OPUS 21

by Philip Wylie

  I said, "All right."

  "You sound terribly nonchalant."

  "It's the telephone," I said. "You can't see over it."

  She chuckled and drew in her breath just enough so I heard it and said, "Twenty minutes."

  I fixed up the manuscript and set the bridge table aside. Then I went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. "Why?" I said to myself.

  This inquiry may seem to have a connotation of guilt. Such is not the case. It represented introspection, which I continued as I removed, in the now-tepid water that emerged from the tap marked "cold," all track and trickle of the night's labors.

  My friend Dave Berne--whom I'd come upon with Marcia in dolce far niente--

  once quoted Forbisher-Laroche to the effect that there are fifteen hundred and six discrete reasons for associating with prostitutes and only nine even potentially commensurate objections. Dave and I, with an hour or so to spare at the time, were able to list three hundred and twenty of the fifteen hundred and six and felt, upon discontinuing the game, that we had every good prospect of recapitulating the lot from our own joint knowledge.

  A degree of doubt was cast upon the Forbisher-Laroche figures in my subsequent association with Dave, owing to the fact that he quoted the same authority on so many other matters--the breeding rate of hamsters, for example, the relative climbing efficiencies of various kite designs, and the esoteric causes of giddiness. It occurred to me that "Forbisher-Laroche" might serve my lawyer friend in lieu of the name of an authority or researcher which he could not call to mind--or even in lieu of better authority than his own. This, however, was remarkably good; so the table, even if specious, may be regarded as sound from the order-of-magnitude standpoint.

  Among the nine objections to association with prostitutes were at least two (Dave said) which could be regarded as obsolete: the dangers of disease and of pregnancy. Of the remaining seven, only two more (he claimed) could be regarded as rational by the man of ethical detachment--one aesthetic; the other, the practical matter of costs. The rest were mere excursions into "morals"--a contradiction in itself since, were we to apply any genuine morality to sex and sexual conduct, we should have to begin by contemplating the field with simple honesty--a process in which the "Moralistical" objections would dissolve instanter, so he stated.

  Of the two objections worth considering, then, one was the expense--a matter to be pondered in all deals and negotiations. The other was that old chestnut which appears in the endless series of candid books of advice to boys, books advertised as providing

  "complete sex enlightenment," books which, in sum, horribly frighten their readers and leave them, as a rule, incapable of any real enlightenment for the rest of their lives.

  "Would you," such books fiercely inquire, "walk into a cheap hotel, find that the stranger before you had left the tub filled with his dirty bath water, and immerse yourself in it?"

  This, in short, is the aesthetic objection.

  It contains certain fallacies. One is the implied idea that sex relations are equivalent to ablution--that they are designed to transfer from each individual to the other such foreign matter as may have accumulated on his or her person. There is the further implication that such individuals are thereafter unable to cleanse themselves of the alleged spotting and staining supposedly got in such a fashion. Carried to its logical conclusion, this thought would force hotels, as just one example, to discard a bathtub with the checking out of each guest. Industry could not keep up with such tub-scrapping.

  In other words, the question is unfairly put. If cleaning one's self is to be admitted as a pertinent analogue for love-making, the question should read, "Would you use the bathtub in a cheap hotel?" And why necessarily cheap?

  "Would you," the interrogator should ask in all equity, "dawdle voluptuously in the shining, sunken, marble tub of the most gaudy hostelry on Park Avenue?"

  Again, modern chemistry being what it is, and business being ingenious, it is a safe inference that the tub in the palatial hotel and the tub in its humble competitor would be made ready by the identical advertised product--one having the same statistical effect upon the muck and microbes of the rich as upon the grime and germs of the impecunious.

  And, even if such were not the case, the Park Avenue situation per se cannot be ruled out.

  But I fear the bathtub analogue is hardly intended to be examined for what it is.

  There is no integrity of thought behind it. Its author does not pause to consider that millions already do plunge daily into common tubs--swimming pools, which are, presumably, well chlorinated. Nor does he go on to inquire as to whether his reader uses the dishes in restaurants and drugstores and whether, before using them, he inspects the dishwashing facilities and practices. There is a lack of fairness in the man. He himself--

  for reasons he would never dare to inspect--regards prostitutes as he regards the standing pool of some rank stranger's bath; and he deems it as his mission in life to promulgate this obscene and entirely unrealistic simile in the hope (and the good expectation) that all his young readers will, for the rest of their lives, upon encountering the flossiest of doxies, think instanter of stale tub water.

  The fact of the matter is that the bright and capable girl who engages in prostitution will be found, on any count, cleaner and shinier, better soaped, scrubbed, polished and perfumed than the average for all wives in the land. Statistically, she may be slightly more venereal than her married sisters, but only slightly--and, since we have given her brightness and capability, it is equally certain (statistically) that she will be more likely to be under treatment and so incapable of communicating afflictions which, as noted above, have themselves somewhat lost their menacing aspect. In short, were a woman to be chosen by lot from (a) the general married group or (b) the group of alert tarts, and were the criterion to be bodily aesthetic desirability, there would be no doubt as to which group one should draw from. Tubs are tubs.

  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 calle
d 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.