Doing It! - Going Beyond the Sexual Revolution (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior Book 13)

by Lawrence Block

  Most of the mail I receive takes the position that the more we discuss sexual problems and the more they are brought out into the open, the better off we all are for it. This is rather obviously my own position—otherwise I’d manage to find something else to write about. But once in awhile someone goes to bat for ignorance and I get a letter like the following one. It came not to this column but in response to a book of mine (though the writer doesn’t make it clear which book) and I thought I’d like to share it with you.

  Mr. Wells,

  After reading your books, I am firmly convinced that you, along with Masters and Johnson, Kinsey, Freud and Krafft-Ebing, are making a great to-do about nothing. The facts follow.

  If an adolescent is told that masturbation is wrong and then he proceeds to do it, and finds it enjoyable, then if he has any intelligence he realizes that he has been misinformed, and like myself, masturbates until his senses have told him to stop, or the semen begins to abate, whichever comes first.

  As to premarital intercourse, we are aware of the fact that a woman or girl does not ovulate every day of the month. While the chance does exist that on a given day almost any girl can be impregnated, with any kind of precaution you can certainly reduce the chances—i.e., condom, pills, etc. When single preferred being masturbated or “dry fucking” to climax.

  Homosexuality—Every month lesbians for the most part are reminded that they are women. Also who ever heard of a “gay” fellow giving birth to boy or girl. My homosexual history consists of one incident, wherein I, seventeen years old, at the time, was given a “blow” job by a forty-year-old man. He sucked me to climax, I did not reciprocate.

  Have been married twenty-two years, have four daughters, have never had any extramarital encounters. My wife and I 69 together. However at climax we are both agreed that the penis should be in the vagina.

  Apparently these people who write you have gregarious sexual appetites. The thought of some guy fucking my wife sounds, and I imagine would be, uncomfortable.

  Some people claim that only forty percent of all married couples go down on each other. It is my opinion that if a hundred percent did, every prostitute in America would be on welfare. Divorcées and other segments of our subculture are something else. In conclusion, I can only add that any married couple who really love each other haven’t any need to go abroad for something they should be getting at home.

  Thomas

  Uh-huh.

  I hardly know where to start. If Thomas seriously thinks that masturbatory guilt is never a great problem because the teen-ager who masturbates can tell it feels good and thus can’t be harmful—well, if he seriously believes that, he probably also believes that girls don’t get pregnant now that modern contraceptive measures exist, and that oral sex is the only thing keeping prostitutes in business. And I suppose he’s had these beliefs for years, ever since his mother found him under a cabbage leaf. I’m not sure I follow Thomas’s remarks on homosexuality. The gist seems to be that we need only ignore things and they’ll go away. Well, we pursued more or less that policy toward Red China for over twenty years with no discernible success.

  So if I’m making a big to-do about nothing, I guess I’ll just go ahead and keep doing so. So, I suspect, will Masters and Johnson—and if Thomas ever acquainted himself with some of their work and their enormous successes in treating human sexual dysfunction, he might not be so quick to urge them to enter another line of work. As far as Kinsey, Freud, and Krafft-Ebing are concerned, Thomas might as well save his breath; they’re all long in their graves, sad to say.

  Mr. John Warren Wells,

  I also have been reading your column in Swank since its first appearance from the beginning. I had the urge to write you too, but kept putting it off. This is my fetish. My problem is a desire to be dressed in the clothes of the opposite sex. And that is being dressed as a woman in the privacy of my own home. I can’t wait until the day is ended so that I can slip out of my male clothes and slip into my female clothes.

  This is my biggest hang-up. I love female clothes. I have many bras, panties, girdles, hose, slips, half slips, and am what you call a transvestite. And I really dig it. I have a variety of dresses, skirts, and am really good at applying makeup. I have many wigs, long falls especially. My only regret is that I am not able to go out in public in these clothes.

  Oh, yes—I’m perfectly normal, AC and not DC. After my complete transformation from man into woman, every time I pass a mirror I lift my skirt to admire myself, my curvy legs and pretty panties. This shift to a transvestite began when I was eighteen. I am 59 now and look 49 with my female clothes, makeup, false eyelashes, and my long fall red wig.

  As this is a fetish of mine for my own enjoyment, I have never been a professional female impersonator, nor have I had any desire to do so . . .

  My only happiness is when I am in these clothes. That is my fetish, getting a kick out of wearing female clothes. Thank you and please keep up the good work you are doing.

  Stavros

  I wrote to Stavros, suggesting that perhaps he would be able to explain his transvestism at greater length. It would be interesting to know just how the practice originated and just what it is about it that excites and pleases him. If I hear anything further from him, you’ll be reading about it in the months to come.

  Readers may recall a letter from Ellen in the May column. Ellen, a fifteen-year-old virgin, wrote in response to my book Women Who Swing Both Ways. She reported on her own bisexual impulses and some experiments in that direction which she had undertaken with Grace, a girl a few years older than Ellen.

  Just last week I received a letter from Grace, giving her own perspective on the changes the two of them have been going through.

  Dear Mr. Wells,

  Hi—I am Ellen’s friend, Grace. I read the letter that you sent to Ellen, and you sound like a cool guy. The kind of person one can trust and be a friend to.

  Well, I’ll write about my side of the problem, or whatever you want to call it. I’ve noticed myself at times getting attracted to women, I mean women that appeal to me in looks. I was like this even before I met Ellen and I am still that way. This goes on back for at least two years. Sometimes I worried about it, but now it doesn’t really matter. I really don’t care if other people find out. If they don’t understand, they weren’t my friends.

  I don’t think it’s weird or perverted at all. People in my class have talked about homosexuality and I’ve taken a stand to defend it. It made me angry at the people’s reaction to it. I say, “Don’t knock it ’til you try it.” Sometimes I think people know I’m bisexual . . . I really don’t care what they call me.

  About the experience at Ellen’s house, when I was staying overnight. I think it started all this thinking about our bisexual tendencies. It surprised me at first. When Ellen and I were kissing, it didn’t feel any different than as if a boy was kissing me. There’s no difference. I might say that I enjoyed kissing Ellen.

  After that, we would talk about it. We talked about bisexuality to these two male bisexuals . . . They said that it is perfectly all right and normal. Then they said to try this touching technique, which they showed us, whenever we are alone together. We couldn’t very well do it with parents watching!

  (The touching technique is described in Ellen’s letter in the May issue—JWW)

  Every time I’m at Ellen’s house now, we sit on each other’s lap, with our legs across each other while we watch television.

  I think I definitely have bisexual tendencies. It’s really amazing how I get attracted to women—I mean I get attracted!! I’m convinced I am bisexual—but I dig men also, don’t forget!

  Grace

  I’ve had several requests for information about vasectomy, the extremely simple minor surgery process which renders a man incapable of fathering a child without in any way interfering with his sexual performance. Correspondents have wanted to know whether the operation is reversible, whether it is 100 percent effective, if it m
ight not have some effect on male potency, and whether it interferes in any way with a man’s enjoyment of the sex act.

  An article in the April issue of Swank is as good a source of information on the subject as I have seen lately. But I’ll take time here to answer the questions most often asked. At the present time, a vasectomy is probably not reversible. I believe there have been a few successful reversals, and I know there is a process being developed which will involve the insertion of a valve which can ultimately be removed if desired, thus presumably restoring fertility. But I would advise anyone contemplating vasectomy to regard it as a permanent thing. If you think it’s a strong possibility that you might want to father children at some future date, I would advise against undergoing vasectomy for the time being.

  A vasectomy is virtually 100 percent effective. There’s a waiting period after the operation before all sperm leave the plumbing, but once a doctor’s examination establishes infertility, it’s a sure thing.

  Almost all men who have had a vasectomy not only report no decrease in performance or enjoyment, but actually insist that their sex lives are distinctly improved. This improvement is usually attributed to the elimination of anxiety over the possibility of pregnancy resulting from coitus. I wonder if that tells the whole story. After a vasectomy, the testes continue to produce sperm at the regular rate, but because the vas deferens has been excised, the sperm are not introduced into the seminal fluid and thus are not a part of the ejaculate. Instead they are absorbed into the body. It’s theoretically possible that this constant reabsorption of sperm has a salutary physiological effect upon the libido.

  The sperm cells themselves constitute only a minute portion of the bulk of the ejaculate. So the whole process of ejaculation feels no different, nor is there any apparent difference in the volume or composition of the ejaculate.

  Sperm banks are very much in the news now, and seem to provide a way for a man to have his cake and eat it, too, by depositing live sperm prior to undergoing a vasectomy so that one can become a father at a later date if one desires. Sperm banks will probably work, although I suspect it’s impossible to tell at this time just how valuable they will be. I think it would be sheer folly to rely upon them to an extreme degree.

  I was quite disconcerted, for example, by a question-and-answer appearing recently in Sexual Behavior magazine. A man of 21 asked if it would be possible for him to place his sperm in such a bank, have a vasectomy, and then have children five or ten years later through artificial insemination. The doctor replied that this was possible without cautioning the man against taking it for granted that the process will work. I think he might easily make a mistake he would regret for the rest of his life. Vasectomy is an ideal birth control method for men who have good reason to assume that they will never want to father more children in the future. For a 21-year-old to make this decision without having sired children, and to use a sperm bank as a form of insurance, seems to me to be wholly unwarranted.

  Sterilization does seem the best method of birth control, and perhaps the only method with good prospects of halting the population explosion on an international basis. I suspect that a quick and easy method for female sterilization would be even more worthwhile than vasectomy in the long run. I hope this does not smack unduly of male chauvinism. On the contrary, my feeling that the woman is ultimately responsible for birth control stems from the same line of thought that holds a woman has the right to have an abortion if she wants one—i.e., it’s her body and she should be in charge of it. In addition, there’s a biological argument for focusing birth control upon the woman. Her biological capacity for motherhood decreases significantly with age, and her chances for producing a damaged child, or for having a complicated pregnancy, increase dramatically as she ages. This is not so for a man; he is as capable of fatherhood, and will produce genetically identical sperm, throughout the course of his life.

  Personally, I wouldn’t have a vasectomy if they were giving away free Cadillacs with them. Irrational or no, the thought gives me hives. Well, we all have our hang-ups, and old JWW is no exception.

  Dear J.W.W.,

  I get a kick out of your column. It’s really great that the average person has a place where he can sound off about some of the things that are on his mind in a sexual way. It’s knowing there’s others in the same boat that makes life a whole lot easier for all of us . . .

  I’ve seen several letters in your column from men who want to know how to get their wives to swing. Well, my wife and I are both swingers, and our experience has been that this is very much of a problem. The average wife will go in for swinging in a big way. It’s getting her started that is a problem, and we have heard the same from the great majority of swingers with whom we have discussed this question.

  Here is what worked for me. When I first began to have correspondence with swingers, it was without my wife’s knowledge. We had discussed swinging and she was not at all interested and thought I would let the matter drop. What I ultimately did was explain the situation to one swinging couple and asked them if it would be possible for us to spend an evening with them, just to talk things over. They agreed and I set up a date.

  I then told my wife what I had done, explaining to her that it would not be an evening of swinging at all but a chance to discuss the topic. She thought I was trying to trick her into something but I convinced her otherwise. So we did meet this couple, and as agreed no sexual passes were made but it was understood all around we were just there for conversation. In the course of it my wife got over her original fear that swinging was not something which “decent” people could do. The fact that another woman very much like herself could discuss this with her made a big difference in her own attitudes. The conversation itself excited her, as I was happy to find out upon our return home, and finally it was my wife who suggested that we ought to give it a try “just to see what it’s like.” Well, we did just that, and we found out that we both dug it—which did not surprise me at all, as I was sure it would be this way once she took the big plunge. Hope some of your readers find our experience helpful. Keep up the good work—we’ve been telling all our swinging friends about your column, so your audience should be growing by leaps and bounds in the months ahead.

  Luke

  Luke’s method makes a lot of sense to me. I particularly like the fact that it’s based on mutual trust and respect and honesty, all of which is essential if swinging is going to be part of a valid marital relationship—which is what it’s all about, isn’t it?

  And while we’re on the subject, let me say one more time that I cannot put swingers or would-be swingers in touch with one another, nor can I supply correspondence club bulletins or swinger magazines. Check the adult bookstores for material of this type. Just yesterday a man offered to pay me if I would put him in touch with some swingers. It’s a nice thought, but it’s not my thing at all—sorry.

  • • •

  DEP’T OF INTERESTING THEORIES:

  I came across a letter in Forum awhile ago from a young woman who insists that swallowing semen enlarges the breasts. (I guess I should have mentioned this to Arnold, the chap who wants to enhance his girl’s mammary development.) The correspondent insisted that she was one of several sisters, that all the others have been flat chested all their lives, that she began performing fellatio in her early teens and that she credits it with her own extensive breast development.

  Frankly, I can’t believe that sperm ingestion could have had anything to do with her breast growth. However, I can see every reason in the world to encourage the spread of this rumor. Go ahead and swallow, honey; your breasts won’t get any bigger, but just watch how quickly your man learns to love you for yourself!

  • • •

  THINGS WORTH READING:

  You may have seen Xaviera Hollander on television; she’s the young Dutch-born hooker and madam who figured in a recent investigation of police corruption. I haven’t seen her, but when I was researching Tricks of the Trade a lot of g
irls mentioned her with something approaching awe. She’s now written her own story with the help of a pair of ghost writers, one of them Robin Moore (The Green Berets, The French Connection). Her book is just out as an original Dell paperback. The title is The Happy Hooker, and it would be hard to find a better, brighter, hipper discussion of the whole subject of commercial sex. Xaviera loved her work and her enthusiasm shows on every page. A pretty remarkable book and one you won’t want to miss . . . The subject of sexual surrogates is very much au courant these days, and just this week the husband of one of Masters and Johnson’s surrogate sex partners settled a suit with M & J out of court. There are two pretty good books on the subject. David Rorvik has done a fictionalized but informative book called The Sex Surrogates (Bernard Geis Associates) and Dell’s published Surrogate Wife by “Valerie X. Scott” as told to “Herbert de’H Lee.” Valerie is a former M & J surrogate, Herb is a successful commercial novelist, and the book’s a good job. I’ll be publishing a book dealing with surrogate sex partners and other avant-garde methods of dealing with sexual dysfunction. (Available as an ebook, titled The Sex Therapists.)

  • • •

  THINGS NOT WORTH READING:

  I find it enormously depressing, as a writer of sexual non-fiction, to see what masquerades as serious work in this category. There are a couple of West Coast outfits that publish endless volumes of tripe, presumably true case histories and actually thinly veiled pornography. I have nothing against porn, understand, except that so much of it is so godawful dull.

  Anyway, I came across a little abortion the other day called, The Sensuous Group, by S.V. (God knows why the author used initials, since there’s no personal information included; just another rip-off of the Sensuous Woman approach, I guess.) What I especially liked about this one is the cover line: Actual Case Histories Which Probe Boldly Into America’s New Trend. All well and good, right? And then on the copyright © page this notice appears: “All characters in this book are fictional and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.”