(1961) The Chapman Report

by Irving Wallace

  Dr. Chapman straightened on the bench and brought his hands together, lacing his fingers. He contemplated them for a moment, and then he looked up.

  “Everywhere I have traveled,” he said, “I have been asked to give out some summary, some trend, of our inquiry into the sexual history of the married female. Everywhere I have declined.”

  Paul shifted in his chair and stared at the maroon carpet. What Dr. Chapman was telling the press was not quite accurate, he knew. The project had been no more than six months on the road when, to climax every big-city press Conference, Dr. Chapman had begun to drop a new and provocative generality gleaned from his female survey. He judged, and correctly so, that these insignificant morsels would be lapped up by the sensation-hungry press and enlarged upon under great black headlines. Thus, the project would

  be kept before the public, dynamic, important, and, appetites would be constantly whetted for the appearance of the forthcoming book. Dr. Chapman never discussed these casual droppings. Pure science was above catering to popularization and publicity. Perhaps he did not even design or plan them in advance. But so strong was his instinct for survival, for the project’s advancement, that possibly unconsciously he had kept adding these transfusions. Never before, however, had he prefaced an announcement of something new and newsworthy so definitely.

  He wants to wind up the tour on a high note, Paul told himself. Or maybe this is the beginning of a campaign to combat Dr. Jonas before the jurors of the Zollman Foundation. Until now, Paul had tried to push off the uncomfortable assignment before him. He did not want to call on Dr. Jonas with a blatant bribe. But there could be no doubt that the future of the project was at stake. That justified what he must do, and what Dr. Chapman was now doing.

  “… I have declined,” resumed Dr. Chapman, having disposed of his cigar stub, “because I did not feel we had gathered enough of a sampling to see any definite trends, and, even after we had, I was reticent because I wanted to check and study my totals with my staff. However, now that we are in Los Angeles for our final sampling-we have carefully interviewed over three thousand American married women, divorcees, widows, to date-I feel it only fair to let the public in on one aspect of our findings, one that I know to be generally accurate, and one that will have immediate significance to married women throughout the nation.”

  Paul, observing the eager faces of the reporters, could conjure up a vision of the headlines expanding larger and larger, like mammoth balloons puffed round by the words Dr. Chapman was breathing.

  “It became clearly evident to those of us on the team, very early, that the greatest-” Dr. Chapman paused, reconsidered, modified -“one of the greatest misunderstandings existing between the sexes is the belief that men and women are possessed of like or similar drives and emotions. While it is a fact that men and women are physiologically alike in genital responses, in location of erogenous zones, this alikeness does not carry over into needs and desires. The public seems to believe that for every man on earth who wants sexual relations, there also exists a woman who feels exactly the same way. In short, that both sexes have equal need of sexual release. While, I repeat, I am not yet prepared to present you with statistical evidence on this important point, I am quite prepared to

  make a general statement about it. To date, our findings explode the belief completely. To date, our findings indicate that sexual participation is less important to the American female than it is to the American male.”

  He paused. There was a flicker of a smile on his face as the reporters bent to their pencils. He glanced at Paul, who nodded approvingly, and then across at Ackerman, who lifted a chubby hand in brief salute.

  The rangy reporter with the gray felt hat, standing behind the chairs, looked up from the folded papers in his hand. “Dr. Chapman, I want to be sure I have this right. Are you saying that, after talking to three thousand women, you believe that women aren’t as interested in sex as men?”

  “I’m saying something like that, based on our survey,” said Dr. Chapman agreeably. Then he added quickly, “Of course, we’re referring to American married women. I’m in no position to speak for the English or the French-“

  “I’ll speak for them!” boomed Ackerman from across the room. “When I was in Paris last year-” He paused, and grinned, “I better not, there’s a lady in the room. Meet you boys down at the bar later.”

  Everyone laughed. The girl reporter made a mock grimace. “Aw, come on,” she said to Ackerman. He shook his head.

  “Our sampling includes only American married women,” Dr. Chapman repeated.

  “Can you tell us more about that?” the girl reporter asked. Paul noticed that though her hair had a Bohemian tousle, and her legs were long and shapely, her face was all sharp features. But the legs were fine. Her eyes were very bright. Paul bet himself that she was reporter and not voyeur, interested in story and not sex.

  “I intend to,” said Dr. Chapman to the girl. “Our findings on the married female are now of more value, because we have a detailed record of the unmarried male to employ as some standard of comparison. Our respective samplings indicate that the average male is more concerned, even obsessed, with sex than the average female. More often than not, the basic reason a male will marry is because he wishes to possess a woman sexually. Later, should he be disappointed, or tire of his wife-I am speaking of sex-he may divorce her, or be unfaithful, or turn to psychiatry or drink. On the other hand, the female does not marry mainly because she wishes to be possessed by a man-again, sexually. It is one of her motivations, of course, but not the basic one. In her attitude toward physical love, she is the more passive partner. She marries for security, social acceptance, conformity, children, companionship. She desires normal sexual outlets, but if they disappoint her, she will more often than not resist the extreme measures of a divorce, a lover, an analyst, a bottle. If physical love dissatisfies, she will repress it, suffer and survive the emotional ill effects, and sublimate her needs in other equally important comforts like children, home, social life, and so forth.”

  Dr. Chapman waited while the reporters busily scribbled. When most of them had caught up, he continued.

  “Based on our findings, I suspect that men have created a fictional world of women-women who do not really exist in today’s America. This is one of the many significant points I hope to bring out, and support with evidence, in A Sex History of the American Married Female, which we plan to release to the public next spring. Consider the mediums of entertainment and escape-I refer specifically to novels, plays, motion pictures, television. The men who are the writers in these mediums most often project heroines who hunger to receive sexual love, who cannot have enough of it, who respond erotically and without inhibition. Those are the American women of fiction. But our interviews indicate that they are not the women of fact. These women of fiction, invented by-men, are performing as men think women should-or wish they would. But the women my colleagues and I have met are quite the opposite. They are real, and most of them-the majority-can take sex or leave it alone; they do not daydream about it and excite themselves as men do; they are not stimulated by nude or semi-nude men; they are not overcome by handsome, virile men. In novels and motion pictures, they are. Men seem to think they are. But it is not so. Facts are facts. It is not true.”

  They were all writing. The girl reporter’s forehead was furrowed. . She held up one hand. Dr. Chapman nodded.

  “Speaking for the distaff side,” she said, “if what you are saying is true, Dr. Chapman, why do so many women like sex novels-I mean, those books seem to sell-and the rental libraries-doesn’t that show women are interested?”

  Dr. Chapman puckered his lips and studied the ceiling. “I’m glad you asked that,” he said at last. “Of course, I don’t have the facts. Do those books really sell? Are they mainly read by women? I don’t know. But let us assume that is the case. It probably is. The

  answer, from my point of view, is this-and though it may sound contradictory to al
l I have said, it is not. Many women are preoccupied with sex, but in ways different than their husbands or lovers imagine. Women are attracted to romantic fiction not so much for identification or stimulation as to satisfy an irritating curiosity. First, because men place so high a premium on sexual attraction, and the rewards for possessing this attraction are so great in our society, women find that they must devote themselves to it, whether they are interested or not. Second, most American females have fallen for male propaganda. They are told, daily, that they are supposed to behave and feel the way men want them to behave and feel, yet they know they are not so behaving and feeling. It troubles them. It worries them. It gives them inferiority. And this, coupled with the whole defect in our culture-I refer to the purposeless, pointless road most women travel in their marriages, but this is another area and I will not go into it-makes women feel unfulfilled. What is wrong with them? They ask themselves this. They want to know. So they devote themselves to books, plays, movies, envying the women they read about, the women they can’t be, the women who don’t really exist. A large share of these wives think they are unusual, undersexed, odd. They are none of these things. They are average. They are the twenty-fifth to seventy-fifth percentile of all women. I think our survey-” he became aware of Grace Waterton in the doorway signaling to Paul. He returned his gaze to the reporters-“will dramatically prove this point. I am confident it will do much to relax tension among women in America.”

  “Speaking for myself,” said the girl reporter, “one thing isn’t clear-“

  Paul was on his feet, beside Dr. Chapman, bending to him. “Pardon me, Doctor,” he interrupted. “They’re all assembled; they’ve been waiting-“

  Dr. Chapman nodded, and briskly came to his feet. “I’m sorry,” he said to the girl reporter and the others, “but you remember I said I would have to terminate this when the lecture could begin? These women were kind enough to appear. I don’t want to keep them waiting.” He smiled winningly. “Of course, you’re invited to stay for my little talk. But to save you time-I know you want to file your stories-Paul Radford here has advance copies of it.”

  “Thanks for all of us, Dr. Chapman,” the rangy reporter called after him.

  “It was a pleasure,” said Dr. Chapman from the door. He waited

  for Ackerman, and then placed his hand on the fat man’s shoulder. “Why don’t you find a seat, Emil? The briefing won’t take more than an hour. Then we can have lunch.”

  They went out together. Paul picked the pile of mimeographed transcripts off the glass-topped dressing-room table and began to pass them out.

  Dr. Chapman had been speaking, in his easy, informal manner, for ten minutes, and the anxiety in the auditorium had visibly lessened. So far, the women found, there was no invasion of privacy, no shock, nothing to fear. This was an affable, nice man chatting with them. His personality was as reassuring as that of any elderly physician at a bedside.

  Kathleen Ballard had been sitting stiffly in her seat, hardly aware of the meaning of Dr. Chapman’s introductory remarks, so intent was she on resenting and rejecting him. But gradually now, her antagonism was being blunted by his friendly manner and tame speech. For the first time since he had begun, she sank back in her seat and tried to understand what he was saying.

  Dr. Chapman had one elbow on the lectern, and his head intimately inclined toward the microphone as he spoke. “There was a day, not too long ago, when prudery was the fashion-you could not refer to a piano’s legs, and when you wanted breast of chicken you asked for bosom of chicken, and women had no complaints between shoulders and thighs other than liver complaints. Two world wars changed all of that. Sex was brought into the open and honestly discussed. The persons responsible for this revolution were Susan B. Anthony, Sigmund Freud, Andrew }. Volstead, and General Tojo. By this, I mean that female emancipation, psychiatric airing of the libido, over-reaction to the Eighteenth Amendment, and two wars that sent American young men and women abroad to absorb the sexual mores and customs of other cultures have done much to destroy prudery.

  “Yet, prudery is far from dead, and sex still remains a secret and shameful function. Although women have acquired a certain degree of freedom through employment equality, the right to divorce, the use of contraceptives, the control of venereal disease, the shift of living from rural to urban areas where activity tends, to be more anonymous, though women have acquired all of these weapons of freedom, they still are not free. An unhealthy attitude toward sex persists. And too many women suffer from too little knowledge

  about a subject that occupies-whether they like it or not-a major and crucial part of their lives.

  “Consequently, sex is the one aspect of human biology most in need of scientific inquiry. Now, pioneer steps have been made in the right direction. The misconception persists that I invented the modern sexual survey. Or that Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey did so before me. This is not so. The profession of sex investigator, historian, pollster-what will you-is relatively modern, but older than you may imagine. The real innovators in this special field of inquiry were Max Joseph Exner, who questioned 948 college students or graduates in 1915; Katherine B. Davis, who questioned 2,200 women in 1920; Gilbert V. Hamilton, who questioned 200 women and men in 1924; Robert L. Dickinson, who studied 1,000 marriages before 1931; Lewis M. Terman, who examined 792 couples in 1934; and a host of others.

  “A brief review of my predecessors in the field may be enlightening and comforting. In 1915, a year dominated by the sinking of the Lusitania, the first transcontinental phone call made by Alexander Graham Bell, the premiere of The Birth of a Nation in this city, the jailing of Margaret Sanger by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, a year dominated by names such as Woodrow Wilson, Jess Willard, William Jennings Bryan-in that year there was published a thirty-nine-page pamphlet, Problems and Principles of Sex Education, by Max Joseph Exner. The pamphlet announced the results of what was probably the first formal sex study in our history. Exner’s questionnaire went to 948 college men. They were asked, among other things, ‘Have you at any time indulged in any sexual practice?’ Eight out of ten replied that they had indulged in some sexual practice or another-four out of ten admitting to sexual intercourse with women, and six out of ten confessing to what was then delicately referred to as ‘self-abuse.’ Although Exner had conducted his poll to prove that sex education was harmful, the results of his survey had quite the opposite effect. Unwittingly, he had established a new method of acquiring information on a subject hitherto taboo.

  “Five years later, in 1920, the year Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested, Harding was nominated for President, and F. Scott Fitzgerald published his first flapper novel, a woman named Katherine B. Davis undertook a courageous study of female sexual behavior which she would later publish as Factors in the Sex Life of Twenty-Two Hundred Women. Katherine B. Davis developed an eight-page

  questionnaire concerning female sexual habits from childhood to menopause, and she sent it to 10,000 members of women’s clubs, as well as to college alumni. She inquired about everything from frequency of sexual desire to emotional experiences with other women. Of the 10,000 women solicited, there were 2,200 usable replies, and 1,073 of these were from married women. The compiled answers to each question were published in statistical tables. Interestingly enough-remember, this was when Mother or Grandmother was a girl-sixty-three young ladies admitted to having sexual intercourse daily, and 116 confessed that they were unhappy with their husbands.

  “In 1924, Dr. Gilbert V. Hamilton, the psychiatrist, did a secret investigation of 200 women and men in New York City. He saw each subject in a private consulting room, had the subject sit in an easy chair fastened to the wall (for, in their eagerness to discuss sex, the subjects often edged the chair almost into his lap), and presented each with white cards-forty-seven cards for a woman, forty-three for a man-on which questions were listed. There were eleven questions on orgasm, five on the variations of the sexual act, eleven on intercourse, fifteen on h
omosexuality, and so on. Some of the questions, considering the period when they were asked, were extremely valuable. For example, Hamilton asked all women, ‘If by some miracle you could press a button and find that you had never been married to your husband, would you press that button?’ And again, ‘Are you and your husband more or less friendly and affectionate during the first twenty-four hours after the sex act?’

  “Robert L. Dickinson, the Freudian psychiatrist, published his marital findings in 1931. His questions were elaborate, and conducted under his personal supervision. Lewis M. Terman, working in California during 1934 and 1935, tested 792 couples with nine general questions.

  “Now, I have said that there were a host of others doing equally useful groundwork, most of it unknown to the lay public. I speak of Ernest W. Burgess and Paul Wallin testing 1,000 engaged couples in Illinois between 1940 and 1950, and Harvey J. Locke and his associates working in Indiana and California between 1939 and 1949. I speak also of such sex investigators as Clifford Kirkpatrick working in Minnesota, Clarence W. Schroeder working in Illinois, and Jud-son T. Landis in Michigan.

  “Of course, the great popularizer in this little-known field was Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey, of Indiana University, who died in 1956. The two

  surveys done under his direction were begun back in 1938. Exactly ten years later, in 1948, he reported On the sexuality of 5,300 males in his 820-page book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Five years after that, he published a similar book about the human female, employing thirteen associates and assistants in his survey. Although he came under heavy bombardment from others in his field or allied fields, Kinsey was a pure scientist and a great one. No sexologist of the past brought more patience or knowledge to his work. Kinsey must be credited for refining interview techniques and contributing mightily to national enlightenment.

  “If I may be so immodest as to mention my own already published findings, I have tried to bring this work, originated by Exner and Davis and improved by Dickinson and Kinsey, along another giant step. I have had the extreme good fortune, of course, to be able to study the efforts of those who came before me, and, where possible, I have tried to avoid the pitfalls they encountered. In my earlier samplings, I began an unusual program dealing with specifics rather than generalities. Instead of a survey on all young people, I determined to devote myself to one type-the adolescent. Instead of a survey on all types of males, I determined to concentrate on one type-the single or unmarried male. Instead of a survey on all types of females, I decided to question only one type-the married or once married female. This is a process I strongly favored, for, in this way, I was able to zero in on one type at a time, to narrow down, to pinpoint, thus promising more detailed and accurate results-results that I felt would prove more useful to science and the public at large. I am convinced that this is one major contribution I have made to sex education.