FOREWORD (24 page)

I am a bastard-literally-because my mother and father were only fifteen and sixteen when I was born, and they were not married. My mother died in childbirth or shortly thereafter, and I think my father held it against me. At least I remember my childhood as being mostly a time when he slapped me around or tormented me and picked on me. We lived in the country for a while; but when I was about nine years old, we moved to St. Louis; and that’s where I got really screwed up about sex. My father was wild when it came to women; there were whores in our apartment all the time, different ones, in and out. I could hear them in his bed; and I had an idea of what they were doing; but since it was dark, I never exactly saw them fucking. But one day, one of his girls started on me

– I guess as a game, really. I came into the apartment and saw her sitting on the couch; and she told me my father was in the shower. I was about ten then and not really grown, but starting to look less like a kid and more like a young man. She started kinda flirting with me and reached out for my hand.

She rubbed it a minute and then reached out for my pants and started to rub. I got hot pretty fast, which just amused her. I remember she unzipped my pants and took out my penis and started to rub it. Then she leaned over and put her tongue all over my cock, and about the time I went crazy, my father came back into the room. The girl told him I had made advances toward her and had asked her to suck me, and he backed me into a corner and threatened to cut off my cock if I so much as even looked at his girls again. WAS THAT

CLEAR?? He scared the shit out of me, and for weeks afterwards I would look over my shoulder while I was peeing Men In Love

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because I was afraid he might cut off my penis. This same girl sucked me another time, again just a game for herself probably, but it stirred up feelings in me that I didn’t know what to do with. She’d wait until my father was somewhere else and then she would start in on me. This time she had my pants open again and was sucking me in the closet, when he came up the hallway. She just went out and shut the door on me and I had to stay there until she and my father left. She got me all hot and excited and then quit before I ever got to where I was going. I can see now that she was using me like a toy to amuse herself, but at the time I didn’t understand what she was doing to me or why. It left me very frustrated, and it made me a little afraid of women. I never actually went all the way with a girl until I married my wife. At school I petted with girls, and I let a few suck me, but it almost always made me a little anxious and insecure. If I had a fantasy then, I guess it was that I could capture some girl’s affections and really make it all the way with her, that she wouldn’t laugh at me or use me just for her own pleasure.

The odd thing is that I find I’m often a toy now, in my adult life. I do know women who treat me like a person, and for that I’m thankful, but an entertainer also has lots of women who just want to screw him and all I am to them is one big penis, I guess. I’ve had women write me notes asking if I’ll take them to bed, and one woman said it right to my face. “Fuck me!” If that’s liberation, I don’t want it. Maybe that’s a reaction to what happened to me as a kid, I don’t know, but it is probably true that I would like to place my woman at least a little bit on a pedestal. My wife was very sexy, but also very much a lady, and I was faithful to her during our marriage because I felt a very deep love for her.

I’ve slept with other women since her death, but not just for a fuck if I can help it.

But I have realized that sometimes when a woman is sucking my penis, if I close my eyes I can see all the way back to my father’s girl friend, and it churns up something inside of me when I remember what it felt like to have her tongue over Nancy Friday

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me when nobody else had ever touched me there before. The thing about it is that a kid being sucked by an older woman is very vulnerable, both physically and emotionally. The American ideal of a man is somebody strong and tough, completely self-assured, and all that bull. So naturally men try to live up to this and nobody wants to admit they are weak or insecure or vulnerable. But when you don’t know too much to start with, and you have an experienced woman sucking the part of your body that defines you most definitely as a man, she is really in control of your maleness. If she bites you, you’ll have physical pain, if she makes fun of your penis or teases you and torments you the way I was tormented, you have an emotional pain that can hamper sexual relations throughout your life. I know that women are very sensitive and I try to protect their feelings, but a lot of women don’t realize that I’m also very sensitive about my manhood. The fact that I, and most men, don’t feel all that free to admit it doesn’t mean the insecurity isn’t there. Locker room bull is one thing, but to really be honest about your deep fears and fantasies, that’s another thing altogether.

Freud was one of those rare scientific minds able to think about the unthinkable. He based his oedipal theory on findings that the desire for incestuous relations with the parent was biological, inborn, and unavoidable, but that guilt would inevitably follow. However, the men in this chapter often show no more guilt than a Thoroughbred mare being mated with her son to “improve the breed” (Tim) – or father and daughter rabbits doing what comes naturally in the woods.

The salient point about men like Butch and Jake (above) is that they are not crying out against the seduction of the innocent; no accusations are being made that sex with a mother, older sister, or aunt had broken a life.
These men are rapturous.
Wouldn’t any wife be envious of the language they use to describe their love for their mothers, hers for them? In earlier chapters we spoke of one of the forms men’s basic Men In Love

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conflict takes: the split of love vs. lust, and the consequent division of women into “good” and “bad” figures. For these men, there is no such division. One woman is both love and lust.

“When I was in psychoanalytic school in the fifties,” psychoanalyst Dr. Richard Robertiello said to me, “the big idea was still that most neuroses stemmed from unresolved oedipal feelings. And having sex with your mother – what could be more guilt producing than that? But psychoanalytic theory has now advanced to placing the seminal disturbances much earlier in life. My own clinical experience has also worked to change my mind.”

Dr. Robertiello went on: “Of course, if sex within the family is sneaky, guilty, manipulative, charged with fear, shame, and so on, it can be shattering. Since these adjectives precisely describe character traits in most people, incestuous behavior is still likely to lead to devastating results. What I am saying is that it need not be that way. This is especially true in the single-parent family where ideas of jealousy, or being found out, need not invariably arise. Patients who have been introduced to sex by a young widowed mother or a divorced father – they may have problems, character neurosis, whatever. But I know people, who had strong incestuous relations with a parent when little. Today, they do not seem to me to have any greater sexual problems than anyone else. I am a classically trained, Freudian analyst; for me to say this is an enormous and radical change in thinking.” Here is the most important clue:
It is not the physical fact of sex that
matters so much as the psychological message the parent
imparts along with the erotic experience.

I hesitate in writing this. Fashionably with-it parents may read what I have said and decide they are single-minded about how beautiful sex is, and therefore can give their child a loving introduction to the erotic life. This is dangerous ground.

For all her astounding candor and sexual acceptance, even Tim’s mother taught him their relations must be kept secret.

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In his letter he says he wanted to make love to his mother “to prove I could do it and survive.” Survive what? Punishment at the hands of his absent father? Society’s rage? We don’t know, but the fervor of Tim’s defense of incest hints he may not have come through the experience as guiltlessly as he believes.

While I believe that Freud was right and that all of us have repressed oedipal wishes, I think it is mindless to misinterpret him and decide that all repressions are “bad.” Would you like to be liberated from the iron, unconscious barrier that keeps you from wetting your bed at night? My own feeling, as a matter of fact, is that the people who wrote me so happily about real incest are probably the rare exceptions. I am convinced that the incest taboo has strong survival value, not only for the individual but for the race.

A child’s first years are better spent, for instance, on socialization and education than in coping with the intensities of lived out sexual relationships with people to whom he is so vulnerable. Chet (above) still carries the scars of a semi oedipal relationship in which one of his father’s girl friends took sexual advantage of him.

But these are social values; they are not biological imperatives. What can be objectively stated is that we are born with a desire to have sex but with no bias about having it this or that way. We are paper. In our first years our parents hold the pen. If what they write is done with love and without ulterior motive or guilt, we will probably not be hurt by anything they do. My only warning is to echo that of Dr. Robertiello: This kind of parent is rare. Many a wife will try to use sex to hold a husband, thus tearing him with guilt. It is much worse if a mother tries to do the same with a son.

JEFFERSON

I am fifty years old, married, with two children.

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My wife and I for some time were made more passionate during our fucking sessions by the recounting of the following by me

When I was about eleven, I sucked my father’s penis. He was a good man, but drank heavily. Many times when he was sleeping heavily, after much drinking, I saw his stiff brown prick. Dad had the biggest pair of balls I have ever seen. A few times I would stand by his bed and pull the covers down so I could gaze at his beautiful organ. I would masturbate right there.

The summers in New York were very hot. He would sleep on the couch in the front room, and I, because of the shattering heat, curled up on the floor on a blanket near the couch.

On one very hot night, he was asleep on the couch after drinking. I woke up and saw the sheet he was covered with standing up like a tent around his stiff organ. I crept closer and pulled the sheet down and looked closer at his wonderful prick. I lightly took his balls out of his shorts and stroked them. A few times I had seen my mother suck his organ, and I thought it would be wonderful to try the same. Now I was on my knees on the floor, my head resting on his thigh. Getting up my nerve, I held his thick penis and kissed the crown.

My mouth sucked half of his cock into it. He moaned, but continued to snore. His penis now was almost all in my hot young mouth, and I sucked hard, and moved my head up and down slowly. It was heaven. Many minutes passed and I continued to suck my Dad’s cock. He moved a little and moaned again.

I felt he was near his climax and sucked harder, and moved my head up and down faster. Then his cock began to pulsate and he started to spurt his semen into my mouth. I sucked on and on, taking all of his juice into my mouth and swallowing. Father came and came, and I held his organ in my mouth until no more semen came. I covered him again and jerked off into my undershirt. (When I would tell my wife this, she came and so did I.)

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Next day, Dad gave me no sign that he knew what had happened. Some nights later, I did the same. He woke up as he was about to shoot, and held my head tight as he flooded my throat. He called me a “cocksucker” as he finished in my mouth. Father then pulled me on the couch, and sucked my mouth taking some of his own semen in his mouth. He took my hand and put it on his prick. Making me get on my knees, he sucked my anus, it was wonderful. His penis was stiff again, and he made me get in the “sixty-nine” position and he sucked my penis into his mouth and his prick sank into my throat. We came together strongly.

My wife and I talk about these past events. In fantasy we think: my father on his back, his cock deep in my wife’s vagina. She is pumping hungrily on it, I am sucking and licking her asshole, and his balls. Or: My wife sucking Dad’s penis and he sucking her cunt while I am fucking my wife in her asshole. (She loves this fantasy and goes wild.) I feel some comment is necessary on Jefferson’s communication (above), which seems to be rooted in real experience he had as a child with his father. Since it is the only such expression I received, I showed it to several therapists for comment. The three I happened to interview said that in their clinical practice, it was new to them too.

If I had mentioned this fantasy/ experience to three other psychiatrists, would I have gotten the same answer? Perhaps not. Jefferson’s ideas may be rare, but I find it impossible to believe that any sexual notion can be unique to one person.

The most consistent thing years of studying sexuality has taught me is that there are untold numbers of troubled people walking the earth, feeling they are the only ones so “strange” and “unnatural” to have done or thought whatever it is that is on their minds. “The more years I spend in practicing analysis,” a doctor once told me, “the more I realize we are more alike than different.”

8

Fetishism

Much as my present thinking may owe to Freud, something in me still resists his iron determinism. The child is father to the man, yes – but where do the mysteries of temperament, personality, and individual genius enter? How about the randomness of genetic inheritance? During the second draft of this book, I asked my typist what she thought of the material. She said she was “shocked to see how much of what we do and feel can be traced back to infancy.” She had my sympathy. Isn’t the full human being something more than a toy train running on tracks laid down in childhood? I had based my life on a boast that I’d “made myself up.” In retrospect, it seems my refusal to give Freud’s teachings any credence was evidence of determination to ignore, forget, repress – choose the word you like – my first years and their inevitable humiliations and traumas. The books I’ve written were a painful education. But I chose to write them; on subjects whose genesis lies in our earliest years. Something in me wanted to understand puzzling facets of my own behavior, patterns of my life that no amount of intellectual rationalization about my adult years could explain.