FOREWORD (20 page)

Long before sexual feeling becomes focused in the penis or vagina, we go through what Freud calls “the pregenital phase.” The baby’s first great source of pleasure is the mouth, through which comes food, warmth, love, and milk. Toilet training brings other parts of the body to the fore. The ambivalences surrounding elimination move into the spotlight.

When we do well, we are rewarded with kisses and caresses –

which to the baby are forms of erotic gratification. But sometimes, just when we have done what we think is wanted, we get frowned upon and even spanked. We are like a puppy being housetrained: We don’t understand the complexities of time and place. What is wanted from us? Slowly we begin to learn; certain distinctions come to be made. Degrees of dis-pleasure are perceived: Mother may not like her little boy to pee in his pants, but to shit is even “dirtier.” The anus becomes the most forbidden part of the body, thus invested with its own secret glamour.

As one psychoanalyst said to me, “Considering that both sexes begin by taking pleasure in anal activities early in life, and that our earliest experiences cut the deepest, you might say that to stop being interested is more unnatural, more repressed, than the reverse. The love affair on the part of both sexes with the breast never ends, but women turn off all their interest in the anus.”

Why?

Because mother passes on her own repressions to her
daughter far more successfully than to her son.

Mother was raised to believe girls must be “ladies,” fastidiously clean, fragrant as roses. She has no serious doubt that this commandment is practically divine in origin. She knows. Isn’t she female herself? But she is not so sure of her son. He resists all her efforts to keep him neat and clean. In Men In Love

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the end, she gives up, resigning herself – “Boys will be boys,” she sighs. All his friends seem to be messy, too. It becomes familiar, another way to tell boys and girls apart.

Being dirty may not be nice, the boy learns; but it does not force on him the terrific coefficient of anxiety it has for his sister, who has had standards of personal hygiene drummed into her as one of the surest signs of her femininity.

Let me add here once again that I am talking in generalities, in terms of tendencies. All men are not totally comfortable in sweat-soaked T-shirts, nor do they all desire anal sex.

What I am saying is that
being dirty does not threaten male
gender identity.

MITCH

I am, I’m sure; a typical sex-preoccupied, fifty-year-old married salesman. My wife is attractive and sexy enough so that most of my fantasies have been experienced with her in one form or another, physically that is.

But, as you know, so much of sex is mental. The buildup and preliminary action has become more important to me as I grow older. I love to talk about the coming events, to make little ceremonies out of them. My wife finds this embarrassing and tedious, beyond a few brief words or actions.

Lately, my fantasies have involved the beauty of the female ass. I imagine being with someone very refined and dignified – Claire Bloom or Eva Marie Saint are two of my favorite celebrity partners. We are acquainted for some reason and at a party. I know that I’m going to have her eventually, but am shocked to hear her make dates with other men during the party.

“Dahling,” says Claire Bloom to one man in that wonderful refined British way, “you do have a load for me, don’t you? I’m dying for a little snack. I know a room that’s empty, dahling. Come, I’m famished. Excuse us, won’t you, dahling.” And she leaves me to go off and fellate this man.

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“Richard, dearest! I’m standing here feeling so empty! Can you fill me? Please, dear, I know what depths you can plumb.

I remember that monster of yours – let’s dash upstairs now.

Excuse us please” (to me).

The thought of such an intelligent woman of class being so forward and raunchy excites me greatly. As the party goes on, I observe that she has had oral sex and intercourse in various combinations, never losing her cool dignity between these acts. I’m dejected and disappointed and very excited.

She notices this and starts to make little promises.

“Dahling, I know I’ve shocked you. But that’s me, don’t you see. Anyway, my dearest treasure is for you.”

“Oh, dear, you’re angry with me.” (After returning from a quick lay.) “Please, dear, you know I’m saving my most secret place for you.”

And later as we dance, the thrilling promise, “Oh, lover, I’m ever so ready! You’ll love it. My greatest mystery, all yours.”

Finally alone with her, she wears only high heels. Bending forward from the waist, her beautifully manicured fingers stroke her ass which is soft and so white and gorgeous.

Slowly her fingers part the cheeks, slowly, as she croons her invitation.

“You see, dahling, no one else has touched me here. You may kneel and look, dearest. Oh, how I need to be kissed now. This is really the secret me, dahling. Here, just ‘a little wider. There, sweetheart, my secret lips, yours only. Kiss me gently there – oooh – I’m in heaven.”

And I’m in heaven too. This mental picture of myself making love to the ass of this well-bred beautiful woman. Slowly kissing at first, then daring to tongue those mysterious hidden lips – so well bathed, so sweet and clean. And her words of encouragement. Her sighs. And at last I stick my tongue up into her asshole and suck. I’m erect and full of come – my heart pounds as I suck and lick and kiss Claire Bloom’s ass –

or Diana Rigg’s – or Joan Kennedy’s ass. Then after many minutes of sucking, “Oh, darling, what you’re doing to me, Men In Love

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I’m dripping. I’m so happy.” And at last the refinement is gone – “Suck it, you ass licker. Eat my asshole, you bastard!

Serve me, you prick. I want my lovely ass served! You are licking the asshole of Joan Kennedy” – the names flash through my mind – “ooh–lover–now feed me!” We fall into sixty-nine and I come gallons as she drinks and I lap and we both try to drown each other in cream!

Your name and face and beautiful ass now predominate my fantasy. Has this now become an obscene letter? Please forgive me if it has, Nancy. But now my fantasy is: Nancy Friday reads my letter. She finds it more intriguing than most. She knows how lovely she is in the place I long for most. When her research brings her into my area, she drops by to visit me at my work. I’m not handsome, but a nice guy, safe and discreet. She senses this.

I am honored by her visit. When she tells me that she’s at the nearby Holiday Inn, she knows that my visit to her room would be like visiting a shrine. Could it possibly come true that I could kneel behind Nancy Friday and see and taste her mysteries? And hear that beautiful voice croon to me –

“They’re all yours!” I can only fantasize.

Please don’t be angered by my final fantasy. It is as honest as those that I had before I saw you on TV. I have never written an obscene letter. I don’t make obscene phone calls. I’m really concerned that you might think of my frankness about your effect on me as other than part of my desire to participate in your research.

I’m five-eight, high-school educated, with night courses at college in public speaking, salesmanship, psychology. I sell appliances. I talk to women of various ages all day. Maybe that’s why I’m able to fantasize so readily.

LAWRENCE

I hope I am wrong, but I think that men are more psychologically rigid than women and are therefore less tolerant of Nancy Friday

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sexual images that are not compatible with the image of being male.

When I was ten and eleven, a neighbor boy, five years older than I, would visit me and persuade me to have sex with him. Frequently he would penetrate me anally, which was painful at first but soon became surprisingly pleasurable and I found myself anxiously waiting for his next visit.

This submissive-anal erotic tendency is still with me, although I have left behind the homosexual inclination. Not surprisingly, this sexual desire finds gratification in fantasy.

I meet a woman in a bar who is committed to the feminist movement and against the rigid role playing we have all been conditioned to. She declares that men should submit to sexual dominance by a woman to experience the vulnerability of the passive role. She calls this “asshole liberation.” I act quite naive and tell her that I agree with her. I say, “Maybe my asshole needs liberating.” She suggests that we go to her place and I agree.

Her roommate happens to be home and I am told that if I am sincere in what I’ve said, I won’t object to her watching. I make no objection. The three of us go into the bedroom and I am told to strip naked; the women remain clothed. My excitement heightens when they tell me to get on the bed on all fours, my ass towards them. One woman applies lubricant and the other inserts a vibrator in my ass. It is all I can do to conceal my pleasure.

The formality of the “liberation” ends quite abruptly when one of them straps on a dildo and tells me to lie on my back, and raise my legs high and wide. There I am, unbeknownst to them, relishing their domination, peering up at them from the bed, my legs high and spread. The woman with the dildo mounts me and penetrates me with no pretense of being gentle. I wince in pain but soon the pain is gone, replaced by the tactile rushes of her pelvic thrusts. I am no longer able to conceal my passion. I moan and groan in ecstasy, mumbling,

“Fuck me, oh fuck me,” and beg her not to stop. My enthusi-Men In Love

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asm encourages her and we fuck with abandon, finally stopping when I’ve reached the climax of my life.

Frequently it is the climax of my life. Orgasms from masturbating are some of the best.

The contrast of ideas in the two fantasies above is instructive. Mitch has followed the usual path of male development.

He has taken in the injunction that playing around with the anus is dirty – but he is not going to surrender like a mama’s boy. He wants it anyway! In his fantasy, Mitch meets a famous woman (the center of the world’s attention, as mother once was to him). She is also very refined – once again, the way mother was. But instead of acting passively about anal play, she demands it of him! Mitch gladly complies. The supreme excitement is that
he is thus corrupting authority
–

getting things his way, not women’s. What a kick, what a sense of power, to find that these very pure and exalted ladies, the ultimate extension and epitome of the mother who first forbade him his dirty desires, love asshole play themselves!

What is more, by suddenly using all the forbidden words in the books, by asking of him what is the most taboo of all, these haughty mother-surrogates suddenly change into that image of male delight: the woman who is sexually abandoned as a teen-age dream. The real mother said, “No, never!” The fantasy woman says, “Yes!” to the most forbidden way of all!

By making his fantasy women lose their cool and reduce themselves to his animal level, Mitch’s sexuality is reinforced by a terrific sense of power, his masculine conflict resolved.

Lawrence (above) shows a different path of anal/genital development. Here we see the classic psychoanalytic idea that erotic patterns of submission, domination, passivity, and aggression often grow out of the war of wills that takes place between mother and child during toilet training. Lawrence himself makes the connection, calling his sexual attitudes

“anal-submissive.” Mitch was aware that his anal desires Nancy Friday

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were forbidden, but he battled to fulfill them anyway. Lawrence is more obedient, learning to accept and enjoy the anal intercourse forced on him during childhood.

His story shows that he continued to look for the same pleasures even in heterosexual life. He wants anal play, but it must be “forced” on him, this time by a powerful woman.

This is akin to female fantasies of rape – a way of guiltlessly gaining desired sexual satisfaction by saying it is the other person’s fault.

At one time a dominant woman forbade Lawrence to take any pleasure in his anus. In his fantasy, another powerful female insists that he
does
. In submitting to her will, Lawrence gets what he wants.

As little boys grow older and the psychosexual development continues through puberty, the penis comes into its dominant own. But the old, more primitive sources of bodily pleasure do not entirely vanish from the unconscious.

When a man wants to include the woman’s anus (or his own) in loveplay, he is first of all responding to his physiology, to nerve endings and sensitivities that have as natural an erotic response as any other part of the body; but he is responding to psychological excitement, too: He is breaking mother’s old taboos, a perfectly acceptable, even lauded, male role in our culture. When he asks his wife to kiss his anus, he is not necessarily trying to humiliate her, as she may think. He’d do it for
her
, wouldn’t he?

LEWIS

I’m male, twenty-one years old, single, and not very good-looking. I attend college full time and work almost full time as a print shop apprentice. I am quite horny and have indulged in masturbation almost every day for over fifteen years.

In my fantasy, I am with this very horny girl. I start by giving her a nice warm bath (she loves receiving enemas, or Men In Love

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so I imagine). Next we go to bed. She lays down on her stomach with her legs spread apart, and I begin licking all over her corpulent buttocks and up the deep slit between them. Then I give her a “ream job” with my tongue (analingus). Continuing, I massage her massive bottom and proceed to kiss, suck, and rub my face all over it. Next I mount her fat ass which feels overwhelming to my thin body. (I am built like a rail-six feet, three inches; 160 pounds.) Her entire body against mine is like heaven. Anyway, using lubricant, I slide my cock up her anus which is good and snug. I shove it all the way in, and we’re ready to go. By the way, simultaneously as I’m humping, she is frigging herself. We both approach climax together as I hump harder and harder. Soon, I’m shooting a huge wad of semen up that tremendous fanny.