Notes about Sexuality and Religion

by Gay Talese.

“If a woman can stimulate herself to orgasm, she is orgasmic and sexually healthy,” [Betty] Dodson declared. “‘Frigid’ is a man’s word for a woman who cannot have an orgasm in the missionary position in five minutes with only the kind of stimulation that is good for him. We must no longer cling to the notion that we ‘should’ have orgasm from intercourse alone.

https://archive.org/details/y000gayt/mode/2up

page 28
Each month she was a new person, satisfying the male need for variety, catering to various whims and obsessions, asking nothing in return. She behaved in ways that real women did not, which was the essence of fantasy, and was the primary reason for the prominence of Hugh Hefner, the first man to become rich by openly mass marketing masturbatory love through the illusion of an available alluring woman. It was a convenient way to carry on a relationship. For the price of the magazine, Hefner gave thousands of men access to an assortment of women who in real life would not look at them.
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page 55
While many politicians agreed with [Anthony] Comstock’s conclusions, there was some reluctance to support him because his corrective methods-which included the use of informers, spies, and decoys, as well as tampering with the mail-threatened constitutional freedoms in America and were more like the repressive practices that now existed in England in the interest of combating immorality. In 1864 the English government, hoping to eliminate venereal disease, had passed a law that forced women suspected of spreading the disease to submit to medical examinations and to wear yellow clothes until they had been cured. In hospitals the women were segregated in special sections known as canary wards. This practice continued for more than twenty years, until the protests of feminists successfully led to the repeal of the law.

Also in England at this time were several presumed cures for masturbation, including a sort of chastity belt that parents could lock between their son’s legs each night before he went to bed. Some of these gadgets were adorned with spikes on the outside, or came equipped with bells that would ring whenever the youth touched his genitals or had an erection.
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page 73
Hefner would not print any advertising that focused on male problems or worries, such as baldness, physical frailty, or obesity. Having made a small fortune at the newsstands by selling a magazine that emphasized pleasure, that linked naked women with dapper young men who drove sports cars and lived in bacchanalian brown-leather bachelor apartments, Hefner did not intend to desecrate this dream with advertisements reminding male readers of their acne, halitosis, athlete’s foot, or hernias.

Hefner believed in health through hedonism; he was an optimist and positive thinker.
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page 74
These magazines ignored the reading interests of indoor urban types like Hefner who disliked hunting and fishing, and dreamed of one day dwelling in a modern bachelor apartment with a gleaming high-fidelity set and having a new girl and a new car. Hefner associated romantic adventure with upward mobility and economic prosperity, believing that men who were successful in bed were also successful in business; and while this was merely theory on Hefner’s part, he intended to promote it in his magazine as no other publisher was now doing.
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page 75
and the 1953 Kinsey report on American women. Kinsey’s statistics stated that about 50 percent of all women, and 60 percent of female college graduates, had experienced intercourse prior to marriage, and about 25 percent of all wives indulged in extramarital sex. More than half of the female population masturbated, 43 percent performed oral sex with men, and 13 percent of the women had at least one sexual experience with another woman that resulted in an orgasm.
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page 75
But for women during the war it would have been almost unpatriotic not to regularly write V-mail expressing encouragement and hope and loving lies, suggesting a sexual fidelity at home that was often as fictional as that of their lovers overseas. The war was sexually liberating for women, particularly those who ventured into the expanded American job market and worked in factories or offices far from the restrictive influence of their parental homes, their relatives, and neighborhood churches. These women were among the first of their sex to earn equitable salaries, and with it they rented their own apartments, and dated different men, and learned much about themselves that would have astounded their domestic mothers, if not Dr. Kinsey. While they wrote letters to men they loved, they made love to men they didn’t, and along with this varied experience and experimenting they developed a tolerance and understanding that would one day contribute to their permissiveness as parents, a permissiveness that would be condemned by moral critics of the sixties.
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page 114 – 116
Lady Chatterley’s Lover [1928] was Lawrence’s tenth and final novel, and it told the story of the frustrated wife of an imperious, impotent aristocrat who had been injured during World War I, and of her affair with a gamekeeper by whom she became pregnant and for whom she left her husband, her home, and her social class.

Despite its adulterous theme, Lawrence was convinced that he had written an affirmative book about physical love, one that might help to liberate the puritanical mind from the “terror of the body.” He believed that centuries of obfuscation had left the mind “unevolved,” incapable of having a “proper reverence for sex, and a proper awe of the body’s strange experience”; and so he created in Lady Chatterley a sexually awakened heroine who dared to remove the fig leaf from her lover’s loins and examine the mystery of masculinity.
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through the character of the gamekeeper, Lawrence probes the sensitivity and psychological detachment that man often feels toward his penis-it does indeed seem to have a will of its own, an ego beyond its size, and is frequently embarrassing because of its needs, infatuations, and unpredictable nature. Men sometimes feel that their penis controls them, leads them astray, causes them to beg favors at night from women whose names they prefer to forget in the morning. Whether insatiable or insecure, it demands constant proof of its potency, introducing into a man’s life unwanted complications and frequent rejection. Sensitive but resilient, equally available during the day or night with a minimum of coaxing, it has performed purposefully if not always skillfully for an eternity of centuries, endlessly searching, sensing, expanding, probing, penetrating, throbbing, wilting, and wanting more. Never concealing its prurient interest, it is a man’s most honest organ.

It is also symbolic of masculine imperfection. It is unbalanced, asymmetrical, droopy, often ugly. To display it in public is “indecent exposure.” It is very vulnerable even when made of stone, and the museums of the world are filled with herculean figures brandishing penises that are chipped, clipped, or completely chopped off. The only undamaged penises seem to be the disproportionately small ones created perhaps by sculptors not wishing to intimidate the undersize organs of their patrons. In religious art, the penis is often represented as a snake, a serpent crushed by the feet of the Blessed Virgin; and priests since the eleventh century, adhering to the vows of celibacy, have rigidly resisted its covetous temptation. Masturbation has always been considered sinful by the Church, and cold showers have long been recommended to unmarried male parishioners as a means of dampening the first simmerings of rising passion.

While the moral force of Judeo-Christian tradition and the law have sought to purify the penis, and to restrict its seed to the sanctified institution of matrimony, the penis is not by nature a monogamous organ. It knows no moral code. It was designed by nature for waste, it craves variety, and nothing less than castration will eliminate the allure of prostitution, fornication, adultery, or pornography.
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page 186 – 187
He was particularly interested in the work of the controversial Austrian psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich, who was opposed to the double standard between the sexes but recognized it, and the general repression of women, as society’s venal way of preserving the family unit that it considered necessary for the maintenance of a strong government. In a male-dominated world, Reich suggested, there was an “economic interest” in the continued role of women as “the provider of children for the state” and the performer of household chores without pay. “Owing to the economic dependence of the woman on the man and her lesser gratification in the processes of production,” Reich once observed, “marriage is a protective institution for her, but at the same time she is exploited in it.”

The average woman’s early social conditioning was described by Reich as “sex-negating” or at best “sex-tolerating”; but in view of the conservative morality advocated by governments and religious institutions, this sexual passivity made women more faithful wives if not more daring lovers. Men meanwhile indulged their unfulfilled lust in what Reich called “mercenary sexuality” with prostitutes, mistresses, or other women that respectable society held in low esteem. Largely from the lower classes, these women were the sexual servants in a system that scorned them and punished them, but could not eliminate them because, as Reich wrote: “Adultery and prostitution are part and parcel of the double sexual morality which allows the man, in marriage as well as before, what the woman, for economic reasons, must be denied.”

While Reich himself did not personally favor prostitution or promiscuity, he did not believe that the law should seek to prevent acts of sexuality between consenting adults, including homosexuals, nor would he restrain expressions of sexual love between adolescents. “The statement is made,” he wrote, “that the abstinence of adolescents is necessary in the interest of social and cultural achievement. This statement is based on Freud’s theory that the social and cultural achievements of man derive their energy from sexual energies which were diverted from their original goal to a ‘higher’ goal. This theory is known as that of ‘sublimination.’ … It is argued that sexual intercourse of youth would decrease their achievements. The fact is-and all modern sexologists agree on this-that all adolescents masturbate. That alone disposes of that argument. For, could we assume that sexual intercourse would interfere with social achievement while masturbation does not?”

Throughout his professional career, which began in the 1920S when he worked as a clinical assistant to Freud in Vienna, Wilhelm Reich’s daring defense of sexual pleasure brought misery to his life and would finally lead him into the American prison where he died in 1957. Departing from Freud’s exclusively verbal analysis, Reich studied the body as well as the mind, and he concluded after years of clinical observation and social work that signs of disturbed behavior could be detected in a patient’s musculature, the slope of his posture, the shape of his jaw and mouth, his tight muscles, rigid bones, and other physical traits of a defensive or inhibiting nature. Reich identified this body rigidity as “armor.’

page 188
He believed that all people existed behind varying layers of armor which, like the archaeological layers of the earth itself, reflected the historical events and turbulence of a lifetime. An individual’s armor that had been developed to resist pain and rejection might also block a capacity for pleasure and achievement, and feelings too deeply trapped might be released only by acts of self-destruction or harm to others. Reich was convinced that sexual deprivation and frustration motivated much of the world’s chaos and warfare – the 1960s’ slogan of the Vietnamese war protestors, “Make Love, Not War,” reechoed a Reichian theme – and he blamed the antisexual moralism of religious homes and schools, along with the “reactionary ideology” of governments, for their part in producing citizens who feared responsibility and savored authority.

Reich further believed that people who cannot achieve sexual gratification in their own lives tended to regard expressions of sexuality in society as vile and degrading, which were the symptoms of Comstock and other censors, and Reich also suggested that the religious tradition of sex as evil had its origin in the somatic condition of its celibate leaders and early Christian martyrs. People who deny the body can more readily develop concepts of “perfection” and “purity” in the soul, and Reich deduced that the energies of mystical feelings are “sexual excitations which have changed their content and goal,” adding that the God-fixation declined in people who had found bliss in sex.

Such sexually satisfied people possessed what Reich called “genital character,” and he considered it the goal of his therapy to achieve this in his patients because it penetrated the armor and converted the energy that nourished neurotic numbness and destruction into channels of tenderness and love that released all “damned-up sexual excitation.” An individual with genital character, according to Reich, was fully in contact with his body, his drives, his environment-he possessed “orgastic potency,” the capacity to “surrender to the flow of energy in the orgasm without any inhibitions … free of anxiety and unpleasure and unaccompanied by phantasies”; and while genital character alone would not assure enduring contentment, the individual at least would not be blocked or diverted by destructive or irrational emotion or by exaggerated respect for institutions that were not life-enhancing.

Partly because Reich suggested healthy sexual intercourse as an antidote to many ailments, his critics often saw him as espousing nothing but pleasure, whereas in fact Reich claimed that his purpose was to allow his patients to feel pain as well as pleasure. “Pleasure and joie de vivre,” he wrote, “are inconceivable without fight, without painful experiences and without unpleasurable struggling with oneself”; although he asserted that the capacity to give love and gain happiness is compatible with “the capacity of tolerating unpleasure and pain without fleeing disillusioned into a state of rigidity.”

Reich assuredly did not believe, as did many therapists who had followed Freud, that culture thrived on sexual repression, nor would he quietly condone what he saw as a church-state alliance that sought to control the masses by denigrating the joys of the flesh while presumably uplifting the spirit. Control, not morality, was the central issue, as Reich perceived it; organized religion, which in Christian countries fostered among the faithful such traits as obedience and acceptance of the status quo, strived for conformity, and its efforts were endorsed by governments that passed illiberal sex laws that reinforced feelings of anxiety and guilt among those lawful God-fearing people who sometimes indulged in unsanctioned sex. These laws also gave governments additional weapons with which to embarrass, harass, or to imprison for their sexual behavior certain radical individuals or groups that it considered politically threatening or otherwise offensive. The writer Ayn Rand went even further than Reich in suggesting that at times a government hoped that citizens would disobey the law so that it could exercise its prerogative to punish…
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page 193
A lawsuit against the Masters and Johnson center by a husband of one of the surrogates, as well as snide speculation in public print about the performance of the machine, contributed to the researchers’ decision to eliminate these features from their laboratory work, although female surrogates would continue to find employment at several other sex-therapy clinics that would be established around the nation as a result of Masters and Johnson’s fame and success. At some of these clinics, couples would be tutored in the art of giving erotic massages and would also be shown instructional films on fellatio, cunnilingus, and the joys of mutual masturbation that were more sexually explicit than what was passing for pornography in theaters on Forty-second Street.

The number of mate-swappers in America, most of them middle-class married people with children, were now estimated by some swing-trade periodicals to exceed 1 million couples; and in a speech to the American Psychological Association, Dr. Albert Ellis, a psychologist and author, said that marriages can sometimes be helped by “healthy adultery.” Group nudity could also be personally beneficial, according to psychologist Abraham M. Maslow, who believed that nudist camps or parks might be places where people can emerge from hiding behind their clothes and armor, and become more self-accepting, revealing, and honest.

Mixed nude bathing and massage became popular during the sixties at such “growth centers” as the Esalen Institute in Northern California, a lush retreat nestled in rocky cliffs overlooking the Pacific where the spirit of Reich seemed alive in the faculty that supervised dozens of sensuous seminars attended by thousands of predominantly middle-class couples that made Esalen a million-dollar-a-year enterprise. Most of the new forms of therapy that had been at least partly inspired by Reich’s work – bioenergetics, encounter, sensitivity training, primal therapy, rolfing, massage-were available at Esalen, where the most prominent therapist was Dr. Frederick S. Perls, a German refugee who had been one of Reich’s patients in Europe before the war.

Like Reich, Perls had become dissatisfied with Freud’s “talking cure” as well as with many of Freud’s rigid practitioners who, in Perls’s view, were “beset with taboos”-it was as if “Viennese hypocritical Catholics had invaded the Jewish science”-and Perls’s therapy emphasized instead new methods for achieving freer body movement, more awareness, fuller expressiveness, and “life feeling.” Too many people were obsessed with their heads and were alienated from their bodies, Perls believed, adding: “We have to lose our minds and come to our senses.”

Much of what was being advocated at Esalen and elsewhere was in harmony with John Williamson’s own attitude, although he wanted to go further than Reich’s followers in altering the sociopolitical system through sexual experimentation-he hoped to soon establish his idealized community for couples wishing to demolish the double standard, to liberate women from their submissive roles, and to create a sexually free and trusting atmosphere in which there would be no need for possessiveness, jealousy, guilt, or lying. Now was the perfect time for such a venture, Williamson felt; society was in turmoil, and people were responsive to new ideas, particularly in California, where so many national trends and styles had started.
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page 295 – 296
Sandstone [commune], and what John Williamson was attempting to create there, was not unlike the idealized community described in Stranger in a Strange Land, the science fiction novel by Robert Heinlein in which a group of men and women lived in isolated comfort, swam nude together in a warm pool, made love to one another shamelessly and guiltlessly, and defied the Ninth Commandment because, as the main character in the book explained, “There is no need to covet my wife. Love her! There’s no limit to her love …. “

But while Williamson would concede a thematic similarity between the novel and his own ambitions at Sandstone, he dismissed the book as an inspirational source, regarding it mainly as one of many simplistic renderings and evocations of a real and powerful desire that has consumed certain men for centuries: namely, the hope of reviving within Western culture the spirit of festival love and joyful coupling, derived from the pagan fertility rites, that existed among early Christians prior to the darkening influence of the medieval church, with its emphasis on sin and guilt.

A man with whom Williamson could identify was the fifteenth-century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, a leader among a group of libertines known as the Brothers and Sisters of the Free Spirit, an erotic sect that considered itself directly descendant from Adam and Eve; they worshiped in the nude in secret churches they called Paradise, and while they indulged in group sex they regarded it as an experience in shared love rather than an impersonal orgy. Citing the celibacy of priests and nuns as contrary to nature, and disagreeing with the notion that sexual pleasure was a source of original sin, the freedom-seeking Brothers and Sisters, sometimes called Adamites, were eventually destroyed during the Inquisition, although a remembrance of their nude gatherings survives in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch.

Closer to Williamson in time and place was the nineteenth-century utopia in Oneida, New York, established by a radical theologian who, with his wife, practiced free love with his closest friends and for thirty years pursued a policy of “perpetual courtship” with myriad lovers on a blissful secluded estate that he identified as heaven on earth. In the center of the estate was an impressive mansion that he and his followers had built, large enough for one hundred people; and surrounding it were other buildings that served as dormitories and schools for the Oneida community’s many children, and factories where the community members conducted several prosperous businesses-one of which, the Oneida tin-plated spoon company, begun in the 1870s, would endure and expand into a multimillion-dollar twentieth-century corporation.
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page 296 – 297
Most upsetting to the church leaders in New England were Noyes’s views on sex and marriage and his assertion that the Bible advocated communal love and physical intercourse between all true believers in God. Instead of monogamous marriage, which Noyes saw as a manifestation of selfishness and possessiveness that minimized one’s capacity to extend love to others, he envisioned “complex marriage,” an arrangement in which harmonious groups of men and women lived and worked together and made love to one another regularly, though never exclusively, and were the collective parents of all children born among them. In an effort to limit the births to a number that the community could financially support, and also in the interest of enhancing women’s enjoyment of sex without fear of unwanted pregnancies or the dangers of childbirth, Noyes exhorted his men to withhold ejaculation during intercourse except on those occasions when he had previously approved a couple’s desire for children, or when he himself had selected a willing couple for propagative purposes.
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page 298
When Noyes believed that certain of Oneida’s young people were mature enough for their first sexual experience, community women volunteered to share their beds with teenaged boys, while Noyes or other older men of his choosing would indoctrinate the female virgins. In addition to pleasing the older people, Noyes believed that this system offered the young the benefit of more experienced lovers-and, since the older males had already proven themselves faithful to Noyes’s policy of “male continence,” there was little chance of unwanted pregnancies. Although the younger members would also be permitted to enjoy sex within their age group, there was constant community pressure against any sign of “exclusive” love. Like everything else in the community, one’s body was to be shared; possessiveness of any kind was considered contrary to the community spirit and the will of God.
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page 302
Before his death in Paris in 1837, [Charles] Fourier had lectured and published works asserting that nineteenth-century man’s inherent greed and destructive nature could not be curtailed and made compatible with the highest goals of world capitalism unless the system of Western civilization was radically altered. Fourier proposed that national leaders divide the populations of their lands into separate groups numbering approximately 1,600 people, each group living and working within a kind of grand industrial hotel, or “phalanstery,” that would fulfill all of a citizen’s private and professional needs.
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While upward mobility through greater production was encouraged, no member of a Fourieristic community could be socially ostracized for a lack of industriousness, nor was any member expected to feel sexual frustration or deprivation: Even the least physically attractive were guaranteed a “sexual minimum” by the “erotic saints” who would make themselves available in private suites set aside for such purposes.

Monogamy among couples was discouraged by Fourier, who also felt that the nuclear family was a detriment to utopianism because it promoted possessiveness, nepotism, inward-thinking, and a narrow view of life that blurred the grander vision of mankind. Although Fourier was unable during his lifetime to raise sufficient capital to construct even a single phalanstery, certain of his ideas were considered meritorious and even practical by such influential Americans as Albert Brisbane, who had met Fourier in Paris and whose book The Social Destiny of Man brought Fourier to the attention of the editor of the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley, who in turn invited Brisbane to use the columns of the Tribune to popularize the theories and fantasies of Charles Fourier; and thus did Fourierism become a minor fad in America.

During the early 1840s, dozens of Fourier-inspired experiments were begun by various utopians, escapists, and advocates of free love. Occupying large rambling houses on remote farms or in the outer thickets of towns and villages in the Northeast, the Midwest, and as far west as Texas, people sought to earn a collective livelihood through horticulture, small businesses, crafts, and light industries; but few of these associations survived for more than two years because they were undercapitalized, hastily organized, and soon splintered by disruptive factions.
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page 317 – 318
By 1869 Noyes believed that his community was sufficiently affluent and spiritually ready to venture beyond the realm of “perpetual courtship” and “male continence” and to attempt to create, through a committee-approved program of selective coupling, a special breed of Perfectionist children.

Prior to 1869, going back twenty years to Oneida’s founding in 1849, only thirty-five children had been born in a community that each year was inhabited by at least one hundred sexually active adults. While several of these births had been accidental-despite Noyes’s preaching, not all of his men proved to be flawless practitioners of continence-an equal number had been born with Noyes’s permission to women who feared that if they became much older they would be unable to conceive.

In addition to the thirty-five children, many other children had been brought to Oneida by their parents, who then surrendered their parental responsibility to the community and also sought to adjust to the community’s prevailing atmosphere of free love. In the free-love system at Oneida, any man wishing to go to bed with a certain woman had to first submit his request to a Noyes-appointed intermediary, a senior woman who then relayed the “invitation” to the desired woman and ascertained whether or not the latter was willing. While any woman could refuse the propositions of any and all men, such rejections were generally not the rule in Oneida’s sex-affirmative society; and the sexual records kept by Oneida’s intermediaries indicated that most community women had an average of two to four lovers a week, and some of the younger women had as many as seven different lovers in a week. The purpose of the intermediary’s ledger was not to discourage the frequency of sex, for at Oneida a bountiful bed-life was considered healthy and proper, but instead it served as a check against those couples who might be overindulging in “special” affections for one another and not sharing their bodies with other Perfectionists. Any tendency toward “exclusive” attachments was discouraged by the intermediary, and Noyes had no intention of altering this policy even after he introduced his plan for selective breeding.
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page 322
But as awesome and vindictive as Comstock was, the censorious crusader was not the worst of John Humphrey Noyes’s worries during the disruptive months of the late 1870s: Noyes had heard horrifying rumors that some Oneida defectors of the recent past were now being persuaded by government prosecutors to come forward and testify in court that Noyes had indulged in sexual intercourse with a number of young community women who were legally under age; and since this was true, Noyes knew that he could be charged with statutory rape.

With such pressure mounting against him, and with lawmen now arresting Mormon polygamists throughout the land, Noyes concluded that he had no alternative but to abandon his community. If he were to disappear, perhaps the enemies of Perfectionism would soon lose interest in retribution, as had been the case years ago in Putney.
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page 505

Among the many issues involved in the liberation of women, the two major fronts in my own personal liberation have been sexuality and economics. Ultimately, they are not separable-not as long as the female genitals have economic value instead of sexual value for women. Saving sex for my lover/husband was my gift to him in exchange for economic security-called “meaningful relationship” or “marriage.” My future depended upon finding the right partner whom I would possess forever with my gift of sex and love. With that romanticized image of sex, in a society that doesn’t have economic equality between the sexes, I was forced to bargain with my cunt for any hope of financial security. Marriage under those circumstances is a form of prostitution.
-BETTY DODSON, American artist-feminist, 1970S

page 506
Even before she visited Sandstone, where she would meet feminists as phallic as herself, Betty Dodson had conducted seminars for women in her New York apartment, consciousness-raising sessions in which the participants were encouraged to scrutinize their own and each other’s genitals without shame or diffidence. Using mirrors for self-examination, and then taking turns spreading their legs for observation by others, the women were amazed at how varied were their genitals’ shapes, designs, textures, patterns: Some were heart-shaped, others resembled shells, wattles, or orchids; and when the pubic hair and foreskin above the vagina was pulled back, fully revealing the clitoris, many women saw clearly for the first time the feminine center of arousal, and they were surprised to discover that clitorises could vary in size and shape from recessed pearls to protruding bullets.

The women learned, too, that the position of the clitoris with regard to the vaginal opening differed from one woman to the next, as did the coloring of the outer and inner lips, ranging from dark brown to light pink. At Ms. Dodson’s suggestion, the women not only observed but also touched, smelled, and tasted their own genitals, and sometimes those of their friends, in an attempt to overcome their childhood inhibitions and Bible-based traditions that marked this physical area as evil, unclean, the site of the curse.
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page 511
When a woman masturbates, she learns to like her own genitals, to enjoy sex and orgasm, and furthermore, to become proficient and independent about it. Our society is made uncomfortable by sexually proficient and independent women.”

Betty Dodson asserted that it was very significant that a woman gives up her surname when she marries, adding: “It is really her identity she is giving up”; and the sex-negative conditioning in which most middle-class women were reared, and which they often reinforced in their daughters, tended to perpetuate the double standard and to deny to a majority of married women the “reclamation of the female body as a source of strength, pride and pleasure.”

Betty Dodson also insisted that the social pressure on women to conform to male-defined standards of respectability-lest these women encounter the social ostracism that befalls the “prostitute or tramp,” the very females that are patronized by many male moral hypocrites-resulted too often in women becoming “crippled” sexually: “Our pelvises are severely locked. Our shoulders are frozen forward. Our genitals are made repulsive to us and a source of constant discomfort. Our bodies lack muscle tone and often are armored with fat. The insidious thing about this system is that we end up accepting the self-serving male definitions of ‘normal’ female sexuality. We vehemently or sullenly put down masturbation and overt displays of healthy female sexuality. At this point we embellish our own pedestals and become the keepers of Social Morality … sexless mothers and house-slaves.”

Conversely, Dodson declared, in a magazine interview in the Evergreen Review: “If we women all got together and became one unified ‘yes’ for sex, it would show us [that] men are just as uptight about sex as we are, only they don’t have to confront that. Since women act out all of their sex fears and reservations, men get to act and feel very sex-positive. Unconsciously they depend upon our saying ‘no’ or being hesitant, fearful, or passive.” And when men failed to satisfy women in bed, Dodson wrote in her book, they rationalized their failures by assuming that the women were frigid, even when these women were capable of satisfying themselves through masturbation. “If a woman can stimulate herself to orgasm, she is orgasmic and sexually healthy,” Dodson declared. “‘Frigid’ is a man’s word for a woman who cannot have an orgasm in the missionary position in five minutes with only the kind of stimulation that is good for him. We must no longer cling to the notion that we ‘should’ have orgasm from intercourse alone. And we must not be intimidated by chauvinists in white coats who still refer to ‘coital inadequacy’ in women when their own laboratory and statistical evidence clearly contradicts this male concept of female response. The truth is very few women ever consistently reach orgasm in intercourse without additional stimulation. To be liberated a woman must be free to choose and state her preference in sexual activity without prejudice or judgment when it is her turn.”

At the sexual gatherings in Betty Dodson’s apartment, to which male friends and husbands were often invited, and where the activities might include anything from yoga to group sex, the women were generally uninhibited and fully capable, in Dodson’s words, of “running the fuck.” Dodson’s women had developed through attendance at her seminars the confidence and ability to take the sexual initiative, to tell their male lovers how they wished to be touched, how much pressure they enjoyed, what positions they preferred, going so far as to straddling a man’s face and controlling the movements, and discovering in the process that men often welcomed the opportunity of switching the traditional roles and becoming the passive partner. And the “cunt positive” attitude that many of Dodson’s female friends assumed enhanced not only their sexual lives but also their entire sense of self-worth. One woman, who, like Dodson years ago, believed that her genitals were deformed and ugly, was persuaded by Dodson’s color slides of female genitalia that she was as attractive as most other women; and the next day in her office, reassured and confident, she demanded a raise-and got it.

page 513
But although Betty Dodson was aware and proud of the progress made by the women in her group, she was not so naïve to think that they were representative of American women in the 1970s, a large percentage of which still opposed the women’s Equal Rights Amendment and doubted that they could, or even wanted to, survive personally or economically outside the conventional system of marriage. Women were not as sexually spontaneous as men, Dodson conceded, but she again attributed this to the historical conditioning of the double standard; and until this tradition was altered, until more women could enjoy one-night stands and “open-ended” marriages-in which the man and woman both maintained casual sex outside the marital unit-too many women would remain largely dependent on a husband or a single lover, instead of on themselves, for sexual, economic, and emotional fulfillment.

“It takes a lot of courage to be who you are in any life situation … ” Betty Dodson said, and “when you get into varietal sex, you have to confront your orgastic potential on a social basis just as a man does,” which was another way of saying that varietal sex for women would be less restricted to the “meaningful relationship” and more to fun and recreation, experimenting and experiencing. “To love only one person is anti-social,” Dodson said, reflecting a view expressed more than one hundred years ago by Oneida’s John Humphrey Noyes; and she added: “It’s a beautiful concept, social sex for life-affirmative pleasure instead of sex based on economics and power, buying and selling, and manipulating with your genitals.”

The problem remained, however, that there were very few safe places in America where an adventuresome woman could go to learn through experience what men had been living for centuries. There were numerous swing clubs, of course, but these tended to be surreptitious gatherings in overcrowded suburban houses with the shades pulled down, and they were frequently raided by the police following complaints by prying neighbors. Indeed, probably the only place in the nation where recreational sex could be indulged in by women in a pleasant and open environment was Sandstone Retreat…