Originally published in The Atlantic in 1975.
Are sexologists dumb? I’ll admit that’s an impolite question—and I’ll also admit that a little of my skepticism of the sexological tribe stems from irrelevant literary fastidiousness. Sex researchers and commentators sooner or later “bring in” a poet or two to decorate or amplify their arguments, and depressingly often, they misquote what they’ve appropriated or otherwise deface it. (One recent volume includes the following remark: . . [we] realize that, in a paraphrase of John Donne, the unsatisfied metaneeds of any group within a community weaken that community and reduce the chances of all its members of reaching their full potential.” Of what in hell could these words be a paraphrase?)
But my skepticism has other roots as well. I think it’s fundamentally unintelligent to seal off sex from the environment, to natter on about technique, satisfaction, “trends,” and the like, as though sex somehow existed Out There, separate as Mars, a thing in itself, an inviolable “problem area.” The false reductiveness in that position is an exact counterpart of talk about malnutrition in the ghetto as a “medical problem,” The more committed the address to problems conceived in those terms, the smaller the likelihood of understanding or progress.
Still, personal prejudice is one thing and cultural reality is another: if you ignore writing on sexual themes nowadays, you shut your eyes to what must rank among the most significant expressions and reflections of contemporary superstition and fantasy.
Just at the moment, three treatises bid for regard as potential major influences in this field—Robert and Anna Francoeur’s Ho t & Cool Sex: Cultures in Conflict (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $7.95); Dr. Alex Comfort’s More Joy (Crown, $12.95); and The Pleasure Bond (Little, Brown, $8.95) by William Masters and Virginia Johnson. And each book clearly seeks to shape popular attitudes, to move readers from one set of assumptions to another. The married co-authors of Hot & Cool Sex—Robert Francoeur is a former priest who now teaches embryology and sexuality at Fairleigh Dickinson; Anna Francoeur is a historian—are partisans of “open marriage” (they prefer to speak of the development of “satellite relationships” by marital partners). They are also promoters of a relaxed, demythologized sex that offers (in their view) a release both from Puritan hang-ups and from hip obsession with the perfect orgasm. Their main function, though, as they perceive it, is interpretive; they are bent on placing the “contemporary sexual revolution” in broader contexts than the early seventies cared to provide.
The starting point, predictably, is a famous piece (“The Future of Sex”), now several years old, by Marshall McLuhan, in which the sage claimed that the historical shift he discerned from hot (high definition) to cool (low definition) media of communication had its counterpart in a shift from hot to cool sexual consciousness. McLuhan rested his argument mainly on the advent of unisex styles, which diminish visible differences between male and female: after publishing the piece, he dropped the subject. The Francoeurs pick it up on the ground that the McLuhan conceptual model is relevant not merely to unisex, but to a wide range of phenomena. They discover evidence of a cooler sexual consciousness everywhere—in the advent of open marriages, communes, the women’s movements, declining birthrates, amended divorce laws, new participational political structures . . .
The authors of Hot & Cool Sex are the defacers of John Donne just mentioned; they speak in a highly taxing tongue. (“We will have to create, on the social institutional level, eupsychian communities that allow and promote truly non-possessive, synergistic love.”) As popularizers, brokers of other people’s ideas, they owe (and acknowledge) large debts to futurologists (McLuhan, Gordon Rattray Taylor), humanistic psychologists (chiefly Maslow), and reporters on alternative life-styles (chiefly the O’Neills, authors of Open Marriage). And a portion of the cultural significance of their book lies in its unexamined assumptions. Marriage plainstyle, the Francoeurs aver, is a world bare of growth and development: the victories and defeats of one’s children, the passing of elders, one’s own and one’s mate’s, breaches and confirmations of trust, clarifications of personal abilities and limits—these happenings that continually forge new identities for “marital partners.” new terms for dependence and independence, new foundations for sympathy, are, in this reckoning, nonevents. Closed marriage is presented as a vacuum: only the eruption of a novel partner, a satellite, a new relationship, incites reflection and the deepening of interior life.
What is equally troubling is that the book seems biased against depth itself, as though seriousness about the heart’s affections were a defect of sensibility. Relaxed, unpressured, “down to earth,” the authors command us implicitly to be unimpressed with sex. disinclined to imagine physical love as an entrance into profundity or intuitions of the real. (While the word mystery surfaces once or twice in this book by a former priest, it seldom achieves reverberancy.) Is the alternative to overheating a chill? . . . The authors’ confidence on the point is disheartening. But as symptom and signpost, as a well-advertised effort to elevate sexual detachment. in popular thinking, to the status of a Virtue, Hot & Cool Sex could become a cultural force.
Gourmet Sex II
Precisely the same prediction seems reasonable for Dr. Comfort’s More Joy, which also commits itself unreservedly to the cool-sex cause. Viewed culturally, this cause obviously reflects longing for a sophisticated “post-revolutionary” posture—a way of separating, say, the veteran swinger from the tyro. —Once upon a day, in the dark backward, when liberation was coming in, it was necessary to talk intensely about improved technique, and necessary to traffic in kite sexual news bulletins—exciting revelations—so that people would feel the strangeness and promise o f the “new modes of relatedness.” Now, though, we’ve been through it, we can relax, stop making heavy weather . . . The latter tone wasn’t noticeable in Dr. Comfort’s The Joy of Sex, but here it’s pervasive. Both books are illustrated by the same artists (“32 pages in full color” in More Joy, plus a number of line drawings of group sex parties and threesomes and foursomes, for which the world wasn’t ready in 1972). The author’s easygoing diction (“horny,” “scoring.” “muff-diving”) is unchanged, as is his assurance that “we manufacture our own nonsenses,” and his adeptness at Village Voice patter: “Most of the people who have written about sexuality never saw a couple making love—probably not even Sigmund Freud: it wasn’t his scene. It’s a heavy thought.”
But there’s a clear determination to move on from technique and the “physical aspects of sexuality” to the themes of personal development. “co-marital” and satellite relationships, and the new (or unfaithful) fidelity. And as indicated, it’s Easyrider cool that the mass audience is offered as a model. Condemning “hot sex attitudes,” Comfort argues that sharing sex with virtual strangers enables people “to transfer sex and its anxieties from the ‘hot’ category prescribed by an irritated culture to the ‘cool’ category based on nonanxiety, noncompulsion and recognition of personhood.” He argues that physical and social ease flow from what was once termed promiscuity: by starting “to live sexually.” a person enables himself to act “socially less like a tailor’s dummy.” The urgings that seriousness and intensity should be shed are explicit:
Our culture has probably greatly overvalued intensity. Some people can’t help it . . . but there’s no virtue and some harm in overcultivating it. and some virtue and no harm in tender playfulness. Tragic intensities tend to produce bad trips. . . .
Some will contend that this second volume, “featuring” Dr. Comfort’s advice on security, swinging, meditation, and dozens of other current themes, is less an attempt at consolidation and understanding of The Revolution than a fresh exploitation of the middle-class porn markets. Certainly it’s true that in some passages the doctor seems to be overworking his own relaxations:
Male babies, incidentally, get erections early on and nursemaids used to quieten them by bringing on the nearest thing a baby can contrive to orgasm. Some pediatricians now sav this overstimulates the child . . . we can’t give an opinion as to whether it’s wise or not, but since many primitives masturbate babies it’s most likely harmless, and the baby appears to like it.
And it’s also true that many odd juxtapositions of pictures and text in More Joy are downright hilarious. But at the risk of solemnity, it needs to be repeated that the point of real moment lies elsewhere, in the fact that, like its predecessor, this volume of instruction in how to think, feel, and do has won a mass audience. Its endorsement of cool-sex larking, its tutoring in disengagement, is being heard.
With the Resistance
The proper praise of The Pleasure Bond, by William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson (in association with Robert J. Levin), is that in a number of sustained passages on hard subjects—fidelity is among them—it runs the risk of solemnity, backs the good cause of seriousness, and wins. As should be said at once, this new volume by the co-directors of the Reproductive Biology Research Foundation in St. Louis travels close, in several chapters, to the borders of nonbookdom. On the publication, in 1966, of their definitive Human Sexual Response, Masters and Johnson half promised that they would address themselves, in time, to sexual realities that aren’t objectively physiological. The promise may have signaled alertness to the humanist outrage expressed when the first sex research papers began appearing. The protest was led in England by David Holbrook in the Cambridge Review, and here at home by George P. Elliott in the Hudson Review and by Leslie Farber in Commentary. It was triggered in part by the smugly abstract enthusiasm of Masters and Johnson for their wonderful flying machines:
The artificial coital equipment was created by radio physicists. The penises are plastic and were developed with the same optics as plate glass. Cold light illumination allows observation and recording without distortion. The equipment can be adjusted for physical variations in size, weight, and vaginal development. The rate and depth of penile thrust is initiated and controlled completely by the respondins individual. As tension elevates, rapidity and depth of thrust are increased voluntarily, paralleling subject demand. The equipment is powered electrically. —Human Sexual Response
But the question of how to fulfill the promise remained unanswered for some years, and. to repeat, the “solution” put forward in the work at hand isn’t free of gimmickry. In consultation with a magazine editor-collaborator, the scientists decided they could best deal with the texture of “frustrations and fears”— as of “natural healthy delight”—by meeting and talking with “couples who were either satisfied with their relationships or who felt that they were successfully coping with whatever dissatisfactions there were in their marriages.” After this bout with normality, Masters and Johnson could speak their best minds informally, as people, instead of as directors of electrified coitus. In a word, the stuff of The Pleasure Bond is tape recordings, and much of the chatter is vapid, banal, or worse:
Virginia Johnson: But there are so many easy, simple ways to communicate without words! A touch, a glance, a sound, can say a great deal.
Charles Gallagher: A sigh is as good as a paragraph.
Jean Gallagher: If your husband listens! (H er husband shakes his head and grins.)
..
Virginia Johnson: Did you ever think you might be able to alter this situation by introducing creativity?
Justin: There isn’t a room in the house where we haven’t had sex or a position that we haven’t tried. . . .
Yet in the sequel, surprisingly, sense dares to contend with banality, and the book gathers strength. There are glimpses of spiky “personality.” Rick Brooks, swinger, lays on a long, likeyknowlottajive rap when asked how he feels about having kids: “I’m not analytic. I’m just accepting the fact that I think it’ll be fun to watch something grow and develop”—whereupon Virginia Johnson cuts in with fine abruptness. “Get a plant,” she tells the man curtly, winning me absolutely for that instant.
In addition there are passages of moral analysis which, while often ungainly and unnuanced, are nevertheless uncommonly firm and unillusioned. Consider these remarks on sunny Naomi:
Naomi’s emphasis on the fact that she still “loves” the men with whom she had her affairs, even though she no longer “makes love” with them, is just one example of the kind of cliched requirements that such people use to maintain their meticulous sense of themselves as decent hum an beings—or. as she puts it, a person who does not want to be guilty of “fouling the nest.” Most often these individuals are genuinely talented people with a considerable capacity for creative work and they characteristically make use of whatever circumstances are at hand to enhance their total way of life, including sex. . . . [Everything] is based on the idea that the sexual experience can be dominated, if not dictated, by the intellect. . . . If, in order to have affairs of this civilized kind, men and women are willing to regulate their emotional responsiveness, they may succeed in doing so. paying a price that they themselves may not be aware of: a lost capacity for powerful emotions, emotions which will not listen to reason. . . .
At one point in The Pleasure Bond, Masters and Johnson are provoked to chide one half of the team that produced Hot & Cool Sex, Robert Francoeur, for proposing, while he was a priest, that extramarital sex “can serve as the vehicle of faithfulness to God.” They remark that:
To encourage such a belief is to encourage . . . megalomania. . . . It is one thing to repudiate the idea that every instance of extramarital sex is an anathem a to God; it is something else to advance the idea that in certain cases extramarital sex is a way o f being faithful to God. Such a suggestion, coming from authorities who are concerned with the ethics o f sex. is doubly dangerous. Not only does it lend itself to the most seductive of rationalizations but it undermines the value of sexual commitment by subordinating the exclusive physical bond between husband and wife to the apparent needs of a third person. W hat is the basis of such counsel? On what ground does it stand, other than conjecture?
Can we dismiss the possibility that Masters and Johnson speak simply as echoes of standard middle-class homemakers’ magazine morality? (The panel discussion “featuring” them appeared in Redbook.) No, but neither can we dismiss the possibility that only in “popular culture’’—as opposed to hip coffee-table sex books or cool-sex agitprop—can endorsements of decency survive.
The prime ground of suspicion, for me. isn’t that these sex researchers are accommodating themselves to commercially viable values; it is that nowhere do they seem to see that the publicly avowed assumptions and methods of their research in the sixties—the ceaseless, proudhearted crying up of “physiologic truth as opposed to cultural fiction”; the hard-nosed decision to employ prostitutes as lab helpers—were the single most important influence in that period in shaping the obsession with technique and the acceptance of duplicity and treachery, against which they now declare war. “An entire vocabulary shrinks,” these moralists assert. “Among educated people who consider themselves sophisticated, such words as loyalty and faithfulness, honor and trust, are avoided because somehow they seem suitable only for sermons. Yet all human association depends on these and other such values, and they cannot be ignored in relation to marriage.”
But they were, in fact, totally ignored in Human Sexual Response—indeed, they were despised. And. reverting again to the question of levels of intelligence in this field, it seems to me at least questionable whether a decision by Masters and Johnson to rehabilitate this lost language, unaccompanied by any acknowledgment of their own role in discrediting and soiling it. can stand as a significant act of mind.
It does stand, however, as welcome evidence that the latest dogmas in this “field” aren’t to go wholly unchallenged. What lies ahead, apparently, is a struggle between the parties of Intensity and Cool—trust and commitment versus variety and surprise—that could change the minds of millions. And perhaps the single sure thing about the prospect is that if. in choosing sides, people are guided by purely technical, sexological considerations (and vocabulary), nobody on earth will win.