FOREWORD (47 page)

He is not hard, although I am by now. “I guess you’ll have to suck it,” he says. She seems reluctant and she looks at me and at him. I know that she won’t go this far and back out though. Then she bends over and takes his cock into her mouth. Her eyes are closed and she slowly nibbles around the head of it. He begins to get hard pretty soon, and Vi puts more into it. I run my hand between her legs and she is wet and slimy. She opens herself and I play with her clit while she plays with his dick.

After a while, she lies down on the bed and spreads her legs in welcome. It is a compelling sight to see her thus, and both he and I get hard as iron. He mounts her and she throws back her leg so that I can see him enter. He puts just the head to her cunt and it looks too big to fit in, but quickly it slips in Nancy Friday

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by itself. I can see her pussy open itself up to take him in as he slowly slides the entire length down into her. I think that by the time he reaches the bottom, they have both forgotten about me watching. She sighs and clasps him firmly with her thighs as he begins to pump slowly and deeply in and out.

I become aware of her eyes on me, watching me watch them: I take her hand in mine, and it is as if the circuit is closed. Her eyes grow dreamy and her body begins to tremble. She is coming. He responds with more powerful and faster thrusts and her trembling comes all the way down her arm to the hand that I still hold, and then it is over.

He kisses her mouth for the first time as he pulls out of her cunt for the last time. His dick is withered and small and he takes his drink and goes into the other room to refill. I put my hand between Vi’s legs and find her pussy so hot that she almost burns me. She is wet all over and it runs down onto the sheet. By this time my dick has been so hard for so long that it is beginning to ache. She is so wet and so open now that I slip into her cunt almost without any effort at all. As I touch her bottom, she locks her legs around my waist. She has not opened her eyes.

“Loving my wife like I do, and wanting her to have the best of everything,” Thomas says (above), he wants to furnish her with a handsome lover but he wants to be included, too. Mac (above) makes an important distinction between fantasy and reality: The idea of his wife and two men excites his imagination, though in actuality be would “never want it to happen.” Jeffrey (above) says he is sure “most men would like their wives to experience intercourse with two men at once.” Only when we get to Reynolds (above) do implica-tions that have been resisted throughout get overt statement.

He calls himself bisexual.

If a man wants to define himself as homosexual, bisexual, straight – that is his business. I accept his name for himself.

What is of greater interest to me in these fantasies is how the Men In Love

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presence of the woman enables the man to express his homoerotic needs while being able to avoid facing them at the same time. The greatest number of fantasies I received were from men like Clayton (above) who are genuinely fond of women, who love their wives – but nevertheless still want some male linkage, too. “I take her hand in mine,” Clayton says, “and it is as if the circuit is closed.” The circuit between him, the girl, and the other man.

To the men who invented these fantasies, the first likely association to the word
sex
would be
women
. This is not to say, however, that sex with women encompasses the fullest erotic experience they can imagine. Their scenarios tell us they yearn for something more; they feel something missing

– some solidarity, even physical identification, with people of their own sex.

After all, a woman cannot give a man his sense of maleness. He can desire her, but not identify with her. At best, she can give him a negative identification:
I am the opposite of
her.
This can be very thrilling, but still leaves him deprived of an object of positive identification. In the fantasies in this chapter, other men are brought in to fill the void. They provide contact with an element the inventor, consciously or not, knows he needs to assert himself as fully male.

On some dim level, women – the people for whom he gave up his boyhood closeness with other men – are still taken to be strange, unfamiliar, unpredictable, censorious; heterosexuality, for all its satisfactions, carries a note of anxiety, danger, fatigue, and risk. Like a boy who hesitates to explore a haunted house alone, these men feel more excited, sexually more courageous –
more like men
– if when they are having sex with a woman, another man is there, too.

By joining in their sexual games, the woman grants absolution and permission. It isn’t so much that these men use women to get to other men as that they need the woman to help break through the guilt barrier that blocks them from their
feelings
about other men. The woman’s act in making it a trio provides a connection; a double charge of sexuality Nancy Friday

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flies through. The men can face what is going an between them or not – as they need. For this freedom, this release from anxiety, of course they love her all the more.

15

Groups

How many make a group? If three is a trio, is four a group, or does it take ten to make an orgy? Whether you want to call the fantasies in this chapter group sex orgies, swinging, or swapping, it is significant that of the three thousand from which this book was distilled, I collected only one or two describing scenes of more than four people. Judging from my research, it is the rare man who dreams of mass bacchanals.

What seems to be wanted in these group sessions is both variety and order. Wild, wonderful wicked, wet sex, yes – but also
control
.

Clubs like Plato’s Retreat, which have begun to appear in cities across America, are subtly structured. They may be playgrounds for swingers, for orgies, swaps and group scenes among consenting adults who met only four seconds earlier; but there is a firm rule at the door (other than having to pay a handsome entry fee) : Women can come in any number, but every man must be accompanied by a woman.

At first glance, this may seem unexceptionable. Unless you want to run a gay establishment, how can you have an orgy without women? But why does no one worry that there might be a preponderance of women over men? Why, in fact, is it felt
desirable
to try to make this happen?

It is my belief that – consciously or not – entrepreneurs of these places realize that women have psychological benefits to confer to the proceedings, benefits at least as important as their anatomical presence. Commercially speaking, if you are going to have swaps, daisy chains, or other varieties of group sex, male patrons must be offered the greatest possible lati-tude of choice. A less obvious reason is that since women are experienced by men as the censors of sex, women alone can legitimize it. Even men who love orgies don’t want to feel they are a gang of dirty fellows imposing their awful desires Nancy Friday

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on one or two stray, freaky women. The more women present, the more women who joyfully enter into these scenes, the greater the implied permission for the men. Hell, women aren’t the prissy, jealous prudes men have always expected them to be; look, they’re joining in themselves – and by the dozen!

We tend to measure the sexual revolution by changes in women’s behavior. If the rate of male change is not yet equally rapid, it is perhaps because they don’t trust that the new attitudes women boast of have become integrated on the deepest level. A woman may signal “I am sexually liberated” and still reserve to herself the right to retreat back into old-fashioned strategies of shock, tears, reproaches, and/or flight, leaving the man “out there,” naked, exposed ... perhaps with his arms around another man.

The delicate issue here is that if a man is turned on by a woman so sexually avid she will take him on in an orgy, he must accept the possibility – not as fearsome but as fun – that he will soon be sharing her with another man, or even rubbing up against the other man himself in the heat of the moment. Only when women are present (and the more the better), is the homosexual onus taken off such an event. If two men “accidentally” find themselves touching one another while both are having intercourse with the same woman, how can they be called “queer”? Only someone of an older, hung-up generation would use that label.

This may explain why I received so few group/ orgy fantasies: The subterranean psychology of these events may still be too threatening for men to put into words. Even those who did contribute to this chapter are careful to have as little male-to-male contact as possible in their scenarios. They are a transitional generation, contemporary in their ideas, but still their mothers’ and fathers’ sons underneath. Most of them discuss how inhibited their early training was. Several were virgins when they married. Can you really expect that attitudes as deeply implanted as those we feel about our bodies, which were imbued in us by the most important people in our Men In Love

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lives, are going to change in ten or fifteen years of liberal thinking? Out of this grows a conflict: freedom in the mind versus guilt in the gut. The fantasies in this chapter deal with the overt and covert satisfactions men find in sharing their women sexually, and the various strategies invented to do so without anxiety.

JUSTIN

Since it will not cost me anything to experience the “high” I get from recounting my fantasies, may I submit the following:

I am a Ph.D. and at forty years of age, I live a very happy and fulfilled life with my wife of eighteen years, Bess, and our four children. Bess and I were raised very much in an inhibited style, and although I had a small and lousy attempt at fucking at the age of twenty-one, we were both essentially virgins when we married. Bess was already a teacher and I was almost finished with my doctoral studies. Although her experience with masturbation, childhood look-and-touch games was very limited, I was a very inquisitive and horny cock-in-hand young boy who masturbated almost every day between the ages of ten and twenty-three.

As boys between nine and fourteen, we had reciprocal suck-off sessions at rare intervals, and though I enjoyed doing it, we never “came,” so the interest kind of waned. At fourteen, the homosexual taboo ended this, and I passed the next twelve years with no interest in males at all. My desire for females with whom I might have a sexual experience was always very high, but my inhibited background prevented me from admitting it. From marriage until the present, I grew rapidly more confident, more sophisticated, and I quickly nurtured and encouraged the sleeping cunt I was married to, and she turned out to be a “diamond in disguise. “ She has eagerly accompanied me into every kind of contact imaginable: mate swapping, manage a trois, etc. She has been Nancy Friday

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friendly and understanding to many women whom I have fucked and sucked, but this was only after I was able to assure her that sex is sex, and I would never leave her for any thousand women in the world. I have had about twenty-four women, but I always insist upon a clear understanding of the limitations of a sexual relationship, and they all seem quite willing to accept that.

Here is my fantasy: Bess and I decide to return to mate swapping (we did for two years, and kind of “retired” four years ago), but this time no separate bedrooms. We meet a group of decent, clean swingers and agree to have a full orgy in which everyone fucks and sucks everyone else at one time or another, all naked and sprawled out in our basement on the carpeting. I am fucking one blonde, sucking a negress, and as I peer out over her mons, I see my wife vibrating with joy as she sucks off two men alternately while a third is fucking her

“doggy” style. Then we all switch and it becomes a kaleido-scope of cants, cocks, tits, hairy chests, smooth faces, and on and on and on.

LARS

It is with my wife’s encouragement that I am writing this letter to you. I am a thirty-two-year-old police officer, happily married for ten years to a wonderful woman who has given us four beautiful children. Our sex life is great. Neither of us has had affairs since our marriage, although the subject of swapping and affairs comes up regularly. I guess it’s just the intrigue of wondering if someone different and strange would be exciting for a change of pace, but I doubt that any permanence would ever become attached to such an arrangement. That is why I would never worry or feel insecure if she were to go to bed with another man. After the initial excitement subsided, I am totally confident that she would return to me for the really good and thorough fucking which we have learned to give each other.

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I guess what I am about to tell you will blow the image that some people have of the superstraight and conservative cop. I think it’s about time that people learned that policemen are just as horny and down-to-earth as any other people. Living in constant fear of being shot tends to make some of us hard shelled and unsympathetic, but that’s only superficial. I think the average cop is one hell of a lot more sensuous and sexually oriented than most people would imagine. How many times have we looked down into the car as we issued the citation to the speeder and seen her miniskirt hiked up to her crotch and her low-cut blouse or halter falling away from her beautiful boobs and wished and prayed that she would reach out and fondle our genitals and we could forget this bullshit and rush to the bushes for an all-out earth-shaking fuck? How many hundreds of opportunities have been wasted when I am out alone on the highway at night talking to a beautiful woman and saying, “Ma’am, I’ll need your license and registration card please,” when what I really want to say is “Baby, I want to suck those beautiful tits and roll your soft little clit between my teeth.” But she’s put off by the badge and uniform and I’m locked into my role as enforcer of the public law and safety.

My parents were very religious people who were good to my sister and me. I never had a sex education directly from my parents, but they had an old sexual encyclopedia printed back in the 1930s which I would read whenever I had the opportunity. The very first experience I can remember was when I was about five years old and I discovered that the rotating shaft of an old electric mixer without the beaters caused a pleasant sensation when I placed it against my penis through my clothing. I sat on the floor and experimented with it for almost a year before my mother threw it away.