by Nancy Friday
Some women denigrate men who masturbate while looking at naked women in Playboy and Penthouse, as if a voyeuristic connection with their penis were dirty and unmanly. The great majority of women don’t have fantasies of men satisfying themselves because they would say to the woman that he doesn’t need her; in this scenario, his penis is our competition. When I was in my twenties, I awoke one night and found my lover on the living room sofa, masturbating. I was furious, envious; just hours earlier we had had sex, and here he was with this other person/thing, doing it without me. In some strange way he had betrayed me. I looked at the wasted sperm on his belly like an ugly puddle; in fact, the whole man looked less attractive.
I often think part of male excitement during masturbation is that they are breaking mother’s antisex rules, inculcated since they were little boys. Isn’t this what the naked women in the magazines arouse in men, along with the extra kick that he is having his dirty little orgasm while looking at her looking back at him? She sees him “doing it.” Eye-to-eye contact was Hugh Hefner’s contribution.
“We may have some sexual tastes that come from our distant past,” writes anthropologist Helen Fisher. “Some men are voyeurs. Some like to look at visual porn…. In fact, men’s sexual fantasies are regularly aroused by visual stimuli of all sorts. Perhaps these partialities are, in part, directed by their more spatial brains. Women like romance novels and soap operas on television—tepid, verbal porn. Maybe these inclinations arise from their sensitivity to language.”
Cosmopolitan recently published another male nude centerfold, approximately the twelfth since Burt Reynolds first appeared in the buff in 1973. Clearly, Helen Gurley Brown registered the popularity of the recent Coca-Cola commercial in which the women stare from an office window at the hunk construction worker on the street below. They giggle and mention his pecs. But do they get as moist as a man would get hard looking at naked women?
The answer is yes according to erotic film producer Candida Royalle. “I find that many women like seeing male genitalia. Women may not be admitting it to their men because they haven’t yet admitted it to themselves. But tests have been done where receptors were hooked to women who were being shown a variety of erotic material. Interviewed afterward, most of the women said they had not been excited, but the receptors told a different story. They simply were not consciously acknowledging their physical reactions. ‘Nice girls’ still don’t look.”
To this day, the man who “forces” the woman to have sex remains one of women’s most powerful fantasies. He arrives, he does the deed, he leaves her an “innocent” victim. And we women say that men see us as “objects.” All we want from our fantasy lover is his strength and his cock. Are these fantasies any “nicer” than the naked beauties in Playboy who tempt men to be Bad Boys and masturbate? When Madonna and Sharon Stone assault men with their bodies, are they so different from the men who objectify women in the workplace with their sexually harassing words?
A man from my past comes to mind while writing the above. I realize now that I didn’t “see” him, didn’t even notice him for the first two nights I was in his company, having dinner with five other people. I looked right through him, my mind elsewhere, on another man. It wasn’t until the next day that I looked at him, and then, what I saw were his sexual parts, which triggered an erotic response.
It was the mid-sixties, and I was in Palermo writing a travel article for a magazine. The days were passing slowly, uneventfully, until one morning the photographer with whom I was traveling suggested that it would be polite if I rode in the car with this man, an architect whose hotel we were going to visit. Grumbling at having to get back out in the heat and travel with a man whose name I didn’t even remember, I consented to ride with him.
There we were, this stranger and I, flying along the Sicilian coast in his Alfa Romeo, silence hanging heavy in the summer heat, for he spoke no English and my Italian was rudimentary. Vrroooom! roared the powerful motor as the man controlling it took me faster and faster, up, over, and around the dangerously narrow road, past the painted carts with their high wheels, past other, slower, less masterful drivers. Now I looked, looked down at the back of his widespread hand, shifting the gears up and back, and my eyes followed the dark hairs on his suntanned arm, reminding me of all the masculine hands and arms that had driven me off into the nights of my life. Only now, as his bronzed, sandaled foot pressed onto the accelerator did I look up at his face, see the whole man and know that before the day was over we would be lovers.
It was the sighting of his “parts,” those masculine objects—hands, feet, arms—that pulled me into focus with him, a picture of me beside him, he all control and power and me, well, taken, of course. Though I would orchestrate the seduction along with him, due virtuosi, it would always remain that initial reawakening to the seductions of adolescence that triggered our month-long affair, crisscrossing Sicily, Rome, the Amalfi coast, Capri, his wife in hot pursuit.
Being in a car, alone with a man whose hands were on the steering wheel, whose arms and legs and feet were controlling my ride to a sexual rendezvous, this was what I was raised for, a Prince of Masculine Parts. Raised in a home without a man, all men by definition were an assemblage of lovely parts imbued by me with needs, desires, sexual fulfillments.
A man in a car was a prince on a horse. Hadn’t I grown up in cars, in drive-in restaurants, in drive-in movies, parked on beaches? At the onset of these erotic adventures, the individual man was almost interchangeable with any other man whose objectified function was to drive/protect/direct me, little, powerless creature that I was; eventually, I would grow to love the subjective, whole man, but there has never been a drink so potent, or music so heartbreaking, that would shift me into sexual gear like being alone in a car with a man at the wheel.
That day in Palermo I awoke to an erotic fantasy like a woman in a trance, a triggered response. “Autolove” was what I called it in a short story I wrote ten years later.
Men’s Hungry Eyes
In the compartmentalized life of a man, there is no need for romance novels, no door marked dreamy and soft, soft being the enemy of hard, which is how a man must get to perform sexually. Women want to be Swept Away, a man can’t afford it. The Job of Sex has always weighed heavily on men; women may see it as power and resent men’s sometimes clumsy efforts at seduction, but for a man who is not temperamentally suited to being a Don Juan, this business of erections and maintaining them is crucial to identity.
Women may say contemptuously that men are in love with their penises; we have no sympathy for men who look at naked women and masturbate. But what if the penis didn’t get hard at the sight of a naked woman in his bed, not in a magazine, but lying there, expecting him to make her sexual, keep his penis hard until she is hot, and then “give” her an orgasm? Embarrassing as it is to get an unexpected erection, even worse to ejaculate in one’s trousers, imagine how a man feels not getting an erection or losing it.
When Patriarchal man owned the world, he encouraged women’s sexual ignorance, which made us boring partners in bed, but protected the man from our visual and intellectual sex education. We didn’t look at our own genitals, and we didn’t look at his. Women saw men as providers and protectors, to the degree that we looked at all, and men went to burlesque, to whorehouses to look at women and to fuck them in ways they didn’t want to fuck their nice, clean wives. Men also looked at pictures of naked women because the human eye is born with a taste, so to speak, for the female body. One could say that looking at naked women was good practice for the penis, for that circuitry between brain and erection that men needed to keep well oiled.
There was at the turn of the century a fashionable school of painting that played with men’s voyeuristic needs while abiding by the strict antierotic rules of the Victorian Age. In these canvases by some of the most eminent artists of the day, Childe Hassam, Robert van Vorst Sewell, Josef Englehardt, and Charles Chaplin, naked women sprawl on riverbanks, in verdant fields,
on sun-bleached rocks, and under the boughs of trees, their lovely, strangely ethereal bodies seemingly involved in the very evolution of nature. One of our favorite restaurants in New York, the Café des Artistes, is famous for its murals of young nudes frolicking in the bulrushes, splashing in the brooks as if nature was their home.
It is quite a tour de force, this fin-de-siècle period of art that gave a Patriarchal gentleman the opportunity to stand at the Royal Exhibition and safely stare at naked women, satisfying his voyeurism as a patron of the arts, a student of the medium, religious in his reverence for the purity of woman. In fact, there is something very “unreal” about the naked women in these paintings. Yes, there are breasts and a cleft between their legs, but they seem to be without skeletons, almost spineless, barely able to support their willowy bodies as they emerge out of flowers or lie in a swoon as if fallen from the trees under which they sleep in one another’s arms.
Today one might ask, What is going on here, so nonerotic are these naked women. It’s fascinating how society always manages to feed the human need for the sight of the naked body within certain prescribed rules specific to the era, whether the beauty icon is male or female. All of a man’s concentration was required to be a provider at the onset of the Industrial Revolution, but an outlet was nonetheless required for his erotic imagination. Patriarch and captain of industry, he had neither time nor societal permission to pursue beauty in himself. As for sexual excitement, Queen Victoria forbade it (leading, of course, to one of the most licentious periods in modern history). Nor could he afford to think of women as having any power whatsoever, including sexual beauty.
Women were therefore split neatly into two camps, the Good Woman who was wife and mother—whose total purity had to compensate for the man’s necessary involvement in grimy immoral commerce—and the Bad Woman, she who was available to satisfy sexual needs. To combine Good and Bad Woman—mother and sex goddess—into one person was unthinkable, alarmingly frightening. Life was hard enough. Requiring respite from the crime and competition of the new marketplace, the Victorian gentleman was himself bound, at least publicly, by the asexual rules of the household in which he had been raised by his mother, “the household nun,” and a withdrawn, tyrannical father.
What a perfect visual “feed” these paintings of nude, not quite human women were, a plethora of naked female flesh. In his club, or in his pub to which cheaper imitations quickly trickled down, a man found voyeuristic comfort in the bosom, quite literally, of the naked ladies who papered the walls.
I imagine Victorian man losing himself in the safest sort of erotic daydreams after a hard day’s work in the bloodless mercantile machine. “To the late nineteenth-century male,” writes Bram Dijkstra in Idols of Perversity, “nothing was as unwelcome as the thought of woman—even woman as the embodiment of nature—taking charge. He wanted to be in charge, it was his right to be in charge. To him, Henry Drummond assured him, had been ‘mainly assigned the fulfillment of the first great function—the Struggle for Life.’ It was woman’s appointed role, even as the personification of nature, to float weightlessly in the breeze.” And she floats in these paintings “because to walk is to act, and to beckon a form of invitation, a way of taking charge.”
In Dijkstra’s book there is a reproduction of a painting titled Sleep, in which several sumptuous nudes lie beneath a tree. “Out of the upper-right corner of this painting,” writes Dijkstra, “crawls a peculiar little monster, half-businessman and half-slug, with the sunken eyes of the sort of male… found prone to self-pollution…. In fact, the peculiar creature… here only seems capable of contemplating the beautiful, self-sufficient women under the tree from a safe distance. The lower part of his body would seem to have melted away, as if he were a symbolic representation of the essence of voyeurism.”
The voyeur and the beauty object, a rigid definition of sex roles for most of the twentieth century. Man the voyeur would be looked down upon for his masturbatory fantasies and actions, but nonetheless the “act” of masturbation remained his. Woman, the sex object, would eventually evolve into the Vargas Girl in the 1930s and ’40s pages of Esquire, a long-legged sex goddess who had no more blood in her veins than the earlier nudes at the Royal Exhibition. But she and her less tony friends on cheap calendar art provided man with his necessary masturbatory tool: the safe, nude, female beauty object.
It would be Hugh Hefner, in the 1950s, who would take the revolutionary step of directly involving his naked centerfold, the Playmate, with her voyeuristic male companion. These women agreed, via their eyes, to enter the man’s fantasies and invited him to enter theirs. As time passed, they grew bolder, touching their breasts and moving their hands between their legs. What her look said was “See, I am sexual like you.” In her way, the Playmate was a step forward for women too, for she announced that the girl next door had a sexuality of her own. Not that Nice Girls initially identified with the naked centerfold, God forbid; but the door was open and the Playmate, Bad Girl that she was, gave permission to all women to be more sexually self-accepting.
There was outrage from feminists in 1979 when Playboy invited young women from the Ivy League colleges to compete for the privilege of taking off their clothes for the Playboy photographers, outrage against both the magazine and the women who did it. That it had come to this, that Very Very Nice Girls from the best next doors would pose nude, attested not only to men’s voyeurism but also to women’s acceptance of the joy of exhibitionism.
The Playmate, sexually blatant as she was, posed no threat to men, being inside the covers of a magazine. Even the Playboy Bunnies, invented to wait on men at their local Playboy Club, were untouchable, and the thick Rule Books by which these women worked were as strict as The Girl Scout Manual. They protected the Bunnies from lascivious men, but The Rules protected the men too.
Matriarchal Feminists still see the Playmate and the Penthouse Pet as degrading to women, an idea, in my mind, closer to men’s Victorian image of women than to the sexual freedom we won in the sixties and seventies. But that is where we women divide, a problem between us that has nothing to do with men; the same women who picketed the Playboy Clubs twenty years ago today write against pornography as degrading to women, even when women write it.
I don’t blame men for staying out of our furious debate on just how much a good feminist can show. Women who vilify other women for choosing to take their clothes off in front of a camera, for writing pornography or buying erotic videos so that they might go home and masturbate, these cranky sexual prohibitors are the direct descendants of the household nuns at the turn of the century. They hate seeing beauty and power in women’s sexuality because it is not a license they allow themselves.
Once, long ago, these antisex women tasted erotic excitement; it is impossible to go through life never, even as a child, to have touched oneself. It used to be only Vile Men who reminded these witchy women of their suppressed sexuality. But now they hate sexual women even more for picking the scab where their own sex once lived.
Many men still enjoy satisfying their erotic needs just as their grandfathers did: alone in the dark. No orgasm was quite so thrilling as that during masturbation in mother’s pretty powder room just feet away from the family dinner table. And no woman is so exciting as she whose fingers work between her legs, her eyes staring out at the man, inviting him to do likewise.
As men begin to appreciate their own beauty power, they will look at women differently. Being less needy, they will not stare at us with quite so much hunger. I wonder how women will like this, and if some won’t miss the mirroring eyes many say they hate. Men know more about women and our beauty than we do. They watch us watching each other. We deny our competitiveness, but in literature and in film men have always seemed to be shaking their heads, amused, on the sidelines of women’s competition for them, the male provider, but not really the prize, which was always in other women’s eyes.
I welcome men’s advance into the beauty arena. I want to stand
on the street and cheer them forward to get the power and pleasure their male ancestors enjoyed two hundred years ago. If the fashions today dip into the fifties one day and the seventies the next, looking futuristic tomorrow, we should remember that the design of clothes is often ahead of our conscious day-to-day decisions.
As Anne Hollander says, “fashion tends to show us what we’re really thinking rather than what we’re saying.” I think men are sick to death of women’s posturing and preaching; maybe they can tolerate equality in the workplace, but to take their jobs, want their hearts too, and blame them for problems we are still afraid to face among ourselves? “I’ll give you this, I’ll give you that,” many of them say, “but I’ll take some of that beauty you don’t even know how to use, and I’ll show you how to exercise its power.”
Men’s eyes eat us up. When their stare is longer than a compliment, we hate them. How much looking constitutes a compliment? That decision has always been women’s. When does a look of appreciation become a rude stare? Women critique men mercilessly for how they stare and hate them when they do not look. The man’s eyes may have been drawn to the pretty woman as innocently as a passerby stares at pastries in a window, his thoughts on the business meeting to which he is heading. Men are hungry.
Having given us the power of beauty, which many men miss sorely—it being human and not gender-specific to want to be adored for one’s self—men have needed to enjoy our beauty just as we needed their money. But rejected by women who hate their own bodies and so can’t allow others to feast, men go to prostitutes, look at naked women in magazines, and release the longing and anger, which, it should be noted, is more often turned against themselves.
