinging, but by this time we knew each other well enough and were secure enough with each other that this was no longer a major concern. Still, it was nice to find out that, not only did we not feel differently toward each other in a negative way, but that we felt closer, in terms of having shared this important and delightful experience. Then there was another effect which is harder to explain, and this was increased in later swinging experiences. We became more conscious of ourselves and each other as sexual beings, as sexually attractive. I had always found Joanne attractive and considered her desirable not only to me but in the abstract. The fact that another man found her attractive and enjoyed making love to her made her increasingly desirable to me, at the same time that it made her more sexually confident of herself. And the same thing worked as far as her attitudes toward me were concerned.

We swung again with that same couple a week later. In the week between those two meetings, you could say that we put some of what we had learned into practice. We certainly were more active sexually than was usually the case. Our memories of the swinging evening, our anticipation of the next meeting, and our shared recollections and fantasies, all contributed to create an atmosphere that made us very anxious to make love to each other.

I don’t think we had consciously considered ourselves to be sexually inhibited previously. Perhaps “inhibited” isn’t the right word. However you want to put it, we found out now that we had been holding a part of ourselves back in our lovemaking, and it had affected the quality of our sexual relationship. It wasn’t so much what we had not done before, but that we had not done it with complete abandon and involvement.

During that week, I kept waiting for a reaction to set in, either on my part or on Joanne’s. I anticipated such a reaction and had tried before the event to prepare myself for such a reaction when it came. After all, I had spent a great many years of my life in the grip of a very straight, puritanical set of values, and I expected that I would get echoes of them, aftershocks, something like that.

This didn’t happen. I’m sure it would have, for both of us, if that first experience had not been such an excellent one and if it had not served to bring us so much closer together, both physically and emotionally. If we had been uptight with each other, I’m sure we would have felt that swinging was responsible and would have begun having second thoughts about the decency or morality of what we had done. But everything was so good for us I couldn’t make myself believe that anything about it could be indecent, immoral, evil.

•  •  •

JWW: Their second swinging experience took place a week later, again at the home of the couple who had initiated them. On this occasion, the other couple suggested they try “open” rather than “closed” swinging; in other words, all four persons remained in the same room rather than separating and coupling off behind closed doors.

While generalizations about swinging are difficult, it is probably valid to say that most swingers begin with closed swinging and gravitate to open swinging. The reasons advanced for the eventual preference of open swinging are several; most commonly one hears that open swinging is more exciting because of its possibilities for voyeurism and/or group sex, that open swinging makes the event more of a shared experience for a couple, that one partner might otherwise tend to worry about his or her mate’s safety or enjoyment.

For Bruce and Joanne, with their particular approach to swinging as sexual therapy-cum-education, open swinging was especially attractive for another reason. It had an educational value. One could learn by observing.

Here’s how Joanne explains it.

•  •  •

JOANNE: I’ve always enjoyed watching Bruce with another woman. First of all, it’s a very thrilling experience to watch two people make love. It’s an aesthetically beautiful thing, and it’s as erotic as anything I can think of. But more than that, there are things you can learn that way more easily than any other way I can imagine. By watching what another woman does, and by seeing what Bruce especially likes or doesn’t like, I can get ideas of things to do or not do when I make love to him.

It’s also a way of seeing yourself, if you can follow me. When I see another woman make love I identify with her, I feel what she’s feeling, and I know what I look like when I make love, and it gives me a different sort of perspective on the whole experience.

The first time we did this, I have to admit to extraordinary nervousness. I think I was more nervous then than I was when we first swung with this couple. The idea of all being together was very unsettling. Everything about it embarrassed me. I was apprehensive at the idea of Bruce seeing me with another man, as though his feelings for me would be severely tested by the sight of me in another man’s arms. I was also nervous about the presence of the other woman. I felt I would be in competition with her. Her breasts were considerably bigger than mine, and I felt that she was more attractive and that both of the men would gravitate toward her, or want to be with her.

There were other feelings, too, other anxieties. I had some unfocused reservations about her seeing me naked, about my looking at her body. I had a great curiosity about what she would look like naked and at the same time was nervous about it, was reluctant to actually go ahead and look at her. Later I learned to recognize these anxieties as evidence of my own ambivalent homosexual impulses, and of course in time this resolved itself easily enough, but then it was just a further complication.

Fortunately, we had established enough of a pattern of them leading and us following so that my own nervousness was swept aside and ignored. They put on records and we had a few drinks, and then I was sitting on one couch with the husband while Bruce was sitting across the room with the wife. The husband and I began necking, and it didn’t take him long to get my mind off my anxieties. I got excited, and then I forgot about the other two people in the room, and then when I got more excited I remembered them and found their presence exciting instead of inhibiting.

Before our lovemaking got down to the nitty-gritty, the other husband slowed things down and indicated that we ought to watch Bruce and his wife. So we watched them. I can still picture that scene very vividly in my mind.

The were both naked. The couch was sort of a love seat, about five feet long, and he was sprawled out on it with his head in one corner and his legs extended, his feet hanging on the floor. He had his eyes closed and his mouth half open, and one hand was tangled in her hair. She was kneeling on the floor beside him sucking his cock.

It was the most, oh, the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life.

I was just absolutely struck by the sight of this. I watched her head bobbing up and down, and the way her cheeks were drawn in, concave, as she sucked him, and his fingers flexing in her hair. I watched her breasts rise and fall as her head moved up and down, up and down. And while I watched, her husband was playing with me, touching me all over. He took my hand and put it on his penis, and my hand picked up the rhythm she was using and I jerked his cock in time to the rhythm she sucked in.

He began making love to me in earnest before the two of them finished. It was a nice lazy transition. First we were watching them, and then we were watching and making love simultaneously, and then we had forgotten them and were all caught up in the things we were doing to each other.

I really enjoyed going down on him that time. I had never before really enjoyed the act, not in a direct sense. I had long ago learned to do it without disliking it, but previously it had been only a secondary source of pleasure for me—I enjoyed it because it brought Bruce pleasure.

Watching her—well, it not only showed me things about how to do it, but it made me vividly aware of fellatio as an act that could be an enormous source of pleasure for the woman performing it. It was so obvious that she enjoyed what she was doing, and not only because she was driving Bruce out of his skull.

So when I had her husband’s cock in my mouth, I found myself loving it. Relishing the taste of it, the way it filled my mouth, the sensation of it on my tongue and lips and the inner walls of my mouth. I had never been able to take too much of Bruce’s penis into my mouth, I would always tend to gag on it if I tried, but now the excitement I was getting helped me dilate my throat muscles or something, or just overcome the gagging reflex, and I was thus much better at what I was doing.

So I did that for a long time, and we did other things, and then there was a point when I realized that Bruce and the other woman were just a few yards away and that they were watching us. And I was so thoroughly excited by then that instead of being uptight about being observed, I found it had a strong aphrodisiacal effect upon me. I responded to the fact that they were watching me. The whole thing, every aspect of it, was tremendously stimulating.

•  •  •

JWW: Bruce and Joanne continued to swing, spending an average of a night a week in this fashion. They continued to see the first couple occasionally, and gradually enlarged their circle of swinging acquaintances, both through correspondence and referrals.

Naturally, not all of these experiences were idyllic. Sometimes they did not find the other couple physically appealing, although this was rarely a highly disturbing factor. More often, the might be put off by the personalities of another couple. Some of their experiences were such that, had their introduction to swinging been similarly disappointing, they doubt that they would have continued with it. But by this time they felt themselves wholeheartedly committed to swinging, and unfortunate experiences of this sort were just seen as temporary disappointments.

Sexual facility is not hard to learn once you begin to learn it. As soon as people start learning to get and give pleasure, they will generally continue their education themselves quite automatically. Thus it was not very long before Bruce and Joanne were quite sexually accomplished, and one might think that “sexual therapy” would then no longer be a true motive for their continuing to swing.

Perhaps their insistence that they continued to regard swinging as educational is in large measure a means of rationalizing; perhaps their real motive was an understandable desire purely for pleasure, for fun. Nevertheless, they do seem to believe that they went on swinging out of a desire to go on “growing” sexually—not so much to learn techniques but to open themselves up sexually, to learn to deal with hang-ups and inhibitions, and further to explore themselves and their world in terms of their own sexual identity.

This expanding of sexual horizons is not unusual among swingers. On the contrary, most couples who get involved in group sex find themselves forever enlarging the boundaries of their sexual experience—moving from closed to open swinging, from two-couple parties to larger groups, from one-plus-one couplings to threesomes and moresomes, from heterosexuality to bisexuality, from orthodox to more unusual forms of sexual relations. Sometimes this desire for novelty can become an end in itself.

Let’s see how Bruce sees it.

•  •  •

BRUCE: The way we’ve approached it, you could almost say that swinging has been a sexual version of psychoanalysis. By getting into new scenes, new experiences, and by teaching ourselves to be open to them, and finally by discussing and analyzing our reactions later in the privacy of our own home, we’ve found out a great deal. We’ve found out things about ourselves and we’ve learned things about sex and life in general.

I could go through all the weird scenes we’ve been involved in and try to show how each of them has been a growth experience for us, but I don’t know if there’s much point to it . . .

•  •  •

JWW: I had expressed some mild disbelief at the suggestion that sexual experimentation had been conducted primarily for educational purposes, and Bruce was trying to justify his position.

•  •  •

BRUCE: . . . So instead let me talk about our experiences with bisexual activity. I think it’s no exaggeration to say that everybody has problems with his feelings about homosexuality. Everyone has bisexual impulses in himself or herself, and it’s hard to work them out.

Neither Joanne nor I had ever had any homosexual experience—hell, we had had virtually no heterosexual experience, and homosexuality had never come up in our lives before we got into swinging. Joanne had a crush on a teacher in high school which she is now able to identify as a typical adolescent homosexual crush, but at the time she never thought of it in sexual terms at all and of course nothing ever came of it. I had no feelings about homosexuality except for the vague general repugnance which is the usual means of resolving unconscious homosexual desires and affirming one’s own heterosexuality. No one had ever made a pass at me, or if they did it was sufficiently subtle that I was never aware of it, not even after the fact.

Once we got deeply into swinging, we were frequently confronted with the prospect of bisexuality. As you know, a large proportion of the people in swinging are at least occasionally bi. This is particularly true of women, though there seem to be more and more bisexual men as well in recent years.

When we were first getting started, people were generally very tentative about bisexuality. When we were asked if we were bi we would reply in the negative, and that would generally be the end of it. Occasionally we would infer that the couple asking the question were bi, or more often that the wife was, but nothing was pushed at us and the subject was dropped.

Then occasionally when we were asked, we would answer, “No, we’re not bi ourselves, are you?” And the answer would generally be that the wife would be bi “occasionally, if the vibes were especially right,” something like that. People tend to try to be what they figure you want them to be, so if we announced ourselves as strictly heterosexual, they would accordingly minimize the extent of their own bisexual predilections.

A couple of times women would go on to say that they were attracted to Joanne, and would enjoy making it with her if she would like to try it out. The first few times this happened she refused. You can almost always do this politely enough, and swingers almost always accept refusals of this sort in good grace. One time the wife whom Joanne turned down was obviously disappointed, and afterward we talked about it, and came to the conclusion that, after all, it was something that certainly wouldn’t have hurt Joanne, and would have given this girl so much pleasure, so maybe it was silly to have refused her, especially since Joanne had no experiential basis for deciding she wouldn’t enjoy it, since she hadn’t tried it.

Now the fact that she was in so much proximity to bisexuality, that the question was coming up so frequently, made us both far more aware of the possibility of bisexuality than we had ever been in the past. On a couple of occasions we were in group scenes where two of the girls made it together, and we watched, and it wasn’t so much that Joanne found the watching exciting as that she found nothing off-putting about it. She could imagine herself involved in something like that without getting nauseous at the thought.

The upshot was that she decided she ought to have a bisexual experience. Not because she might like it—we recognized that possibility, but it didn’t seem that important one way or another. More that she felt, we both felt, that she would know more about herself and more about her sexuality if she went through with it than if she didn’t. The worst that could happen was that she would discover she didn’t like it, and then at least she would know that much and it would cease to be a problem.

Well, the next time we were with a couple where the woman had expressed an interest in Joanne, she asked if the offer still held. The other girl was pleased and not terribly surprised. Her attitude seem to be that all women get around to trying another woman sooner or later. They made it together, with the original understanding that Joanne would not be required to go down on the other girl, that it would be perfectly all right if it remained one-sided, but I think Joanne had already resolved that she would go the whole route and find out what it was like to eat another woman.

Anyway, they did it, and Joanne discovered she was bi.

But she discovered a great deal more than that, and continued to make discoveries in future bi encounters. I don’t know that either she or I can verbalize these discoveries effectively. There’s a difference between heterosexual lovemaking and female homosexual lovemaking, an entirely different tempo, a different sort of build-up of excitement, a more gradual ebb and flow of sexual tides. Joanne found new aspects of herself through this. She realized another side of her sexual nature through the experience of making love to other women. She found, too, that this sort of lovemaking could never be as important to her as male-female lovemaking. It could never stir her as deeply, it could never seem to her to be as serious or important a matter. It was nice, and she liked it, and there is an intimacy and sweetness to it that is perhaps greater in certain respects than she usually finds in sex with males, but it is definitely secondary and she is definitely more heterosexual than homosexual.

My own bisexual experience has been far more limited. Among the people we swing with, I would say that female bisexuality has become the norm, while male bisexuality is very much the exception. Most of the time, men would never come right out and ask if I was bi. There would occasionally be veiled allusions which would suggest that they might be interested.

For a long time I took it for granted that most of the men we met weren’t interested, and I also took it for granted that I wasn’t interested. After Joanne’s emergence as bisexual, I began to examine my own feelings more deeply. I began to wonder about myself.

At first this was rather uncomfortable, and I found myself going through a period where I was uneasy making love in the presence of other males, because I would find myself wondering if they wanted to have sexual relations with me, and wondering also if I subconsciously wanted to have sexual relations with them, and all of this put me off a little.

The first actual experience I had was at a group scene, with this fellow coming on to me and saying that he wanted very much to blow me. I said I wasn’t interested, and he said I was being silly, that he didn’t want anything in return, that a blow job was a blow job, that any refusal on my part to submit to it could only be evidence of a hang-up, that I could always close my eyes and pretend it was a girl’s mouth instead of a man’s. I let him go ahead and do it. I’m not sure whether I did this out of curiosity or because it was easier than arguing with him or what. As I said, it was a group scene, and while he was doing this I was manually and orally involved with a girl, so what he was doing was not much more than a purely physical thing. I can’t say that I enjoyed or didn’t enjoy it. It was sexually effective in that I had an erection and reached orgasm.

After that I began to find myself thinking more and more about performing fellatio on another man. I wanted to know what it felt like to perform the act. Not in the physical sense entirely but how it would feel emotionally, all of that. How I would feel about myself afterward.

I think one big aspect of this was the fear that I would like it too much. There was a definite fear of homosexuality involved, I’m sure there was. And this operates far more for men than for women, because of the general feeling that a woman is more female for virtue of being bi, whereas a man is less masculine in proportion to the strength of his homosexual impulses. I can’t explain why this feeling exists but it definitely does.

To make a long story short, I ultimately went down on other men on three separate occasions. Each time I found that I didn’t like it, that I felt no sense of intimacy, that I could only relate to it in a purely physical sense, an almost disembodied sense, and that I did not want to continue the act to the point of orgasm. My reactions in this respect were identical all three times, and I repeated the act the second and third time to see if this would be the case, and it was.

I’m very glad I tried it. I learned that this is not something I want, and hence that it is not something I have to be afraid of, which is certainly an important discovery. I suppose if I kept at it I might find certain degrees of pleasure in the act, but I doubt they would be likely to counterbalance the distaste I feel.

•  •  •

JWW: When I first interviewed them, Bruce and Joanne were once-a-week swingers. When I renewed our acquaintance, they had decreased the frequency of their swinging significantly, and at present they swing once a month, perhaps less. They engage in no correspondence. There are a few couples the see from time to time, and there is a bar they go to once in a while where couples meet one another for swinging purposes. Their explanation is that they have come to find swinging somewhat less useful with the passage of time, that they still enjoy it on an occasional basis but, as pure recreation, they would not want it to play so prominent a role in their lives as it previously did.

At the present time they characterize their own sexual relationship as excellent in all respects, and I see no reason to quarrel with their appraisal. They seem to be getting along very well, are very close mentally and emotionally, and have a marriage which gives every indication of being stable, fruitful, and rewarding.

Was swinging legitimate sexual therapy for them? The fact that they think so may be answer enough. I would say that they seem to have undergone a process which could be called therapeutic, and that swinging seems to have been the vehicle for that process.

Would swinging be valid sexual therapy for others? I would certainly not be inclined to prescribe it, but neither would I argue against it. I am sure some couples will find it of value, just as I am sure others will find it a huge disappointment.

Lay Analysis

“I didn’t even know what was happening at first. I was terribly depressed that day, very much convinced of my own worthlessness. I had been feeling like such a sexual doormat. As though every man in my life used me as somebody to wipe his cock on. I poured a ton of this out to him and I had some kind of catharsis and started crying, and then he was sitting next to me on the couch and stroking my forehead and comforting me and it was so nice to be held, so nice to be soothed by his hands and his voice.

“And the next thing I knew he was lying down next to me with his arms around me and he was kissing me, not a comforting fatherly kiss but a tongue-halfway-down-my-throat kind of kiss, and half of me was watching this whole procedure and was absolutely astonished at what was going down, while the other half of me was responding with my usual passion.

“So we necked for a while, and then we got undressed, and he fucked me. Just like anybody else, I kept thinking, this is my analyst, this is my shrink who’s fucking me, but at the same time he was just another man. And I also had the thought, ‘Well, baby, what did you expect?’ I mean all the men in my life get around to fucking me sooner or later, the butcher and the baker and the candlestick maker, and he was my shrink, and he was fucking me, and why not?

“When the fifty minutes was up I left, and paid his receptionist on the way out, the usual thirty-five bucks. And thought nothing of it. And for the next week and a half I went in every day at my usual time, and we would talk about various things including my feelings about him fucking me and everything else, and on the way out I would pay the money like the prize chump of the decade. Until one day it hit me that I was going there and letting this clown fuck over me the same way a whole world full of men was fucking over me, and then I was paying the son of a bitch. And I thought, hell, I had turned tricks for a period of my young life, I had been on the game, so I ought to be sending him a bill of my own, for Christ’s sake.

“And I also figured the hell with him. I stopped going. When I want to get laid I don’t have to get paid for it, but at least I can come out financially even. I don’t have to pay thirty-five dollars for forty minutes of conversation and ten minutes of sex.

“I ran into him about a year later and he asked me why I had stopped therapy so abruptly. So I told him what I just told you, except putting it lightly, more or less in a humorous way.

“‘But that was for your own good,’ he said. Dead serious, honestly. ‘I felt that that was what you needed very much at the time, someone who would comfort you and at the same time relate to you in a sexual manner. I felt you hadn’t experienced a fusion of love and sex, of authority and sexual love, and that it would be very valuable for you. I would never have initiated sex otherwise.’

“I don’t know if he believes it or not, I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I bet that kind of thing goes on a lot. Here you’ve got all these girls and women who don’t know what to do, they’re all fucked up, and they must be the easiest game in the world for a shrink. His word is God to them. When he says Open your legs it’s like a regular doctor saying Open your mouth, they’ve got to do it with no questions asked. Maybe it’s all very high purpose, all for the patient’s good, but it sounds to me like a convenient way for a man to get a lot of ass and get paid for it.”

•  •  •

JWW: While the woman quoted above did not experience actual sexual therapy, she was unquestionably sexually involved with a therapist. And it is just as unquestionable that this happens quite often, rather more often than psychologists and psychiatrists are wont to admit. The sexual seduction of female patients is a very simple matter for a psychotherapist. He is in a position of enormous authority. He is presumed by the patient to know what’s good for her and to be acting altruistically; in her own best interests. Furthermore, the phenomenon of transference, by means of which an analysand focuses love upon the analyst as a means of achieving recognition of the self, operates very much to his advantage.

That a substantial number of men in this position take advantage of such situations should not be surprising. One observes that men are men, that transference is a two-way street, and that men in this line of work are not all that stable to begin with. (The suicide rate for psychiatrists is four or five times that for the medical profession as a whole, and the profession has a high rate to begin with. And, while I’ve seen no data on this, my own observations suggest that the children of psychiatrists are, pound for pound, the nuttiest children an earth.)

Finally, it is not all that difficult for a therapist to become convinced that sexual relations with him is precisely what a particular patient needs. Freud has been widely quoted as saying of a particular patient that the best prescription he could give her would be Rx: Penis normalis, repetitur, although the good doctor never intimated that it was his own penis which ought to be employed. It is an almost universally held male notion that what any neurotic female really needs is a good screwing, and a therapist may be particularly inclined toward this diagnosis when the patient in question is singularly attractive to him.

This is no place for a discussion of the general topic of sexual relations between therapists and their patients. Indeed, the subject has been covered far better than I could do so. In The Love Treatment, Dr. Martin Shepard discusses quite a few cases of patients who have had affairs of one sort or another with their therapists, sometimes with favorable results, sometimes with extremely unfavorable results. Anyone with even a passing interest in the subject would do well to acquaint himself with Dr. Shepard’s book; he’s an extremely perceptive and sensitive man, and an extraordinarily skillful writer in the bargain.

What concerns us here, though, is the more specific matter of therapists who have attempted to deal with their patients’ sexual difficulties in the most direct manner possible—i.e., through the medium of sexual relations.

The reader will probably not be surprised to learn that this is not an easy subject on which to gather data. I have been fortunate enough to become acquainted with two persons whose experiences in this area are instructive. The first is a young woman who received firsthand sexual therapy from her psychotherapist; the second a psychiatrist who has on several occasions dealt with female frigidity by having sexual relations with particular patients. The girl, Janice, was not a patient of the doctor, Bennett. (Nor was it Janice, or one of Bennett’s patients, who was quoted at the beginning of this chapter.)

I do not doubt that there are any number of female therapists who have occasionally attempted to cope with male sexual inadequacy in a similar fashion. However, I have no direct information regarding cases of this nature. In this connection, I would welcome correspondence from persons with direct experience along these lines, either as therapist or therapee, as it were.

First let’s hear from Janice. She’s in her late twenties, once married and once divorced, short, slender, waifish, at once a heavy smoker and a health-food addict. She went into therapy a few years ago, shortly after the breakup of her marriage.

•  •  •

JANICE: At this time I felt very much alone and quite desperate. I had always equated success for myself as a woman with success in marriage. Then I had a bad marriage for three years, and while it was over for both of us at about the same time, he was the one who wanted out. I was still too committed to the idea of remaining married because I thought a divorce would be such an open and unequivocal admission of failure.

My problem was sexual. At least the manifestation of my problem was sexual.

I was frigid.

Not completely frigid to the point where I couldn’t feel anything. I felt a certain amount of arousal. There were times when I enjoyed sex. I enjoyed a lot of the non-physical aspects of it very much. The sense of being close to a man, of pleasing him, of making him happy. The sense of having a hold on a man through sex. Physically I got a certain amount of pleasure but nothing like what I was supposed to be getting. I didn’t reach orgasm. At the time I entered therapy, I had never had an orgasm in my life.

I felt I knew what an orgasm was. What it was supposed to be. At times, when I faked orgasm, when I pretended to come because men hate it when you don’t come, hate you for making them doubt their ability to satisfy you—at times I would fake it, and it was a sort of case of getting carried away with my own faking to the point where I almost was able to make myself believe I had come.

But I never did. Afterward I was always terribly tense. I hated my husband and was disgusted with myself.

There were periods during my marriage when I was terribly promiscuous. At the time I believed very deeply in monogamy. I felt it was awful for a husband or a wife to cheat. This feeling has changed considerably since then, perhaps because I recently had an affair with a married man which helped me to put adultery in a different perspective. But then I thought sexual fidelity was enormously important.

Still, I went out and cheated. Partly to debase myself, to punish myself. Partly to punish my husband. And for the traditional reason that motivates the frigid nymphomaniac, the hope that sooner or later I would find the right man and he would make me capable of functioning as a woman, of enjoying sex completely, of coming.

I was very cheap and grotty about it. I now believe that there are two types of promiscuity, decent promiscuity and indecent promiscuity. I believe that a woman has the option of sleeping with any man at any time if she happens to feel close to him, or be strongly attracted to him, or something like that. But I was not doing this. I never had love affairs. I never even had intelligent sex affairs. I just went out looking for a cock with a man attached to it. I would pick men up in bars. I remember one time when he didn’t have a room or a car, this man I met, and I wound up sucking him off in an alleyway. That was as low as I ever felt myself to be. I despised myself for that, I really did. Sucking a stranger’s cock in an alley, then spitting and going home and brushing my teeth and pretending to be a wife . . .

After the divorce I dated a lot. I was very easy, I laid anybody who made a play for me. I still never came and I was at a point where I knew I wasn’t going to come, knew it in advance. I wasn’t entirely compulsive about sleeping around. I would go through periods where I was like a cloistered nun, and then I would start sleeping around again, like the swings of a pendulum.

I began to notice that a large proportion of the men I was with were impotent with me. I don’t know to what extent this was my fault. The state of mind I was in, I suspect I must have had a tendency to turn men off once I was in bed with them, at the same time that I was very good at turning them on ahead of time because I gave off vibes of accessibility. I don’t know. At the time, I was always convinced that a man’s impotence was almost entirely my fault. I learned to compensate by developing all the techniques of the whore. I was told that I was wonderful in bed, especially in the department of giving head. This seemed very ironic to me, that I was thought of as good in bed when actually I was frigid. In retrospect, I can see how frigidity would be an asset. I understand a majority of prostitutes are frigid, at least with their clients. I can understand how this would help them. When your own body is not really involved it can be easier for you to concentrate on pleasing your partner.

I was not enormously hopeful when I started therapy with Alan. I had been in therapy before. I was in group therapy during college before I was married. As far as I can tell, it had no real effect on me. Later, during my marriage, I went five days a week to a more or less orthodox Freudian analyst. He barely spoke at all in all the time I went to him. He would grunt or clear his throat and that was about the size of it. I had to remember dreams and talk about them. We never got much past that, and it was particularly frustrating because I have never tended to remember dreams in much detail. I only went for four months and quit because I felt I was making no progress at all, just wasting my husband’s money. I understand that if you go for years and years you sometimes make breakthroughs that can turn your whole life around, but I didn’t have enough faith in the whole concept to stay with it long enough for anything significant to happen.

I had heard that Alan’s approach was different, that he was a progressive young psychotherapist who concentrated on a person’s immediate problems without bothering to investigate the past or the unconscious at great length. This appealed to me. I’ve always been basically a forward-looking person and Alan’s line of approach seemed logical to me. I know I had problems as a child, I know I have ambivalent feelings about my parents. But my parents live almost two thousand miles from me now and I see them once a year and speak to them on the phone maybe once a month. I mean, the important thing for me now is not to learn how to get along with my parents. Even if that’s the cause of all my problems—and I don’t honestly believe it’s that clear-cut—it’s more important to learn to deal with today and tomorrow than to spend five hours a week for the next five years dealing with the past.

The first time I saw Alan, we talked for a little over a half hour. Then he frowned at me and asked me why I was here. I said I was there for help, something like that.

“No,” he said. “Why do you need help? What in the hell is wrong with you?”

“I can’t come,” I blurted.

He nodded, smiling gently. “Exactly,” he said. “You don’t come. Not can’t—don’t. Well, we’ll work on that, shall we?”

I began to see him twice a week, an hour each day. During these sessions we did a great deal of talking about sex. It was virtually all we talked about, very little conversation about dreams of parents or childhood. I did most of the talking but he very definitely participated. At one time or another I told him all of the things I had done sexually, with my husband, with the two men I had slept with before marriage, with other men both during and after my marriage. We discussed my feelings before and during and after the sex act.

One point which Alan stressed was that it was both inaccurate and pointless. Counter-productive was a word he used a great deal. He told me frequently that nothing I had done had been either immoral or unhealthy in and of itself. He also did something which I understand is unusual, and that is that he told me about his own sex life. Not in the sense of a confession, but he would use things which he had done, things which had happened to him, as a means of illustrating a point he was trying to make.

Through our conversations, Alan was helping me to revise my feelings about sex, my attitudes. To root out whatever inhibitions might be making it difficult for me to respond completely, not so much by finding them out as by developing new and more productive attitudes to replace them.

I don’t know if this worked. I know, though, that it helped me in the sense of making me feel better. I enjoyed our sessions together, found myself looking forward to them. Throughout the rest of the week, I seemed to find it easier to live with myself. My job began to seem less of a burden and the quality and quantity of my work improved. I had been virtually living on tranquilizers, and without making any conscious effort discovered that I was consuming less of them. I had been interested in health foods and nutrition for some time, had done a lot of reading on the subject, but my life and mental state had been so disorganized that I had never managed to get into the thing deeply, and I was eating the standard American crap diet of refined sugar and white flour and trash foods. After a few months of therapy I found I had the discipline to work out a nutritional program for myself and stick to it.

I even tried to quit smoking. That’s not so remarkable. I try every year or so, and I invariably fail. I’m now reaching the point where I know better than to make the attempt any more. I think I could kick heroin if I were ever on it, but I’m afraid I’ll just never be able to give up tobacco.

•  •  •

JWW: In addition to talk therapy designed to alter her sexual attitudes, Alan prescribed a variety of techniques by means of which he hoped to heighten Janice’s capacity for sexual response. The reader may find echoes here of several elements—the Masters and Johnson program, The Sensuous Woman, and various sensory awareness workshops.

•  •  •

JANICE: I had smoked marijuana on perhaps a dozen occasions in the past. My husband liked to smoke and now and then I would try to get stoned with him. Either nothing happened or I got high in a way I didn’t like. Marijuana had always tended to bring out my paranoia, if it worked at all. Typically, the two of us would smoke and my husband would get very much in the mood for sex, which he insisted was infinitely better when you were stoned. For me, it got significantly worse. When I was high I didn’t want to be touched or talked to, let alone fucked. I found sex at such times distinctly uncomfortable, which is why I didn’t smoke more than perhaps a dozen times during our marriage. Instead my husband would smoke by himself, and then the two of us would make love.

Alan recommended that I get stoned a couple times a week, but that I do so by myself. He said that marijuana was not an aphrodisiac in and of itself, but that it was an intensifier, it took you in whatever direction you were already going. Which explained why the same grass smoked at the same time could make my husband horny while it increased my frigidity. He said that I was to smoke it alone in my own apartment where I would feel safe and secure, and that all I ought to do at first was concentrate on getting high and enjoying the experience.

He also urged me to masturbate. With all of the openness of the New Freedom, it seems as though people are more embarrassed to admit that they never masturbated than they used to be to admit that they did. Well, I had never masturbated. I gather almost all males do it, but there’s a percentage of girls who never seem to think of it, and I was one of them. I didn’t know about it during adolescence. I remember knowing that it was somehow unclean to touch your genitals, but I didn’t know that the reason for this myth was that it was distinctly pleasurable to touch them. So I never got around to it.

According to Alan, masturbation is especially important for women because it teaches them sexual response. He said it was considerably easier to have an orgasm alone than with somebody, especially if you were a private sort of person who tended to withdraw when you were with another person. And he said that what you learned in masturbation you could more easily teach yourself to accomplish in other situations.

I’ll tell you something—it can be very fucking difficult to go home from a therapy session resolved to masturbate. Even though you’re completely alone, you feel almost unbearably self-conscious about the whole thing. It’s not so much that I felt it was bad, evil, unnatural. I knew better than that. I just felt so damned silly about it.

For a long time I masturbated religiously every night. (Don’t you love that choice of words—masturbated religiously, as though I stuck a votary candle up myself.) It was almost a religious thing, though. I was doing it because my therapist told me to, and I was acting on the faith I had in him that it was really going to do me some good.

It was very difficult for me to get anywhere with it. At first I couldn’t even identify the sensations I felt as pleasurable. I was blocking all the way down the line, shutting myself off, unconsciously willing myself not to respond. Then, as playing with myself became a part of my daily ritual, something I did after brushing my teeth and before going to sleep, I began to relax and enjoy it a little. My masturbation ritual consisted essentially of moistening my finger and playing with my clitoris. I found myself enjoying it more and more simply because it felt good.

And I began to realize—this was brought out in therapy—that I had never thought of sex in terms of something designed to feel good. It always had some other purpose for me, until my own frigidity had brought things to the point where my big purpose in sex was to be successful at it. Well, that’s self-defeating, and I began to see it, and to see what I had been missing all along. Before, even when I had enjoyed sex, even at those times when it had given me pleasure, I had not been able to relax and get into my enjoyment of it.

I found that masturbation was particularly enjoyable when I was stoned on marijuana. The more familiar I got with grass, the easier it became for me to get high. I never got extremely high, just smoked one small joint and got a little bit of a buzz on. And instead of the paranoia trips I had had before, I generally got a nice lazy kind of high and found it very nice to sort of laze around listening to music. On the nights when I smoked, I got in the habit of doing my nightly masturbation while I was nicely stoned. I seemed to be able to make progress that way, to intensify and focus the pleasurable sensations, and this progress would then stay with me at times when I was not stoned.

There was one morning, it was very funny, I woke up and the apartment was quite cold and it was nice to stay in my warm bed, and I was sort of half awake and half asleep, and I started playing with myself unconsciously, just touching myself and enjoying how nice it felt and how nice it made me feel. Then I realized what I was doing and stopped, and felt terribly guilty about the whole thing, like masturbation was something I was supposed to do once a night for therapeutic purposes, but it was impossibly evil of me to be doing it at unscheduled times simply because it felt good.

When I told Alan about this, he thought it was hysterically funny. He said the whole point was for me to learn to enjoy sex for the sake of enjoyment, that it was a great sign of progress that I had started masturbating in that fashion, and that it was absolutely ridiculous for me to feel bad about it.

There were other things he had me do when I was stoned, things that were not specifically sexual. I would close my eyes and concentrate on sounds, on exactly what I could hear. You know of course that there’s no such thing as silence in New York, but you automatically tune out most of the sounds going on around you. Instead I would tune them in, the hums of various electrical things in the building, the traffic noises, the occasional human voices in the streets outside. It’s amazing how much you can hear if you put your mind to it, and marijuana seems to intensify these perceptions, or else to make you more able to focus your attention upon them.

Or I would close my eyes and concentrate on a part of my body, an arm or leg or hand or foot or whatever, and try to picture that part of my body in my mind, and feel all that it felt at that moment, all that was happening in it. I would be aware of the blood vessels pulsing in my arm, and the feel of the bed sheet under my arm, and the feel of air on the top of my arm, and the weight of the arm, and like that.

During this time I was not dating anyone regularly. Once in a while I might go to a party or a meeting of some organization or other and meet somebody. Alan had said that I shouldn’t particularly try to have sex for the time being, nor should I particularly try to avoid it. I should do whatever I felt like doing in that respect, and I should not be much concerned if I did or didn’t go to bed with someone, or if I did or didn’t enjoy it. I didn’t have sex with many men, but it would happen now and then. There didn’t seem to be much difference in the act. I didn’t have orgasms—I hadn’t even begun to have them in masturbation yet, although I seemed to be on my way. Nor did I seem to be enjoying sex with men more than before. It was about the same, sometimes enjoyable and sometimes not but never wholly involving and certainly never wholly satisfying.

Sometimes this depressed me a great deal. I had felt I was making progress, Alan had told me I was making progress, and here I was getting concrete evidence that the progress wasn’t paying off where it was supposed to. Naturally this was upsetting. But Alan made me see that this was to be expected, that the progress I was making would not be reflected in gradual changes in my relationships with men, at least not for quite some time.

Once I realized this, sex with men became more enjoyable emotionally in the sense that I did not have this tremendous feeling of failure afterward. I realize now that this was a very important stage I was going through, although I didn’t see it as such at the time.

You see, I was starting to get out of the habit—and you have to call it a habit, because it was a behavior pattern I had literally learned over the years—of approaching the sex act as a test. I was learning to go into these situations knowing that there was going to be no magic man, no magic act, that I was going to have a limited response which would not lead to orgasm, and at the same time I knew that this didn’t matter, that a deeper response leading to orgasm would happen ultimately. So I could take the sex act for what it was, a pleasurable sharing of intimacy between two people, an act that would feel good, at least to an extent. In other words, I was starting to learn to enjoy sex for the sake of its own enjoyment, which was essentially one of the lessons I was also learning via masturbation.

The next big step came when I began to have orgasms in masturbation. The first time it happened was one night when I was stoned. I didn’t even know it was going to happen. I wasn’t thinking about it, had stopped thinking about it a while ago, which undoubtedly had something to do with my being capable of it. I just got very much caught up in immediate sensations, my own body rhythm and sex rhythm was grooving to the rhythm of the music I was playing, and I was touching myself and feeling good and feeling better and better, and then I was just plain into it, and I came.

I was so excited I wanted to call Alan and tell him.

•  •  •

JWW: Orgasm via masturbation did not lead directly to orgasm via intercourse. Its more immediate result was frustration—Janice now knew what an orgasm was, knew how it felt, knew the pattern of excitement her body went through en route to a climax, and still found it impossible to stay with this pattern of excitement during sexual intercourse. At the same time, various aspects of therapy had altered her sexual behavior patterns to the point where casual sex with near-strangers was no longer acceptable to her. She felt that she wanted sex only in the context of warm personal feeling, if not in a durable relationship, and there were no men in her life at the time for whom she had that sort of feeling. It was with this combination of circumstances operating that she first had sexual relations with Alan.

•  •  •

JANICE: I believe I remember the conversation.

He said, “Janice, I think you’re at the stage now where you’re ready to have an orgasm with a man. Not necessarily in intercourse but with a man. If you were married, if you had a lover, I’d suggest that you and he masturbate each other. That you learn this response in a shared situation.”

I said something about not being in an ideal situation, not having anyone like that.

He said, “Well, this is very awkward. I find myself in a difficult position. I would like very much to make love to you. I think it would be very good for you at this stage but I don’t know that I can trust my own motives. You’re very attractive and I feel close to you and sexually drawn to you, and I’m sure that’s at least partially responsible for my wanting to do this.”

I was really astonished. Of course I had had fantasies of lovemaking with Alan. It would have been impossible not to think of it. Not just because of the role he played in my life but because he was literally the man to whom I was closest at this time. It goes without saying that he knew me better than any other man in the world, knew far more about me than my husband had ever known. I also felt that I knew him better than I knew any other man, and was more relaxed with him.

I knew that he was married, and that he loved his wife and got along reasonably well with her. I also knew that he had affairs intermittently and felt that they did not challenge his marriage. It had never occurred to me that he might have had affairs with patients. He never said so.

He went on to tell me that whatever we did would have to be something we could both take casually. That neither of us was in love with the other, although whether we had sex together or not, both of us inevitably felt a good deal of warmth and love for each other.

I don’t know exactly how I felt at the time. Confused, of course. I told him something to the effect that whatever he wanted to do was all right with me, that he was the doctor—I think I did actually use that phrase.

“Let’s just be close,” he said. “Whatever happens will happen.”

He sat next to me and kissed me. It was a very tender moment. I felt a tightness in my chest. He kissed me and began making love to me, undressed me very slowly, petted me, talked very tenderly to me. Then he fingered me very nicely and it felt divine but I was too tense and I couldn’t come.

When the hour was up he had another appointment, but he asked me to come back after work, not as a patient but as a social call. It was not specified that we would have sex, although we both understood that it was implied. He said it would probably be good if we could get to know each other in the context of a relationship beyond that of patient and therapist.

I came back at the appointed time. His receptionist was gone for the day and he met me at the door himself. We had a drink together and made small talk. Then he brought out some marijuana and rolled a few joints. He rolled them very deftly by hand, which impressed me; I have always had to use one of those little cigarette rolling machines.

We smoked, and it was awfully good grass, much more potent than what I was used to. I got nicely stoned and really grooved on the person he was when he wasn’t being a therapist. It’s interesting how your perception of people’s faces changes when you’re stoned. You keep seeing different aspects of their faces, keep seeing ways in which they resemble different people. I was really grooving on him, and he was a very loose and funny person stoned, he has a wild stoned personality and comes up with all sorts of far-out lines.

We were together for quite a while before he started making love to me again, so that when he did I had almost forgotten that that was what we were both there for. I really responded beautifully. I got very excited kissing him, and when he would touch me I would focus my attention on the part of my body he was touching and really tune into the sensations of his touch. I also got into touching him and appreciating his body.

Finally he had me lie down on the couch—the same fucking couch I always sat or sprawled on during our twice-a-week sessions. He made me close my eyes and concentrate on the music that was playing, and he gave me a really professional massage that relaxed my body wonderfully. Then he parted my legs and went down on me.

This is funny: I had never liked this. I never minded going down on a man, I even liked it because of the sense of power it gave me, but I never liked a man to eat me. A man’s mouth on my cunt has always made me freeze up. I never liked just lying there and doing nothing but receive. I think I must have disliked the feeling of being so exposed, so vulnerable. Something like that.

Well, I liked it well enough this time. I felt very safe, very secure. I trusted him in a way that I’m sure I never trusted anybody before.

He ate me for ages, so very, very gently and thoroughly, and a couple of times I felt passion starting to build and I thought about it, and that made me block, but instead of tensing up I stayed relaxed and he kept on eating me. And then it was like the first time I came through masturbation, a deep welling up of feeling before I was even aware of what was happening, and then I knew I was getting there and I didn’t have to try, I didn’t have to do anything, I just had to let go and for once it was easy to let go and I made it.

I stayed there for a couple of hours. He fucked me, once, and although I didn’t come I knew it was only a question of time before I would be able to. He made me come several more times, once more with his mouth and a couple of times with his hands. I think I blew him that time, too, but I can’t remember too clearly.

From that point on, Alan and I had an affair, except I don’t know that that’s the right word for it. We had a sexual relationship, certainly. I kept seeing him twice a week at my usual time, except that instead of sitting there and talking to him I would take off all my clothes and we would fuck for fifty minutes.

He felt that it was improper for him to take money from me at this stage, and I felt it was wrong for him not to. Because it was still very much a therapy situation, and I wanted to be able to feel free to call upon him for advice as a therapist and not to be obligated to him as a lover. We still spent a large portion of each meeting talking, discussing things, aspects of my life and all. I argued that it was not a matter of my paying him anyway, since under the terms of my divorce my former husband would pay my medical expenses, and this qualified as our divorce agreement was drawn, so actually it was my ex-husband paying Alan to fuck me, a situation out of which I drew a certain amount of perverse satisfaction. He finally accepted this.

I continued therapy—and thus continued our “affair”—for another four months. Before very long I was having orgasms all the time with no trouble at all.

I was seeing other men. Alan virtually insisted on this, just as he felt it was important we not see each other except at our scheduled times. I had sex with other men and found that my frigidity seemed to be cured. I could come with men besides Alan; I found that I could come with a man if I wanted to, and I also found that I did not invariably want to. I had to care for a man to a certain extent in order to want to have an orgasm with him.

I’m fairly confident that the therapy program he designed for me would have worked out satisfactorily if he and I had not had sexual relations together. There’s no question in my mind, though, that this accelerated things for me. Given my whole sexual and emotional state, he was precisely the man with whom I was most likely to be able to open up and relax, the man most likely to be able to bring me to orgasm. So it certainly saved a lot of time and frustration for him to make love to me.

I think it also made it easier for me to open up to him more completely as a patient to a therapist, and vice-versa. Because there was always this current of sexual attraction existing between us, although we had both repressed it to the point where I at least was unaware of it, unaware of the extent of my own desires and completely unaware that Alan entertained such desires. I would think that kind of undercurrent is present in most psychotherapeutic situations involving a male therapist and a female patient, assuming that neither of them specifically turns the other one off.

And I would think that undercurrent gets in the way. You feel it even if you don’t know you’re feeling it. Once we had become lovers, we weren’t repressing all of this, that bar to intimacy had been crossed by the fact of our physical intimacy, and I think it helped to make him a more effective therapist and to make me a more reachable patient.

It ended with no bad feelings on either side. We had reached a point where we both knew I had no real further need for therapy, I was functioning successfully both sexually and generally. Also, I was having an affair with a man with a certain amount of emotional involvement, and while I didn’t feel I was cheating on this man by having sex with Alan, I didn’t feel entirely right about it, either. So we agreed that I had completed therapy, and that was the end of it. I have nothing but good feelings for Alan.

I’m sure a lot of women are sexually exploited by therapists. There’s nothing easier than for a therapist to seduce a patient. I certainly don’t feel that I was exploited, not in the slightest. I also recognize that Alan did get a great deal of personal satisfaction out of having sex with me, but I hardly resent that; it would be far more depressing to think that it wasn’t pleasurable for him!

A girlfriend of mine has problems, and hasn’t been getting anywhere in therapy, and recently we were talking and she confided that her problem is inadequate sexual response, which I gather means she’s frigid to one extent or another. I told her I had had very much the same problem for years and years, and that I had gone to one particular therapist and everything had worked out. I gave her Alan’s name and number and she said she might call him and start therapy with him.

I was dying to tell her just what form his therapy had eventually taken, but of course I couldn’t. For one thing, I’m sure I would have felt very differently throughout the beginning stages of therapy if I had known that things would ultimately resolve themselves as they did. Also, suppose he isn’t attracted to her and they don’t wind up fucking—I would think it would be devastating to her ego!

•  •  •

JWW: Bennett is a psychiatrist whose practice seems to run heavily to persons with sexual problems of one sort or another. He employs a variety of therapeutic techniques, including hypnotherapy, a modification of the Masters and Johnson program for couples, sexual surrogates for sexually inadequate males, etc. I talked with him at some length on several occasions concerning his views on sexual therapy and the success and failure of various courses of treatment he had employed.

On a couple of occasions he had remarked on the difficulty of employing sexual surrogates for frigid women as one could employ them for sexually inadequate men. He made the point that any well-trained and emotionally suitable woman could function admirably as a sexual surrogate for a male partner, but that an adaptation of that program for a female patient was unfeasible on both physical and emotional grounds. In the first place, he pointed out, women were not geared to accept casual, unemotional sex to the extent that men were, and those women most apt to be frigid were precisely those women least likely to respond to the services of a surrogate partner. Furthermore, the physical requirements of male response were such that a male surrogate would have to find a woman attractive and desirable in order to have sex with her; one could not simply will an erection into existence. A female is capable of feigning both excitement and climax; a male lacks this capability.

Perhaps I sensed what he was trying to tell me. In any event, I said something to the effect that he must have been occasionally tempted to function in the surrogate capacity himself.

“Tempted?” He considered this. “Oh, yes, the temptation is often present. When you know just what it is that a woman needs, and feel you can supply it as well as anyone, perhaps better than anyone else available to her, and when you know that you yourself would find the whole experience damned enjoyable—” He looked at me. “I’ve done it a couple of times,” he said. “I’m not sure it’s wise to tell you this. It probably isn’t.”

I made noises about my being a model of discretion.

“I would certainly hope so,” he said. “Well, I seem to want to talk about it, don’t I? It’s not something I make a habit of. It’s happened a couple of times.” He never did supply an exact figure. “And I don’t honestly know how I feel about it. I’ve always had a good deal of contempt for my colleagues in the profession who make the seduction of their more attractive female patients something of a habit. I’ve always felt the pressures—everybody feels the pressures—it’s there and it’s so easy to get and being a shrink doesn’t make you less a man. I had always felt the pressures and had never had much trouble resisting them. One simply forced oneself to pass up this particular forbidden fruit and that was all there was to it.

“In these particular cases, though, the circumstances were special. Sometimes I feel my actions were unethical and immoral and that I was acting out of my own selfish sexual desires. Other times I think that what I did was very much a matter of matching treatment to illness, that it would have been a violation of my oath as a physician had I not had sexual relations with these patients. And I could easily supply an unconscious motivation for either of these lines of thought, believe me.

“Well, I might as well get down to cases. Do be discreet, won’t you? Not merely for the sake of my professional standing, but there’s also the little fact that I’m married, and my wife would not be terribly happy about all of this.”

I have been discreet, as is my vaunted custom. Bennett is not Bennett’s name, needless to say, nor are any of the circumstances of what follows a precise duplication of actuality. But here, in essence, is what he told me.

•  •  •

BENNETT: The first patient with whom I was intimate was a girl of twenty-two. She was completely frigid, incapable of any erotic response whatsoever. She had had intercourse with men half a dozen times. She also seems to have been raped at age eight or thereabouts, but I was never entirely certain whether this in fact occurred or whether it was some form of false memory, as her recollection of the event varied from time to time. The nature of her psychosexual development was certainly consistent with such an experience, but that sort of consistency often is seen in cases where the incident has turned out to be false memory or fantasy.

In addition to her attempts at having sex with men, she had also twice had lesbian relations. She was no more capable of response with female partners. Her attempts at homosexuality were deliberate, deriving not from specific desire but out of the suspicion that, since she could not enjoy heterosexuality, she must be a lesbian at heart. The lack of enjoyment, plus the feeling after the fact that homosexual relations were unnatural and immoral, led her to abandon this approach.

When I first saw her, she was extremely shy and withdrawn. She had by then completed college and was employed as a research assistant in some sort of foundation-assisted project. She had had no active sex life in the preceding year and a half. Indeed, her social life was limited to her acquaintances at work, all of whom were considerably older than she was and with none of whom she had contact away from the office. She lived alone in a small furnished apartment, spent her spare time reading and going to movies by herself, and finally entered therapy because of an extreme increase in anxiety. She had always had acrophobia, for example, a fear of heights which is extremely common, but it was rapidly reaching dire proportions. She had moved from her second-floor apartment to a ground-floor apartment because it bothered her to be that far off the ground. She worried that she was losing her mind, that people could tell by looking at her that she was emotionally disturbed, etc.

From the beginning, she responded well to therapy. Here was a perfect example of a person suffering from terminal loneliness. She had absolutely no one to talk to. I sometimes think that therapy is useful in a great many instances, despite the fact that the therapist has no idea what’s wrong with the patient or what on earth to do about it, simply because the patient profits from having someone to talk to. To an extent, it doesn’t matter what the patient says or if the therapist says anything in reply. The therapist doesn’t even have to listen—and all of us, incidentally, have times when we just can’t listen, no matter how conscientious we try to be. For some patients, none of this matters. All they really require, or at least a good portion of what they require, is a person to whom they can say whatever they want.

I was seeing this girl once a week. We got along well, we seemed to strike the right kind of sparks from each other. This isn’t a requisite for successful therapy but it’s often helpful, and it certainly makes the time more pleasant from the therapist’s point of view. Together we did a certain amount to exorcise the demon of rape—again, whether it happened or not—and we worked to shape up her ideas about sex and about herself as a sexual being. She was a good hypnosis subject. I didn’t put her under very deeply, I hardly ever use deep hypnosis, but I employed suggestion and also taught her how to use auto-suggestion on her own. This proved to be of value to her when she masturbated, which she did quite successfully. She had attempted masturbation in the past but was repressed to the point where she could not even excite herself. I had her use a vibrator, which does simplify things, and I had her build fantasies and develop them through auto-suggestion, and before very long she was having nice little orgasms all over the place.

Well, this was good. The simple fact that she was able to get her rocks off once a day had a definite therapeutic effect. It’s simple fact that human beings feel better if they’re getting off regularly. It’s best if this happens with someone you love, but an orgasm is an orgasm whether the device inducing it is a handy-dandy personal vibrator or King Kong’s cock.

Now it was good that she was having orgasms, but it wasn’t enough. Ultimately she had to be able to have orgasms with someone. She had to learn not to be afraid of men in general or penises in particular. Remember, this was a girl who did not date anyone, who hardly knew a man. She was not the type men tried to pick up. I found her extremely attractive, but her beauty was not at all the flashy sort. She was a very fragile thing, tiny, small-boned, quiet features. She didn’t look sexy and she didn’t project an aura of availability.

So where was I going to send her? The singles bars? She’d gone there a few times and they terrified her. Nobody so much as bought her a drink. I couldn’t send her off to a cathouse. Even if that sort of operation existed, it wasn’t what she needed. She had to be with someone who would take it easy with her, someone she already knew and liked as a human being, someone she trusted.

Obviously, I came to the conclusion that I was just what the doctor ordered. But how do you prescribe yourself? Did I have the right? Would any gesture on my part destroy the whole patient-therapist relationship, undo everything the two of us had thus far accomplished? I went through a lot of soul-searching on these points.

I also went through a lot of personal frustration. She was on my mind more than any patient should have been. I found myself constructing little fantasies involving her, writing mental scenarios in which I seduced her and she embraced sex with uninhibited joy. Very unprofessional, eh? Well, it’s a tricky business. You’re supposed to be concerned and dispassionate at the same time, you have to walk an emotional high wire and it’s hard to keep your balance all the time. I’m sure it’s no news to you that shrinks have hang-ups just like everybody else. If not more so.

Let’s forget my mental agonies. I made a variety of decisions—to go ahead, to restrain myself, to explain the problem and suggest she transfer to another therapist—and I went on stalling. Then one day without any advance planning I told her that it was time she was physically intimate with a man.

She made some self-mocking comment about that being easier said than done and wondered aloud where she could find a man who would want her.

“There’s one right here in this office who would like nothing more than to make love to you,” I said.

At first she thought I had some stud closeted in another room waiting for her. Then our eyes locked and she got the message. She was quite shocked.

I went over to her and took her hand. I told her I thought it would be good for her if we made love, but that this was not my only motive, that I actively desired to make love to her. I confessed that I didn’t know for certain whether this was a legitimate therapeutic technique, that it might do her more harm than good but that my instinctive feeling was that it would be good for her. I made a point of saying that I wasn’t in love with her although I had a great deal of feeling for her, and that we could not have an affair as such.

Her hour was only half gone but I dismissed her early. I told her to take a week to think about it and come in next week at her usual time. I emphasized that she had several options, that she could decide she did not want to be intimate with me but could remain my patient, that I could refer her to another psychiatrist, but that in any event I hoped she would not make the mistake of terminating therapy altogether.

She came back a week later and told me she had spent the better portion of the week trying to get laid. That she had gone to singles bars and likely pickup places and invariably froze if a man even seemed likely to approach her. That she had gone on masturbating, and that I had played a key role in her fantasies. She also confessed that I had been a frequent actor in her fantasies previously as well.

And that she wanted me to make love to her.

The first day we didn’t get any further than a combination of light petting and sensory awareness, kissing and touching each other. Afterward I juggled my appointments schedule and arranged to see her at her usual time five days a week instead of once a week, but told her that she would still only pay for one session.

Our affair, for lack of a better word, progressed just as I would have hoped a sexual relationship with another man would have progressed for her. Essentially I designed a sexual surrogate program for her and played the surrogate role myself. We spent a few days letting her get used to being comfortable with the male body. By the third or fourth day I was petting her to orgasm. On the fifth day we had intercourse, and she was able to enjoy it although she did not have an orgasm. The effects of the rape (or imagined rape) seemed to have vanished. Penetration held no fear for her.

My own feelings during all of this were very strange. I was playing the role of the almost dispassionate sexual partner, and trying to conceal the fact that she actually excited me almost beyond endurance. The role I was cast in was a heady combination of benevolent doctor and cold-blooded seducer, and it was to say the least an exhilarating experience. I had worried, during my spate of soul-searching, that I might prove impotent, which would be the worst possible thing for the poor girl’s ego. As it turned out, I was almost too potent. I had a yen for her that was as urgent as anything I’ve ever experienced. Every morning for two weeks I would be sitting around with a painful erection for the two hours before her arrival, and each time when she walked through the door I ached to rip her clothes off and throw her down on the floor. And all the while I was giving the impression of infinite patience—it was all very thrilling for me.

For two weeks she came in daily and we had sex. The pattern during the second week was fairly consistent throughout. She would come in, we would make a very urgent sort of love, then she would talk both about what we had done and what had been on her mind during the past twenty-three hours, and then we would make love again. She proved to be an excellent sexual partner and we became highly attuned to each other.

After ten days of this, I told her that we would have to return to the schedule of once-a-week sessions, that she had completely conquered her problem of frigidity and it was now necessary that we avoid her becoming personally dependent upon me. (What I also felt, but did not say, was that I was at least as concerned that I might become overly dependent upon her.) I would continue to see her once a week, and in the intervals she should begin to let her own social life develop, as she no longer had reason to fear the possibility of sexual confrontation.

During the next two months I saw her one day a week, and the sexual bond between us began to cool off. She very definitely had come out of her cocoon as a result of having enjoyed a satisfying sexual relationship, and she gave off an aura of confidence and competence that made her far more attractive to men. She dated several men, had sexual relations with two of them, and after approximately two months I told her that she could terminate therapy, that she did not need to come to see me any more.

•  •  •

JWW: Bennett’s first experience as a “lay analyst” had results which he increasingly came to regard as ideal. While he remained concerned about the ethics of what he had done, and appreciated the potential for disaster of sexual involvement with patients, he became convinced that no alternative therapeutic method could have had such a beneficial effect upon his patient. Thus considerably less rationalization was required when similar situations came up later on, and he found himself acting in a considerably less candid fashion with another patient.

•  •  •

BENNETT: For a variety of reasons, I was determined that it was desirable for me to have sexual relations with Brenda. She reminded me in certain ways of the first patient I had had sex with, although they were quite dissimilar. In Brenda’s case, the physical attraction on my part was not nearly so demanding. I did find her very attractive but not to the point where I was desperate to make love to her. I believed then and believe now that my decision to seduce her was based primarily on altruistic motives. I felt it would be for her own good.

Briefly stated, her problem was what the profession used to call nymphomania. She had very strong sexual desires but did not reach orgasm except through masturbation, and her masturbatory orgasms were more frustrating than non-orgasmic intercourse.

She was very aggressive sexually. She always initiated sexual contact. Thus she was extremely promiscuous but impossible to seduce; it had to be her idea. She would select a man and make a play for him, and I gather she was as good as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police when it came to getting her man.

She was terribly afraid of being exploited by a man. Her father had evidently dominated her mother to an appalling degree—or what she perceived as an appalling degree—and she was determined to avoid that fate herself. There was the usual ambivalence in her feelings toward her parents. She hated her father, resented him for his treatment of her mother, yet simultaneously regarded him as the ideal male. To state it as simply as possible, her sexual behavior represented a symbolic desire to fuck her father without being fucked by him. Thus her inability to acquiesce to male domination even to the point of permitting herself to have an orgasm when there was a penis in her vagina.

There was no question of her not having adequate opportunity for intercourse, as in the earlier case. Brenda’s sex life remained very active during therapy, and showed no changes of either a qualitative or quantitative nature. She still went out and got her man, she still was unable to let him get to her, and she still hated him when it was over and did not want to have relations with the same individual more than once.

I felt it was necessary for her to have a relationship which deviated from this pattern, a relationship in which she could not have the opportunity to play the dominant role. Again, I elected myself.

If I had merely desired to have sex with this girl, all I would have had to do was accept her offer. She had behaved seductively toward me from the beginning, and boasted of having had sex with another therapist several years before. I made it very clear at the time that I wasn’t having any, and after a few more half-serious attempts at seducing me, she gave it up. Had I taken her on her terms, I would not only have destroyed my own therapeutic usefulness but would have reinforced precisely that pattern which I wanted to interrupt.

One day she was discussing her experiences with masturbation. I told her I found her description of “empty, dry masturbatory climaxes” puzzling (although in fact I knew very well what she was talking about) and suggested that she give me some nonverbal evidence of what she meant. I hold her very matter-of-factly to take off her clothes and masturbate right there in my office. She responded with some flirtatious banter which I ignored. Then she expressed doubts that she would be able to masturbate with another person present. I told her that if she was able to talk about it so freely she certainly ought to be able to do it, whereupon she raised her skirt, removed her underwear, and commenced manipulating herself.

Not too surprisingly, my presence had an inhibiting effect and she was unable to become excited. I put her in a light hypnotic trance and suggested that she would be able to become excited. I also suggested that the orgasm she reached would be more satisfying than usual, which proved to be the case.

We then established a pattern whereby she would masturbate each time in my presence after having been first lightly conditioned by hypnosis. I found all of this quite exciting, incidentally, although I was careful to avoid any suspicion on her part that my interest was other than purely clinical.

She gradually reached a point where she unconsciously connected the process of hypnosis—and the domination implicit in it—with sexual excitement and satisfaction. At this point it was child’s play to inaugurate a sexual relationship. I simply began touching and caressing her one day while she was already in the act of exciting herself, explaining that this would teach her to accept male attention while in a state of sexual excitement (which was true enough). On various occasions I had her masturbate and fellate me while she handled herself. Eventually I began having intercourse with her, and although her acceptance was not immediate, it was not long before she found herself having orgasms in coitus.

Sexual relations with Brenda were not a regular thing as they were in the first instance. In line with establishing a role relationship in which she was submissive while I was dominant, I so structured things that we did or did not have sex at my whim.

All of this would probably have been extremely dangerous if Brenda were not having an active sex life of her own. The fact that she was, added to the fact that I did seem quite disinterested, made it easy for her to avoid forming too strong an attachment to me. On the positive side, the responses she learned with me carried over bit by bit into her other sexual relationships. She felt less threatened with men and gradually became able to respond with others as she had learned to respond with me. As her sexual relations became orgasmic, she lost the need to behave promiscuously, as I had anticipated would be the case.

•  •  •

JWW: One wonders just how valid this sort of therapy may be. Bennett can make a very good case for it, although after doing so he will qualify his arguments by admitting that he is not all that certain of their validity. I suspect that sexual therapy along these lines may sometimes be indicated, and that it sometimes may be successful.

But there are far too many members of the profession who lack the necessary objectivity and competence, far too many who would be quick to use the concept of sexual therapy as a convenient means of rationalizing the pure and simple desire for sexual conquest. The potential for disaster would thus appear to be enormous, and my own inclination would be to dismiss this personal sexual therapy on the therapist’s part as generally unsound.

A Good Excuse for an Orgy

The encounter group is a phenomenon of the late sixties that was widely embraced upon its inception as a vehicle for instant psychotherapy. The premise of the encounter group, in essence, is that a collection of strangers operating in an intensive form of group therapy over an extended period of time may act upon one another in such a way as to facilitate significant breakthroughs which could otherwise only be achieved by months or years of more conventional therapy.

These groups have taken an infinite variety of forms and have held appeal for as great a variety of persons. Quite a few corporations arranged for key employees to attend groups designed to improve their emotional outlook and increase their self-awareness. Many neurotics saw the encounter marathon as a valuable shortcut to what they had thus far been unable to achieve via conventional therapy. Encounter groups have also drawn a significant number of persons who employ them periodically as a sort of emotional high colonic, a means of achieving a temporary catharsis; such individuals participate in marathon after marathon, playing in them as in any game situation.

In the past year or so, there has been a rather severe backlash. Persons in the field have become increasingly aware that what was at worst regarded as a psychic cocktail can be more like nitroglycerine than alcohol, with an unpredictable potential for explosive results. The most obvious danger—that an encounter can trigger nervous breakdowns in unstable individuals—seems to be the least of it. A far more insidious danger lies in the possibility that a person may experience an enormous emotional breakthrough (which of course is the whole idea) and will subsequently prove incapable of handling that breakthrough. The exhilaration of the experience is followed in a day or a week or a month by the unhappy realization that, breakthrough or no breakthrough, one is still the same person and one’s problems are still the same problems, and what appeared to be the light at the end of the tunnel was merely a mirage.

The result of this realization is apt to be depression, often suicidal in scope. This particular pattern is a known hazard in psychotherapy in general, but in conventional ongoing courses of therapy the patient has at least minimal safeguards. He sees the therapist on a regular basis, and the therapist is presumably competent to identify signs of such depression and deal with them as they manifest themselves. In addition, the therapist is available to the patient in times of stress.

This is not the case with the great majority of encounter groups. Once the marathon is over, once the emotional merry-go-round grinds to a halt, the participants are very much on their own. There is generally no follow-up by the person or persons running the operation, nor are they apt to be accessible to participants should they be needed. Some observers have detected a definite syndrome in which a person attends an encounter marathon, experiences enormous exhilaration and the sense that a whole new life has opened up for him—and, within a month or so, commits suicide. It is of course impossible to say how often this happens, but it is widely recognized as a genuine hazard of this form of therapy.

Another serious problem with encounter groups is that there is no guarantee whatsoever of emotional stability, let alone professional competence, on the part of the person running the show. Anyone in the world can run an encounter group simply by doing so, and an unsettling number of group leaders have no qualifications whatsoever beyond the fact that they have previously participated in other groups themselves. Those who have what they regard as positive results from attending marathons often become quite messianic about the whole thing and begin running groups of their own, and it is hardly surprising that they are utterly unequipped to identify dangerous psychoses, cope with undesirable results, or otherwise ensure against the group’s having destructive effects upon some or all of its members.

In my own personal experience, I have a woman friend whom I’ve known for several years. She has organized and directed encounter sessions on several occasions, and has no qualifications whatsoever for so doing, unless one is inclined to count a freshman level psych course in college. In addition, her personal emotional stability is such that she really should not be permitted to walk around without a leash. That she is responsible for directing others in an emotionally charged situation is something I find quite terrifying.

This prelude to a discussion of some sexually-oriented encounter groups should not be taken as a blanket condemnation of a psychotherapeutic vehicle. It is to be expected that encounter group techniques will go through considerable refinement in the future, and that some sort of control will be established in order to guarantee against unsuitable and unqualified group leaders.

In this chapter, however, we will examine an encounter technique which strikes me as utterly unsound, even as the man whose technique it is impresses me as either a charlatan or a psychopath, or possibly both. His premise is that happiness and emotional satisfaction can best be reached through the explosion of all sexual inhibitions, and he professes to have derived his therapeutic techniques from a study of the work of Wilhelm Reich. (His understanding of Reichean theory is vague at best.)

I first became aware of this man—whom I’ll call Jeremy—by talking with a woman who had attended one of his marathons. I found the whole idea of what he was doing interesting if somewhat appalling, and made an attempt to interview him directly. After he had ignored several letters of mine—nothing personal, as I later learned, since he habitually fails to answer his mail—I reached him by telephone. At first he seemed quite enthusiastic about discussing his program with me. I arranged to call him later and set a time and place for an interview. When I did so, he brushed off the idea of an interview and suggested instead that I attend one of his sessions as a participant.

From my friend’s description, I seriously doubted that I would be able to participate wholeheartedly in a marathon. In addition, I have grown averse to the idea of traveling under false colors, and do not like to pretend to be other than what I am—a writer who intends ultimately to report on what he discovers. Jeremy made it quite clear that he would not welcome my attendance unless I concealed my professional status from the other members of the group, and I found this unacceptable.

I suggested again that he spare me an hour or so for an interview, and he replied that he did not have the time available, that his schedule was impossibly heavy. When I tried to question him over the telephone concerning his previous experience, his qualifications to run a group, etc., he became evasive and rather surly and terminated the conversation almost immediately. Shortly thereafter I learned he had moved to the West Coast, which I believe is where he had come from in the first place.

I then got in touch with my friend and explained that I would like to get a detailed version of her observations of the marathon. Before we could get together she left town to spend the summer at the shore. She suggested that perhaps she could write up some sketchy notes of the session as she recalled it, and I could use the notes to create an interview.

After some thought, I’ve decided I’d rather let her notes stand as written. Any editing I might do (except for the deletion of some extraneous personal material) would only interpose an extra viewpoint between the actuality and the reader. Thus what follows is precisely what I received. I have merely cut a few brief irrelevant passages and corrected some of her unorthodox spelling.

The author of the following is in her mid-thirties, bright, hip, perceptive, and irreverent. She is bisexual and was not involved in a relationship at the time she attended the marathon. She had had some prior experience with group sex. She attended the marathon not in the hope that it would help her emotionally but because what she had heard about Jeremy had led her to suspect it would be an interesting and novel experience.

I’m sure it was.

•  •  •

As arranged, I get out there noon Saturday. The place, incredibly, is a semi-detached brickfront in Flushing, the epitome of squalid bourgeois respectability. I could accept (a) a clearing in the woods near Big Sur (b) a loft in SoHo (c) a Lower East Side crash pad (d) a split-level in Westchester (e) an old Victorian manse on Staten Island (f) a brownstone anywhere—anything but this tacky row house.

Meet Jeremy at the door. Spoke to him on the phone and now find that his body matches his voice, pear-shaped body and pear-shaped tones. Big man, fat and bald as Buddha. Looks a bit like Buddha, come to think.

I’ve already sent him a check. Ditto everybody else. Cash in advance, not just before you get in the door but before you are told the address. There are an even dozen of us plus Brother Jeremy, each of us having forked over fifty bucks. That’s six hundred dollars for Jeremy and he does this once a week. This is not bad. Howard Hughes would not be impressed. Me, I’m impressed.

•  •  •

Among those present: three married couples, six of us single folk. (Jeremy tells us later this ratio is by design. Suspicious Me thinks it’s cause that’s who came up with the fifty bucks.) Married couples—Ralph and Sally, he’s an accountant, she apologetically identifies self as housewife, they’re about forty, she’s overweight and looks like it worries her, he’s overweight and looks like it doesn’t. Peter and Linda, he a tax lawyer, she a dancer. Suspicious Me thinks she’s a housewife with delusions of grandeur. Dancer’s body, tho. They’re my age. Ditto Arnie and Marilyn, he’s bald and very sincere, she very Flatbush Refugee, a housewife but less apologetic than Sally. Can’t remember what he does.

Single people: Janine, schoolteacher, about 24, potentially dumpy. Hal, long tall slightly faggy, my age, does something incomprehensible for Lindsay administration. Robert, pudgy myopic late twenties, says he’s in furniture, gather he works for his father. Estelle, another schoolteacher, divorced, ugly, must subscribe to dozens of unreadable magazines. Myron, self-consciously hip appearance, ditto speech, standard ten-dollar haircut, sells life insurance yet. (I don’t want any.) Also Me.

•  •  •

Immediate reactions—of those present, I would not at all mind balling Linda, Arnie, Hal. Would as soon not ball Robert, Estelle, Myron, Ralph. Neutral about the others.

Whole first floor is one big room. Somebody must have knocked all the walls out. No furniture anywhere, just pillows and mattresses scattered here and there on the wall-to-wall carpet We sit in a circle, all twelve of us plus Jeremy. Before this there has been a half hour of mingling with nauseous small talk and drinks. The drinks are apple juice and Coca-Cola. Not mixed—you choose one or the other. I overhear a spirited discussion, I forget between whom, as to whether or not it’s organic apple juice. No speculation as to whether or not it’s organic Coca-Cola.

Gross Guru Jeremy announces how to begin. We are sitting boy-girl-boy-girl etc. in our circle. We will go around the circle, taking turns giving our names (first names only, he stresses, like it matters) and saying up to a hundred words about ourselves. Then, after delivering our little speech, we are to take off all our clothes and sit down again.

Impression: everyone is so serious about this. Been to swings where you come in and take off your clothes. Not formal, just you notice everybody’s naked so you take off your clothes and join the crowd. But this is structured. And there’s neither embarrassment or joy evident. Astonishing. I have great desire to deflate everything with a smartass line. Can tell right away that this is going to get in my way. 24 hours without a sense of humor a dismal prospect. How to handle it?

Somebody is designated to go first, don’t remember who. A man, I think. Stands up, says something stupidly self-deprecating, then with rare economy takes off clothing. And around and around we go. Perversely, I watch the watchers, wishing someone will get a hard-on. Nobody does. Not that I can tell, anyway. Possibly somebody got a hard-on while dressed, but none of the naked people have hard-ons.

All of this is so exhibitionistic, and most of the people here are not used to it. When a person is on center stage like that and strips you have to look. You can’t look away, it’s too ridiculous a cop-out. By the time we’re halfway around the circle Yours Truly begins to groove on it. Get great pleasure staring at the cocks as they are revealed to my view. Find myself getting off on staring very hard and very obviously at these revelations to blow everybody else’s mind.

Vibes: these people are disrobing apologetically. “I’m sorry (a) my tits aren’t bigger (b) my cock’s not longer (c) I’m fat (d) I’m skinny (e) my tits sag (f) I’m not circumcised (g) I’m circumcised (h) I’ve got too much body hair (i) I’ve got too little body hair (j) none of the above.”

My turn. I’m ninth in a field of twelve, and by the time it gets around to me I’ve managed to become nervous in spite of myself. God knows why. I have undressed in front of enough friends and enemies and strangers so I should be able to be cool about this. Jeremy’s fucking structure fosters uptightness.

Fuck it. I say, “Hello, naked people. My name is Susan and I am gainfully unemployed. I came here because there’s nothing terrific on television over the weekend. Also I want to have a Meaningful Experience as much as the next schmuck. Please remember I didn’t laugh at your bodies so don’t laugh at mine unless you positively can’t help it.”

I shuck my clothes and nobody laughs. Actually I’m fairly confident, because I probably have the best female body there exc. for Linda.

•  •  •

When we’re all naked, Jeremy stands up and says “My name is Jeremy” and takes his clothes off. He is gross and pale and sloppy but is so completely at ease that his body looks surprisingly together. His penis looks small, probably because it is largely eclipsed by the fat. I still don’t care for him but have to admit the schmuck has presence. He is super-cool. You would have to be to be into this scene.

Jeremy speaks: “See how strong we are, yet see how vulnerable we are. Our nakedness makes us at once stronger and more tender. Clothing is a mask. We have shed that particular mask. By the time we leave tomorrow, we shall have shed several other masks as well. For we are all wearing armor and must remove it to bare our souls.”

•  •  •

Group exercises, a game of sexual Simple Simon. First all the women turn and play with the cocks of the men on their left. Then the men fondle the tits of the women on their left. Then the women stroke the balls of the men on their right. Then the men finger the girls on their right.

All sorts of little idiot games like this. Up to a point, tho, they work. They are designed to break down barriers, and the barriers are breaking down. At first all of the fondling is done very mechanically and a little defensively. People project an air of Look, I have to do this, he told me to, it’s nothing personal. As the game goes on, familiarity breeds familiarity. Here and there people start responding sexually. Across from me Janine is starting to breathe hard. Some of the men have erections. Some of the eyes are beginning to gleam.

I’m sitting between Myron and Arnie. I play with one, I play with the other, they alternate playing with me according to the dictates of the gross guru. Arnie gets a hard-on early on in the game, but I can’t know whether it’s in my honor or whether the woman on his other side is responsible. Myron gets a soft-on, his organ flushed with blood but not quite rigid yet.

They are both circumcised. Both have nice cocks, Arnie’s a little thicker, Myron’s a little longer. Myron’s hands are very nice, he has a good sense of touch.

The barriers break down. The barriers should yield easily. After all, we all know what we’re here for. Everybody knows that Jeremy’s marathons are light on revelation of self and heavy on sexual content. Everybody fucks everybody else sooner or later, according to my information, so that’s what we’ve all come for.

What I can’t believe: that these people are not all as conscious of the game aspect of this as I am. This overwhelming sincerity everyone’s giving off seems to be honest and true. How come? Do they really believe this is going to turn their heads around and make them better human beings? Do they really think Jeremy is a kind of god?

Me, I’m more detached than the rest of these people. I figure it’s just a good excuse for an orgy.

•  •  •

After about fifteen minutes of Simon Says, Jeremy calls two people out of the circle, Ralph and Estelle. They were not sitting next to each other. He has them sit on a mattress in the middle of the circle and gives them instructions. He also tells the rest of us to watch them, which was hardly necessary—we were already watching them. He has them kiss and feel each other up, and then tells Ralph to go down on her. Estelle sits back with her arms stretched out behind her and her legs apart. She has a pretty nice bush. Her eyes are closed and her mouth hangs open. Ralph gets on his knees with his ass up in the air and begins eating her out. All I can see is his ass, it’s pointed directly at me, and just above it I can see Estelle’s face, which becomes increasingly expressionless as she gets hotter.

I watch this for a while, then look at some of the other people, then watch Estelle as she starts huffing and puffng.

Is this supposed to be turning us all on? Me, I’m not affected much. I usually enjoy watching, altho it’s rarely a turn-on as such. Just fun, usually. Thing is, maybe this is too structured for me.

Another thing. The rest of the group is just watching. Nobody’s doing anything. Everybody just sits and stares. Some of them seem absorbed in the spectacle of Ralph and Estelle.

Sally, Ralph’s wife, is impossible for me to read. Is she getting anything, pro or con, out of watching her husband give this ugly schoolteacher some head? If so, she hides it pretty well.

At one point, more out of boredom than desire, I reach over absent-mindedly and take hold of Myron by the dork. He’s nice and hard, so I wrap my hand around him and begin tugging him off. I get a few strokes in and then his hand covers mine.

Myron: I don’t think we’re supposed to do that.

Me: Don’t you like it?

Myron: Yes, but I don’t think—

Me: Wouldn’t you like to come?

Myron: Not right now.

I remove my hand. We have been talking in whispers, but people have noticed and are staring at me. Have I committed some great gaffe? I do not terribly care. Thing is, tho, I feel rejected. No one ever stopped me in the middle of a hand job before. I’m supposed to have nice hands.

Came to me then that perhaps he was afraid that if I got him off he wouldn’t be able to get it on again. Had to be in condition for when it was his turn in the barrel, his time to be the center of attraction on the mattress in the middle of the circle.

Thought so at the time. Now not so sure. Think his main reason was he wanted to do what Jeremy told him and nothing else. Hell of a way to open people up and blow their minds, just have them follow instructions.

•  •  •

The animals come in two by two.

Estelle has a yipping orgasm, comes sounding like a Pekinese. Yip yip yip! Ralph crawls out from between her legs, shiteating grin on his face, cock at half mast. Estelle flashes us a shy smile. They return to their places in the circle and Jeremy calls up another couple and has them warm up with finger exercises, them hump dog-style.

Estelle should have been chosen for the dog-style, yipping like that.

And so it goes. One couple does this, another couple does that, and we all of us take our turns. The couples are boy-girl. I have been given to understand that everything becomes thoroughly bisexual eventually, but I gather that we have to build up to that.

Don’t remember who was with whom or what precisely was done in the six couplings. Who can remember all this? Make up something imaginative when you write this up.

•  •  •

I was fifth on the agenda. By then I was beginning to feel slightly paranoid. Is he ducking me for a reason? Does he suspect my purpose is not as worthy as the rest of these clowns?

Or is he saving the best for last?

And is it good to be last? By then everyone will be too fucked out to watch. Presumably all of these watchers will be a turn-on.

And what if I really don’t dig it? Do I pretend to? Or am I supposed to be honest?

I wasn’t last, just second-last. Penultimate.

My partner is Robert, who is in furniture, and who could have probably supplied a better mattress than this smarmy come-stained arena on which he and I are supposed to couple. Far as that goes, I could have hoped for something better than Robert, who is soft and plump with a permanently apologetic face. Understandable—he has much to be permanently apologetic about.

Jeremy wants us to fuck with Robert lying on his back and me on top. There’s a problem, tho. Robert’s not hard. We play around and he’s still not hard. Jeremy’s not saying anything, but I sense that Robert is beginning to get uptight about this. The uptighter he gets, the harder he’s not going to get, so instead of waiting for instructions from Jeremy I crouch over Robert and pop his soft little cock into my mouth.

I like fellatio best when the man is soft at the beginning. It’s nice to be able to get it all in my mouth and cup his nuts in my hand and go gobble-gobble and feel it grow long and hard in my mouth. Gives a wonderful sense of power and accomplishment. Suck suck suck and make it bigger and better.

Except that midway through the process Robert gives a sharp little cry and twitches spasmodically and fills my mouth with unborn children. Poor baby comes before he’s even fully erect. I go on draining him until he stops trembling and wonder what to do with his gift. Spit it on the mattress? Given the condition of our little playground, it’s unlikely anyone would notice.

Decide he’s feeling lousy enough about coming quick, so why add to his sense of rejection? So I swallow it. I’m funny about this. Whether or not I swallow come is a great index of my feelings for a man.

Robert’s tastes good, at least. Why has no one written about the great difference in taste, the variation from man to man? Some salty, some bitter, some burn the back of your throat on the way down. I wonder why. I suppose it must have something to do with diet. The health food people should get into that: Turn to natural foods and your girlfriend will gobble up every last drop. Sounds like a can’t-miss ad pitch to me. If they could get it past the censors.

•  •  •

Robert feels bad, apologizes. I tell him to forget it.

Robert: I don’t usually have that problem.

Me: Look, it’s an unnatural situation, all that pressure. Forget it.

Robert: I’m sorry I didn’t satisfy you.

Me: Forget it. I enjoyed what we did.

Robert: I wouldn’t want you to think I’m usually like that.

Me: All the circle jerking and all the watching, naturally you had to hold it back. Hardly anybody lasted very long. The only one who did, he had the reverse problem, he couldn’t come at all.

Robert: Just so you don’t have the wrong idea about me.

Me: Anyway, I had an orgasm. The minute I took you in my mouth. I can come that way.

(Which is true. I can. I didn’t, but I wanted to make the poor schmuck feel good. With all he was going thru to assure me that this rarely happened, I was pretty sure it happened a lot. Poor bastard.)

•  •  •

Another round of Coke and apple juice. Plus a round of Vitamin E capsules, designed to increase everyone’s capacity for heavy-duty screwing. I don’t know if they work or not. I suppose it’s men who have a limited capacity. A woman can ball forever unless she gets a sore twat or falls asleep. Maybe they work if you think they work. I’ve been taking them for over a year and never noticed any sexual effect. (Did I notice I don’t get short of breath running for a bus the way I used to. Maybe it’s the Vitamin E.)

Then it’s talk time, Jeremy again structuring everything to hell and gone. We go around the circle, and everyone has to tell his most appealing secret fantasy.

This was a lot of fun in college. It’s also still fun in bed with someone you love. Not much fun with this crowd, tho. Just slightly interesting.

The women all have fantasies involving either bondage or rape or both. I wonder why. Do they all have this particular fantasy or are they getting their cues from one another?

The male fantasies are more diversified. One man, can’t remember who, has a fantasy of being kidnapped by a man and woman who force him to do things to both of them. Another has a fantasy of killing a woman at the moment of orgasm. A few of them have the balling two-girls-at-once fantasy. Can’t remember the rest.

Damned if I’ll tell these people my secret thoughts. I invent a nice fantasy on the spur of the moment about being given an enema while performing fellatio, and then defecating in a roar just as the man comes. It seems to go over pretty well.

I wonder if the rest of them are more honest about this than I am, or if we are all keeping our true fantasies to ourselves.

•  •  •

“Now I want you to tell us the person in this room you would most like to fuck, and the person you would least like to fuck, and your reasons for both of these choices. Let’s start with Arnie and go around the circle.”

Arnie says he would most like to fuck me because my enema fantasy turned him on and he likes my body. He says he would least like to fuck Janine because he doesn’t dig big hips.

Poor Janine. Well, this accomplishes something, all right. For the first time since I got to this madhouse I am genuinely involved as a result of being genuinely pissed off.

And it’s my turn.

Loudmouth Me: The person I would most like to fuck is Janine because she reminds me of a girl I was in love with once. Also I have the feeling she has never made it with a girl and it is kicky for me to make it with a girl who has not made it with a girl before. As for the other half of your question, I’m going to be liberated enough to tell you to shove it up your ass. I didn’t come here to make people feel bad by telling them I wouldn’t want to ball them, and anybody who does is an asshole.

Buddha just smiled and went on to Myron, who confessed he’d like to throw it to Linda. He just stopped there and didn’t say anything about who he would prefer to not fuck, and neither did anybody else all around the circle.

I got a couple votes, including Janine’s. I also got a couple of very heavy looks from Janine.

She doesn’t really appeal much to me. The bit about her resembling a former love was crap. She does remind me of a girl I once knew, but I had never had anything going with that girl and had never really wanted to. But now I’m getting turned on by Janine because a feeling is building up between us.

I suppose I started to get the lukewarm hots for her when Arnie said he didn’t want to fuck her. Well, it figures. I also tend to take in stray cats.

Poor Arnie. He’s the only one in the group who confessed to not wanting to ball a particular person, and I’m sure he hates himself for it. Or hates me for calling him an asshole.

Tough shit.

•  •  •

Jack, it’s very hard to remember just what happened from here on in. The first couple of hours are much easier to recapture. It’s a shame I couldn’t have written all this out the next day or something when it was fresh in my mind. I’ll just give impressions and incidents in no particular order to give you a sense of what was happening. When you write it up, you can make things up to fill in the blanks and give it a feeling of order.

Is that all right?

•  •  •

It’s dark outside. Jeremy turns off all the lights, plunging the place into total darkness. He announces the rules. No one must say a word or make any sounds beyond the inevitable odd grunt of pleasure. We can do whatever we want with whoever we grab. Anything goes. In fifteen minutes the lights will go on and we will stop whatever we’re doing.

My feeling at the beginning is that this is a very dumb thing, an adult version of a child’s game. I’m standing there waiting for something to happen when someone takes hold of my arm. It’s a man and he has hair on his chest, but so do most of them. He puts his arms around me and kisses me, and he rubs his hairy chest deliberately over my tits, which is very stagy but which nevertheless invariably reaches me. I take his cock in my hand. It’s rock hard and very large. We shuffle around, find a mattress, and collapse on it, and he rolls me onto my back and mounts me. I don’t even have to guide his cock in. He hits the bull’s eye on the first shot.

For a minute or two it’s disconcerting because people are wandering around and almost stepping on us. Then everybody seems to have found somebody, and I’m being fucked fast and furious by someone, and I don’t know who it is and he doesn’t know who I am, and I discover it’s kicky. Really kicky.

He fucks good, too. Nice powerful strokes, and I flash on the fact that all around me people are fucking in the dark same as me, and it gets to me, and in no time at all I have three teensy comes and one BIG one.

Then he pulls out and gets off and wanders away.

He didn’t come. Not that he couldn’t but he didn’t want to.

I have met lots of dudes like this at swings and I hate them. They want to screw all the girls they can so instead of just letting go and enjoying themselves when they’re into something, they hold back and get the girl off and then take their cocks out and find somebody else to finish in. I think it stinks. If I’m good enough to fuck I’m good enough to come inside of, dammit.

•  •  •

I get up and wander around in the dark. It is really pitch black in here. I find a couple of people fucking on the floor, guy on top of girl, grinding slowly and merrily away. I have no idea who they are but decide to play with them a little. I put a finger up the guy’s ass, pet his balls a bit. He seems to appreciate this anal, reaches out a hand which I guide between my legs. It’s a hard reach for him and I adjust my body to make it easier for him to get at me. I move my hand around so the tips of my fingers are between the two of them. I can feel her cunt and his cock going in and out of her between my fingertips. He fingers me quite expertly considering the fact that he’s busy fucking her at the same time. Well, maybe he was one of the ones who had the fantasy of balling two girls at once. If so, he’s got his wish.

She has an orgasm and collapses. He goes on fucking her and a few strokes later he comes, at which instant so do I. It’s kind of nice.

•  •  •

A sudden hysterical thought that I had somewhere in the course of all this. There are three married couples here. And it’s dark and no one knows who’s who. So what are the odds that somewhere in this room a man is fucking his wife and neither of them realize it?

Hysterical.

•  •  •

I’m taking tentative little steps in the darkness, hoping I won’t trip over anyone, when a hand touches me. I reach out and explore nice soft skin. Hands touch me, and there’s a little gasp when they find my breasts.

Because my little pal is female also.

Dynamite. She starts to draw away, but that is not at all what I have in mind. I reach out and put my arms around her and plant a solid kiss on her mouth. It’s a little like kissing a statue, but I’m hot enough for both of us. I stroke her ass and kiss her more insistently, and she has a little battle with herself and either wins or loses, you figure it out, and her mouth relaxes and opens and I stick my tongue halfway to her tonsils.

We stand there hanging onto each other, kissing and rubbing our bodies together. She’s got nice plump tits and very smooth skin. Who the hell is it? Janine? Linda? Who?

Ball first, find out later. I get a firm grip on her upper arm and stagger off in search of a mattress. I keep a tight hold on her because I do not want to give her a chance to get away. Ah, no, my proud beauty! Gotcha!

I get her on a mattress and kiss her and play with her and do everything I can think of, and she seems to appreciate everything I do. And she doesn’t just want to be done, like so many selfish little pigs first time they ball another woman. No, she’s grooving on my body. I put a tit in her mouth and let her enjoy it. Oh, so nice!

So I think of a number between sixty-eight and seventy. I crawl on top of her, our bodies inverted, and I open up those pretty legs (assumption—I can’t see them but prefer to think of them as pretty at the moment that my head is between them) and away we go. She hesitates for only a second or so, breathing her uncertainty between my thighs, and then her mouth is glued to me.

Ah, my proud beauty, you have been recently fucked! She tastes of boy and girl all at once, her juices mingled with sperm from some anonymous donor. Yummy.

We eat each other into double happiness. Then I get off her but I don’t go away. I put my arms around her and snuggle her head to my breast. Partly because I feel tender, but there’s also an ulterior motive. I am not going to be happy unless I find out who this is.

No such compulsion with the man. I’m perfectly willing to have him be a ship that passes in the night. But I have just taught this girl to do something she has not done before, and I was not lying when I said I liked that. I wanted to know who she was and I wanted her to know who I was.

She doesn’t try to escape. She’s fidgety for a minute, then calms down and relaxes. We lie there listening to grunts and sighs. I know one thing—she’s not Estelle, because I hear that yipping sound on the other side of the room as Estelle gets her cookies.

Lights on. About half of the people, scattered here and there in twos and threes, have not yet finished, but I barely notice them.

My little pal is Marilyn, Arnie’s wife.

I had not much noticed her before. I think her voice put me off. There’s a particular accent girls have if they’re born in Brooklyn and go to Brooklyn College. I had not even thought of her as one of the possibilities when I was trying to figure out who I was balling, and now here she is, lying next to me, glowing and blushing all at once.

Marilyn: Did you know it was me?

Me: No.

Marilyn: Are you disappointed?

Me: I’m only disappointed all these other schmucks are here. Give me a kiss.

Marilyn: I can’t believe any of this. I was almost sure it was you. Because you knew just what to do and everything, and I knew you were bi from what you said before. I knew I would have an experience with a girl here, that it’s part of the program, but—

Me: But what?

Marilyn: But I didn’t know I’d like it this much. This was my first time. I guess you knew that. It won’t be my last.

Me: It won’t even be your last time with me, honey.

Marilyn: You’re very sweet. You’re a nice person.

•  •  •

Score card: In the twenty-four hours I was there, I had all six of the men at least once. I had Marilyn again, and I had Linda and Janine. I had contact of one sort or another with most of the others in the course of various clusterfucks. You can probably make up combinations when you turn this crap into English. Don’t even worry about it being untrue, as any combination you can think of probably happened at one time or another.

There were snacks served periodically. Not served, exactly. We would all go into the kitchen and help ourselves. There was a cold buffet that night. The next morning you could go scramble yourself an egg or con somebody into doing it for you.

What really fascinated me was the behavior of the married couples during feeding time. As soon as the word food was mentioned the wives became responsible for their husbands’ well-being, a responsibility that was immediately recognized and acknowledged by husbands and wives alike. The couples hardly bothered with each other at all the rest of the time. (Jeremy’s orders may have had something to do with this; he’d told them that no one was married under his roof, that it was as if they had never met before. Obviously he didn’t subscribe to this one hundred percent or he might have occasionally paired a husband and wife together in one of the staged sex acts. It wasn’t that these people were not married under his roof but that they were not supposed to acknowledge each other’s existence under his roof.)

But mention food and everything changed. The wives fixed plates for their husbands, made sure they had enough, etc. And sat with them while they ate and talked about ah, this is good roast beef and other crucial matters. And in the morning each wife left whoever she had been fucking and fixed bacon and eggs for her lawfully wedded spouse.

Proving what?

I guess that fucking is one thing, but that food is a serious matter.

If houses and apartments didn’t have kitchens, I don’t suppose anybody would be married.

•  •  •

I suppose you were wondering what Jeremy did during all of this fucking.

So am I.

I disliked him on sight and liked him less naked than dressed, and I saw no reason to change this feeling in the course of the twenty-four hours I spent in his company. The feeling, I am sure, was mutual. Altho he didn’t make a big thing about it, my rebellion at the idea of saying who I didn’t want to ball did not endear me to him. He runs these things every week, and obviously does the who-turns-you-on number every time, so he must get his jollies out of it, and I spiked it for this group. So I don’t suppose his heart overfloweth with love for Nasty Me.

I also got the feeling that he realized I didn’t take this as seriously as I was supposed to. As time went by I became more and more inclined to make smartass remarks, altho I never challenged his authority directly.

Authority, I think, is his whole trip.

I have not been able to make up my mind whether or not he believes in what he’s doing. It’s possible that he really thinks getting people to open up their cocks and cunts is going to get them opened up in other ways, so that they’ll have open minds and open souls and will no longer have bad breath and sleepless nights and fart a lot. There are people who have had weirder delusions than that, so it’s possible he buys the whole trip.

It’s also possible that he just gets a kick out of it. I’m sure he’s a voyeur. He would have to be a voyeur. No one can spend that much of his life watching people screw in various ways and various combinations without either being bored to death or finding it a turn-on. Also I think he’s an emotional voyeur. He would purposely put together combinations that would engender a certain amount of uptightness. Nothing people couldn’t ultimately handle, because he’s also a showman and wants everyone to have a good time.

I wonder what he does for sex. As far as I know, he didn’t fuck anybody. I think he’s probably impotent, or else he has special kicks that he couldn’t indulge in a group.

He’s a toad.

After the first few hours the pace slowed down a little. There was a long period given over to informal fucking. You could do whatever you wanted with whoever you wanted as long as whoever it was wanted to, too. And the hint from the Grotty Guru was that, while anyone had the option to say No, it would not be taken as a sign of liberation. So, as far as I know, no one directly refused anyone.

At a swing, you can say no. You can say no to everything and just stand around all night watching, as far as that goes. Of course you’re apt to acquire a reputation as a drag, and you may not get invited back, but everything is your option. Here there was implicit pressure to say yes, and I didn’t like that too much.

People would sit around and talk, and then they might get into something, and then they might drift away from sex and back to conversation or go to the kitchen for something to drink.

I think Father Jeremy put something creative in the apple juice and Coke. If I had to guess, I’d say that it was, as they say in the Anacin commercials, a combination of ingredients, probably an upper and a tranquilizer. Probably Dexedrine and either Valium or Librium, if I were guessing. (Which I suppose I am, huh?)

I had a glass of apple juice when I first got there and began to feel that I was on something more far-reaching than plain ol’ apple juice. So I stayed away from it from there on in. That would help explain, tho, why everyone had an abundance of nervous energy and the ability to keep going long after you would have thought they’d have had enough of screwing.

Whatever that drug was, it was also in the morning coffee. I had a couple of cups anyhow. Better drugged coffee than no coffee at all.

•  •  •

When we got up the next morning, someone noticed that Ralph and Sally were gone. Evidently they woke up somewhere in the middle of the night and decided they had had as much of the marathon as they wanted. And away they went without a word to anyone.

I was a little surprised. They seemed to be enjoying themselves more than anyone else, and none of the great sexual breakthroughs seemed to faze them in the slightest. I remember one happy moment when Sally was sitting on some man’s face and Ralph came over, gave her a big kiss, and then went down on the guy who was gobbling her. They seemed to be entering into the spirit of things beautifully.

Well, things do look different in the morning. Me, I had wanted to leave that night instead of sleeping over, partly because I dreaded waking up all smelly and brown-mouthed and having all of these assholes around. Noblesse oblige, kiddo; I figured it wouldn’t really be fair to split until the party was over.

•  •  •

Final impressions: shit, man, I don’t know. I think Jeremy’s a tool, I despise him, and yet I can see how none of this would have come off without him. Because what it comes down to is that all of these people wanted to cut loose and lose themselves in twenty-four hours of sexual experimentation, and they couldn’t just go and do it, they had to have the excuse that it was for their emotional health. I think one of the married couples had done a teensy bit of swinging with another couple before, and I gather that some of the singles had made an occasional group grope scene of some degree or other, but no one had been into anything like this before and they couldn’t have gone through with it without some sort of excuse.

So maybe it’s good for them that way. Or bad for them that way. I don’t know.

I guess I’m glad I went. You know me, love—I like to try new things, and I enjoy them even when I don’t enjoy them, if you follow me. (I’m not even sure I follow me.)

Well, that’s all she wrote. Do something creative with it, will you, dear?

Let Them Cure Each Other

David is tall and thin, with graying hair and a small, neat moustache. He is a clinical psychologist, and marriage counseling constitutes a substantial portion of his very successful practice. He was one of the first persons in his area to use the Masters and Johnson techniques; indeed, he had begun to develop a program of therapy along similar lines before the St. Louis researchers first published their findings on the treatment of sexual dysfunction.

I found David extremely cooperative and very easy to talk to. I was able to speak with him on several occasions. We had dinner together one evening and sat drinking and talking far into the night. We have also corresponded at considerable length.

Much of our discourse centered, not surprisingly, on the subject of sexual therapy. David spoke quite freely about his theories and experiences in this area. He disagreed with certain aspects of the Masters and Johnson approach, and was most critical of their program of sexual surrogates; his alternative approach to the problem of sexual therapy for a person without a regular sexual partner is particularly interesting.

What follows is a distillation of David’s remarks.

•  •  •

DAVID: Over a period of time I came to the conclusion that the sexual element was a major component of virtually every troubled marriage. When sexual disharmony was not a prime cause of marital difficulty in the first place, it was almost invariably present eventually, with a faulty sexual relationship serving as an effective metaphor for a faulty marriage.

On the other hand, when two people have a good thing going in bed together, their other discontents don’t seem to matter a hell of a lot. If a man and woman can make good satisfying love several times a week, they may have other problems with each other but these problems are usually ones they find they can live with. Part of this is undoubtedly physical. There is simply no tranquilizer that can hold a candle to good honest fucking. On top of that, these people are inevitably inclined to believe that the quality of their sexual union indicates their marriage is of value. “If I enjoy fucking him-her this much, I must love him-her.” That kind of thinking.

In marriage counseling, the immediate object is the preservation of the marriage. That’s what they come to you for. If at least one of them did not want the marriage to go on, they wouldn’t stop in my office first. They’d go directly to a lawyer.

Now there are certain things a counselor can do. Often his function is that of referee. Here you have two people who want to fight and they don’t know how. You have to teach them to fight fair. He has these criticisms of her and she has these criticisms of him and you get them out into the open and make them say the real thing that pisses them off about the other person, and you get some communication building. Sometimes that’s all the battle right there. They don’t know how to talk to each other. They live under the same roof and share the same bed for years and they’re still strangers, keeping their real feelings masked.

In a lot of these relationships, you come up against people who would be a lot more at ease in a world that only contained one sex. I don’t mean that they’re homosexual. Not at all. But there are men married twenty years who act as though women are a separate species entirely. And women who are the same way about men. Their whole social interaction is with members of their own sex. He goes bowling, she plays canasta, and at mixed parties he sits on one side of the room talking cars and pro football while she sits on the other side of the room talking baby-sitters and clothes.

This is all breaking down with the kids nowadays, and I think it’s an enormously healthy thing. Teenagers have genuine friends of the opposite sex to an extent they never did twenty years ago. This is a marvelous thing. Adolescence is supposed to be a time when you learn how to function as an adult. Old-school dating patterns taught you a certain amount of social ease and surface calm, but they also taught you to approach the opposite sex as a foreign country. In the best marriages, husbands and wives are friends, so the skill of friendship with the opposite sex seems worth learning.

It’s not going to change that many people’s lives that there are now male students at Vassar and female students at Princeton. The significance of this lies in the fact that the kids are so oriented that these schools have had to become coeducational. That shows just how much their attitudes have changed—and while I’m old-fashioned enough not to applaud every manner in which youth’s attitudes have developed, in this instance I approve wholeheartedly.

In marriage counseling, then, one tries to bring problems into the open, to get them to find out for themselves what bugs them and share this discovery with one another. And a lot of the time that’s all there is to it. Remember, they’re largely predisposed to save the marriage, or they wouldn’t have turned up in my office at all.

The more stubborn cases proved to have sexual difficulties as a common denominator. These people were not having a good time in bed and it was coloring every other facet of their relationship. Sometimes they didn’t know that was the problem, didn’t recognize that their sexual relationship was all that lousy. He’s convinced that he can’t stand her mother visiting them all the time and she’s positive that they’re fighting all the time about money and they’ve both lost sight of the fact that during their first year of marriage they were screwing like maniacs and nowadays he can’t get it up or she can’t get it off or it’s just so little fun that they don’t get around to doing it more than five or six times a year.

What I found quite a while ago was that once they were enjoying sex again—or enjoying it for the first time, because contrary to popular opinion a hell of a lot of marriages don’t turn sexually stale, they start off that way from the wedding night—once they were enjoying it, almost magically the mother-in-law ceased to be such a pain in the ass and money problems were no longer worth fighting about.

This doesn’t mean that everything is going to come up roses for the rest of their lives. There are too damned many people around who should never have married each other in the first place. This doesn’t mean that they should therefore terminate their marriage. They may want to stay together for any of a number of good reasons, and they may manage to do so, but that won’t necessarily make them Romeo and Juliet. As far as that goes, if Romeo and Juliet had gone ahead and gotten married, within ten years they’d have been saying nasty things about their in-laws.

•  •  •

JWW: David’s initial approach to sexual therapy was largely educational. He found that a distressing number of his clients were sexual illiterates, men and women who did not know what to do in order to satisfy one another. Thus his first chore was to instruct them in the simple mechanics of mutually satisfactory lovemaking.

•  •  •

DAVID: The extent of ignorance among long-married couples is sometimes staggering. She thinks all she has to do is lie there and he thinks all he has to do is stick it in and come as quickly as possible. He doesn’t know he’s supposed to do something to make her come and she doesn’t know she’s supposed to feel anything overwhelming. Women will say that sex is obviously more important to men because men have orgasms. They honestly don’t realize that women are also capable of orgasm.

Now this ignorance is much less widespread than it was ten or fifteen years ago. The accessibility of popular literature dealing frankly with sex has had an enormous impact. This has had a great positive effect, and I’ve been able to see the results in my own practice. People of all ages know more about what to do, and, just as important, they’re trying it.

Ten years ago, most of the couples I counseled had never attempted oral sex with one another. Nowadays, almost all of them have at least tried it. I’m not implying that oral sex is the indicator of a good marriage—though the lack of it is a damn fine indication of a bad one. This change is a good sign, though, of all the changes the average person’s sexual attitudes have gone through. I used to see so many cases where both parties had wanted to go down on each other and neither of them dared to mention it. You hardly ever come across that any more.

This is excellent. It’s so valuable that material on sex is available to the general public. I’m old enough to remember when the only candid writing on a lot of sexual practices could only be found in medical books, where the “hot stuff” had to be printed in Latin. Now we’ve gone to the other extreme, and I’ll defend all of it, even the rankest pornography. Dirty books serve an educational purpose, you know. Sometimes I wish the authors had a more complete grounding in physiology, but even so I’ve long been convinced that any form of erotic literature does infinitely more good than harm. There are people who will read pornography and learn from it—and profit by what they learn—who would not get around to reading this material in any other form. So of course it ought to be available to them.

At the same time, there is a result of this informational explosion about sex that is not so ideal, at least at first glance. And this is that people are aware of the true possibilities of pleasure afforded by sex and are thus inclined to realize just how far their own sex lives fall short of what they can envision. They recognize that they have sex problems. This is good in that they then gave a chance to do something about it. It’s bad to the extent that they look for the answer in the wrong place.

It’s my feeling that a lot of the unfortunate extremes of sexual behavior derive from the failure of a sexual relationship to be as great as people can wish it could be. People expect sex to prevent cavities and cure cancer, and as far as we know it has neither of those properties. So when it’s not the parade of starbursts they think it could be, they begin following some strange paths.

This outburst of swapping and group sex is one side of sexual freedom that I don’t care for. I know our attitudes differ on this point, Jack, and that you think this sort of experimentation can have beneficial results for many of the people engaging in it. You may well be right. I know, though, that I have a very negative reaction to the entire notion. I’ve said I’m old-fashioned in certain ways. Perhaps this is one of those ways.

•  •  •

JWW: David went on to explain how he helped his clients get their own sexual desires out into the open, and how he helped them educate themselves sexually. He did this last both by providing information directly and by giving them books to read on the subject. He encouraged them to increase the frequency of their sexual relations and to enhance its romantic aspects.

•  •  •

DAVID: When she goes to bed with her hair in curlers and he staggers up belching after a night of guzzling beer in his undershirt in front of the television set, you can’t expect them to spend ten or twenty minutes on sexual foreplay. Given the circumstances, if they do it at all they’ll want to get it over with as quickly as possible.

Improving both the understanding of sex and the attitudes of the partners toward each other can do a great deal for a sexual relationship, and hence for a marriage. Where it falls short, though, is in the area of sexual dysfunction, of sexual inadequacy.

All the wine and soft music in the world can’t do the trick if a woman still fails to reach orgasm time after time, and all the lovemaking manuals can’t help if a man still ejaculates seconds after penetration, or has frequent difficulty in getting or maintaining an erection. Sometimes these difficulties were recent in origin and seemed to exist largely to reflect the deterioration of the marriage; when other problems were cleared up, sexual functioning improved. In other cases the problems were longstanding ones, and conventional therapy did not seem to hold much promise of alleviating them.

Over the years, I found myself inclining more and more to the idea of sexual therapy. For husbands with periodic impotence, I recommended methods for the wives which might help in encouraging their husbands’ potency. I also advised the husbands to practice satisfying their wives through non-coital means on occasions when they were impotent. This not only guaranteed that periodic impotence would not mean the cessation of sexual relations, but also served to lessen the actual incidence of impotence. The men felt under less pressure to perform, since they could bring their wives to orgasm regardless, and the absence of pressure helped them function better.

When Masters and Johnson published the details of their program, I began employing their techniques immediately. I was astonished how successful they had been and at the relative simplicity of dealing with problems I had always regarded as difficult. Premature ejaculation, for example, has been a complaint they have treated with almost one hundred percent effectiveness. This technique of the woman’s retarding ejaculation by squeezing the penis—such a simple thing, and what an extraordinary boon to marital relations! Previously I had tried a great many things, most of them aiming at dispelling the man’s concern over his shortcomings and at rooting around in his subconscious to dredge up the anxieties likely to have interfered with his ability to prolong intercourse. This helped in some cases and had less effect in others. Masters and Johnson published their findings, I put them into practice with my own patients, and I was delighted to find that they worked. You could argue that it seems too simple. Well, it is simple. So’s the wheel. The greatest discoveries usually are.

My work with couples very much followed the Masters and Johnson line. There were some differences in approach, of course. For one thing, my clients were not in a rush. They did not have to leave their homes and jobs and families and spend a couple of weeks in St. Louis. Even so, I found that it worked best if the course of therapy or counseling or whatever you want to call it was as condensed as possible, if only because the effect was most beneficial if the results could be achieved as quickly and dramatically as possible. But there was no deadline, and couples were initially encouraged to think that successful therapy would take more time than I actually anticipated it would take. Then, when progress came faster than they had been led to believe, their own self-confidence increased markedly.

•  •  •

JWW: There were other minor points on which David was in a certain amount of disagreement with Masters and Johnson. In the main, these related to the supportive talk therapy by a male and female therapist which leads and reinforces the Masters and Johnson program. David has his own ideas about psychotherapeutic technique and has developed ways to wed his approach to the physical side of M and J.

A greater departure, and one in which David has been something of a radical innovator, has been in the area of sexual surrogates.

•  •  •

DAVID: Masters and Johnson developed the sexual surrogate program for the benefit of patients who were unmarried or who could not persuade their husband or wife to accompany them to St. Louis. I say “husband or wife,” but as I understand it the program has been essentially confined to males. Young women were enlisted as sexual therapists to function in the capacity of surrogate wives for these men.

When I learned about this, I assumed at first that they were employing professional prostitutes. This put me off immediately. Then I found out that they were doing something which to my mind was even worse—they were taking girls who presumably were not prostitutes previously and were making prostitutes out of them by paying them to have sexual relations with strangers.

Let’s pass over the possible legal implications of this which, incidentally, cannot be all that easily dismissed out of hand. But ignoring them, look at the ethical side of it, the moral side. It is all well and good to talk about these sexual surrogates as practical therapists. It is fine to say that they have been carefully screened and that one is certain they will have no compunctions about what they are doing. But, damn it, you can’t say that. You can’t predict with any guarantee of accuracy that they won’t suffer from severe guilt feelings some time in the future over what they have done. You can’t say that the men whom they will ultimately meet and marry will be as sanguine over their beloved’s having worked as a sexual therapist as if they had spent the same amount of time as a nurse or secretary.

In my own practice, I saw early on that the most serious cases of sexual inadequacy were cases involving unmarried individuals, individuals with no steady sexual partners. Their situation may not have had the urgency of married persons in the same bag, but this didn’t make it less problematic for them. I felt, just as Masters and Johnson had felt, that these persons deserved to be helped. I agreed that the techniques which worked with married persons ought to work as well with single ones. And I further agreed that such techniques could only be applied if some sort of surrogate partner was enlisted.

But I never seriously considered developing a stable of surrogates.

At first I used prostitutes. I felt on a much sounder ethical footing this way. There is certainly a difference between employing a prostitute who has already functioned in that occupation and recruiting a girl as a de facto novice in the profession. There is also the security of knowing that she has done this before and has been able to handle the role emotionally to a greater or lesser extent.

But there was still so much wrong with this method. The motivation on the female’s part, for example. It’s entirely financial, and as carefully as you try to screen potential surrogates, you still wind up looking for the mythical whore with the heart of gold. If she exists outside of melodrama, I’m afraid I haven’t yet met her. In my experience, the average prostitute is a severely disturbed woman with an unresolved Oedipal conflict, an inability to postpone immediate satisfaction for the sake of long term benefit, and a neurotic emotional cripple. And those relatively few prostitutes who are well-adjusted are still women who want to make as much money as possible in as little time as possible with as little effort as possible, either to live luxuriously and effortlessly or, more rarely, with the hope of retiring as soon as they can to a better way of life.

Thus there’s an incredible degree of unreality here. A couple on the Masters and Johnson plan are working together toward a common goal that will benefit them both. A man with a professional sexual surrogate is receiving treatment from her for which she in turn receives financial compensation. They inevitably relate to one another in this light. If, for his own benefit in terms of the therapy, the man tries to regard his partner as something other than what she is, as a love-object, he is simply deluding himself. And, when his course of treatment has been completed, he has not learned how to make love to a woman. He has only learned how to achieve satisfaction with a prostitute.

Given these reservations—and they are considerable—I still achieved some favorable results in this manner. But I was never satisfied with it, not entirely. And it did absolutely nothing for women in the same position. I never even considered going out and finding male prostitutes to service them, nor could I imagine such an approach having any useful results. I simply had to assume that the Masters and Johnson approach to female sexual inadequacy was not applicable to single women.

When it first occurred to me that two patients could serve each other as surrogates, I rejected the idea out of hand. It goes against the grain, you know. Even in group therapy, which is predicated upon the idea that patients can help each other through emotional interaction, there’s the absolute premise that such interaction should take place only within the group, that the patients should not know one another’s last names, and that they should have no social contact on their own.

Now this is easier said than done. Whatever the ideals of group therapy, whatever rules one sets up in advance, the patients manage to work things out as they see fit. It is a practical impossibility to prevent two adults from exchanging telephone numbers if that’s what they’ve decided they want to do. And it constantly happens that they want to do this, to see each other outside of the group situation. Sometimes, especially when you’re dealing with people in an urban locale, they have few real acquaintances outside the group. It’s no more than natural that they’ll want to heighten these relationships.

Periodically I would discover that two members of a group I was running were having an affair. Once this happens there’s not a hell of a lot you can do about it. If you discourage the affair, all you usually accomplish is to drive the persons involved away from the group. These affairs would have a bad effect upon the group because they would alter its emotional makeup in certain ways, and would prevent the persons involved in the affair from playing their roles in the group as freely as they might have done otherwise.

Yet it was my experience that such affairs were not necessarily bad for the two people involved. It was quite often just what the doctor ordered—except that in this case the doctor in question had ordered the opposite. While the affair might adversely affect the way the two functioned in the group, it often seemed to improve the way they functioned in other areas of life.

This led me to conclude that, while it was undesirable in certain ways for members of a group to have an affair, it was not perforce undesirable for two patients to have an affair with one another.

I then began to consider anew the prospect of two patients serving one another as sexual surrogates. As I saw it, this would amount to creating a therapy group composed of two persons and specifically encouraging their interaction, interaction on a sexual level. They would be able to utilize Masters and Johnson techniques in dealing with one another’s problems, and they would approach each other as equals, similarly motivated and drawn together for their collective good. They would not have the advantage of married couples. They would not love each other and would not have a common goal to the same extent. But it seemed to me that their relationship would have to have greater validity than that of prostitute and client.

My ideas on the subject remained highly theoretical for some time after I had clarified them because the right patients did not materialize. I continued to treat single subjects as best I could. I modified the treatment of premature ejaculation, for example, by having single male patients employ the M & J technique by themselves in the course of masturbation. This works to a certain extent, in that the mind and body learn to defer orgasm. There’s an argument that premature ejaculation represents a problem originally learned through masturbation, that adolescent masturbators often attempt to bring themselves off as quickly as they possibly can and that this sets a pattern of future sexual response. I’m not sure how valid this is, but it’s been my experience that men who learn to prolong masturbation can more easily learn to prolong intercourse.

It didn’t work as well as it might have, though, because it couldn’t go far enough. A man might train himself from a physiological standpoint to postpone orgasm, but this interaction between his penis and his hand would hardly give him confidence when he was with a woman. His concern over the possibility of failure could serve to guarantee failure, as is so often the case with sexual difficulties.

Ultimately, I found myself in the position of having two individuals as patients whom I felt could very likely help one another. The female patient was a young woman of twenty-four who had been recently divorced. Her husband had left her for another woman. Their sexual relationship, never entirely satisfactory, had deteriorated considerably in the months before the divorce. Since then she had had sexual relations on several occasions with several partners and had found herself incapable of response, although she had responded sexually in the early years of her marriage and had frequently reached orgasm then.

The male patient was approximately the same age. His problem, really, was sexual insecurity as much as anything else. He had never been married and had never had a long-term sexual relationship. On the few occasions when he had had sex, he had been impotent to a greater or lesser extent most of the time. Occasionally he was unable to get an erection in the first place, occasionally he reached orgasm immediately upon intromission, occasionally he sustained intercourse for a long enough period of time but subsequently lost his erection without having reached a climax. Because he was not confident of his ability to perform adequately, he tended to avoid situations in which he would be called upon to perform at all. He was socially unaggressive, dated infrequently, and found it excessively easy to accept when a woman rebuffed his attempts at seduction.

It struck me that these two might be very good for each other. I also was able to determine that neither was likely to do the other any serious harm. These two were not extreme neurotics and their personalities were such that they would not attempt to hurt one another or use one another improperly.

I brought the two of them together, explaining that I wanted to experiment with a form of group therapy involving two persons instead of the traditional larger group. In this way they were able to get to know each other and discuss their problems without the pressure of an incipient sexual relationship, and at the same time I was able to observe how they related to one another. My impression that they would be good for each other was reinforced.

I met with them separately and established that each found the other sexually attractive. I then discussed with them—separately, again—the idea of the two of them working together to improve their respective sexual performance. I explained how the Masters and Johnson system worked for married couples and how I would be inclined to modify it for their special circumstances.

While each was somewhat hesitant, both of them agreed to try working together as what you might describe as an ad hoc couple.

The program I established for them ran along the following lines: Three nights a week, they would have dinner together. They would then return to the young woman’s apartment where they would become increasingly intimate with one another along the M & J lines. At first they were to practice giving one another pleasure in ways that were not specifically sexual, caressing one another on the arms and face, giving each other back rubs, etc. Then they would remove their clothes and pet. Ultimately they had sexual relations, employing the techniques I had explained to them to deal with sexual problems.

At the same time, I was seeing them both together and individually several times a week. I would discuss with them the progress they were making and their emotional reactions to what was taking place. There were certain problems. Each of them was holding back to a degree at the beginning out of a fear of being hurt. Each felt the possibility of falling in love with the other and worried that this love would not be reciprocated since they were basically involved in an affaire de convenience, so to speak. Each simultaneously feared that the partner would be the one to fall in love. My method of coping with this consisted largely of inculcating them with the idea that, in a contrived situation of this sort, love was a legitimate option which could be regarded as a nonpermanent thing. Don’t try to make too much sense of that statement; it was more pragmatic gobbledygook than anything else, a line of argument simply designed to allay fears.

In a matter of weeks they were functioning more than adequately. The fact that each was helping the other was enormously important. In dealing with married couples, Masters and Johnson have confirmed that one problem lies in a tendency to regard a shared problem as the particular problem of one of the partners. In other words, if the man’s impotent, both the husband and the wife tend to think it’s his problem and she’s helping him solve it, when actually it’s their problem and they damned well better work it out together. With my two single people, both of them knew they had a problem and that the partner had a problem, so this made things easier in that respect.

Before very long, the man was learning to take for granted his ability to get an erection, keep it as long as was desirable, and reach a strong climax. The woman was learning to relax with a lover, respond to sexual stimulation, and reach orgasm either in intercourse or in non-coital love play.

I had been fairly certain that this would happen. What concerned me more was what would happen next. There was the chance that they would worry about their ability to function as well as other partners. There was the chance one would want to continue the relationship and the other would have to choose between prolonging an undesired affair or rejecting and hurting the partner. It was the possible denouement of the whole thing which had concerned me most at the beginning, and the better the two of them were together, the more anxious I grew about it.

I wondered just how they would work it out. Would they both begin dating other persons at about the same time? Would severe depression be a problem for the rejected partner? Or would the ego boost of sexual success be sufficient to lead the rejected individual to form meaningful sexual relationships on his own initiative?

In this case, I got no answers, because my two guinea pigs were too well suited to one another. Perhaps my intuition in selecting the two of them had been particularly keen. Perhaps the sharing of this triumph created a bond of particular strength. Whatever the cause, their relationship simply did not break up. They continued having an affair, neither of them desirous of ending it, and they began living together, and at the present time they are married and awaiting the birth of their first child.

At the time I regarded this as an extraordinary development. I have since ceased to be surprised when affairs which I have arranged lead to long-term alliances, if not to marriage per se. One must appreciate that two persons who know each other through shared therapy, and subsequently through shared sexual therapy, almost inevitably construct a very strong basis for a continuing relationship. They know each other better than most people do at the onset of a marriage. They have conscientiously exposed themselves to one another. And they were emotionally compatible in the first place, since I had established this compatibility long before suggesting that they treat each other’s sexual ills. And they’ve developed a sexual relationship which has been more satisfying for both of them than either has managed in the past, and have done so in an emotionally candid fashion. Why then should it be surprising for them to conclude that they’ve got a good thing going, and that they want to hang onto it?

In instances when the two persons did not remain in a long-term monogamous relationship, the results have been almost entirely favorable. Again, let me emphasize two things. First, the persons involved were not severely disturbed to begin with. They were emotionally stable and intelligent. Secondly, I was meeting with them regularly, and was able to prepare them for changes in the nature of their relationship, and to offer some support when it was needed.

Affairs that did not continue resolved themselves in a variety of ways. In one case, for example, both of the parties felt that sexual relations of a casual nature were quite legitimate. When they ceased seeing each other in their therapeutic relationship, both of them began seeing other persons and had successful sexual relations with a variety of partners. Periodically they would get together with each other in order to have sexual relations and enjoy one another’s company. They have been able to do this without any unpleasant effects on either side.

In other instances, both persons have agreed in the course of therapy that they feel it necessary to rule out seeing one another at all after therapy had been concluded. For example, I put two people together in a successful therapeutic relationship and, good as they were in bed together, their backgrounds and interests were such that they recognized it would be impossible for them to make a success of a marriage, nor did they feel themselves to be in love in any sort of permanent fashion. Their orientation was such that they only approved of sexual intimacy in the context of a serious relationship—with the exception of their own relationship created for therapeutic purposes, which they were able to accept in that respect. Therefore they agreed from the start that the relationship would never be more than a mutually therapeutic one, and neither appeared to desire to change this agreement at any stage.

I can’t claim one hundred percent success. I doubt any matchmaker can, whether he’s aiming at temporary sexual harmony or permanent marital bliss. In many cases the two people simply don’t take to each other. Their personalities clash or they fail to find each other sexually appealing. Most of the time, this comes out long before I’m likely to suggest that they go to bed together, so there’s no harm done; I simply discontinue seeing them together and, if the prospects are right, pair them up with other partners. A few times they began the therapy process before discovering that they could not function together for one reason or another. Again, no real harm was done.

I’ve lately come to the conclusion that it’s not absolutely essential that both of the parties have a problem of sexual dysfunction as such. For example, I’ve paired an impotent man with a woman whose major problem was general anxiety and low estimate of self. I felt that the experience of sexual interaction of this sort would be beneficial to her and that she would be a useful partner for the man in question. I’ve also done the reverse, paired a man with more general problems with a woman with problems of sexual inadequacy. The procedure has had good effects on both parties, perhaps because anyone is going to benefit by having good healthy sex on a regular basis, whatever the nature of his or her basic difficulties.

Paradoxically, the chief difficulty I face at the present time is that patients have been coming to me lately with an understanding of the course of treatment I employ. They’ve talked to former patients of mine and know in advance that I’m likely to pair them off with other patients. This makes it difficult for them to approach their prospective partners in the right frame of mind, as they are apt to erect defenses immediately because they are thinking in sexual terms. Also, when I do pair them tentatively and things don’t work out, they can hardly avoid interpreting this as rejection, whereas they would not know they had been rejected if they had not known that a sexual pairing was in process. This has been a problem, but even so the results have been significantly more favorable than unfavorable.

Years ago I read a mystery novel by Fredric Brown called The Screaming Mimi. One of the characters was a lunatic psychiatrist who had created a certain amount of frenzy at a mental hospital which had employed him by taking a satyr and a nymphomaniac and locking them in a room together until they either killed or cured each other. Sometimes I feel as though the role I’ve played of late is not all that different from that of the fictional psychiatrist. I know a great many persons in the field would tend to regard what I do as either unethical or dangerous or both. I can only say that it seems to work, and that whatever dangers it may have do not seem to have materialized.

If the best way to treat persons is to let them treat each other, I can’t see any valid objection.

In Praise of the
Electric Toothbrush

I get quite a bit of mail. Initially I was surprised at just how many of my correspondents sought my advice on sexual matters—surprised because I consider myself quite unqualified to give such advice. I’ve since come to realize that a good many people find it far easier to write a letter to a stranger than to sit down face to face with someone and discuss intimate aspects of their lives. This is especially true of persons in rural areas who have less opportunity to secure advice from professionally qualified persons.

I’m asked all sorts of questions. How can one increase the size of one’s penis? (One can’t, and why bother?) How can one increase the size of one’s breasts? (One can’t, except by silicon implants, and why bother?) Sometimes I tell people to consult a therapist. Other times I try to answer the question.

The following letters are from a young woman in the Far West who had never had an orgasm. They provide an interesting look at an example of do-it-yourself sexual therapy.

Dear Mr. Wells:

I read your book The New Sexual Underground and enjoyed it very much . . .

I am a woman of thirty-one years who has never had sexual climax. I suppose there is something wrong with me. I like being with a man and enjoy sex but that is the extent of it. I read about sex and become highly aroused at the descriptions of what other women go through. Yet at times I do not believe it because I have no experience with this.

This is a small town which I doubt you ever heard of. I live with my mother. My father is deceased ten years. I am alone out here but see men now and then. There is a salesman who will always call me when he is in town. He is married and just looking for a quick intercourse but fun to be with. And I will go into the nearest city from time to time where men can be met if wanted . . .

I was engaged twice and had relations with my fiancé on each occasion. In sex lately I will get so hot but then nothing comes of it. I can feel that there is an orgasm there but how to let it out of the bag? That is the question . . .

Mr. Wells, am I a lesbian? The thought of sex with a woman makes me sick to think about it. But then I will read about lesbians having sex and get hot reading about this. Then I think more about it and get upset. So maybe I am a lesbian after all without knowing it. If I am, what do I do about it? How to meet a lesbian here? How to find someone? Is there a way I could find out if there are lesbians in this area? Any that you know of that would be interested in meeting a girl with red hair and not too bad of a figure? Is there some place I can write to?

Do you think swinging would help? Where are these correspondence magazines that you write about?

I hope you will answer this letter.

Sincerely,
Rita

JWW: I replied that, on the evidence, I saw no reason for Rita to suspect herself of lesbianism, that a failure to reach orgasm heterosexually was not a sign of homosexuality, nor was an ability to reach orgasm heterosexually negative evidence of bisexual potential. I added that swinging was a life style which might or might not appeal to her, but that there were other things she might try in order to deal with her immediate problem before examining her options regarding swinging. I suggested some books to her, and specifically recommended that she attempt to reach orgasm through masturbation. Finally, I expressed the hope that she would keep me informed about her progress and feel free to get in touch with me if she had any further questions.

Dear Mr. Wells:

I don’t know if you remember me, but I wrote you some months ago about my problem of not having a climax, to which you replied for which I thank you very much . . .

I have to admit your letter shocked me. Though I don’t know why it should. Namely the advice about masturbation, which I had always learned was something a person definitely should not do, having been given to understand as to it being harmful and unhealthy. I have read in your books and others that it is normal but still somehow thought it was better not to do this.

You ask if I have ever done this. When I was a child I would touch myself but never had an orgasm this way. Also from time to time since then have had the desire but always managed to rise above it. Then you come along and tell me it is what I should do!

After much thinking about it I began to do so. Also obtained some of the books you recommended and have read them all several times over. Some were hard to understand, being educated only through eleventh grade . . .

Well, I have been touching myself as suggested and maybe should worry as am learning to enjoy it! Except the point is that I am supposed to enjoy it, isn’t that so? No climax yet, which is making me desperate, but I will have to learn to live with the idea that it may take a long time.

Afraid it is impossible to obtain a vibrator in these parts. Even if they sold them here, I cannot picture myself going into a store and asking for one. Maybe my letter did not indicate that I am an extremely shy person. I even find it difficult to buy books on sex subjects but the desire is so great that I am able to force myself . . .

I have had sex with two men since my first letter to you. One is a salesman who is married who I see from time to time. Also a man I met in the city who says he is not married but they all say that. I doubt I will see him again . . . Just last night the salesman was in the area and called me. We went to a motel where we had intercourse twice and once I took him by mouth. He likes me to do this but I don’t know. Is it dangerous? Abnormal? I have the sense that I could enjoy doing this but something is tight inside that stops me from having pleasure. But it is pleasure for him and so I do it. I had pleasure with him in intercourse and beforehand by means of him touching me but of course no orgasm, which I guess I must learn to get used to . . .

Sorry to waste your time with such a long letter. I hope you will write to me again some day.

Sincerely,
Rita

JWW: I replied that she should not worry about wasting my time, that there was nothing dangerous or unnatural about fellatio, that it was perfectly normal for her to let herself enjoy performing it, and that she might enjoy it even more if her salesman friend should return the favor. I further suggested several common household appliances which she could purchase readily anywhere, and which could do the job of a vibrator.

Dear John,

Well don’t I feel stupid. I have been brushing my teeth with an electrical toothbrush for almost five years and never once thought of it as a sex machine.

Well I am making up for lost time.

When you wrote about it I was almost afraid to try it. I don’t know why. But in less than a day I conquered my fears and put it to use. Almost immediately it excited me in a new way. I don’t know to explain it but it was that I could let go of myself and it could do the work, and I could relax in some parts of me that would not relax before. I am not good at putting things into words . . .

The first time I tried it I got so hot I was on fire but could not quite come. I kept feeling right on the edge and could not get over the edge. But I kept trying and made myself sore. The soreness went away in a day and I tried again, and had an orgasm.

To go thirty-one years and miss this is crazy. It is just crazy.

I was going to write you right away. After the orgasm I thought, “Well, I must write John and tell him about this” but put it off for no particular reason. Since then I have been doing it all the time. Well not all the time. By this I mean doing it every night before going to sleep and sometimes in the morning as well, and occasionally during the day. To tell you the truth I worry about doing it too much. Is it possible to do it excessively? I have read in certain books that excess masturbation is harmful.

Was with my salesman friend last night who I think I wrote about before. He is married but sees me when he is in town. Yes, I know I wrote about him. We went to a motel as always and had good sex. I thought I would have an orgasm but didn’t. At least I was not left high and dry as I knew I could go home to my loving toothbrush!

I thought of what you said about having him use his mouth on me. Thought of this a great deal but did not dare to suggest it. What would he think of me?

I’ll tell you one thing, it is embarrassing for me now to brush my teeth! I pick up the toothbrush and don’t know where to put it! Please forgive me if it is out of line for me to make jokes of this sort.

Sincerely,
Rita

JWW: I replied that there is no such thing as excessive masturbation, that you can do it any time you have the urge. I suggested she alternate her methods from time to time to see if she was now capable of reaching a climax without the stimulation of the toothbrush. (It has been remarked that the one danger with vibrators lies in the fact that it is so easy to climax with them that women can find themselves becoming dependent upon them. I refrained from putting it in these terms in my letter, however, figuring that Rita was already worrying about too many things.)

I encouraged her to ask her salesman friend to go down on her. What he would probably think of her, I added, was that she was a sexually liberated young woman and an even more desirable sexual partner than he had realized.

The following two letters came just a few days apart, so that I received the second before I had had time to reply to the first.

Dear John,

I just wanted to keep you posted on my career as “the sensuous woman.” Today I had a climax without using the toothbrush. It was not as intense as I have with the toothbrush but was perfectly satisfactory and here I am feeling damn proud of myself.

Well, let me say thank you for everything. I am a happier person than ever wrote to you before. At least I can have pleasure. I know I am always going to be living alone and never have a man except some woman’s man on a night out. Well now I can live with that for at least I have pleasure that I never had before. Even if I have no man ever again, let alone a climax with a man, I can be content with my station in life. This is a lonely world but I guess I can stand it.

Sincerely,
Rita

Dear John,

Well here I am again. You never knew what you were letting yourself in for when you said write you any time.

Last night I was with this salesman again and could not stop thinking about what you wrote me about asking him to eat me. Well I thought what have I got to lose? Because what can he do besides say no?

So I up and asked him, and he looked at me with surprise and said he didn’t do that sort of thing. I asked him did he ever try it and he said he didn’t so I asked why not? And he thought a minute and had no answer. I asked him again and he said all he knew was he wasn’t no cuntlapper, and I said if I could be a cocksucker he could be a cuntlapper, which I can’t believe I would actually say but I did, any more than I can’t believe I’m writing these words now but I guess why try to hide the truth?

Well to make a long story short he said he guessed he would try it; and later he said he guessed he always wanted to do it but something stopped him. Anyway he did it and at first I was numb at the thought of this and then I was loving it and afraid he would stop but he must have loved it himself because he did not stop and I had an orgasm.

Well I’ll tell you a tongue is better than a toothbrush any time.

I am going to see him again tonight so I guess he doesn’t mind doing this. Maybe because I gave him a reward of cocksucking like never before which he said was like no woman ever did in his whole life and which almost drove him crazy.

Like in the cigarette ads I have come a long way baby!

Please forgive my writing like this and the language I have used but I felt you would understand and would not have objections.

Sincerely,
Rita

JWW: I congratulated Rita and offered a few comments. Then I failed to hear from her for several months, until I received the following letter:

Dear John,

I have been meaning to write to you but just never got around to it . . .

You said it was a question of time before I would have climaxes through coitus. Well you were right, and it was not much time at all, as it happened just a week after what I wrote you about.

Here is my big news. The salesman is not married after all! How I found out is that we were together and he asked would I be interested in marrying him? Well I said that’s a good question but what about your wife? Well he hemmed and hawed and then said he had been divorced three years ago on account of her leaving him. (If he had known then about eating a girl I bet she would never of left, as he is really something, believe you me!)

So he said he never let on he was divorced because of not wanting to marry again, but loves me and wants me to marry him. I don’t know but guess I probably will. There is nothing better kicking on my door and I guess I would like for to be married. He says he doesn’t want children which I don’t think I do either but who knows?

It’s hard to believe I’m the same person that wrote you that first letter.

Sincerely,
Rita

The End

About the Authors

Lawrence Block has been writing best-selling mystery and suspense fiction for half a century. A multiple recipient of the Edgar and Shamus awards, he has been designated a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, and received the Diamond Dagger for Life Achievement from the UK’s Crime Writers Association. His most recent novels are A Drop Of The Hard Stuff, featuring Matthew Scudder, and Getting Off, starring a very naughty young woman. Several of his books have been filmed, although not terribly well. He's well known for his books for writers, including the classic Telling Lies For Fun & Profit, and The Liar's Bible. In addition to prose works, he has written episodic television: Tilt! and the Wong Kar-wai film, My Blueberry Nights. He is a modest and humble fellow, although you would never guess as much from this biographical note.

John Warren Wells emerged in the mid-1960s as a writer of sexological nonfiction, and produced twenty books in the ensuing decade. His works, in the main, consist of compilations of case histories selected to illuminate a particular theme, and topics range from female bisexuality (Women Who Swing Both Ways) and troilism (Three is Not a Crowd) to the evolving lifestyles of a decade of sexual liberation (The New Sexual Underground and Wide Open: The New Marriage). His groundbreaking work, Tricks of the Trade: A Hooker’s Handbook of Sexual Technique, was especially successful, and may have inspired Xaviera Hollander to write The Happy Hooker.

One particularly noteworthy book, Different Strokes, consists of his screenplay and production diary for the pornographic feature film of that name, which he seems to have written and directed, in addition to playing a key role. His column, “Letters to John Warren Wells,” was a popular feature in Swank Magazine. The dedications of several books would seem to indicate that Wells carried on an extensive on-again, off-again relationship with Jill Emerson, herself the author of Threesome, A Week as Andrea Benstock, and, more recently, Getting Off. All of JWW’s books have been out of print for thirty-five years; that they are now available to a new generation of readers may be attributed to the technological miracle of eBooks and the apparently limitless ego and avarice of their author.

Contact Lawrence Block:

Email: lawbloc@gmail.com

Blog: LB’s Blog

Facebook: LB's Facebook Fan Page

Website: www.lawrenceblock.com

Twitter: @LawrenceBlock

John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior Ebooks

3 Is Not A Crowd

Beyond Group Sex: The New Sexual Life Styles

Come Fly With Us

Different Strokes: Or, How I (Gulp) Wrote, Directed & Starred in an X-Rated Movie

Doing It!

Eros and Capricorn

The Male Hustler

Older Women and Younger Men: The Mrs. Robinson Syndrome

Sex and the Stewardess

The Sex Therapists

Sex Without Strings

The New Sexual Underground

The Taboo Breakers

Tricks of the Trade: A Hooker’s Handbook of Sexual Technique

Versatile Ladies: Women Who Swing Both Ways

Wide Open: The New Marriage

The Wife-Swap Report

3 Is Not A Crowd

John Warren Wells
Lawrence Block

Excerpt, Copyright © 2012, Lawrence Block

All Rights Reserved

Introduction

“Three is not a crowd.”

A few years ago, this variant of an old cliché began turning up with increasing frequency in personal advertisements in the swinger publications which first appeared in New York and Los Angeles. Ever since then, more and more couples seeking to enlarge their sexual relationships through contact with others have expressed their willingness to engage not only in two-couple swap sessions but in threesomes as well. Two is tedium, one infers, but three is not a crowd.

While this may be seen as a new direction of sorts in the swinger subculture, there is nothing wildly revolutionary in the idea of three in a bed. One is reminded of the Hollywood titan taken on a tour of a friend’s garden and shown a large brass sundial. When its function was explained to him, he shook his head in amazement. “What’ll they think of next?” he marveled.

And of course the ménage à trois is as much an invention of antiquity as is the sundial. The one is the result of man’s desire to know the time, the other of his even stronger desire to make that time pass more pleasantly. One recalls that both Sarah and her handmaiden Hagar dwelt deep in the bosom of Abraham, that Jacob married two sisters, that Lot tumbled both his daughters. (One may believe, in the last connection, that the girls were moved solely by filial piety and the urge to provide their father with male heirs. One may also believe that Lot didn’t know what was going on. One may further believe that the Earth is flat and the moon a wheel of Camembert.)

But however one may feel about the literal truth of the Bible, the simple endurance of these stories testifies to the age old occurrence of troilistic relationships and, even more, to the propensity of human beings to find such relationships of interest. That the contemporary sexual underground has embraced the ménage is hardly remarkable.

•  •  •

For quite some time now, I have been peripherally involved with America’s sexual underground. The rising tide of mate-swapping and other forms of ritualized extramarital sexual relations has lately proved to be neither a fad on the order of the hula hoop nor, as was often charged, a creation of the sensational press. On the contrary, it becomes increasingly evident that the tribe of swingers constantly wins new recruits and has emerged as a fact of life in contemporary America. Whether this trend will continue is moot. That it is quite real is indisputable.

At first glance, one may easily regard the threesome as a component of the swinging scene, of no special importance in and of itself. That a couple with a preference for group sex is willing to participate in an occasional threesome does not seem overwhelmingly significant. Indeed, one of the reasons many swingers will emphasize in their ads that “three is not a crowd” simply because a threesome is often more easily arranged than a four-or-moresome. The world of mail-order adultery is strangely competitive. Many ads draw surprisingly few suitable responses, while many responders find themselves writing dozens of letters and getting distressingly few letters in return from advertisers. Couples do find each other, certainly, and a pleasant evening with a couple will lead to other presumably pleasant evenings with that couple’s friends but the initial plunge into the pool can be difficult to arrange.

On the other hand, I have found that single swingers are in abundant supply. A couple expressing a willingness to swing not only with couples but with singles as well is virtually guaranteed a full mailbox and as full a bed as they desire. This is most notably the case when the couple wishes to swing with single males: the couple seeking an extra girl will not experience nearly so great a deluge of applicants.

When I first began encountering examples of troilism in swinging circles, I tended to attribute this partly to convenience and partly to that desire for variety for its own sake which is a hallmark of the swinger. And while these factors undeniably play a role in a large proportion of cases, they do not begin to tell the whole story.

In one way or another, I have been made acquainted with quite a number of cases in which the threesome is the preferred, even the exclusive form of sexual liaison. Neither convenience nor experimentation begins to explain these instances. Moreover, the persons involved can often not be called swingers in any real sense of the term. Their fixed sexual triangle constitutes the whole of their sexual experience, and no outside contacts are sought or permitted. They are, in essence, a sort of plural marriage.

I became sufficiently well acquainted with four of these triangular relationships to report on them at length in the pages to follow. While I prefer to let the facts—indeed, the participants—speak for themselves, some introductory observations might not be amiss.

First of all, the reader will note that all four of these triangles consist of one man and two women. One ought not to infer that this is the standard or even the most common form of the triangle. In swinging society per se, I would say that it is by far the most frequently sought—far more couples seek single girls through ads than single men—but that it is less frequently achieved—infinitely more single men respond to such ads. I am not statistically inclined, nor is my sort of research the kind that involves a large enough sample for statistical conclusions to be drawn. However, I would guess that the majority of more or less permanent and stable threesomes do involve a man and two women rather than a woman and two men. Generally speaking, a man may willingly share his wife with another man for a night or a weekend, but permanent polyandry seems to go against the grain of Western culture.

The reader will further note the presence of incest as an exceedingly strong component in these three-cornered sexual relationships. Two of the cases which follow involve genuinely incestuous situations while what I would consider symbolic incest plays a part in the others. One might argue that incest plays a subliminal role in all sexual relationships, that any lover is playing roles of parent and sibling and child at one time or another. But I do feel that incestuous overtones are far more strongly present in the threesome—in any threesome—and I think it is more than the workings of sheer chance that two of these cases do involve actual incest.

•  •  •

The stories which follow are told insofar as possible in the actual words of the participants. They are the product of a great many lengthy interview sessions, with the results of these interviews edited and rearranged but the content essentially undisturbed. I have tried to eliminate the backing and filling, the questions and answers which characterize most interviews, and to keep my own observations to a minimum while permitting the speakers to present a cohesive and straightforward narrative.

Beyond this, the only changes I have made have been the automatic changing of names and places and any similar material which might enable anyone to identify any of these persons. Any such attempt will be a waste of time.

•  •  •

Just how common is this sort of thing?

A good question, and one for which I have no good answer. In fantasy, certainly, the ménage à trois seems to be universal. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that every red-blooded American man spends a certain amount of time dreaming of having two wives or two mistresses or what you will. While the same man may in fact be incapable of satisfying one wife in the manner to which she would like to become accustomed, nevertheless the fantasy persists.

But in actuality how often does this go on?

More often, certainly, than one would at first suppose. The stable ménage à trois is as easily concealed a form of unorthodox sexual behavior as exists, with the possible exception of compulsive chastity. One must realize that the presence of an extra female “relative” in the household of a married couple occasions little comment in even the smallest and most provincial town. Whether she is indeed a relative, and just how she is related, and by whom, is rarely even a matter for speculation. The suspicion of homosexuality is almost automatic in these enlightened times when two men or two women live together, but equivalent suspicion is rarely visited upon a properly cloaked troilistic union.

I have learned two things well in the course of several years of absorbing (if occasionally hectic) research. The first, is that, in the realm of sexual behavior, there is absolutely nothing that the mind of man can envision which is not being enthusiastically practiced by someone somewhere. You may give your imagination free rein, you may concoct the most impossible sexual fantasy, and you may take it for granted that someone is at this very moment doing precisely what you’ve just invented, and has done it before and will do it again.

Secondly, the extremes of sexual behavior float, like icebergs, with their bulk well below the surface, forever unexposed. Thus not only does everything exist, but everything exists to a far greater degree than visible evidence would seem to indicate. Most men and women lead lives of quiet depravity.

We can interpret this as we wish. We can view it as evidence of the extreme decadence of our culture or of the immensely evil and perverse nature of humankind. Or, on the other hand, we can rejoice in the fact that, however desperate and disparate our urgings, we are not alone.—JWW

3 Is Not A Crowd Available on Amazon