How To Make Your Sex Life Even Better
Sexual history - the socio-cultural contextWritten 1970 The study makes reference to Group 1 70 years and over. Group 2 The 45 year olds to 65 year olds Group 3 Adults between 30 and 45 years Group 4 Young adults between 22 and 30 years.
Group 3 (the thirty to 45 year olds) are more adventurous sexually than Group 2 (45 year olds to 65 years olds). For the most part they have at least half a dozen good sex positions, out of a possible seventy or so, in their repertoire. However, there is still a reluctance on the part of a large number of women to accept rear-entry sex on the grounds that it is degrading, and there is a similar reluctance to permit mouth-clitoris caresses (cunnilingus, or oral sex). Even among women who will accept cunnilingus many are reluctant or flatly refuse to apply mouth-penis caresses to their husbands (fellatio), and I suspect that the fear of receiving their partner's ejaculate in their mouths, even though the partner promises to see that this will not happen, is the chief cause. Two other traits also distinguish group 3 despite their comparative emancipation vis-à-vis groups 1 and 2. They are, in fact, traits inherited from these two groups. First, the majority of women in group 3 have gone to their bridal beds without having bothered to acquaint themselves with any techniques of lovemaking. The prominent family doctor who wrote the Foreword to the book Mainly For Wives, remarked in it, 'Unless one has had first-hand experience of it, it is almost impossible to appreciate the degree of ignorance - abysmal is the only word to describe it - and the fear of practical sex that is encountered in clinics where young wives attend for advice and help because they are childless. Many of these young women have never enjoyed normal sexual intercourse, some, no form of intercourse at all. Until they have plucked up the courage to visit the clinic to seek advice, they have tolerated the situation because either they have had no sex instruction in the early years, or the sex instruction they were given was faulty; or other women have told them that "sex is just something for men". This was admittedly painting the blackest part of the picture, but the view is still too widespread among women in their late twenties and early thirties that 'sex is just something for men'. Certainly, the majority of women who do go into marriage with no idea of how to stimulate their husbands sexually, do learn in time if they have patient and wise husbands who have a knack of teaching the art without seeming to force their sexual desires and ideas upon their wives. But precious time has been lost, and, what is more to the point, in very many cases a second or third grade technique is accepted where a first grade reciprocated technique would be operating had the women come to her bridegroom having sexual knowledge - if only a theoretical knowledge - of her husband's sexually sensitive (erogenous) zones, and the type of caress which most stimulates each. As a result of this lack of foreknowledge, the cursory advances which are made in practical co-operation with the partner are all too often accepted as sufficient; whereas ideally love-making should be a continuous exploration and experiment throughout a long term relationship. This outcome means that though the couple may be satisfied, they could find sex even more thrilling than it seems to be for them. They are missing out on a very important aspect of their lives to which they have an undeniable right. Second, there is a too widespread lack of communication between husbands and wives about their sexual preferences and dislikes. I appreciate only too well that the formal sex vocabulary consists of words and phrases which are not, so to speak, in every day use - I have dealt with this difficulty in other places - but it should not be beyond the wit of any couple to devise their own words. The inability to communicate about sex, as I have already said, is, in my view, one of the prime factors in the breakdown of too many relationships. But apart from that, if husbands and wives could only tell one another the kind of caress that excites them most, and make suggestions - each of them, wives as well as husbands - about sexual techniques both of foreplay and sexual positions, their sexual lives could be that much richer. This is one of the reasons why I welcome the more and more frank discussion of and approach to sex on the mass communication media. Ultimately a sexual relationship is an intensely intimate and private matter between two people, but I can see no reason at all why sex in general terms should not be as easily and openly discussed as any other aspect of living. Sexual modesty, in my view, is a completely false modesty. The genitals should be no more private than the hand, arm or head. We all know that other people have them and that those of others closely resemble ours; and I cannot for the life of me understand why their exposure to public view - except in the case of the pathological exhibitionist - should be regarded as obscene or even immodest. Certainly I can see no reason why there should be any such reticence among families, particularly if the children are accustomed to seeing parents naked from earliest childhood. Certainly, group 3 will graduate into group 2 - the over fifties enjoying sex - and group 1 far more sexually enlightened and uninhibited than our contemporary groups 2 and 1 did. But it is the children of our present group 4 - the young adults between 22 and 30 - who will really be able to claim to be fully sexually emancipated. Or will they? The children's group I will still have as much to protest against in their behavior as the group 1 of the 1970s, because I can foresee all kinds of regulations being applied to procreative activity at all events, which will have to be compensated for by lovemaking techniques. The gap between the 1970s group 1 and 2 and group 4 is, as I think I have shown, considerable, and it is from groups 1 and 2 that most of the criticism of group 4 comes. Group 4, who were born between 1940 and 1948, had the advantage of being in puberty and adolescence at the time when the new approach to masturbation was being widely disseminated. Not only that, they have become transformed into young adults during the last four or five years, the period in which the impetus towards a really emancipated outlook on sex in all its aspects, including sexual behavior, has been tremendously speeded up. That a number have taken advantage of this new impetus is clear from the scenes that are sometimes enacted at mass pop group concerts in the Albert Hall - I am thinking of the young lady in the audience there who undressed herself completely during a concert - and at dance sessions in Junior Common Rooms of some of the younger universities, as was reported in The News of the World for 3rd May, 1970. But I always have felt that while there has quite clearly been a definite advance towards greater frankness between the sexes and that young men and young Women have a much freer sexual contact than we had at their age, the conduct I have just described is not widespread. Yet it is by this conduct that the older generations judge the young generation. I wanted to know what the true situation was; whether I was proved right or wrong did not matter; and the only way to find out was to ask a representative group of young men and women between the ages of 22 and 28 a number of questions the answers to which would give me the information I wanted to have. The question was, how to get a sufficiently large group, picked at random, to be frank about their most intimate activities - their views on various aspects of sex, and the experience of sexual growing up. Kinsey showed that the more intelligent and educated a person is, the more sophisticated he or she is likely to be. In others words, the grammar school and university (or equivalent) educated person, who goes into one of the professions, or into business in one sphere or another, from white-collar worker to executive, is the man who sets the sexual tone. This, of course, presupposes that the unskilled and skilled worker is less sexually sophisticated - in such matters as choice of the best sex positions - generally speaking they will not attain the standards of the more educated, smoother handed fellow. Put in another way: the middle and upper classes are franker with one another and more adventurous in their sexual activities, while the working classes are decidedly puritan in their approach to every aspect of sex, which has the effect of making their lovemaking rudimentary and comparatively unimaginative. Though this view of the working classes appears to be contradicted in the past by the higher rate of illegitimacy among them, in actual fact this illegitimacy supports the thesis. Masturbation among boys and girls of working class families is frowned upon by the boys themselves, and if a boy does masturbate, he keeps it secret even from his cronies as a rule. (I feel certain that almost every social worker will be able to draw upon experience to support my own experience here.) Because they have not, therefore, the simple sexual outlet that masturbation provides, and because they must have an outlet, they more frequently resort - and at a much earlier age - to sexual intercourse of the crudest variety, which excludes foreplay and consists merely of penis-vagina penetration; and this without the application of contraceptives. (Coitus interruptus is still the most common method of contraception among the working classes; even the French letter is a sign of sophistication among the skilled artisan group.) Most of this is true today. Adolescent girls from working class backgrounds have told me that they could never bring themselves to seek their mothers' advice on sexual matters; they knew that if they tried the only advice they would get would be, Don't do it!'; and that was no good when it was already done. Their brothers have told me that if their fathers mentioned sex at all, the advice has been limited to, 'Don't go getting girls into trouble!' a warning given once in a fierce tone to hide the older man's great embarrassment. However, gradually these lines which I have drawn distinctly are becoming blurred, as the provision of more and more educational opportunities makes it possible for increasing numbers of working class children to raise themselves above the intellectual standards of their parents. This is bound to have a future effect on the sexual behavior of the working classes, bringing a large section of them into line with those of the professional and equivalent sections of the population. For, though copulation may be instinctive, lovemaking is an art, knowledge of which must be acquired from other sources - mainly books - and fed upon imagination. However, at the moment it is still the middle classes who set the standards of sexual behavior for a people. (I have tried to avoid the old class-distinction terms, but as I have had to use working class in order not to involve myself in euphemistic periphrases, I may as well use 'middle class'.) The working class members of groups 1 and 2 may be as deeply concerned as the middle-class members of those groups, about the 1970 behavior of their adolescent children, who are working off their sexual energy, but if they are, they are keeping quiet about it. In any case, their complaints would not, I think, disclose quite so extensive aspects of sexual behavior as the moans of the middle-class members do. It was upon this basis, then, that I decided to conduct my survey, and fortunately I had at my disposal a means of obtaining my sample. I had in my files the names of several men and women who had been in touch with me about sexual matters at one time or another, and who, from the fact that they were articulate about sex indicated that they had the backgrounds I wanted my sample to have. These were people who could articulate issues around male sexual dysfunction, matters which would be unknown to most of the population. Sex is, by its very nature, still a difficult area in which to probe the individual. It is a very private sector of his experience, and anyone who wishes to probe must tread warily, both so that he does not lose the respect, and therefore the confidence, of his collaborator and his own self-respect, for the line between the investigator into sexual matters and the voyeur is very thin. Perhaps I am not the ideal investigator, but I will not impose myself on anyone who does not voluntarily wish to collaborate with me in my area of research. I am well aware that the statisticians hold that only the sample picked at random in the streets or by a house-to-house random canvass provides valid answers. With this I do not agree. Six years ago I carried out a survey on the habits of British bachelors over the age of 35. I advertised for bachelors of this category to fill in questionnaires. I had a response from 364, and on the basis of their answers to my questions, I drew my conclusions. I am not concerned, therefore, about the validity or otherwise of the present case; that is to say, I do not doubt that from the answers I have received I shall be able to present as correct a picture as if I had gone into the streets or knocked on doors. I am quite convinced that if people, protected by a guarantee of absolute anonymity, of their own free will will agree to answer questions about the most intimate aspects of their lives, in 99 per cent of cases the answers they will give will be genuine and valid. |