October, the First Year
I’m in love ... not just with Beth Hillyer who is utterly, completely wonderfully feminine, but I’m in love with Sheila Grove and Dorothy Stapleton ... in fact, I’m in love with fifty girls. “Bless them all, the long and the short and the tall ...” That’s a World War II song my father used to sing ... and there’s another. “Thank Heaven for little girls.” Only these aren’t little girls ... they are fully developed women with breasts and swaying behinds and soft round stomachs.
Every day when I go to Physical Education, there they are ... girls ... naked, swimming in the pool, playing volleyball, doing calisthenics ... yelling, screaming, soprano-joyous. If I stand by the pool, one of them is likely to shove me in. When I come up spluttering in the middle of other girls, they splash me, or challenge me to a race, or toss a beach ball at me ... and the hour goes by so fast that I can’t really believe it is over ... and then back to the room and I yell for Beth, only she hasn’t come back from her classes ... so I lie down on my bed and think awhile before dinner.
Mostly, I think I am a very lucky Beast. What good fortune saw to it that a homely guy like me should be so lucky? Four weeks ago I had never been nearer to a girl than ten feet. Even when that happened, I used to get perspiry and so wound up inside that I couldn’t even talk to one if she ever happened to speak to me ... which was seldom. Now, it’s easy to banter with them or talk seriously, and they talk back to me ... easily ... unashamed.
Like, yesterday ... I was sitting at the edge of the pool just watching about ten fellows and girls playing water volleyball when Sheila Grove dropped out of the game and scrambled up beside me. She was puffing from the exertion. She pulled off her bathing cap, and with her hands swished the droplets of water off her face and breasts.
“Woo! I’m pooped.” She grinned at me. “You know just two weeks ago when I first came here and had to walk out in front of everybody naked, I thought I’d die of embarrassment. Now it seems the only way to be ... naked. Stanley isn’t such a big shot, either. He told me that he was really scared to death he’d have an erection ... right in front of everybody. He still gets a little worried about it.”
“It’s mind over matter,” I said, grinning at her. “Like if I thought how nice it would be to kiss your breasts ... wingo, I’d be in trouble.”
Sheila looked at me with a teasing expression in her brown eyes. “Maybe I should keep you thinking about it. Males are so funny,” she chuckled. “Roger Wilnor had it happen to him yesterday. Jane Atterman challenged him to a wrestling match. She said she could wrestle better than any of the boys. I guess Roger was thinking about something beside wrestling because suddenly he was really pointing in the air. Everyone who saw him laughed and kidded him.”
“You see why a boy can’t wrestle with a girl,” Roger said, blushing.
“Don’t you worry,” Jane told him laughing. “Once I got you in a hammerlock, you’d forget all about that!”
“He might relax and enjoy being suffocated,” I suggested.
“Seriously, Harry,” Sheila said, “what do you think of this whole idea of boys and girls living together this way? If what’s happening at Harrad ever leaked out, an awful lot of people would be shocked. How do we know this kind of life won’t make us all promiscuous? Maybe after males and females have been so casual with each other they never can really fall in love or will never want to settle into a monogamous marriage.”
“I guess what the Tenhausens are trying to prove with us is that you can love,” I said, “I mean, really love many people in your lifetime. How we will react when we get to the point of settling down with one person is a question that I’ll bet even the Tenhausens don’t know the answer to. We are sociological guinea pigs. Anyway, at the moment I’m quite happy.”
“Have you gone to bed with Beth yet?” Sheila asked and then looked uncomfortable. “Maybe I shouldn’t ask?”
“Why not? The answer is no. How about you and Stanley?”
“No ... but it’s bound to happen sooner or later.”
“Would you go to bed with me?”
“You mean now ... today?”
“I don’t know really when. Sometime ...”
“I don’t really know, Harry. I think the Tenhausens expect it to happen.”
“Did you ever stop to think that one bad little girl with nymphomania or something could wreck the place?”
Sheila smiled. “I doubt if that will happen. Remember, one of the cardinal rules is that a Harrad girl will sleep only with one man between her monthly periods. Any girl here will be pretty strict about that. After all, if there is a slip-up, she’ll want to know who the father is. So, if some girl here develops nymphomania, she isn’t going to be able to play the field. At the rate of one man a month, it would take her the whole four years, including summer vacations, to accommodate all the men in the freshman class. Anyway, Harry, most girls aren’t like that. The feminine pysche is pretty exclusive. I’ll bet you that ninety-nine percent of the girls here within four years will not have had sexual experience with more than three men ... four at the most, and maybe lots of them with just one. Harrad provides the female an exposure to many potential husbands and gives her an opportunity to indulge her natural sexual desire and curiosity without fear and furtiveness.”
“You sound like Margaret Tenhausen,” I said. “But what about jealousy? Supposing some month you decided to sleep with me. Suppose Stanley was in love with you, but you weren’t exactly in love with him.”
“That could be messy,” Sheila chuckled. “But you overlook the way the Tenhausens are very carefully attempting to reorient our values. Everyday we are being shown, and I think convinced, that the individual human being is ultimately good. Jealousy is within our own control. It’s strictly a man-made emotion. Love and sex are two different concepts, interrelated but impossible of satisfactory existence alone. You can love man in general ... but to really enjoy the peak experience of the contact of genital organs with one specific person, you must know that individual deeply ... emotionally, in ... a thorough empathetic contact based on a desire to rationally understand the other person and care for him. The mucous will flow in my vagina and your penis will become erect without this understanding, but the result is simple rutting. Animals do that. Man persists in saying that beneath the cultural veneer he remains an animal ... but it simply doesn’t have to be true any longer. If individual men can be taught to make the effort, they can learn to love other human beings in a brand new way that gives the male and female security and value in each other’s eyes ... ”
“You mean,” I said, “if I were in love with you and valued you, that you wouldn’t be jealous of some other person I might think I was in love with?”
“Harry, I don’t know.” She playfully flipped water on my penis with her toe. “I’m Sheila, spouting Tenhausen gospeL I’m not Beth. If you slept with Beth, I don’t think I could ever understand why you’d want to sleep with me. Would it be because you wanted variety? And if you wanted variety wouldn’t you devalue me, and yourself?”
I laughed. “It’s fun to try and find the answers. I think my own answer would be that I am studying to be a doctor because I find human beings endlessly fascinating. The awe-inspiring mystery of what makes you Sheila, and not Beth, could still make sexual intercourse with either one of you ... without devaluing either of you ... a wonderful exploration. Come on, I’ll race you to the shower, and I’ll scrub your back because it’s Sheila’s back and very nice and fragile and freckly ... and I’m glad you exist in my world.”
FROM THE JOURNAL OF STANLEY COLE
November, the First Year
Last Saturday I went to “E” College for a football weekend. Sheila arranged it. Tom Brierly, a fellow she met in her Pre-Elizabethan drama course at “R” College has a brother at “E” who is a sophomore. Sheila was Tom’s date and I had Tom’s sister, Ruth, for a date. Sound screwy? Well ... more to come. I went along as Sheila’s brother ... Stanley Grovel
Of course, one thing we have all been cautioned about from the very beginning is that Harrad College doesn’t exist. If students at other colleges ask us where we live, we pretend we live somewhere in the Greater Boston area and commute to classes. This is probably good sense. If the outside world were aware of Phil Tenhausen and the Mad Hatter world he has created, we would be all living in a fishbowl with a million sober citizens up in arms screaming that the Tenhausens were destroying the morals of the country ... those are Phil’s words and we all agree that he could double them in brass.
While this secrecy has its complications, it gives Harrad a sense of unity, and most Harrad students seem to think it’s a ball to be the “villains” in the drama. Sheila is no exception.
“I think we should see how the other half lives,” she said. “Please ... please it will be fun to pretend you’re my brother.”
“Other than picking up your bra and panties, and trying to find my way into the bathroom through a forest of nylons, I might just as well be your brother,” I said, teasing her.
“At least, you’ve seen me in my birthday suit,” Sheila grinned. “I can assure you Tom Brierly isn’t going to have that privilege.”
“Big deal ... I’ve seen the entire freshman class of females at Harrad in their birthday suits at one time or another.”
“Has it given you a let down?” Sheila asked. “No more feminine mystery ... just girls, big, skinny, plump. Do they drive you crazy? ... Do you think about sex all the time? I think you should let me read that monstrous journal of yours so I would know better what you are thinking.”
“Stay out of my journal,” I warned her. “And don’t get yourself in a tizzy. I’ve been studying so hard these past three weeks that I scarcely know you exist.”
“Then why do you watch me when I dress and undress?”
“To tell you the truth, I can’t believe that you’d ever get so relaxed.”
“Neither did I,” Sheila said, grinning. “For eleven days I analyzed myself and wrote at least thirty pages in my journal ... all of which sounds silly. Now I take it for granted. You’re just like some girl I could be living with.”
“That statement, my full-breasted friend, is. to use the current vernacular, the living end!”
“Well, I admit I like your anatomy better than a female roommate’s. It’s more interesting, and there’s no competition ... please, Stanley ... will you go as my brother?”
So we went, and I guess it was a good idea, because it gave Sheila and me some sharp contrasts between life at Harrad and life at a small New England all male college.
Contrast # 1: SEX. Sex is number one topic of discussion both at Harrad and at “E” College. But the difference in approach is night and day. At Harrad if you get into a male discussion of sex ... the question is when ... not IF. I know, for example, that I will eventually make love to Sheila. We talk about it often, and have long discussions about man and woman. But we aren’t really intense about it. I think we’ll know almost simultaneously when we want to make love. Things are considerably different at “E” College.
We left Boston about nine-thirty and arrived at “E” about noon. When we finally located Bill Brierly’s fraternity, we found it jammed from attic to basement with fellows and girls. The men were drinking beer and the girls had weak Tom Collins.
Bill Brierly, full of at least two quarts of beer, grabbed Susan like a starving man. “Gotta hug my bug,” he said, enthusiastically kissing her. “Don’t worry if we get separated,” he told his brother. “We’ll be around.”
I could see where this was going to become complicated. Sheila had one Tom Collins. Dubiously, she watched Tom attacking bourbon with beer chasers. I kept Tom company in his drinking, and we reached a happy state of euphoria.
Bill introduced us to a mountain of nondescript hors d’oeuvres, telling us how he and his fraternity brothers had worked on them until midnight. We ate politely, showed more enthusiasm at some boiled hotdogs, then began the trek across campus to the stadium.
Walking through the pine woods toward the football game, Bill joyously began feeling Susan’s behind. Tom walked closely with Sheila, talking to her intimately. I was polite and circumspect with Ruth, who seemed none too pleased with me.
I was obviously not behaving according to “E” College patterns, since I had made no offensive based on the simple fact that Ruth was a girl and I was a boy. Ruth is pretty enough. She is a freshman at “L” College just outside of Boston. As she made quite clear on the ride up to “E” she isn’t going to college to learn anything in particular. She had just read Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, and in Ruth’s opinion the author was plainly a kook.
“Sure,” she said, “there are girls at “L” who are planning to be scientists or what not ... but they’re creeps. I feel sorry for them. They have no choice. If a girl has anything at all, she’d darned soon rather get married and live in suburbia. The hell with how dull it was. Anyway, darned few men want to marry a brainy woman. They want somebody to tell them they are wonderful, and be ready to cuddle with them or baby them.”
“Maybe a girl can be intelligent and cuddly, too,” I suggested.
“Sure, intelligent,” she replied. “She can read the best sellers and take on little civic problems in her women’s dub ... but let her really get her own interests ... let her not be completely children and house oriented ... then watch out, she’s in for trouble. Take you, Stan. You’re going to major in History and Government. I don’t really give a damn about history or who runs what. Now, just supposing that I married you and I was a career woman, a doctor, or make it simpler, a dress designer, or worse, for the hell of it, a lawyer. Do you think we’d stay married long? Heck no! Most men want three things out of a woman ... a nice social hostess for their friends, a good mother to their kids ... and a sex pot in bed.”
“Supposing we were married, and you were like that?” I could see Sheila, sitting in the front seat of the car, straining to hear our conversation. “What would we talk about?”
“Gossip, kids, sickness ... your job ... what’s in Time Magazine ... what’s the sexiest best seller, who some movie star is shacking up with ... what some neighbor is doing to some other neighbor’s wife ... and television when we ran out of higher thoughts.” She looked at me archly, “That’s what my father and mother say and do. What do you want in a wife ... in a marriage anyway?”
Since I wasn’t so sure I knew, I dropped the subject. I also had the feeling that if I weren’t careful, Sheila wouldn’t be able to stand eavesdropping any longer, and both Sheila and I would end up expounding marriage a la Tenhausen to her.
By the time we stumbled over more sober spectators and finally located our seats, the first quarter of the game was nearly over. This was the football game of the year pitting “E” College against their arch enemy “G” College. In sixty years, according to the program, “E” was only one game up on “G.” I sat with Sheila on one side of me and Ruth on the other. Tom had a flask of straight bourbon which he passed around. “W” College was aggressively murdering “G”, College. By the half the score was 21 to o, and three men had been carried out of the game on stretchers while the cheerleaders paid special tribute to them with frenzied cheering. Everytime “E” College made a small yardage gain, or it looked as if “G” College might recover the initiative, Tom, Bill, Susan, and Ruth would jump up and scream wildly and cheer in voices cracked and shrill from previous cheerings.
It was nothing new. I had done it myself at football games. The last year at high school, when I was captain of the football team, three colleges had offered me football scholarships ... but I had suddenly got fed up with it. Get yourself murdered ... for what? A lot of screaming maniacs ... a crowd that is only interested in you for the moment. Only two guys came to see me in the hospital after that last game I played. So I was a limping hero for a couple of weeks. Big deal.
From the quick glance Sheila tossed in my direction, I could tell she w
as reacting to this spectacle of mayhem much the same way I was. In the second half, “G” College, evidently goosed to activity by the coach and old-grads, came to life. After wreaking their share of vengeance on “E” College, they were only a field goal behind.
I guessed that Sheila and I both felt like anthropologists studying the tribal rites of some vanished, primitive civilization. After two months of exposure to the Tenhausen’s Human Values course, I was beginning to sense the eventuality of all of us at Harrad, for good or bad, evolving into a new form of man and woman. Not that I was disgusted at the game or even aloof. It was interesting enough. But I knew I was observing and not reacting like a typical college student. It was an odd experience.
This, then, is CONTRAST # 2. Group spectator sports seem atavistic to Harrad students. If they arrived at Harrad with this as a feeling, Harrad will eventually make it articulate. Not that Harrad students aren’t aggressive. I think they are considerable more aggressive than most students, but they are not competing against each other. They are unified against a common enemy... man’s own lack of knowledge, and the immensity of things there are to know in the world.
This leads to CONTRAST # 3 which is a by-product. The entire Harrad environment has been created for and revolves around individual competition. It isn’t a competition of man against man, rather it is man, like the Greek heroes, against Nature (meaning all that man doesn’t know). Result: Harrad students don’t rebel against studying. A good example is the course in Human Values. Sometimes, I think the Tenhausen’s feel we shouldn’t sleep. In addition to the six courses I’m carrying, (all practically at the sophomore college level) we are required to read an average of a book and a half a week in the Human Values course. In eight weeks we have read The History of Contraceptives, by Norman Himes, The Meaning of Love, by Ashley Montagu, Motivation and Personality and The Psychology of Being by Abraham Maslow, Becoming by Gordon Allport, the Art of Love, by Erich Fromm, and three books on how-to-do it sex, by R. Street, Van de Velde, and Albert Ellis.
The Harrad Experiment Page 4
