FOREWORD (30 page)

He may “rape” the prostitute with his eyes; but instead of getting mad at him, she takes him to bed free.

Wanting to see, but afraid to look, men invent voyeuristic fantasies to heal a paradox, the conflict in themselves.

JESS

I am a forty-four-year-old man (a fat forty-four-year-old man!) with a speech impediment. I have very little formal Men In Love

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education. I am not retarded. I have been on public welfare for much of my life.

The only women I have ever had sex with are professionals. I don’t do this as much as I should like. I don’t like to give a woman less than fifty dollars. And there are so many times when I just don’t have fifty dollars. Now they say that men have for a long time had a buyer’s market. In one sense this may be true. But I have a feeling that a fat forty-four-year-old woman with a speech problem, who was willing to do all the things for a man that I fantasize doing for a woman, could be able to get sex without paying money.

I once saw a fat woman and a skinny woman, in an exhibitionist act in a carnival sideshow. The women made jokes about their figures, to which the men in the audience made such encouraging remarks as (to the fat woman) You can’t get too much of a good thing, baby!” Or to the thin woman,

“It’s not what you’ve got, it’s what you do with what you’ve got.” The thing I remember most, and think of when I masturbate, is the fat woman squatting facing me and saying,

“Look, mister, look! Look at that big hole! How’d you like to stick it in there?”

It is true in one sense that the situation in our society which makes it possible for such a show to exist is very unfair to women. But look – me and the other men paid to see the show. We let the women know that we liked what we saw. Suppose a fat man and a skinny man wanted to exhibit themselves in front of a group of women. Where would they find women who would pay to see them?

I used to measure my fondness for a certain admirable male friend by my ability to forgive his one character flaw: he is a stripshow aficionado.

“How can you go to those dreadful places?” I would ask.

“You should come with me sometimes,” he would reasonably reply. “You’d be surprised at what goes on.” Nancy Friday

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I was. Curiosity, this book in general, this chapter in particular, drove me there. I expected to see a nasty spectacle of mutual contempt – men who sneered, female performers who returned the disdain. Instead, I saw a mutual love feast. Customers cheered their favorites like fans at a hometown baseball game. The dancers responded by trying even harder to please. The audience’s warmth and admiration were tangible, and there was no denying the obvious pleasure the strippers took in being adored by so many men.

One of women’s most popular fantasies is exhibiting themselves to the cheers and adulation of thousands of men. That is exactly what goes on at strip shows. Why was I so prepared to find it an ugly scene? A woman has to ask herself: Do we dislike men who go to burlesque because we feel they will hold what they see in low esteem? Or is it projection and defense – projecting ourselves into the dancers’ place, and angrily defending against the contempt we feel our female bodies must arouse in these men? Is the low value placed on the naked female body put there by men, or by us women ourselves?

A very proper friend recently told me of a secret midnight frolic in a Caribbean nightclub. She got up on stage in pasties borrowed from a stripper and proceeded to outdo the star.

Even though my friend had acted out her desire in an almost fantasy setting – a half-drunk nightclub two thousand miles from home among people gathered for the sole purpose of expressing love for the naked female body, I was awash in admiration(and envy). Most women wouldn’t have taken the risk. Exhibitionism may be a great female desire, but in reality it is usually kept well within safe limits. Only in fantasy can the woman safely control the audience’s response, and guarantee herself beforehand that the men will love what she breaks all the rules to show.

There are women who enjoy watching burlesque. Now I know why. They are not afraid for the reception the strippers will get. Instead, they identify with the way famous G-string stars love their bodies, their breasts, their vaginas. They are Men In Love

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confident that men adore them, too. The audience’s applause confirms that love.

In the show I attended, only one man shouted something awful to the dancers on the stage. The men around him turned to glare disapprovingly. When he kept up the jeering, the manager was called. The man was asked to leave, like an unruly outsider disturbing a family picnic.

Was he maddened that he could not touch what was so temptingly revealed? Was his fury increased by memories of other exhibitionistic women who had similarly seemed to lure him on, only to reject him in the end? Maybe. But it is my feeling that he could be justifiably – if inappropriately – venting his anger against a culture that gives men no audience, no applause, no socially acceptable outlet for their own exhibitionism.

When a young boy is taught his naked penis is offensive to women, he learns shame. A few years later, he would gladly adore every comer and crevice of his girl friend’s body if only she would let him; when he asks for the same response from her, and shyly leads her hand to touch his fly, she slaps him down. That’s when he learns anger.

Not all strip shows are mutual love feasts, and both men and women play games of show-and-look powered as much by anger as by love. For instance, it is usually said that exhibitionism is a purely masculine deviation, but don’t men encounter it every day of their lives?

Take the braless young woman in the wet-look T-shirt, the secretary who wears no underwear beneath her short skirt.

Grateful for any whisper of yes behind the deafening female no, men just can’t believe such women can be making a sexually aggressive move. She may be wearing jeans so tight that her labia are defined like two halves of a peach, but the average man on the comer thinks she must be unaware of how much she is showing. He takes the encounter not as a form of female exhibitionism, but as a sly event in which he “steals” a glimpse of the luscious forbidden.

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The woman, of course, who has spent an hour in front of her mirror, both knows how much she is revealing and doesn’t want to know. She floats in a rosy glow of enhanced sexuality, nervous all the while at how she will be perceived. Her training as a Nice Girl says she would be bad to seek attention or praise for her body too directly. Hence, the fingers that anxiously button, unbutton, and then rebutton the top of her neckline, all evening long.

A psychoanalyst told me this story: When he asks female patients if they are aware of how provocatively they dress, almost invariably he is met with denial. “She can be standing there in a see-through blouse with a skintight skirt that reveals the line of her panties,” he says, “and she’ll say, `Who, me? I’d never be that obvious.”‘

It is not that she minds a man who looks, goes the female refrain, it is
how
he looks that is offensive. This denies the self-accusation of exhibitionism by raising counter-notions of ugly male manners. What is often the point here, I feel, is control. Calculated, sometimes hostile control. The woman wants the right to send out a mixed signal: Admire me, but don’t touch. As for the man, how is he to know that the way he reacts to her is so important to her notion of herself as either a femme fatale or a hooker? Behind this confusing presentation she makes of herself as naughty but nice, she is just waiting for him to make a wrong move. A slight, approving smile from him and she is affirmed, walking past him with all the reassurance in the world. A catcall or snigger and she is humiliated, angry at herself and furious with him. Little wonder that men feel so frustrated, so much in awe, even threatened and resentful of the power of women’s beauty.

This is not to say that any woman deserves the rude remarks she gets from men working on the street. There are hostile people everywhere who need little excuse to vent their rage at vulnerable targets. The shouted insults may even be seen as competitive anger directed not so much at the woman as at the imaginary (fantasy) man she is on her way to meet.

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Seen in this light, bringing the women down a peg is comparable to Mickey Mouse cartoons of knocking the banker’s top hat off with a snowball. None of this may salve the woman’s feelings, but the hurt may be lessened if she could understand the cause: His rage is not directed at me, but at the strictness by which he feels tied and thinks I am free. “If I were in her position,” these men might be understood to be feeling, “I wouldn’t be so snooty, so unresponsive. But goddamn it, I never am in her position. Look at her. My eyes tell her I think she’s a knockout, but her eyes tell me that to her I don’t exist!
She’s making me invisible!”
Jess (above) talks, too, of the one-sidedness of voyeurism.

In the show he attended, even though the strippers were not attractive, “We let the women know we liked what we saw.” What if two equally unattractive men wanted to exhibit themselves? He asks. “Where would they find women who would pay to see them?”

This has a certain pathos. The undressed male is not presented to the little girl as a seductive figure, but as a scary one. Consequently, in the long pre-sexual years she has no chance to develop the association between a naked man and the erotic. Her masturbatory fantasies do not intimately link the two so that forever after they form a Pavlovian chain: See the one, feel the other.

Certainly it is true that many women like to look at men, dressed or not; but the desire dates from a comparatively grown-up stage of life. As such, it is easily kept within the bounds of social control. The new women’s magazines are teaching their audience to delight in the sight of penis, V-shaped torso, and narrow hips. Does this mean that, as women give themselves more and more permission to express their desires, we eventually will find “Peeping Janes” lurking outside football camps and boys’ gymnasiums? I doubt it.

Women’s looking is not powered by the voyeur’s kind of infantile and irresistible longing. From the time when mother’s breasts were all the beauty the world could offer, both sexes have had feelings of enlarged, enhanced life from Nancy Friday

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seeing a gloriously naked woman. The male body holds no such primitive magic. It is one of the dissymmetries of our biological life.

KENNETH

I cannot conceive of American women having such fantasies as exist in your books. In fact, all the American women I have known are real prudes and have as much sexual imagination as a six-month-old baby. Notice I said American women and not another race of women such as Oriental.

I am thirty-two years old, white, twice married and have two beautiful daughters. I have also been in the military for fifteen years.

Now to my fantasies and my sexual life as a whole. As a young teenager, I enjoyed running around the house nude whenever I was alone. I was much larger developed at this time than the other kids I went to school with. Each time I went to the john and the other guys were there, I was always teased about the size of my cock. This all went to my head and I became an exhibitionist. This period lasted five or six years. In my high school years I developed acne, and it was near impossible for me to obtain a date with kids my own age. Therefore, I went out with younger girls. Quite often in these cases, the girl’s younger brother or sister had to accompany us. On many occasions, the younger brother would watch as his sister and I screwed on the back seat. This was a turn-on for me. After high school, I joined the service and have been in the service ever since. I was still a bit of an exhibitionist.

While stationed overseas, I married a beautiful Oriental.

Her skin was luscious, she had nice breasts and an extremely beautiful and hairy pussy. After a couple of years of marriage, I started fantasizing her exhibiting herself to other men, and even fucking someone else as I watched. My own exhibitionist tendencies ceased to exist. Gradually, I talked my wife Men In Love

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into exposing her breasts very discreetly to someone. From there she finally agreed to expose her beautiful pussy. Our main places were freeway service stations, out of town mo-bile home parks; the men were salesmen, repairmen. She became quite good at it and even started to become excited if the person she was showing it to become excited, and because she knew I was getting excited. I then tried to get her to seduce someone all the way. As she was really interested in exciting the younger set, we eventually found a boy of fifteen or sixteen. She seduced him as I watched from a closet. As soon as he left, we had the best bout of sex we had ever had.

From there we tried swapping, but it was a total flop. Back we went to exhibitionism.

Then one day she said she wanted to watch me make it with a young chick. I agreed and since I already had someone in mind, it was rather easily accomplished. What we didn’t expect was her inability to cope with it and this inability drove me to become emotionally involved with this girl; solution –
divorce
.

Now all I have is my fantasies and past memories. Straight sex doesn’t tam me on. My present wife is a prude from the word go, so I cannot fantasize about her.

MEL

My wife did not fantasize before she read Secret Garden.

Now she asks me to tell her wild stories while I masturbate her.

First let me tell you a little about us. I am twenty-six years old, and my wife Brenda is twenty-five. We have been married for six years and have one child age three. I have a high school education with a little college (two months).

Brenda’s body is perfect except for a couple of small stretch marks on her stomach from the baby. Her breasts are beautiful with large brown nipples. She is really a knockout.

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The reason for such a description of her will be clearer after you hear my fantasies.

My experiences with sex didn’t start until I was about thirteen, although I started masturbating at about eight. When I was thirteen this couple moved in next door to my family.