FOREWORD (32 page)

The urge to transvestism is not necessarily homosexual; as mentioned earlier, many transvestites have never had a homosexual experience in their lives. In Sandy’s case, wearing women’s clothes is less homosexual than humiliating. When a woman dresses in trousers, she is taking on the attributes of a class more powerful than her own. For a man to put on a dress is to surrender his upper-class status, which is why so few men do it.

“In America,” says Dr. Robertiello (to whom I’m indebted for many of the ideas in this chapter), “the strong, reserved man is set up as the ideal. Men are not allowed the splendid, unabashed exhibitionism of women like strippers and models.

What some men do instead is unconsciously identify with the beautiful woman’s direct and uninhibited demand for admiration.” What is important is not so much that she’s a woman as that she is getting the kind of worship and adoration the man has not received since he was a baby in his mother’s arms.

And so right along with his pride in having a beautiful wife comes the man’s anger at her for putting him in the shade, seen only in her reflected light.

MAURICE

I can summarize myself in one brief sentence! I am a perfect exhibitionist in search of the perfect voyeur!! In my forty-two years, I have found a small handful of women who have been sufficiently liberated to derive real sexual pleasure from watching me perform. Throughout my life, I have never been able to accept as fact what psychiatrists and psychologists have attempted to foist on me, i.e., “women are not Nancy Friday

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sexually stimulated by viewing a man’s body and genitals.” I am eminently qualified to
disqualify
that statement! Mainly because I have had the courage – yes, BALLS! – and the conviction to
test reality
in the public domain.

I am a professional fine arts painter of some twenty-three years’ standing. My philosophy is based on what makes my cock hard, and my nuts tingle. A person who cannot stand naked before me is not self-accepting. I despise with my whole being American standards of physical beauty. The 40-26-38 female ideal and the twelve-inch cock, wide as an ax handle, are repressive weapons.

One of my greatest sexual fantasies is masturbation while several women watch. If women envy men at all, it is not for the penis per se, but rather for the biological capacity to ejaculate as proof of orgasm. I’d like to masturbate for you so you can “see” that lovely loss of control (orgasm) as my gyzym shoots and gushes out the head of my cock. I like to start out with my penis soft and shriveled up so a woman can watch the phallic metamorphosis: big, bigger, biggest!

In my fantasy I find the perfect voyeuse – a “peeping Jane.” She is very authoritarian. She comes to my room where I am stretched out naked on my bed. She commands me to dress, but I decline. About an hour later, I hear her coming down the hallway with the medicine cart, so I just continue masturbating slowly with Johnson’s Baby Oil. As she draws abreast of my door I make several more slow thrusts then glance up. Her eyes are glued onto my swollen, glistening cock. Like a person mesmerized, she walks in and hands me my pills. I begin to talk to her while I pick up my bottle of baby oil and anoint myself. I fondle myself with naughty abandon, stretching my scrotum, rolling my testicle about and tickling all around the glans. As I get harder, I squeeze my cock as the skin on the head gets as smooth and shiny as a patent leather plum. Then I begin an earnest demonstration of my technique, slowly fucking my fist, turning my erect cock this way and that, so she can view it from many angles.

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As I am just about ready to come I take my hand away and she says, “You’re a very lovely, beautiful person!” My cock jerks as come shoots out and the expression on her face is my most precious treasure. I squeeze the last of my come out and lick it off my hand and she grins and stands there watching.

After that, her whole pattern changes. She uses any excuse to come to my room, finally bringing me some art materials so I can do a portrait of her. I can’t tell you how thrilling it is to perform uninhibitedly to an appreciative audience. Believe me, it blows my mind in my fantasy when she brings a girl friend who wants a “portrait.”

No, I’m not well endowed. Just under seven inches and rather narrow, but I feel my cock is beautiful.

DANIEL

I’m fifty-one, married twenty-seven years, four children, two of them grown and gone now, a third nearly so; master’s degree, professionally trained. I often think I must be one of the Dirty Old Men, but if so, I have been a D.O.M. for a long, long time.

I have had a long and fantastically active sex life, 85 percent fantasy During actual sex, while masturbating, and at any other odd and frequent period, day or night Considering the degree to which my mind runs to sex, and the wild dreams I have for sex, masturbating has probably saved my life, or, at least, kept me out of the police station, booked for rape, exposure, or peeping. I am not aggressive, and long before women’s lib I firmly believed in the woman as an equal partner.

My masturbation probably developed in a normal fashion.

“Sex” began with the girl next door, when we were curious enough about each other’s bodies to show ourselves to each other in the nearest vacant lot. A later stage brought an energetic competition with a pal up in our attic to see who could come to orgasm first – long before either of us could, bio-Nancy Friday

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logically. Then followed a period of daydreaming about girls I knew in school, and occasionally teachers. When I was in my early and middle teens, I worked out a game with coins. I would spread out ten or fifteen pennies on the bed in my room when no one was home, with each coin representing a different girl or teacher. Since I had never had a single thing to do with any of these girls or teachers sexually, this was entirely a figment of my imagination. Anyway, there they all were, lined up across the bedspread. Then I would begin to flip them, heads or tails, which would indicate yes or no to my question addressed to each one in turn. Would she remove a certain article of clothing, dress first, then slip, and so on, until she was, in my imagination, completely naked?

Naturally, the first one to be naked won. I had to keep straight the state of dress or undress of each one as I went back and forth over that line of pennies.

I had never seen a nude female figure up to that time, so my imagination was forced to extraordinary feats of visualization. During this game, I erected quite fast, and the entire game was played with me slowly and deliciously handling my prick. As I recall now, I frequently failed to reach the end of the game, to see who had “won” before I came. To this day, through a long and often uneasy marriage, I recall some of those people, and fantasize about them, creating and recreating scenes where they all desire me. Strange to recall this to print, because this is a part of the me I have lived with all these years without ever telling a soul, nor would I willingly and openly to this day. I offer it as a kind of clinical evidence of what goes on in the mind of one man.

Needless to say, none of these fantasies has ever worked out in reality. Just one moved briefly but fleetingly onto the stage of reality, but I boffed it – and many, many more like it

– and then it receded forever into the world of fantasy. For a time I found after-school work doing odd jobs for one of my teachers, an old maid. She never encouraged me in the slight-est, of course, but she was very much on my mind, sexually.

It added to the excitement that she was still a teacher in the Men In Love

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school I went to. One morning finding myself in her bedroom to wash windows, I saw a pair of her panties lying on the floor. Urged on by a rising erection initiated by simply being in her bedroom, I picked them up and felt of their smooth silkiness. I thought of what they had touched on her. On an utterly spontaneous impulse, I ripped off my pants, and, with my hands shaking so violently that I could scarcely use them properly, I pulled her panties on. One look in the mirror, and the combined visual and physical experience induced an immediate ejaculation. Fortunately, I managed somehow to pull her panties far enough down so that I ejaculated into my hands rather than into them. I was scared of what I had done, perhaps the force that had been released in me; ashamed and thoroughly confused about my whole sexuality. The fantasy that I was trying to bring to a reality ended one hot day when I was stripped to the waist sawing wood down in her cellar.

My fly had been left carelessly (so cool a youth was I, even then!) open to attract her attention. She saw clearly, but I became so excited having her there watching me that when I put my foot down on the floor from the sawhorse I was leaning against, out popped my shamelessly stiff prick. She hurried up the cellar stairs, with never a word, apparently too embarrassed to say or do anything. That was the closest I ever came to her, although I did continue to work for her for some time to come.

As I think of them, most of my fantasies have been about older women. The fact that I was brought up in a fatherless home by my grandmother and my working mother has undoubtedly provided the necessary ground for these fantasies to grow in. But in what inverse way I am not sure.

Much later, while on a furlough cavort in the army, I had a girl tell me that I was “not a man, but a horse!” That’s all I needed to know to set my ego in motion. It ruined me for years. I had the crazy idea that all I had to do was show it to a woman and she would break her neck getting to me. Of course, it was not so. But I tried. If there is such a thing as discreet indecent exposure, then I did it. Not in public, ever, Nancy Friday

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not ever in such a manner that would be construed overt or frightening. Always appearing quite accidental – in hotels, boarding houses, tourist homes ... where the possibility was quite reasonable that it was, indeed, accidental. I’m sure I didn’t carry it off as well as I thought. But on the few occasions when I received “interested” vibrations, I failed to follow up, through some ineptness on my part, and these experiences, in turn, became the subject of further fantasies.

When the sex instruction books began to hit the book stores, I read avidly, seeking confirmation that I was not perverted or abnormal or obsessed with sex. I don’t remember when I learned that women masturbate, but whenever it was, I turned on
fast
! I have been looking ever since for the woman who will invite me to watch her masturbate. Nearly all my present-day fantasies include that aspect, and that is one dream that I would not hesitate to carry out! My wife and I recently had a beautiful opening out of our feelings and for a while, we were on top of the sexual world. During that period, I confessed my masturbation practices to her, and in doing so, felt that tremendous surge of relief from guilt that must provide the basis for all confession, spiritual or otherwise. In addition, during that dreamy period, I persuaded her to masturbate, after she told me she had done it a few times, alone. She managed to do it twice, but soon decided that she doesn’t like the feel of her own finger.

There I am, my dream still hot and hopeful, but with no prospects of realization on the stage closest to me – my own bed! I suppose I am luckier than most people who harbor frustrating fantasies all their lives. I, at least, have had several of mine come true, and for that, like the old woman in Synge’s
Riders to the Sea
, “I must be satisfied.” The pleasures of seeing a naked woman do not interest Maurice (above). Instead he wants her to look at him. “I am a perfect exhibitionist,” he says, “in search of a perfect voyeur.” It is his life’s ambition to prove those psychiatrists Men In Love

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wrong who say that women are not sexually stimulated by seeing a man’s naked genitals.

Maurice gives us a chance to clear up a common misunderstanding. In our society, female exhibitionism is a form of seduction, but male exhibitionism is a hostile act. The man who flashes his penis at a woman who has not asked to see it is not trying to win her; his goal is to scare her to death. He is trying to overcome his feeling of powerlessness vis a vis the women whom he feels have rejected or restrained him. He is angrily reacting to civilization and its discontents. The prime fact that works against men like Maurice is that in our civilization, using the body to sexually attract is the role assigned women.

Looking good is a passive form of magnetism
, and thus comes within our cultural definitions of femininity. The girl in the tight red dress need not say anything or make unmaidenly advances. She can even pretend to be aloof and disdain-ful. Men will flock around anyway. But women have not been trained to come forward merely because a man is handsome, let alone because his trousers are so tight you can see the veins in his penis.

Early in life, poor Daniel (above) felt that his enormous penis was the sign in which he would conquer the world. But the result was that he was “ruined” for years. Exhibitionism, revealing the aspect of himself he was proudest of, brought only rejection. This is not to say I am in favor of men being allowed to exhibit their penises. What I am trying to explain is the anger and guilt many men feel when they are caught up in social contradictions.

The man who preens, primps, or goes too much out of his way to attract attention to his physical self is putting himself in jeopardy; he could be considered effeminate. It was not always thus; the Greeks, for instance, used the male figure at least as often as the female as a standard of beauty in their sculpture.

A man’s power and wealth get him attention, but your bank account is not you. It is a trite truth that nobody wants Nancy Friday

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to be loved for his money alone. Long before wealth, long before you grew up and became president of this or owner of that, all of us –
both sexes
– had the desire to be praised, to be loved and applauded for ourselves, for what we physically are. It may be nice to be loved for your sterling character, for being a good father/husband, for your achievements, kind-ness, intelligence; but there is a lifelong hunger to be loved for the self – incarnate in the body – alone.