Days of Wine and Rage

by Frank Moorhouse

  Some of the pieces in this book, when originally published in the Bulletin, used the royal pronoun ‘we’. It was not to make the pieces sound like something from the New Yorker’s ‘Talk of the Town’ column. What happened was that I began a column in Thor called ‘Around the Laundromats’, in which I had discussions with a fictional character called Ward. Ward and I carried on discussion about topics of the day while doing our laundry in an inner-city suburb.

  When Thor was suppressed by the weight of legal action brought against it, I moved the column to the Bulletin, then under the editorship of Trevor Kennedy. I had been writing pieces for the Bulletin before, under the line ‘Trend’, when Donald Horne was editor.

  After a few pieces of ‘Around the Laundromats’, the Westinghouse company wrote to the Bulletin pointing out that ‘Laundromat’ was a registered business name and should not be used as a generic word.

  The column, still with Ward, was changed to ‘From the Terrace’. However, after a few months Ward became exhausted as a conversationalist and I was left with the royal pronoun as a feature of the column.

  The Inspector and the Prince: A Profile Of

  Darcy Waters

  (adapted, from the Bulletin, 14.2.71)

  On the court lists at Sydney’s Central Court it was a commonplace offensive behaviour case; but around bohemia, or ‘the Push’ – or, more fashionably, the counter-culture – it was a contest of honour. It was an ideological drama. They’d arrested Darcy Waters.

  The police inspector who’d brought the charge almost certainly didn’t know that the person he’d accused of spitting at his feet in a highly offensive manner was Darcy Waters. Darcy is a bohemian of the old style. Some call him a legend in his own time, a libertarian prince. Others say that the libertarian principality no longer exists except as a romantic recollection; but for others again, it exists still as a baffling and infuriating masonry.

  Now forty-three years old [in 1971], Darcy, a boy from Casino, went to the University of Sydney just at the end of the second world war, but dropped out to become an informal student of, among others, Professor John Anderson. He moved with the Libertarian Society, an informal yet closely bonded anti-authoritarian group – amoral, essentially non-activist in politics, but a group that examined society with a relentlessly mocking detachment. Or, for political activists, with a lily-white gutlessness. The libertarians came to fascinate the Sydney afternoon papers and magazines because of their advocacy of ‘free love’.

  The libertarians used to drink in downtown hotels and collected, as well as intellectual heavies, poets, journalists, and non-intellectual bohemia – the wider group becoming known as ‘the Push’.

  Darcy remained an informal student or by now perhaps a ‘campus tutor’, at both the Universities of Sydney and of New South Wales. From time to time he quietly asserts himself in university matters with a libertarian perverseness which usually rankles both left and right. A few years back we remember he seconded us (as Push journalists) to help write the front page of Honi Soit, the student paper, on a freedom issue. Obscurely, the editorial had been allotted to Darcy to write and we put together the issue although we were both non-students. He has appeared on the staff lists of both Honi Soit and Tharunka.

  Downtown, meanwhile, he led the libertarian life – non-careerist, anti-Establishment – getting an income from casual work on the waterside and from gambling. His nickname among his racing friends is ‘Horse’.

  His role was as a charismatic presence and as personal mentor (to, among others, Wendy Bacon) – theorising to women in bed and informally over the years in hotels and at Push parties, with bluff remarks, puncturing humour, and principled qualification which, to impatient activists, seemed like quibbling or counter-suggestibility.

  He rarely gives a paper at libertarian conferences or meetings – the last, an attack on the motor car, went for about five minutes. But he has helped shape every conference and every series of meetings. He rarely contributed articles to libertarian publications but has been associated with numerous non-conformist publications over the last twenty years – 21st Century, the Libertarian, the Sydney Line, the Broadsheet, and Thor. In fact, his main writing was a racing column for Nation in collaboration with libertarian philosophy lecturer Jim Baker and modelled on the Race Track by Audax Minor in the New Yorker, Darcy’s favourite magazine.

  But to the court case. His opponent was Inspector Robert William Beath of Sub-district 3, thirty-six years in the police force. In attitude to authority and personal style, both were in perfect symmetry. Darcy wore jeans and a duffle-coat in court (his first duffle-coat – bought that week – although no longer high bohemian fashion it remains insignia); Inspector Beath, short back and sides, business suit, Springbok badge [indicating support for the then visiting South African football team].

  Appearing for Darcy was hard-cases barrister Mr J. Staples [now Mr Justice Staples], just his sort of pigeon. As Darcy said to us, ‘Jimmy would have been offended if I hadn’t asked him to take the case.’

  Magistrate Dunn, younger than both Darcy and Inspector Beath, ran a strict court, even creating space at the disused press bench of Court Five to accommodate us, the lone journalist. A place for everything and everything in its place.

  Inspector Beath said he saw Darcy on 6 July 1971 at 9.50 p.m. in Oxford and Bourke Streets, Darlinghurst, cross against a ‘Don’t Walk’ sign, causing three vehicles to remain stationary to allow him to pass; he pushed aside a number of people, and again walked against a ‘Don’t Walk’ sign. When Beath had caught up with Darcy he said, ‘I belong to the police. You should have more sense than to walk against the lights.’ He alleged that Darcy replied ‘So what?’ and spat at his feet.

  Darcy admitted walking against a traffic light (but without stopping traffic) and claimed that he said nothing to Inspector Beath and had not spat. At the station Inspector Beath had said he was charging Darcy with offensive behaviour. A senior police officer in the station had said to Inspector Beath, ‘You’re not easily offended, are you –’ and used Beath’s first name. Inspector Beath had replied, ‘I’m very easily offended, especially by long-haired bastards like this.’ He had then turned to Darcy and said, ‘I’ll make this stick. You’re just dirt.’

  Under cross-examination by the police prosecutor, Sergeant Short, Darcy agreed that he was anti-Establishment and that he had no great love of the police force in general although he had no acquaintance with the police in particular until this case. But he didn’t agree that his demeanour in court was ‘nonchalant’.

  A character witness for Darcy, John Maze, a senior lecturer in psychology, said he had known Darcy for most of twenty years. Darcy did not have an aggressive attitude to his fellow beings and typically remained calm and good humoured. He had never seen him react emotionally to provocation.

  In his address Mr Staples argued that Darcy had been arrested ‘for not tipping his hat’ to the inspector. The arrest had been a ‘crazy line of action’ taken by the inspector who’d had a few drinks and a hard day at the anti-Springbok demonstrations on the same day.

  Magistrate Dunn said that there were only two witnesses to the facts – the inspector and the defendant – and he found that the prosecution had not proved its case beyond reasonable doubt.

  He therefore dismissed the case against Darcy Waters.

  In the late afternoon light of Central Court, the bustle of legal business long finished, Robert William Beath, inspector of police, and Darcy Ian Waters, bohemian prince, left the precincts of the court without looking at each other, to go, as ever, in opposite directions.

  TOWARDS LIBERATION

  In the early years of the liberation movements we discussed the orgasm a lot. I reviewed Anne Koedt’s pamphlet The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm and then went on to write a piece for Thor about it.

  The Myth of the Male Orgasm

  (adapted, from Sex, 1971)

  In fucking it is generally held that as long as a male has a stiff penis and can
deliver sperm out the end of it at the right time he is okay. This ejaculation, in both sex manuals and idiom (and even in Masters and Johnson) is equated with orgasm.

  Although it is probably too late to worry about the linguistic distinction, there seems to be a need to re-establish and stress the distinction between ejaculation and orgasm theoretically. Wilhelm Reich made the distinction in 1923 but it has been ignored by textbooks since. In the absence of other evidence this piece, my thinking about it, is almost entirely subjective and dogged by maybe-it’s-only-me anxiety. There is no research and my acquaintances don’t all agree that there is a distinction between orgasm and ejaculation, at least qualitatively. All agree that there is a high degree of variation in the intensity of pleasure from fuck to fuck.

  Although idiom uses orgasm and ejaculation as interchangeable terms, there are in idiom distinctions among fucks made by men, gradations between the ‘good fuck’ and the ‘bad fuck’. There is generally a distinction made between masturbation and its ejaculation and the ejaculation from sex with another person. ‘Jerking yourself off’ not only describes the action of masturbating but also conveys something of the nature of the ejaculation.

  This is jokingly contradicted by the alleged survey carried out among waterside workers on The Best Fuck. The results showed that the three preferred fucks were: (1) a ripe mango (2) cunt (3) placing your penis in a saucer of warm milk and letting a cat lick you off.

  When Wilhelm Reich, in the book The Function of the Orgasm, talks about orgasm this is what he means:

  The erection is pleasurable … and not over-excited … with urge to penetrate … The man is spontaneously gentle. The man’s sensation of ‘being sucked in’ corresponds to the woman’s sensation that she is ‘sucking the penis in’ … the ego participates in this activity in so far as it attempts to exhaust all possibilities of pleasure and to attain a maximum tension before orgasm occurs … Orgastically potent individuals never talk or laugh during the sexual act – with the exception of words of tenderness … both indicate lack of capacity to surrender. The increase in excitation can no longer be voluntarily controlled … Through further intensification and an increase in the frequency of the involuntary muscular contractions, the excitation increases rapidly and steeply … and normally coincides with the first ejaculatory muscular contraction in the man. Now occurs a more or less intense clouding of the consciousness … the release of tension … is predominantly the result of a flowing back of the excitation from the genital to the body. This flowing back is experienced as a sudden decrease in tension … excitation is replaced by a pleasant bodily and psychic relaxation … in contradistinction, the orgastically impotent individual experiences a leaden exhaustion, disgust, repulsion, or indifference and, occasionally, hatred.

  Reich states that orgasm is the ‘capacity for surrender to the flow of biological energy without any inhibition, the capacity for complete involuntary pleasurable contractions of the body’.

  He observes that some men, while being erectively potent, found that ejaculation was accompanied by little or no pleasure.

  While finding Reich’s description of the atmosphere and preliminary sensations too prescriptive, too narrow, I accept his definition of orgasm as distinct from ejaculation.

  One literary reference I came across was in Edmund Wilson’s book of stories Memoirs of Hecate County (1946). In one story the narrator is making love with a woman he finds incredibly beautiful physically and he describes his climax this way: ‘I went on and had a certain disappointment, for, with the brimming of female fluid, I felt even less sensation: but – gently enough – I came, too.’

  The narrator the same afternoon makes love to her again: ‘I pored on her and tried consciously to realise how lucky and how happy I was to be possessed at last of the love I had longed for; but the delight of the climax when it came – even with her there in my arms – did not somehow connect with my vision.’

  Leaving aside the analysis of the narrator’s problem it is clearly a distinction between orgasm and ejaculation. He is experiencing ejaculation but not orgasm.

  When males use the term ‘good fuck’ in conversation, it conveys a series of possible meanings. It sometimes means simply that the woman being talked about is sexually pleasing to the speaker. Sometimes the expression can carry the fallacy that the woman is potentially ‘a good fuck’ for all men. Sometimes it means that the woman is skilled in sexual technique. ‘Good fuck’ may describe a fulsome ejaculation, say, after having gone without sex for some time. It is used as shorthand for some sort of quantitative measurement – how many times the person was able to ejaculate during the fuck, or how long the fuck went on. Finally, I suggest that it is sometimes used to describe an orgasmic fuck as distinct from ejaculation.

  Quantitative measurements are the usual way that men score their fucking and I think that generally this is the way men are thinking when they talk about it. These measurements are related to male ideology. Any remarks about sexual performance, joking or even self-deprecating, are all affirmations of virility as a doctrine. In many situations the gratification a man gets from giving satisfaction to a woman is not that he has given satisfaction to a woman but that he is pleased with his ability to satisfy a woman.

  One of the common measurements of virility is the number of erections that man can have in the one sexual situation. Apart from attesting to the eroticism of the occasion, it centrally dwells on male stamina, not sexual pleasure or orgasmic release.

  Masters and Johnson state that pleasure for a male in sex is related to the quantity of seminal fluid released. This means the amount of fluid ejaculated in one complete action. The suggestion is that the physical pleasure is related to the length of time that the sensory network of the penis is being stimulated by the flow of fluid through it. In what Reich calls orgasm, the amount released is related to the degree of surrender or unimpeded involvement in the sexual action.

  Other quantitative measurements are common too – number of women in a period of time, the length of time that a fuck took, the length of the penis, and the number of climaxes that the woman had during the fuck. The last one has odd implications. It also has a compensatory function for the orgasmically impotent male. Inge Riebe, a libertarian theorist, pointed this out to me. The sexual operator who prides himself on the number of climaxes he can give a woman is sometimes escaping his failure to have full orgasm himself. He measures himself in terms of her pleasure not his own.

  Anne Koedt, in her pamphlet Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm, argues that men created this myth to deny the sexuality of women and the personality of women, and to establish male dominance by making the penis central to the sexual act and crucial for women’s pleasure. (This is about the only part of the pamphlet I agree with. The rest seemed distorted by male hostility and hysteria.)

  The myth has a rebound. The negation of female sexuality and the female as person psychologically rebounds on the male and deprives him of full sexuality. Paradoxically, some men have to feel superior to the female and central to the act before they can function sexually at all. This permits simple functioning but denies the relationship the dynamic of full and joint participation and the male consequently loses the possibility of orgasm (but gains the consolation of ejaculation).

  Domination is necessary to allay fear of the woman. But the fear is still there unconsciously and together with this fear is the other fear that she will rebel against her submissive role, fear that she will use her frustration against him (deviously) and the fear that she might expose him as sexually negative. This is part of the damaging rebound and a further impediment to full male sexuality.

  That ours is a sexually negative culture has been established – we suppress sexual knowledge, we repress the young sexually, we surround our sexual life with taboos, and we back these with legal restraints on sexual pleasure. There are neurotic variations of sexual life in the sub-cultures and among individuals. Given that neurosis is a scale along which we all fall – I specul
ate that the highly neurotic male is at worst incapable of erection (or erection is unreliable) and definitely incapable of orgasm (full pleasure), and at the other end of the scale the slightly neurotic male is sometimes capable of orgasm. Social conditioning of a sexually negative kind is mitigated or reinforced by childhood relations to parents and the other individual factors which modify or distort personality.

  The bonus that has made it possible for the male to tolerate the low level of orgasmic pleasure has been the ejaculation – the physiological thrill of having sperm pass through the penis and which can be easily achieved, with a woman, with masturbation or involuntarily in wet dreams. Maybe there is a minor discharge of tension, too, with ejaculation but never total enough to be confused with orgasm.

  The conditions that permit full orgasm would seem to be: the absence of intersexual hostility or threat (is this possible in a male-dominated society or even in a transitional sub-culture?); low inhibition or absence of inhibition (can we jettison social conditioning by intellectual awareness?); and the capacity for surrender to pleasure.

  Inhibition is partly defensive – a defence against self-exposure, a resistance to sexual ‘surrender’ (the surrender both to the experience and to another person). What Reich calls ‘pleasure anxiety’ is a fear of pleasurable excitation and the unknown paths it invites us along and the temporary transformation it makes to a consciousness and sense of self.

  I’ve experienced orgasm, full release, within a relationship that has had other intimacies – verbal, shared values, acceptance of frailty; but it has also occurred in casual sex – those rare occasions when two strangers give each other a high erotic charge and can enter spontaneously into fairly uninhibited fucking.

  I’ve had full orgasm in homosexual relationships (and also bad fucks). I’ve had full orgasmic experiences a few times which have made me weep through the intensity of their release – and also, probably, because of their rareness. I would not consider that I had a high rate of orgasm to ejaculation. (By the way, in looking for a measurement of ‘average’ in sexuality, Masters and Johnson remind us that as in the case of ‘excessive’ there is no medical or statistical standard of comparison.)