FOREWORD (29 page)

Voyeurism and exhibitionism bear a kind of inverse relation. Each speaks to opposite faces of the coin. There are men who feel complete satisfaction in just looking at a naked woman. This is the pure voyeuristic act.

Others will see a naked woman – in magazines for instance

– and masturbate with fantasies of fucking her. For other men, this one-sided relationship is not enough: They want the woman to become aware of
them
. Their frustration is expressed with catcalls, shouts of praise, whistles, obscenities on the telephone, sexual invitations – attention-getting devices in which desire/ admiration and hostility are mixed in various degrees. When men transfer their own need for attention onto the woman with whom they identify, getting other people to look at “their” woman may bring feelings of pride and pleasure; it may also earn the woman the man’s irritation or anger – he begins to resent his secondary role in all the looking that is going on. Perhaps the most hostile attention-getter of all is the man who exposes himself.

The men in this chapter express these ideas in different ways, sometimes singly, sometimes in interwoven patterns.

One theme will often predominate while the others remain hidden. The dynamics of men looking at women and wanting to be looked at themselves are complex and, to me at least, very new. Therefore, let’s begin with the simplest case: the Nancy Friday

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pure voyeur, a man for whom the act of just looking at a woman is enough.

JAMES

While I love to fuck and have an active sex life, I also enjoy just looking. Simple, unadulterated staring at beautiful female bodies and cunts. To me, there’s no such thing as ugliness when it comes to women’s bodies.

In the last five years, women’s cunts have come out of the closet. When I was a kid, bathroom iconography portrayed the “female parts” as a little hairless V. As a result, I concluded that girls/women were virtually genital-less; and I’m sure this suggested that they were sexless. It is now possible to walk into a supermarket and walk out with color pictures of women’s cunts. These cunts are arrogant, intricate, moist, hairy, labial, honest-to-god genitals as important as any penis.

My many feminist and lesbian acquaintances say these pictures objectify and exploit women, but I find little difference between Betty Dodson’s advocacy of being Cunt-Positive and the latest Penthouse Pet who’s languidly fingering her cunt. I personally don’t think of fucking the women in magazines, or have them beg me to do this or that. When I masturbate while looking at pictures, I basically just respond to the woman, naked; and I’m thankful that she exposed herself to me.

One recent fantasy involves sitting somewhere where I can’t be seen and having a parade of purposeful women walking by in braless tube tops, halters, thin dresses, etc., and feeling very alive, safe, and sensual on the street. I would be inside, celebrating their sensualness. (In a streetsafe society, I’d be willing to wear revealing clothes for the enjoyment of others.) Unfortunately, women with flowing hair and rippling nipples are now said to be asking for rape, our streets are dangerous, and bras seem to be regaining favor.

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It seems as though many women in your books would like to be able to reveal and expose themselves; perhaps in a to-be-hoped-for rapeless and insultless society, sensuality would be like “good grooming” is today – part of the everyday experience for most people. Turn-ons and sexual anecdotes could become like small snacks throughout the day rather than big heavy meals with HUNGER in the middle. Seems healthier.

The ogler, the peeper, the voyeur – they have always been figures of fun, fear, or contempt to women. But sexuality and aesthetics are so intertwined that any discussion of the subject would be incomplete if it did not include the power of beauty

– as a positive and satisfying end in itself – to command attention. Almost every system of aesthetics begins by taking the human figure as a universal standard. “To me, there is no such thing as ugliness when it comes to women’s bodies,” says James (above).

Voyeurism is a general term for people who get sensual satisfaction from looking, often with the knowledge, consent, and even full participation of the sexual object. What would you call the Miss America contest or the afternoon
passeg-giata
on the Via Veneto? The man who peeps into a woman’s bedroom is performing a reprehensible and illegal act; he is raping someone’s privacy. As I understand the term, a Peeping Tom is one who does it on the sly, with no permission given, and often with feelings of hostility in his breast. He may be an unsavory creep, hot to catch a secret glimpse of the sexual and forbidden; but let’s be clear: Morality and legality aside, it is beauty that lures him, too. We name the man who goes to museums to look at Rubens’s nudes an aes-thete. Maurice Chevalier, who loved to look at beautiful young women, was called a
boulevardier
. Yet we sneer at the man who goes to strip shows. For all of them, the eye is one of the organs of love.

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Of course, there is no hard and fast line of distinction; but only when peeping is the sole sexual outlet, only when it is so complusive that the man is driven to find his satisfaction in ways that get him into trouble with his family, the neighbors, and/or the law, are we justified in calling it pathological. To my mind, until that boundary is crossed, it is a matter of taste and manners. Bad taste, bad manners if you like; but nothing more.

James (above) gives us no evidence that his voyeurism is compulsive. Looking is not his only sexual outlet, nor does a stolen glimpse drive him to want more. “I basically respond to the image of the woman, naked; and I’m thankful that she exposed herself to me,” he says. These are the words of the true voyeur: His connection with the woman is through the eye alone.

The use of the word “thankful” is instructive. James sounds like a polite little boy who has just been given something he has long wanted. Once in every little boy’s life, mother’s naked breast, flesh, and body were a feast of life.

Then, just as he reached the age when he stopped taking it for granted – and really began to
look
– it all stopped. Mother began to cover herself up. If James is “thankful,” and at times wants nothing more than a glimpse of the woman, it is because the sight of her body has reopened the door to that time when that was all he needed to feel all right with the world.

The feeling is sensual but pregenital.

None of this will make women love the voyeur more, but it may be a measure of comfort against fear. I myself had always assumed that when men maneuvered to catch a glimpse of naked women or leafed through a girlie magazine, what they saw triggered scenarios of what they’d like to do next: Peeping is the beginning; doing something to the girl is the end. But I was wrong. This is not to say that men who look at
Penthouse
don’t like to imagine having sex with the woman. Some do; but also, some do not. In either case, masturbatory fantasies are a long way from rape.

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The voyeur likes sex. He likes looking. Sometimes the two are combined. Sometimes they are not. James’s fantasies are in line with, and evidence for, contemporary psychiatric thinking, which classifies voyeurism not as a “perversion,” but as a complete satisfaction in itself.

GREG

My age is twenty-seven years. Happily married, have one child When I’m in bed making love with my wife sometimes I imagine that I am screwing another woman, someone I know and whom I’ve been to bed with in the past. I never express these thoughts to my wife, not because she may feel offended, but because I feel guilty.

One fantasy is that I’ve bought an antique mirror. To my surprise, I find that when you look in it, you see whoever you want, but with no clothes on. I take the glass out of the mirror and make dark goggles out of it. By wearing them, when I walk in the street, everyone I see, fathers, mothers, children, men and women – they are all naked. I enjoy the idea of traveling in buses this way, especially when the bus passes a certain insurance company office I know which employs hundreds of young girls. This gives me a strong sense of power, and a vague feeling of guilt, which I enjoy. The feeling of guilt adds to my erotic sense that if they only knew what I was doing....

Here goes my other fantasy: A friend of mine works at a large scientific research place. He discovers a pill. If you take it, you become invisible. I remove all my clothes and go through a lot of houses where I know beautiful women live. I observe many people, dancing, singing, walking, all naked.

Some will press their own firm, rounded breasts, others wash themselves between the legs with soap. One will be sitting on a large chair, lolling back very comfortably as she shaves her pubic area. I like to imagine what their response would be if they knew that some invisible person was watching them.

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This excites me very much. In one of these fantasies that takes place in the bathroom, when a naked girl lathers her body with soap, I pour water on it for her. She is startled, surprised. She looks wildly all around to see what is happening. She wants to put some clothes on. She suspects someone is there, but I have hidden her clothes. After enjoying this scene to my heart’s content, I leave for another destination. I go to a hotel. To my astonishment, all the guests here are women, and they are playing dirty games in the bathrooms.

Two women are making love with each other. This is very exciting to me, because I cannot think what is more exciting than lesbian love. Here is a seventeen-year-old girl. She is masturbating with her fingers moving in and out very fast.

She closes her eyes and moans. In the meantime, she is shouting, “Fuck me, bastard!” Probably she is imagining that her favorite movie star is screwing her. Another woman is using a candle, another has a banana, and one has a slide rule to sate her lust. Just at this moment, my invisible pill begins to wear off. My body has begun to appear for anyone to see.

The girls look at me with surprise and fearful eyes. But one of them is so much in heat that she welcomes me very gladly.

Another end to this fantasy is that the women gang up to punish me for looking at them. They beat me up and throw me into a garbage heap. Maybe they even call the police.

JOSH

I have often fantasized about making love to women who model in magazines, nude and seminude. I see one in a magazine and I fantasize seeing her walking down the street and I tell her, “I have a magazine with you in it nude. You are a model,” and she says, “Don’t talk so loud, someone will hear us,” and then she says, “Let me see it.” I say, “It’s at my apartment.” So we go there, and I show it to her. I say, “It’s hard to believe that your breasts are size forty-four, you being five-three,” and she takes her blouse and bra off and out pop Men In Love

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two big breasts. I stare at them, and I touch lick, kiss, and suck them.

Then she says, “Have you got a camera?” and I say,

“Yes.” So she strips nude and says, “Take your own picture,” and I do. She sees I have an erection, and she says, “I would like to have my lips on that.” I strip nude and say, “Let me give you a tongue bath and suck your sweet delicious cunt “ Then we sixty-nine. We fuck and fuck, and later when she leaves she says. “I enjoyed my day.” As I look at her pictures, I look on the back and they are autographed and her name and address is on them and a short note which reads, Call me any time.

I fantasize about making love to a call girl I meet while walking down the street. As I bump into her, I rape her with my eyes. She senses what I want. So she says, “You know, I make a hundred dollars every time I make love to a man.” I say, “I know.” Then she says, “But yours is free.” The boy’s older sister is getting dressed. Shyly, silently, he watches through the door unconsciously left ajar, enrap-tured by the mystery he sees. Suddenly she catches him. In a mixture of embarrassment and anger, she slams the door in his face. She has taught him that his adoration is dirty.

A few years later, these emotions become formalized, perhaps best exemplified in a kind of ballet found at any beach.

Here are all the young girls, wearing their new bikinis for the young men’s adoration. They are proud of how they look in their near-nakedness; but they are uneasy, too, always adjusting a strap, tugging at an elastic pant leg. The young man looks, sees, and adores; but he knows he must turn away from staring too directly. He and the other guys make up a name for what they are doing and even call it a male sport: girl watching. Behind this socially acceptable facade, he can avenge himself on women who will not show him what he wants to see. He can stare all he wants, mobilizing the women’s guilt against themselves.
What kind of prude could
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object?
It’s healthy, as all-American as the old song “Standing on the Comer,” a kind of national anthem for girl-watchers. The wink in the lyrics was that you would stare all you wanted, but nobody could send you to jail for the fantasies thus summoned to mind.

The boy standing on the comer alone feels pathetic. Standing on the comer as one of the gang whose pleasure it is to look at the girls is a male rite of puberty. Group reinforcement is needed, because this is a time in men’s lives when it seems girls hold all the aces. Sexually ripe, and yet symbols of a culture at least verbally dedicated to virginity, the girls have a dread power. They can reject. By giving themselves the rights of connoisseurs, looking, grading, passing, and even rejecting in their own turn, boys strive to keep themselves in countenance.

Voyeuristic fantasies reverse the woman’s power, it passes from her to the eye of the man. By keeping himself hidden or invisible, the voyeur imposes his will on the woman. She has lost her ability to say no; has been unknowingly frozen into the position of an indulgent mother who allows the boy everything he wants.

Greg’s invisible, disembodied floating (above) gives him the voyeur’s sexual satisfaction without emotional or even physical involvement. Sometimes even fantasy is not enough to ease old, infantile guilts; and Greg is discovered by angry women who put him in the garbage can. But other times they take him to bed. This is the direction of Josh’s fantasies too.