FOREWORD (72 page)

Vernon tells us he wants a nice girl, but also equal and opposite in his mind – he wants to get laid, too.

Vernon is so candid about the conflict that you don’t know whether to hug him for being such a little boy or punch him in the nose for being such a jerk. It never occurs to him that the nice girl and the one who will have sex with him might come in the same package.

The young men in this chapter broadcast their tension, their agony and fury at being frozen by assumptions that they know “everything” while they still have no experience at all.

Nor can many of them look to parents for a solid base line –

even if only to push off against.

Ask someone if he has talked to his children about sex.

“Oh, it’s not necessary. They know more than we did at their age. They pick it up in the streets or the movies.” And yet read the words of the young men in this chapter. Do they sound so cocksure and all-knowing? In fact, do they sound very different than you did as a teenager?

Somewhere between the sexual rules taught when they were young and the sexual revolution their children are living in, parents have lost authority. Some have surrendered, mouthing their children’s inane slogans, imitating their styles and attitudes. Others just throw up their hands. Difficult as was the Victorian Silence, at least it had the virtue of consistency. The modem silence is correctly read by children to mean that parents today are so confused they say nothing for fear they will be laughed at as wrong, harmful, misguided, repressed, or square.

Some parents do try to pass on a more loving, guilt-free ethic to children about sex; but to the boy or girl listening to their supposedly liberated 1980s message, what most often comes through is confusion: The parents’ words (attitude) say Men In Love

537

one thing; the deeper music still carries under- and overtones of unresolved anxieties mom and dad got from their parents.

I hope this will not be read to mean I am against trying to prepare children for their sexual lives. I believe in it profoundly. The danger is that parents will tell children not what they really feel but the brave new way they would like to feel. Out of this gap, inauthenticity grows, paralyzing the child, pushing him/her in two different directions at the same time. The result is that young people are left on their own to figure it all out, pooling their anxieties and fears, their half-truths and rock lyric slogans under the pathetically inadequate banner “all you need is love.” This makes our time particularly difficult for young men.

The same studies that reveal both sexes say they believe in one standard nevertheless often show that the boy is still expected to take the sexual initiative. He is the great sex expert.

Reading these pages, we come to understand the crushing weight this imposes on male virgins. They aren’t even into sex yet, but great things are expected of them. How do you go from uninitiate to sophisticate with nothing in between?

The boy who is still timid about asking a girl to go to the movies is supposed to show no fear of rejection about inviting her into the bedroom afterwards; once there, he must display all the technique of a gynecologist.

Questions about the first step, worries about the First Time, unresolved, unmediated emotions of love, lust and anger come spewing out all at once. How cruelly these young men describe girls who put out, even as they dream of the nice girls who never will. They write down measurements of the penis they’ve never used. This is the age of the pill, they’ve read all the books, they can spell cunnilingus, they die for sex, all around them the whole world is Doing It, but they call a girl who does “a pig.” The boys/men in this chapter are under such pressure that they have become conscious of both halves of the male paradox: They love women, they lust for women, they dream of going to bed with Nancy Friday

538

women ... but they also dread women, fear and are in a rage at them for the frustrations and anxieties they inspire.

In time, as sexual experience is gained, some of the heat will go out of the conflict. If it were possible to interview these same men in a few years, they would probably look at their words in these pages and smile with disbelief. “Did I really say that?” Their everyday sexual experience will have become their reality in an unexamined way. Knowing how to do it – doing it regularly – how could they justify any leftover anger at women for frustrating them? They are now potent, powerful; proud of their sexuality. “Anger at women?” they’d complacently say. “Not me. I’m a lover, not a fighter.”

But the fantasies in this book tell us something else: The rage is still there
. It has merely been repressed again now
that the man has safely maneuvered his first sexual
experiences.
Even a psychiatrist colleague of mine, a man usually sensitive to emotional issues, preferred not to think about the dilemma of the men in this chapter. “This stuff is boring,” he said after reading these pages. “These men are all virgins. So what?”

EDDIE

I am a twenty-two-year-old white middle-class college-educated virgin. Male.
Virgin
. How that word fascinates me, with sick, gnawing despair, hysteria, amusement, awe. How often it seems Eternal, a Cosmic Condition, and this sex everybody is always babbling about is nothing more than fantasies. And yet, at other times, sex seems very real, and I feel that not only could I be a great lover, I
am –
I just, in my leisurely way, have not gotten around to sexual intercourse yet. Hopefully it won’t last much longer. I am getting ready to finally cut the family ties and take off for the West Coast, where I feel that I can really begin to develop my life-style.

Men In Love

539

I have read [sic] a very introverted life intimately involved with books, science fiction and fantasy especially. Thus, fantasy is one of the most important aspects of my life, and always has been, on every level, and naturally sex hasn’t been left out. Most of my “daydreaming” revolves around artistic triumph and cosmic adventure, and is at least as real to me as everyday life. Perhaps I’m insane: people don’t seem to think so but they can’t see The Real Me (credit to Pete Townshend, one of my heroes).

Since I almost totally lack experience with women, my most common fantasy involves My First Fuck. A typical situation would be: I am out selling products door-to-door (that’s how I worked my way through college), and come to a door which is opened by a young, attractive housewife, who smiles warmly and invites me in. She is still wearing her houserobe, or a bikini, or a short skirt and loose-fitting, open blouse. As she is pretending to look over the products, she takes every opportunity to bend over and give me a good look at her generous (but not sagging) bosom. She has no bra, so I can see her nipples – stiff, taut. If she’s wearing a skirt or robe she moves her legs around carelessly, giving me many hot glances of her thighs and “mons veneris. “ If it’s a bikini she behaves freely, aware that she’s driving me wild and loving it. Soon she finds an excuse to sit next to me, pressing her hips against mine. Despite my virgin terror, I can no longer resist the temptation, because she has made it clear that she wants me. I brush the outside of her blouse, casually, she smiles knowingly, and my hands slip into her clothes to caress her firm, warm breasts. She sighs with pleasure, her mouth opens, and I kiss her passionately (how else?). My hand darts down to her groin, rubs it so that she begins to squirm; my fingers plunge into her hot, moist cleft and bring her to a rapid, violent orgasm. She is now completely out of control – she tears off my clothes, popping buttons, abrading my skin – but do I notice? All I’m aware of is her fiery, frantic mouth, her eager hand guiding my erection into her.

We fuck vigorously, and I come soon but lose no stiffness, I Nancy Friday

540

just keep riding her, as she writhes and gasps with intense pleasure, panting, “OOH! Fuck me, fuck me! Harder, oh, harder, it’s-so-GOOD!” We keep at it on and off for several hours, fucking and sucking and coming, until her husband is about to come home and she has to let me go – after we exchange telephone numbers.

Often I imagine that, while we are still in the midst of sexual abandon, the woman’s surprisingly ripe and nubile daughter comes home early from school or work, discovers me, and thinks, “Far out! Here I’ve been feeling incredibly horny all day, and mom has a fine young stud all ready to shtup me!” Her mother defers to the daughter’s acute need, and soon I am deliriously fucking an even hotter and wilder version of the mother! Our arousal is so intense that the women lose all inhibition and start making love to each other as well as me. The sight of the lovely mother and daughter kissing and fingering each other excites me unbearably, and I began fucking them even harder than before. Soon we are all exhausted and slick with the various juices of love, idly nibbling my cock, massaging a clit, sucking a teat, frenching, gliding over each other’s tingling bodies. Afterwards the women talk about their luck at having such a fantastic lover just happen to ring their bell. I assure them that any man would be fantastic with such voluptuous women, and next thing you know we’re at it again, and again, and . . .

I pride myself on being relatively nonsexist, since what turns me on is not women’s bodies, but their reactions – how much I turn
them
on. I am a likable, reasonably attractive person; my lack of experience is entirely my own fault. These scenes could be memories if only I weren’t so inhibited. My upbringing was not at all strict, but asexual – my parents were nervous and unsure about sex and never mentioned it.

It’s hard to explain, but everyone in our family seems very conventional, considering our intelligence and awareness; unwilling to push at the barriers of life to see what we can make happen. Sure, this is a very common failing – but the Men In Love

541

fact that most other people are worse off than I has always failed to make me feel better about my own feelings.

I guess all my First Fuck fantasies are generally the same –

initiated by a sensitive, seductive woman, usually not a stunning beauty, because I find the perfectly beautiful,
Playboy
-type sex objects too unreal to interest me as much as the attractive women I see around me. Our sex is outrageously successful, and is usually joined by a second very horny woman after a while. Afraid I’m too selfish to imagine myself with a woman and another man, but then it is my fantasy. I am not sexually attracted to men, and rather hung up about that since I believe that ideally anyone should be ready to accept and give love to anyone. However, when I do have a homosexual fantasy occasionally (almost never about a man I know, just a general Guy), I can get a hard-on, so I guess there’s hope for me. I’ll be ready for anything if I can just get some experience with women under my belt (heh-heh).

Although the Seductive Woman is my most common fantasy, I can also get very aroused by imagining myself as the aggressor, especially in a public place. I love to think about walking up to a nice bookwormess in a library and putting my hands up her skirt (or, more likely these days, down her pants). I would love to goose some of the women I meet going door-to-door, but I’m sure I never will, I’m such a chicken. I don’t care so much anymore about getting into trouble, but am afraid that she will have a very uptight reaction and make me feel like a crude sick pervert and very impolite at that; or even worse that she will respond warmly and instead of being turned on I will be frightened by not knowing what to do, and thus find myself impotent. It is all too easy for me to imagine myself starting something that I can’t finish.

Where are all these liberated women the media are always panting about? Even at school I found them frustratingly inert. There must be something about my attitude that scares them off; indeed it is hard, torturously hard, to show a Nancy Friday

542

woman you like her when you’re terrified by the fact that you want sex so badly! It’s the most vicious cycle imaginable, which I have been trapped in all my life.

I know that I could handle a relationship if I had one, but how the hell does a guy start in this lousy society? I have so many adolescent hang-ups to overcome, yet I am intellectually very mature, so I despair of ever being able to find a woman who can even begin to understand me. An agonizingly frustrating damnable situation that has me chronically depressed and near to tears right now.

But no! Men must keep a stiff upper lip to keep from rusting their typewriters.

OMAR

I’m white, Christian, Republican, fifteen years old, and a damned virgin. I will be sixteen in October. I have never even dated a girl because I am too shy to approach them. I know plenty about sex, and I wish I could put it into practice, but rejection kills me.

I wrote to a girl whom I’d heard liked me, but she wrote back saying she didn’t. I love girls, and collect girlie magazines, but my lack of confidence keeps me from finding a girl friend. Also no girl has shown much interest in me since third grade. I’m near six feet tall, one hundred thirty-five pounds, blond with brown eyes, and reasonably attractive (maybe) except for a few fucking pimples. One girl pursued me through a female cousin, but she laid it out plainly that sex was not her bag. When I made a date to take her to the movies (twice), she said yes at first, but at the last minute came up with a really flimsy excuse. Even my mother told me I had been kissed off, though not in those exact words.

My mom’s a real puritan where I’m concerned, but she’s taught me about sex right and she likes men plenty well. My father died a long time ago. I believe in sex before marriage, Men In Love

543

though not adultery. My mother would be horrified to know I’m trying to get laid. She disposed of my magazines once, too. She only believes in marital sex. S&M and male fags disgust me, but lesbians do not. Pictures and the idea of two nude women (white) making it turn me on. Orientals also turn me on. Twins (both female), nude and screwing really drive me wild. I’d love to screw twins at the same time. Also sex on a beach or in a pool would excite me. Mostly I fantasize about doing it with a classmate or store clerk while masturbating. I never use my hand while masturbating, I stick my cock between two pillows.