Days of Wine and Rage

by Frank Moorhouse

  The high sexuality of a drug experience (with marijuana or LSD) is probably evidence of the inhibited nature of ‘normal’ fucking.

  I have also experienced negative ejaculation and this is a further distinction. Although the male ejaculation usually provides simple physiological pleasure, it too can suffer from inhibition. Ejaculation can be negative. Psychological intrusion, bad scenes, mood, and other everyday factors can affect it. There is such a thing as genital anaesthesia – numbness or insensate erection, ‘cold erection’. Ejaculation can sometimes be pinched, or gritty or sandy, or it can cause an uncomfortable muscular thud. And there can be what I heard a girl in a pornographic movie describe as ‘short change’ – the expulsion of relatively little sperm.

  As Reich suggests, ejaculation without orgasm as a chronic condition is the male equivalent to frigidity in women.

  Failure to get an erection (functional impotence), premature ejaculation, or inability to maintain an erection after entry, and erection without coming at all, are experienced by many men, it seems, during their sexual life. For some these are chronic states. Fear of being unable to get an erection is probably the central male obsession and again demonstrates the misplaced emphasis on visible virility as against invisible virility (orgasm, known only to self).

  The ideology of male supremacy (which Kate Millett says began God knows where and when) has ‘virility’ as its central doctrine. Virility is an amalgamation of asexual physical qualities, stamina, endurance, strength, prowess in combat, all transferred across into sexual performance.

  Probably the erection–ejaculation performance calibration was adopted because it dodges the moment of truth – personal gratification. The failure to deliver the goods to oneself.

  Taboos on sexual discussion and information has left any self-perceptive male with the ‘maybe-it-is-only-me’ anxiety. Male conversation has a sexual component of boasting, sexual jokes, lies and inverse boasting (self-deprecation).

  I want to repeat, though, that fucking without orgasm can be fun. Ejaculation and erotic play is pleasurable and does not always bring with it disgust or indifference. A fuck can say many things. Tension not discharged through sexuality can be discharged elsewhere.

  As another side note, novelty, new partners or new games, can add other pleasures and distractions which compensate for lack of full orgasm.

  Curiously, I suspect that there is sometimes a faking of signals by a man during and at the conclusion of a fuck (women admit to this also). Sometimes men make noises as if they are going through an orgasmic experience; they exaggerate the pleasure because they know instinctively, or from other experiences, that this is the true outward manifestation of orgasm. It may be done to please the woman or as some sort of wishful acting to fool the self.

  There is the question of whether self-masturbation is qualitatively different (less than) the full sexual act. This question is fogged with moralism. Obviously, self-masturbation does release tension. I can only speculate that a sexual experience with another person is needed for orgasm. That a part of the orgasmic experience is the exposure of self to another person, the psychological relief of being with another person and accepted by them, interplay with others of our species, the escape from the isolation of self, to be taken out of the envelope of our own consciousness. I am not talking necessarily of ‘love’ in the humanist sense.

  What do we do if we cannot find orgasm and want it? I don’t know. Information, experience and exploration can dispel blind unawareness. But inhibition is not easily demolished. I guess there is some feedback from self-knowledge and information – these act on the social conditioning to modify it. ‘Crashing through’ an inhibition sometimes helps – that is, doing what appears most distasteful. The passing of time and intimacy helps. Pornography – the externalising of fantasy – can free the imagination and bring up the subterranean eroticism that crouches within us.

  I have to hold to the idea that exploration of the injurious processes of our culture is part of our resistance to injury and may be eventually a way of defeating authoritarian practices.

  Let’s hope so.

  Yes, if asked in a survey I’d say I was

  a liberated lady

  (adapted, from the Bulletin, 3.6.72)

  What exactly did they mean ‘liberated’ anyhow? Sefton thought she was too liberated. She’d shocked him at a dinner party the other night when she’d openly admitted that she still became ‘all thing’ about old Errol Flynn movies. And she said she meant sexy. The things she hated about dinners (she’d just put her finger on it) was that people were too damned polite to her. Too nice. She wanted things to be open and honest. Sefton said she’d become a two-middy screamer. He said she had a few drinks and began to shout and tried to dominate the conversation. That was unfair. At least it showed that she was not one of those quiet little things. She had her say. As for going back to work, she could always go back to teaching, she supposed. They were screaming for teachers. She had a reference from before she was married – somewhere upstairs; she must hunt that down. She really didn’t know if she wanted to go back to teaching. Those boys with dark adolescent hair on their upper lips. Like swamp creatures. Anyhow, she must hunt up that reference just to read it. She could go to adult education classes to take the rust off her mind. But she wouldn’t do it just to get someone’s shoes under her bed. If liberated meant going to bed with anyone and using four-letter words, she might not qualify in that case. She didn’t use four-letter words. It was a matter of correct English. It was her training as a teacher coming out. On the other matter, she didn’t think she really monopolised the conversation. She wished Sefton wouldn’t say things like that because it just made her self-conscious. It just made it harder for her to be natural. She’d always tried to be a good conversationalist. All in all, she guessed, taking everything into consideration, she and Sefton had a fairly good sex life. He was no Errol Flynn but when he was in a relaxed frame of mind he was … all right. During the week was no good because he was often in a black mood. She hated labels but, well, the Capitalist System had to be blamed. No wonder marriages broke down. It drained men, especially those in executive positions. He was sometimes so tense of an evening that it took him an hour or more before he would talk to the children. Let alone to her. She’d be quite happy for him to throw it all up and go bush. Why, her family had lived in the country with an outdoor toilet and her mother had washed the laundry in an old copper over a wood fire. She wasn’t frightened to say out loud that really they could get by with a lot less – and just as happily. Some of Sefton’s business friends raised an eyebrow when she came out with it. She wasn’t a communist or anything specific. As for sex (returning to today’s favourite topic), she and Sefton had improved. After twelve years of married life she had finally had a talk to him about it. Oh yes, very unliberated – but just hold on – remember one thing, her mother had told her nothing, not a thing. And she’d been quite forthright lately about asking him to use his hand. He was really quite old-fashioned. He was the unliberated one. My gosh, it’s all very well for young girls on the pill to go around talking about sexual freedom, but for her generation it hadn’t been that damned easy. She was glad for them and good luck. But she’d come from the dark ages. And anyhow, she had reservations about the sleeping-around business. She didn’t know what she would tell Gwynne when she was old enough. It would have probably gone the full circle by then. She tried, though, to be reasonable, and whatever reservations she might privately have, she kept them to herself, and at dinner parties she always took the young person’s side. She masturbated now – there, wasn’t that something? Marks for that. She hadn’t known that women could until she’d read about it in a magazine. The things that were printed nowadays would have made her mother die of embarrassment. She had reservations about it too. Because it wasn’t ‘putting into’ the marriage. She believed that to make a marriage work you had to put everything you had into the marriage. She couldn’t help it if she felt that g
iving herself sexual pleasure was selfish. She wasn’t one of those who thought that sex didn’t matter. And she wasn’t complaining. If she had any complaint it was that Sefton had lost the ability to play. It was the System again. Not only in bed – she wasn’t harping on about that – she meant being playful in everyday life. Her playfulness irritated him now, she noticed, and the children were of that age when they didn’t like their mother to be playful. Sometimes, though, she was very skittish – she would act Pierrot the clown, or do a gollywog dance. They used to laugh themselves sick when she did it once. She wasn’t going to become a fuddy-duddy. The System made men old before their time. Were they thinking that she was a little mad when she played Pierrot the clown or did the gollywog dance? Well let them. It was important for her to stay young. But that was something that was a fault in her. Trying too hard. She tried so hard with dinner parties, even now. Sefton had begun to complain that a few of her specialities were not good enough, now they’d come up in the world. He expected her to know everything about wine now. As for the housework, she could afford a housekeeper now, she supposed, but that would just be another headache. She’d have to be around to see that it was done properly. As for sex (it keeps rearing its head), she sometimes felt that to have lived your whole life and to have slept with only one man was somehow silly. She was curious, she supposed, but an affair could always get out of hand. And where would one find the time? But she must have no regrets – she had made her decisions and she knew the rules. She sometimes thought she could have made a reasonable fist of poetry. Oh, she knew there was no money in it. She wanted desperately sometimes for what she said to come out right and to sound right. She sometimes had quite clever things to say but they would come out upside down or inside out. Or back to front. She sometimes worked things over in her head at dinner parties for so damned long that she got left behind by the conversation. She would come out with what she had to say but it would be too late. And she’d look like a fool. When she was younger she used to say whatever came into her head. She was fearless and witty. But you can’t get away with that when you’re older. You would think that life would become easier when you were older, at least socially, but it didn’t. She did tend to get behind in her reading. She listened to the ABC. Honestly, one day she would just Give Up. Sefton often said a lot of nonsense too, but he had a tone of voice that made it sound terribly right. She would sometimes say one thing and think another. That was the actress in her. She enjoyed playing a part. Sometimes when he treated her like a menial – and sometimes he really did – she would pretend that she was completely at his mercy, a slave girl, completely subjected to him. But this would only be in her mind. Another part of her mind said, ‘He really is ridiculous – talking to me like that.’ Anyhow that was beside the point. Well, how did she rate? Was she a liberated lady? She guessed not. Really it wasn’t as bad as she had painted it. Sefton often talked things over with her. Oh, she could have been a lot worse off, when she looked at some of her friends.

  Defenders of Sexiness and Violence

  (adapted, from the Bulletin, 26.6.73)

  We became the sex-and-violence people around town. We realised this when, on the same day, we were invited to defend Violence in the Media on the ‘Mike Walsh Show’ in the morning and to defend Sex in Art on the ABC’s ‘Late Line’ in the evening.

  We always get the nasty jobs that no one else wants.

  At Channel Ten we went to the Green Room where the ‘talent’ lines up. The show is voracious, going out daily with half a dozen segments (we suspect that television is running out of guests and studio audiences).

  Who should be in the Green Room but Tom Mead, MLA, Richard Neville (formerly editor of Australian OZ, then London OZ and the Living Daylights), and **Abigail**.

  The Green Room is a pacifying cage where the circus animals, even those with natural hostility, prowl together in temporary truce.

  The only other place you find this special kind of truce is in a urinal. When you find yourself standing beside your life-enemy in a urinal you are both reduced to human proportion and you’re forced to say a clipped ‘g’day’ and give a quick glance and bent smile, being careful not to let your eyes go too low.

  We asked Richard what he was there for.

  ‘Drugs,’ he said, ‘the drugs segment. And you?’

  ‘Violence,’ we said, matter-of-factly.

  The social problem now was how to recognise Tom Mead who, although publicly attacking us as pornographers and destroyers of western civilisation was our old chief of staff from the Daily Telegraph and had, after all, taught us a few tricks.

  Luckily Richard left the Green Room and we were able to lean across and growl hullo to Tom.

  ‘What are you here for, Tom?’

  ‘Drugs,’ he said.

  ‘We’re doing violence,’ we told him.

  We all nodded understandingly, like true professionals. In ten minutes or so we would be shouting at each other about the fall of western civilisation, the subversion of our values; but in the Green Room we were professional controversialists and very cool.

  In the Green Room they have a monitor set, which allows you to avoid eye contact with the others in the room if you so wish. Most of the talent stared fixedly at it. Except **Abigail**, who seemed to be always going out to get changed.

  Tom asked a few pro questions.

  ‘Who is this Neville bloke?’

  We told him that Richard was a sort of journalist and mentioned the publications OZ, London OZ.

  This touched a nerve in Tom, having been an old-time journalist before becoming a politician.

  ‘Some sort of journalist,’ Tom said dismissively.

  My adversary for the day was educationalist Henry Schoenheimer from Melbourne. We recognised each other from our by-line photographs – stepping out of the page like cartoon characters. We had guessed he was going to run a moral Melbourne line on violence.

  We stayed on safe ground at first, with Henry telling me of his daughters who were at the Aquarius festival at Nimbin: one liked handcrafts and the other wanted to build houses.

  He then outlined his position on violence. He thought excessive violence in the media was desensitising society. There was far too much of it.

  We said we’d argue the opposite. We wanted more realistic violence, especially on the news. But we weren’t giving away our choice arguments and nor was Henry. We went back to looking at the monitor or at **Abigail**.

  Of course, when the cue came Richard Neville became the counterculture revolutionary and Tom Mead became the indignant defender of decency, and they shouted at each other on television which Mike Walsh thought was great.

  Henry and I went on camera and sparred but didn’t land any punches. After four minutes Mike was saying ‘… time for a break, and a big thank-you to our guests’.

  So much for serious television.

  We were followed by **Abigail**.

  In the evening we put away our manila folder marked ‘Violence’ and took out the one marked ‘Sex’ and went up to ‘Late Line’.

  We were met in the corridor.

  ‘We’re here to do sex,’ we said.

  ‘Oh yes,’ they said, ‘come this way.’

  Since I wrote this piece I have learned a little more about the Green Room tradition. It is an eighteenth-century term for the room at the theatre where actors and actresses waited when not needed on stage. It also became something of a club after a show for friends of the theatre. Boswell, in his The Life of Dr Johnson, says that Johnson ‘for a considerable time used to frequent the Green-room and seemed to take delight in dissipating his gloom, by mixing in the sprightly chit-chat of the motley circle then to be found there’. But Boswell records that Johnson gave up the Green Room because ‘the silk stockings and white bosoms of the actresses excite my amorous propensities’.

  For the Course, for the Strike – and for

  the Party

  (adapted, from the Bulletin, 4.8.73)

 
Naturally, being believers in liberation of the human spirit and also constantly on the lookout for a good party, we nosed around the strike at the University of Sydney over the course ‘Philosophical Issues in Feminist Thought’ (some had disputed that the course had a place in a respectable academic syllabus). We found the victory celebration party and the political gossiping more to our taste than the front-lawn rhetoric or the committee politicking.

  Before we went to the radicals’ party we had a sedate drink or two in the staff club with some of the more conservative staff, including a senior member of the professorial board who shall remain nameless.

  He expressed a deep dread that the universities, as he knew them, were crumbling. He saw it in the simple things. He said that young staff seemed righteous enough on the big issues but they stole ballpoint pens from the university. They used the university mail for their private letters. (We were reminded of an earlier vice-chancellor who simply told administration to hold all private telephone, gas, and electricity bills that they could detect in the outgoing university mail for three months. The lights went out up and down the North Shore.)

  Our professorial friend said, ‘Maybe I’m crazy but I don’t even take a university ball-point home. And I count the number of private telephone calls I make on my university telephone and balance them against the university calls I make on my home phone. If I make more personal calls on my university phone, I try to balance it by doing some university calls from home.’