OF THE SUM OF human misery, that part caused by sex research is probably small. But there was a period when I had a hard time, at certain moments, getting Masters’s and Johnson’s faces out of my mind. If you think that God is watching you, it may be limiting but it also lends timbre. To think that Masters and Johnson, in their white coats, are watching just gives you the creeps.
You know what I mean? (Which is like asking, “Was it good for you, too?” And nobody answers. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that writing isn’t strange work.)
Now we have Shere Hite to contend with. She looks a little wasted in the news photos, but that’s because she is on a book tour. (To promote a book you are expected to get it up eight or ten times a day, sometimes in Philadelphia.) It may also be because she is so tired of reading about scrota and anuses.
After a few pages of her book on male sexuality—based as we all know on 7,239 questionnaires filled out (and how) by the type of man who likes to write about his anus and scrotum and parents in questionnaires—I was tired of reading about them, I know that.
The first question should have been, “Do you get off on questionnaires?” The second, “Do you get off on questionnaires alone, or do you also require manual stimulation?” The third, “Is it really necessary for the general public to read your questionnaires, in order for you to get off?”
Don’t get me wrong. I am as prurient as the next man, as long as he isn’t sitting too close. If someone were to tell me, “That photograph lying face down there on the table shows Abraham Lincoln lying naked with John Wilkes Booth and a slave woman thought to be named Elviry,” I would turn it over. If I were told that it was any naked people—with a few exceptions that leap to mind—lying together, I would turn it over. The only movie I ever walked out of on grounds of disgustingness was Pasolini’s Salo, in which Nazis … take my word for it. I sat through all of Animal Lovers.
But I would regret having turned the Lincoln photograph over. If in fact it seemed genuine, I would spread the word—that’s my job—but I wouldn’t enjoy it. I am coming to the conclusion, these days, that there is a lot of stuff I don’t want to know. I don’t want the government to keep me from knowing it; and I don’t mean to suggest that there is anything bad about anuses and scrota, it’s just that I don’t want to know specifically what 7,239 people like to do with theirs.
I like to read about sex as much as the next man, as long as he isn’t making loud noises. But I don’t want to be told by every Tom, Dick, and Harry how it feels to him, and where. I like to read about food, but I don’t want to read a lot of “I like to chew a bite of green peas three or four times and then just let it rest on the very back part of my tongue where it arches up a little and …”
I do not presume to judge this male Hite report as a whole, because I have read only three pages. (In Scribner’s, which is no place to wade through a lot of scrota and anuses.) However, I have taken the trouble to read several of the reviews with care, and I gather that one of the study’s conclusions is that men are tired of being expected to be the dominant one: the host.
Yeah! A woman is never expected to know how to fix the vibrator, for instance—which is why I won’t have one (a vibrator) in the house. We guys get tired of standing like a Colossus night after night, year after year, even if we have a cold. I used to know a little filly down in Raleigh, North Carolina, who wouldn’t let me even start to think I was being dominant enough for her to start getting interested until I had whipped two or three truck drivers and written her a bar-napkin sonnet (always strictly abab cdcd ef ef gg) that caused a certain physiological reaction. That’s tough in one night. I got to where I stopped going through Raleigh.
But then there is this direct quote that keeps popping up in the reviews—Hite’s conclusion that men are oppressed by being “brought up to feel that a vital part of being a man is to orgasm in a vagina.”
Well. Not a necessary part. I don’t guess everybody can recommend it to everybody. I wouldn’t want to have to do it every twenty minutes. There are many, many other things in life. But … did those 7,239 guys think it wasn’t vital? Of course I was brought up to think it wasn’t vital to “fill out” questionnaires.
Okay. I guess it isn’t vital to orgasm in a vagina, and I have been a fool all these years. I guess I just took too much for granted.
BUT I DO KNOW ONE THING. That is the nastiest term for fucking I ever heard.