Authors: Philip Wylie
It is at best a trifling matter.
The positive first item on the Forbisher-Laroche list (if you're interested) and the first which Dave and I set down on our own impromptu schedule, was "fun." The idea that sexual congress, erotic play, coition--call it what you will--is
fun
has very nearly vanished from Western society. To all persons who approach prostitution with the standing-tub-water philosophy, even the most faithful and the most sanctified relations between man and wife will hardly be even appetizing--since, by their acknowledged images, such people will find themselves condemned to a single tub of water in which they will be obliged to bathe all their lives. This, of course, is the inevitable penalty paid by every denigrator of sex activities: his own, under his best auspices, will still forever seem vile. Also this is the outlook of churches. It explains why the churchly so rarely have any fun and why, if they do, they make sure someone pays for it later--preferably a heretic, and, if possible, in blood.
But (to go to the opposite pole for reference--a course which is implicit in all considerations of the well-educated man) even amongst the heretics--amongst sophisticated, intellectual, emancipated citizens--the concept of fun in relation to sexual activity is absent, or nearly so. These people--husbands, wives, bachelors, spinsters, teenagers and precocious children--readers of popular slick magazines and the newsprint digests, subscribers to book clubs, members of frank discussion groups--rely for their sex facts upon certain nationally advertised texts which are dispatched through the mails in plain wrappers. All such volumes are offered as authoritative manuals of the art of love-no holds barred; rather the contrary.
I have read perhaps a dozen of these treatises with close attention and I am prepared to agree that their claims are not exaggerated. They do present, in considerable detail and with never a minced word, what might be termed the classic figures of lovemaking. And yet their readers--persons who are presumed to be doing skull-practice for an imminent marital event--will not find in any of these works a suggestion that the subject in hand involves what I have called fun.
The verbal diagrams suggest, instead, that an extremely intricate and arduous business is being considered--one to be approached in precisely the same fashion as an inquiry into the manly art of self-defense made by a nervous weakling who is about to be exposed, more or less against his will, to an environment swarming with tough, aggressive stevedores and millhands.
In all these treatises, emphasis is put upon the likelihood of early failure--the mere hope of subsequent success--and the stratagems which, if meticulously pursued, may ultimately bring about success. The directions read like those for boxing, savate, or judo.
An encounter of the most dire solemnity is envisaged. Painful knockdowns and other traumatizing incidents are constantly described. Yet it is pointed out repeatedly that a genuine
knockout
will result inevitably in Unhappiness, Infidelity, Divorce, Frigidity, Impotence, Neurosis, Neurasthenia, Psychosis, Premature Senility, Suicide, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Thus the "sophisticated" individual comes to the practice of the art of love without room in his mind for the thought that it might be fun, pleasure, joy, glee, and a source of high laughter. He (or she) is, instead, nerved up for a clash, the outcome of which is most uncertain and potentially of extreme hazard, and the technique for which involves a repertoire like that of a concert organist, along with the timing, muscular coordination, and steady nerve of a trapeze performer.
It is scarcely necessary to remind the reader at this point that the manuals in question here are the works of accredited physicians, which is to say, of scientists. Their observations are astute, accurate and complete, from the objective standpoint--and, of course, highly
reasonable.
All they have omitted is the subjective, or instinctual, aspect of the matter--and here is as good an example of that phenomenal but widespread oversight as any.
Some of them even refer to the subject as the "science"--not the art--of love.
Technique is a still commoner term. One can reflect sympathetically upon the plight of their mates. And, of course, one can also reflect that, at least in a few instances, these amatory scientists should be given the benefit of a solid doubt: were they to describe love-making as fun, and address themselves to the means of eliciting pleasure therefrom, rather than to the training-table and Olympiad aspects of the procedure, they would be denied the use of the mails even in plain wrappers and even if they had fifty university degrees. The United States Post Office is willing (in a gingerly way) to disseminate anatomical discourse on sex for the married or near-married; but it draws an absolute line at any suggestion that sexual relations are, or could be, consonant with a good time.
Thus we see that the churches, on the one hand, and the cognoscenti, on the other, rule fun out of sex and are supported in the matter by the government.
The first good reason for associating with a prostitute is. however, unmistakably--
pleasure.
The pleasure is reciprocal--self-evident for the gentleman, and frequently for the lady also. In cases where the gentleman is something less than that, the lady still has the pleasure of pecuniary profit. This is not a matter to be taken lightly in an era in which the United States is regarded as the last stronghold of capitalism--and the "money-incentive"
is recognized as one of our chief Ideals.
There are, it is true, certain nigglers who claim that, since the prostitute lends her person to an act from which she may receive no particular direct pleasure (owing to surfeit or to disinterest) the profession itself is immoral--a violation of that American Ideal which regards sexual relations as permissible only for the Consummation of Romantic Love. Let all such note, then, that fully half the wives in the land report that they seldom or never enjoy consummation, and rarely even intense pleasure, in their relations with their husbands. Must we say all these wives are therefore prostituting themselves?
A similar question may be asked of those who are finicky about the straight cash aspect of professional cohabitation. Our magazine fiction, radio, motion pictures, and other media are engaged in a uniform campaign to indoctrinate Miss America with the theory that her best possible operation in life is to marry a man with millions, or with wealth in his background, with a good income, or--minimally--good prospects. Hardly one heroine of these legends in a thousand marries an oaf manifestly doomed to poverty.
Money is an American Ideal--and the plain inference to be drawn from our legends is that sexual desirability occurs for the acquisition of money.
The nation is elaborately stratified according to the amount of money obtained by each young woman upon marriage, or by other means. Of the girl who gets a rich husband we say (even though he has the manners of a gopher and the countenance of a quince), "Oh, well, she can own a convertible and sleep on percale." Advertising, of course, is wholly directed to this association of ideas: one never sees a homely girl displaying a fur coat or a roadster or even pop. With such massive duress visited upon her from every direction--with women marrying and divorcing wealthy men one after the other and remaining the while on elective lists of America's Leading Ladies--a girl cannot conceivably be criticized, on grounds logical or grounds emotional--for slightly short-cutting the standard technique and employing her fresh, gay, sex appeal to obtain the money directly, by a somewhat greater volume of relations at a lower net charge per unit.
This is, after all, no more than the translation of another American Ideal--mass production--to a different field.
One associates with these young ladies, then, for one's money's worth of fun, as I have said. But, lest the reader doubt Forbisher-Laroche (as I do in a sense, myself) I set below, at random, a few of the putative 1,505 other reasons:
Company.
A man often finds himself alone--as I did that evening.
Need.
It has been pointed out that the so-called sexual drive of young men, at least, is on the order of five times as great as that of young ladies of equal age. This is a circumstance which, for some generations, our imbecile sires have endeavored to deny or conceal. Obviously, their absurd activities in that direction lie at the very heart of the insane condition of the modern mind. Since men have five times the passion of women in their youth, our sex mores must be revised, and soon, five hundred per centum, or we shall all go wacky. It may have happened to us already, in fact.
It has been pointed out that, with the increase of age, this enormous sex discrepancy tends to diminish. The woman of thirty-five will have undergone an augmentation of desire--her mate a decrease. In an unpublished work, I tentatively suggested that-this being the biological fact--a new sex convention might be devised whereby relations between all women of more than, say, thirty-five--whether married or single--and all unmarried males of less than, say, twenty-one, would be publicly regarded as rising out of "innocent necessity" and not counted as in any way unchaste, or unfaithful, or otherwise compromising. The notion seemed inspirational to me. It would at once provide a remedy for a truly desperate situation now existing unrecognized among both sexes at certain diverse ages--and it would give useful and socially beneficial occupation to a slew of wives and single women in America who at present have nothing to do at all. It would provide boys and young men with experienced tutors--women who knew what was in the books but were able to enjoy themselves, to boot--and it might, indeed, revive the now-drooping flower of love in the whole land. My friends, however, after reading my feuilleton, advised me not to publish it, on the fantastic grounds that it would be regarded as frivolous!
But to go on with the random reasons:
Variety.
It is a point upon which I feel no comment whatever should be needed.
Obedience.
This term has its limitations for the intended meaning. The word
"command" might serve, but it also has connotations not here intended.
In a marriage ceremony, it is true, the wife agrees, as a rule, to "obey" her husband--and he, her. However, in perhaps half of American marriages, obedience drops out of the relationship the moment the preacher closes his prayer book. In perhaps a quarter, the husband becomes the serf of the wife--who has customs galore and the weight of American advertising to back her in her commands of what he must do, earn, obtain, provide, and so on.
Yet the sexual deed itself is one which, if there be command or obedience, requires that the command come from the male, the obedience from the female. (Male aggression, female passivity, the scientists insanely term it.) This circumstance, however loathsome to feminists, is--again--a simple fact of nature: a man is physiologically incapable of being commanded to make love. He cannot simulate. In acts so fundamental to his heart, mind, spirit, and soul as those related to sex, it is therefore not only psychologically evident, but physically plain, that a certain degree of obedience, or receptivity to command, or, if you prefer, co-operation, is necessary on the part of the woman. Without it, lovemaking, when possible at all, is at best a mere reflex.
Such is the condition of millions of women today, however--and not surprising, either, in view of the times and the customs--that they are inclined to refuse male address, and to whine, scold, heckle, disobey, begrudge, demean, belittle, routinize, particularize, censor, evade, scorn, shame, humiliate, et cetera, before or during or after sexual relations. This leaves the male relentlessly insatiate. Geared by Nature for cohabitation with a willing--nay, an enthusiastic--partner, he finds himself bedded with a cold and prissy marmot of a woman. It drenches his self-esteem, decays his manliness, and either reduces him to the shy, stammering estate of millions of our Milquetoasts or else sets him in a permanent rage against life so that he is ready to turn communist, or Ku-Kluxer, to take to drink, or to beat his children.
Prostitutes provide the only dependable respite from this dilemma, which man currently even somewhat allows himself. Inasmuch as they are sexually in the employ of the man, they will, if worthy of their hire, not critically submit to, but genially participate in his caprices. By this method, millions of otherwise lost men keep alive somewhere within themselves at least a flicker of honest, male self-respect. Now and then--if only a night a year--and only for a price--they are obeyed by a woman.
Whim.
This is related to the above. As I pointed out to Yvonne, the norm for the human approach to sex relations is, the mammalian. Yet all forms save one specific approach are today prohibited. State dungeons await even husbands reported by their children as abed off the parallel and with angular deviations of more than a very few degrees. This is called "bestiality"--a term devised by no animal lover.
Being animals, we hunger to be harmlessly animals. Being forbidden by parents, schools, church and state, millions are confined in the domestic arts of love to that one simple stratagem which propels locomotives. But amongst ladies of easier, nobler virtue, the parched mammal may discover some surcease.
Beauty.
This, too, is self-explanatory.
Relaxation.
Ditto.
Peace.
Also.
Health.
Also.
Kindliness.
Many lack it at home.
Warmth.
Another occasionally marked domestic deficit.
Mirth.
See above.
Femininity.
Look over the wives and look over the trollops.
Youth.
Who does not age?
Favor.
Some say all women are masochistic and many wives surely are; for these, a slight indiscretion may be a pleasanter thing to suffer than the painless boredom of impeccable fidelity. Whoring as a favor to the frau may be a rare form--but it must not be overlooked.
Information.
Whole books could be written on this topic alone.