Ladies and gentlemen: It is with distinct pleasure that I accepted the invitation of your gracious Chairlady, to present my theories and thoughts tonight on a problem so prevalent in our culture and in my estimation so destructive of our romantic relationships (the bond of which glues together all civilized society) that it is a wonder this problem has not been popularly described hitherto, nor even superficially treated in those specialized annals of Freudian persuasion which we all like to read late at nights. I am speaking, of course, of the Male FEAR OF PENETRATION.
Not long ago a man of my professional acquaintance, a rigid man devoid of the slightest introspection, a man virulently opposed to homosexual behavior per se (in fact, a doctor for the Public Health Service and so a colleague of mine), informed me that he had considered for some time writing a paper on what he termed “THE FEAR OF PENETRATION” which was increasingly being exhibited, he claimed, by female patients of his in a sex clinic he conducted privately in various nightclubs as a lucrative moonlight. I asked this public health servant (who will remain nameless here) whether the incidence of sexual phobia was only being diagnosed among his female patients at the nightclub. He then tartly responded: “What do you mean?”
What I meant (as I carefully explained to him then) was that—quite apart from women’s FEAR OF PENETRATION as having been classically described as locked-knees, adamant refusal to remove panty-hose, and a general lack of lubricous vaginal secretions upon insertion of an empathic penis—there was yet another underlying pathology at work here: an anxiety hysteria peculiar to heterosexual males in epidemic proportions, which (it can be argued) is a precondition and precursor for the spill over occurrence of the more frequently recognized and avidly described female coition phobias. In point of fact, I asked the good doctor whether he had not considered a more generalized and equitable application of his diagnoses and whether he was not (judging from the tight moralistic line that then appeared upon his unsmiling mouth) afraid of being “PENETRATED” himself.
It seemed (and still seems) rather incongruous to me that some men can specialize in making women more receptive to anal, vaginal, or oral entry, when they, themselves (metaphorically, if not in fact) keep their hands ever-cupped defensively over their own orifices.
Recently, ladies and gentlemen, I joined a country club where men of upper middle class incomes and demeanor meet to attend the ritualistic and still exclusively male game of golf. One large, beefy, middle-aged gentleman in studded oxfords and blaring seersucker slacks (the requisite attire) had stopped outside the clubhouse at the ninth hole for a final five yard putt. His caddie, an appealing, if callow, youth of willowy frame and a fading case of acne (usually employed as towel giver—I recalled—in the club house dressing room, steam bath and sauna), evidently mistook a six iron for a putter and handed the mistaken item to the gentleman requester, who then in a burst of anger and fit of pique that had him jumping up and down in his cleats on the manicured green, told the youthful caddie in no uncertain terms that he was going to take the mistaken six iron and “shove it up his ass!”
Ladies and gentlemen, please note that this was meant as a dire threat, perhaps the most potent threat available in the lexicon of the heterosexual male, who, in a recent survey by a popular American “men’s magazine” voted that they secretly preferred anal to vaginal intercourse with their spouses and lovers by a ratio of 2–to–1! (The tally left out the enormous number of oral PENETRATIONS—proposed and attempted—but did note one particularly generous respondent who remarked that he liked to dole out spending money (otherwise known as “mad money”) to his wife with the accounting that so many twenty-dollar bills given meant so many blow jobs owed him. And so it goes in the commerce of the family…)
That FEAR OF PENETRATION is ever most in the minds of heterosexual males can be readily demonstrated by the following the circuits of conversation contained within the four walls of most any straight bar or locker room (let alone the country club I no longer frequent). First usually will begin the perfunctory, almost obligatory, denigration of some ex-spouse’s private parts with scatological reference to her “loose” vagina and blimp-like depictions of her mammaries. (Notice there is curiously no demeaning of her anal region, the door at which, on so many occasions—perhaps even culminating in the divorcement papers— the speaker without, had often begged entrance!) Soon, however, the circle of conversation will leave derision of the archetypical mature woman and move on to the real modus offendi of the moment: invariably comment will now turn to “Fred” or “Bill” or “Wayne” or whoever had just stepped away from the bar or put on their pants to flee from the locker room. Violent speculation will then be made as to whether the reason they never married was because they were “fags” or “queer”, the active acronyms for homosexuals. Why such personal deviation in the male tribe should matter to heterosexual men crowded before Miller High Life’s at the bar or draped in towels in the sauna and ostentatiously engaged in dissecting the unworthy accouterments of a female is explicable only if one considers the fear they, themselves, collectively feel when they imagine some man doing to another man what they invariably did to their ex-wives.
Homophobia speaks reams of the violence, hatred, masculine mastering and power-play inherent in the male heterosexual view of intercourse. Such locker and bar room conversation is full of fear because straight men are desperately afraid of being PENETRATED themselves, just as a neighborhood bully is afraid finally of being himself bullied when the tables are turned and a new kid arrives in the neighborhood, stronger, more muscular, and virile…
Ladies and gentlemen, one day several months ago, a distraught young woman came into my office seeking marital advice. She dabbed a white handkerchief at both eyes and for many minutes was too upset to talk. Finally, she told me of the despair she felt in her marriage. She related how she felt distant and invisible and then alternately subjugated and humiliated. I asked her if these feelings happened to occur during intercourse.
“Yes,” she responded temporarily withdrawing her hankie, then added (as if the confession were terrible): “he keeps wanting to have anal sex with me!”
I, of course, was not surprised at this revelation and nodded reassuringly. It is, after all, the worst kept secret of hearth and home. I explained to this despondent woman about the dynamics of male heterosexuality and the power games and men’s overweening FEAR OF PENETRATION. She listened attentively as I related how so many men nowadays pretend to sympathize with the women’s rights movement, but cannot truly hide their chauvinistic hang-ups when astraddle their spouse or lover on a futon or riding rough seas in a waterbed.
“Is there nothing to be done to save my marriage?” she asked pitifully.
I advised her that there was the possibility that her husband could be sensitized to an ACCEPTANCE OF PENETRATION and that this could best be done if he were to be physically involved in a homosexual relationship where he repeatedly was the receptive partner, so as to obtain a woman’s perspective and understanding of the matter.
“But I love my husband,” said the woman, “and don’t think I could share him with another person.”
“Alternately,” I told her, “the only hope is that you, yourself, might (as surrogate) administer your husband’s therapy, which with some practice and K-Y Jelly can be done with a dildo.”
THE HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
Ladies and gentlemen: The quandary of our sexuality in these modern times (the scant few years since estrogen was first synthesized from Mexican yams and the pill subsequently manufactured and now readily available in plastic kits World-wide) is that no longer is the mere act of vaginal PENETRATION between a male and a female the necessary conduit for species propagation. In fact, recent laboratory advances demonstrate that much more success with fertilization of the human egg (and its zygote replications, i.e. identical twins, triplets, etc.) can be achieved in a petri dish than in a bedroom!
Our historical rationale for sexual intercourse has suddenly become wholly outmoded: women do not die as often in childbirth as in prior years, and so live on to collect child support payments from their shaken ex-husbands, who in those same prior years would have ended their brief widowerhood by acquiring yet another young wife as dishwasher and genetrix for his family progeny.
Children once were a form of property that could be bought and sold with dowries; there was a strong economic impetus for the genesis of large families. Such is no longer the case. In this period of transition in the evolution of human copulation, there are consequent problems of adjustment. Indeed, present male FEARS OF PENETRATION may be manifested in part at least as a reaction against the intuited loss of the historical masculine role: the modes and motivations mandated in traditional heterosexual intercourse with male on female and bouncing wildly.
No longer does the enlightened man merely pick up a woman “to have his babies” and “raise his family”. Indeed, there is no longer any real necessity to pick up a woman for this subservient role. For instance, a homosexual male, liberated from FEARS OF PENETRATION, may service just as well as any female partner could.
Ladies and gentlemen, “arranged marriages,” “contract marriages,” “family marriages,” all are, thankfully, terms echoing ever more faintly in our recent past. Now heterosexuals claim they marry for “love”, for an abstract idea instead of the “concrete” of property and children. It is a telling confession that the old hidebound anchor of progenitive necessity has been entirely torn away…and we are still drifting on the flood tide.
In the ancient model, Greek males married women merely to establish material households and have children, and so at the same time arrangement was made for lovers—often of the same gender—for their emotional and sexual sustenance, while, no doubt, their Greek wives did likewise with their Doric chambermaids. (Parenthetically, it is interesting to note that male FEARS OF PENETRATION were not as common in Classical cultures as it obviously appears to be in ours, perhaps because in those bygone days there was widespread acceptance of, and active experimentation with, the homosexual relationship; the study of which, at least among young school boys, became almost a scholastic necessity. I am thinking now of poor Socrates, forced to drink the hemlock, not because he mounted his students in the school yard, but because he taught them to question the existence of Zeus and all those other cantankerous Greek gods! The ancient religious fanatics weren’t evidently as vociferously protective of their anuses as their counterparts appear today; though obviously, they were just as jealous of their sacred deities!) Modern heterosexual men are now expected to view their wives (the primordial child-bearers and seed-gatherers of history) with much the same romantic excitement and expectation that the ancients might have exhibited towards their mistresses and lovers upon arrival back from a long sojourn in Sparta.
The modern revolution in sexual morales has come about almost overnight in the sense of historical time. Perhaps, then, it is no real wonder that there should be such a current epidemic of FEAR amongst heterosexual males. Obviously adrift and confused, their sexual anchor needs to be dropped in a new ethos, one compatible this time with the liberation of orgasm from its outmoded procreative function.
Clearly, a HANDSHAKE now has about as much intrinsic meaning (given the old definition of coitus) as would some present humping and heaving qua the missionary position.
Several questions must be asked and answered: “Since sexual intercourse is no longer for reproduction, for what purpose is it?”
I would answer with careful qualification, “for the purpose of giving and receiving pleasure”. To survive, heterosexual relationships must now look to those other sexual relationships where the manufacture of children has never been the modus operandi. What, for instance, is the bond that keeps homosexuals and lesbians together despite all manner of cruel and unusual impediments? Can heterosexuals now crowding in record numbers into the divorce courts, try to emulate the dynamic? (What can be their choice in the matter with the sexual edifice of traditional marriage having collapsed about their ears because of the advent of the Pill from a Mexican yam in 1960?)
“Since women are no longer the child bearers of history, of what use is gender in determining one’s partner?”
The emphatic, obvious answer is “None”. Otherwise, we would have divided the human race back again into two arbitrary classes, one only sexually pounding the other, when they have now ceased (as a practical matter) to have any distinct physiological function from each other. If choice of gender remains the first criterion for a sexual relationship then the dreadnought of PENETRATION will remain the penultimate FEAR both for men and women, with all its attendant psychological injuries. Yet—as any Bahai will tell you—”the World is One”.
“Should one even bother to have a partner?”
Ladies and gentlemen, I do not pretend to have all the answers to all the questions raised concerning our current sexual difficulties, but ask that each of you makes your own extrapolations towards that end…
It is clear that sexual intimacy, if it is to continue to function at all (having lost its prior evolutionary purpose), must now evolve into an expression of ethical valuation. Sexual intercourse (whatever future form it takes) must become a meaningful demonstration of a rational animal’s regard otherwise we won’t progress past the debacle of procreation. But, ladies and gentlemen, that is not the Star over Bethlehem I see us leapfrogging towards!
On the contrary, what we have presently is a “mind/body dichotomy” where heterosexual males persist in divorcing sex from values and so with obsolete instinct (rooted in the antiquated reproductive technique) grip closed their own sphincters as a kind of relic “self-protection” even while they PENETRATE the vaginas and sphincters of their unwilling partners.
Ladies and gentlemen, reproduction for our species has already evolved from the crude and violent poking of barnyard animals in oestrous to the more careful (and craftful!) machination of microscope and petri dish. Yet all too many heterosexual men are still atavistically engaged in mindless couplings, leading inexorably to psychic unhappiness and breakdown. An otherwise brilliant young attorney yanks off at Bo Derek movies and is arrested. In the nightclub of my fellow medical practitioner, the virgin in the spotlight is worshipped even while the whore in the phone booth is being stuprated. There, beneath the blue smoke and distorted atmosphere lit with flashing neon lights, we can observe the whole mind/body dichotomy at work with all its attendant FEAR and psychological disconnection.
It is often the case that public health problems—and even personal conflicts—will see their manifestations fully mirrored and solemnly acted out on the larger stage of history. A macrocosm can display all the disturbances of the individual psyche. Thus it comes as no surprise in societies still largely dominated by male heterosexuals, on a globe bristling with male-dominated governments, that there should be obsessive concerns about protection of “territory,” “borders,” “airspace,” and “sea lanes”. Even while some incursions against paranoia are here and there made, “iron curtains” are just as emphatically dropped. Walls are erected overnight in a fever of hysteria. Immigration is curbed. The major World Powers look in masculine askance at each other over stalled arms negotiations in Geneva. The Chief of the American State glances up and talks of hanging a “strategic shield” in Space. What is this, if not male FEAR OF PENETRATION?
A SERENDIPITOUS SURPRISE
The “difference” between the sexes may have ceased to have any real meaning. Just eighteen months ago a burly truck driver in Milano, Italy, brought a nine pound baby girl to term. A fertilized embryo with placenta was implanted near his large intestine and was successfully extracted through cesarian section many months later. (This was all accomplished unbeknownst to his comrades on the road who thought his weight gain and protuberant belly had only been acquired through excessive beer drinking.)
It has long been known that men can, with the proper stimulation and quaffing of hormone pills, lactate almost at will. So much for the “nutritive” differences between the sexes!
Next, it has traditionally been claimed that there is an actual physical difference between the orgasms of men and women. This perception continued in part because there was no real interest in understanding the mechanism of the female climax, which was considered immaterial to conception, and much harder to achieve than the quicker, quivering satisfactions of the male. Since the Sexual Revolution of the 1960’s, however, discovery has been made of what is called the G-Spot in women: a point in the vaginal area that, analogous to the male function, is composed of erectile tissue and issues an ejaculate upon arousal. So much for “penis envy” in the female!
A perception still persists to this day—thanks to the advertisements and product hype of venture capitalists—that women are beset with what are peculiarly “women’s problems”. These include everything from PMS (Premenstrual Syndrome) to vaginal itch and yeast infections. The assault on these so-called “women’s problems” is the bread-and-butter for the daily soap operas on TV where terrified housewives are advised every few minutes to stay away from this or that competitor’s tampon and buy Proctor and Gamble’s instead. What is not said in all these announcements of peril is that as many men as women have died of toxic shock and likely will continue to do so. The continued emphasis on “women’s problems” (or “female troubles” as they are also often called), coupled with silence about those problems that confront men, gives the erroneous impression that being troubled per se, is a difference between the sexes. On the contrary, however, men are literally woebegone with problems, not the least of which is my specialty to treat: the crucifixion of sexual dysfunction.
The prostate is a gland in males that contributes to the seminal fluid dispensed during ejaculation. It is not uncommon for this sensitive gland to become inflamed and enlarged, causing great pain upon erection and burning discomfort during urination, which is often mistaken for the clap. The cause of this chronic condition (called “prostatitis”) can be bacterial or just result from long-standing sexual incompetence; and then it can lead to either or both of these again in an increasingly vicious cycle. Prostatitis is a peculiarly “male problem” unaddressed as yet by commercial television. In fact, if it is ever spoken of at all, it is usually mentioned in rather hushed tones as something besetting older men, men long past their sexual prime. Such, I can vouch from personal experience, is not the case. Prostatitis afflicts males as young as twenty! An inflamed prostate is most easily diagnosed by digital manipulation through the rectum, and this is why doctors always culminate a male physical examination by pulling on a rubber glove, which often causes the patient’s teeth to grit in fevered anticipation.
(Here they are, the heterosexual men, spread-eagle over my examination table, their FEAR and PERTURBATION clearly depicted upon their frowning faces!)
A positive diagnosis of prostatitis means months or even years of therapy, the chief aim of which is release of the pressure of the prostatic fluids. In medicine under the old regime of procreation, masturbation was looked upon as something wasteful and evil and even a symptom of mental illness! Back in those days, instead of “self-abuse” (as it was often called) the patient would return twice weekly for his medical practitioner (or the bosomy blonde nurse who assists him) to more indirectly cause ejaculation by digital massage of the prostate, rectally. And herein was made a SERENDIPITOUS DISCOVERY: As with women—who, as I’ve said, have an area of sexual stimulation analogous to a man’s—men were found to have a similarly sensitive area providing orgasms akin to a woman’s; as the initial pain, FEAR and PHOBIA of treatment subsided (along with enlargement of the inflamed prostate) the nurse’s persistently probing hand had discovered the G-Spot in men…
So now you know, ladies and gentlemen! There is no real difference between male and female orgasms. They both have erectile tissues; they both ejaculate lubricants and fluids; they both claim “clitoral” and “vaginal” responses, of which the male variant, located in the prostate by way of the rectum, is vouched by many homosexuals to be the most exquisite and satisfying of all.
You will, however, have a hard time finding any extant literature on male anal sex. (All reference to it has been expunged from the original Greek and Latin texts, wherein yodeled the climaxes of Socrates and Plato.) It is as if there were a conspiracy of silence about the G-Spot in men. (Or at least, until recently, homosexuals have not been overly willing to vocalize for scientists and news reporters!) But any conspiracy or cabal will have its inevitable leaks of information (besides the occasional indiscretion of an overexcited homosexual). For instance, the traditional massage therapy for prostatitis has produced a whole generation of anal addicts, from age 20 to 90, eagerly lined up to bend over for their buxom nurses.
More recently, the Vietnam War exposed some macho sailors to some talented young whores in the Philippines who were adept at “the silk knot trick”. This procedure was accomplished with a long silk scarf tied into nine separate knots with one end tied to the dexterous whore’s little finger. During traditional missionary position intercourse, the whore innovatively kneads each knot, one-by-one (with the same rhythm of coital thrusting) into the sailor’s rectum. Then, just at the precise moment of her customer’s climax, the whore rips the knotted scarf out with a tug. This trick was said to have the American sailors lined up for blocks in Manila, until the civic authorities found out what was going on, razed the brothel, jailed the whores, and left the poor sailors—having just discovered their G-Spots—to die of a weird form of VD! (Prostate massage should always be performed with a sterilized rubber glove, etc.)
So now you know that the G-Spot in men is the secret attractant to homosexual behavior and why such carnal pleasure-seeking has been so potently FEARED by so many procreationists for so long. Heterosexual men have in turn intuited the undeveloped power in their own anuses and, like anything else they do not consciously know or understand, are both frightened and fascinated by it at the same time; or why would they make such constant reference to it (even by invidious remark) or try to vicariously stroke it through their wives’ forbidden portals, whose G-Spots just happen to be located elsewhere?
IN CONCLUSION
I know, ladies and gentlemen, that my talk has been long and the benches hard. I do not know what the future ultimately portends for the evolution of the sexes, or even the survival of the World. All is not gloom and doom, however.
Let me close in a rather up-beat manner by relating what happened to the young wife with the marital problems who had sought me out for advice. The prognosis for her marriage did not appear good. My RX FOR SEX was hopeful, at best. I saw her sometime later, however, and there shone a radiant new glow in her eyes. She appeared very happy. Upon leaving my office the first time, she had—as advised—bought an implement of astonishing size. Initially, her husband protested wildly, then finally one night acquiesced…and it has made all the difference in the world to their marriage, she says. He no longer insists on penetrating her anally, as he has now found his own G-Spot to concentrate upon. (She has, in fact, become quite adept at probing it!) Where their bedroom formerly was a jarring, smoky battlefield with their opposite sexes an emblem of warring combativeness and their physical intimacy a vicious display of sexual power-playing and disconnectedness, now it is a sunny field of undulating daisies with two genderless lambs innocently gamboling.
Thank you, Madame Chairlady.
