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A musing part rant part editorial pure provocation of the moment. October 2002 |
or
where your allowance went
when you weren't old enough for
that brand new thing called Playboy
Fourteen years separate my lover, T, and I. It's not much of an age gap now that we're older, but we have some tangible differences. Take sex: Necking and petting were as radical to his teen years as fucking was to mine, but where he was doing it to early-60s folk music, I was precociously doing it to the tail end of the Woodstock generation and (fortunately) well ahead of disco. Each in our own way, we were pushing the envelop of our times.
Our age difference does present us with some amusing moments, too. I don't remember what prompted this discussion -- certainly it was something date-stamped 1956 -- but somehow we got onto the subject of what T did out of sexual curiosity the year I was bound in swaddling clothes. "I went to the drug store and bought this sex digest. It wasn't much, but it was about sex."
This "sex digest," it turns out, was Sexology magazine, boldly and progressively started in the 1930s, lasting well into the early 1970s. Chaired and authored by medical practitioners, Sexology was pretty much the only publication where monthly you could learn about human reproduction, sexual practices, and the social science and history of sex -- heck, it was about sex, pure and simple. Certainly, the staff's credentials added a lustre of acceptability to the publication (remember, the Comstock laws were still in effect back then), but it was just about the only thing that approached prurient material for at least some of its readers. Well, that and National Geographic, I suppose.
And it's where a fourteen-year-old's allowance money went. After all, he wasn't likely to snag Playboy from the corner drug store; it was far too new, too groundbreaking, and too adult.
Today, the publication looks downright quaint, what with it type-treatment cover and digest-style table of contents. Inside, it relied on pubic domain material, museum photographs, medical illustrations, and clip art for its graphics. Cover art of any kind and nudity wouldn't appear until the 1960s after the last of the obscenity laws had been overturned, but that doesn't mean the editorial staff wasn't savvy. The issue printed the month I was born included a publicity still of Marilyn Monroe, its blurb commenting on our then new-and-growing breast culture with "American men show evidence of partialism to female breasts." It did mean, however, that they couldn't take the risk of adversely attracting smuthounds.
T's past interest in Sexology put my imagination into motion. I tried to imagine a fourteen-year-old him standing at the newsstand, publication in hand, skimming its cover. I imagined him plunking down good allowance money, wondering if it was as brave a move for a fourteen-year-old as buying condoms was for a grown man back then. I tried to imagine his curious mind and his emerging pubescent hormones colluding over the contents. In fact, I wondered, what exactly did he read the month I was born? I decided to track down an issue and find out.
What I discovered was predominately psychosexual writing, a modest beginning to sexual openness, and evidence that some things never change.
Its editorial, for example, recounted various physical problems that might cause frigidity in women, but laid the pinnacle of the problem on a lack of openness about sex. "If boys and girls, especially girls, are brought up with the right approach to sex from the start, these harmful patterns can be avoided. The greatest responsibility for the proper sex education of growing children rests upon the parents." (p.683)
A key article on "vicarious sex life" presented case studies of "persons who, having no definite sex lives if their own, compensate for this lack by becoming extremely interested in the sex live and activities of others." (p. 691) And mostly affecting women, said its author. I got a chuckle out of the case study of a smuthound who "saw all the off-color parts, but he would not permit anyone else in the state to see them." (p. 693) Turns out, his impotence prompted his vicarious practices. I couldn't help but notice the medical swipe the case study took at the Comstock types.
Of course, my favorite case study centered on a woman of 40 who collected "off-color literature." Fortunately, the difference between her and me is that I have a full and satisfying sex ife. Unfortunately, if there's an erotomaniac article somewhere in the forty year run of Sexology, its case studies ight well strike close to home.
The magazine's reliance on contemporary psychotherapy dominates the magazine, often at the expense of of a more compassionate sex therapy. A married couple, in which the husband liked foreplay and caresses and the wife didn't, earned the compassionate "to each his own" reply from a sex therapist, but individuals with partialisms (attraction to big breasts or butts) or outright fetishes were seen as having a neurosis which "can be eliminated with proper treatment." (p. 729) Reparative treatment of a different, precursive sort? You think?
But what really astounded me were tidbits that read almost the same then as they do today. Take a look at this brief on the need for sex education among teenagers:
Recent reports of oral gonorrhea among teen girls who engaged in group sex among their peers come to mind.The need for more sex education among teen-agers is daily becoming more urgent. In a recent survey of a group of teen-agers in Des Moines, Iowa, Dr. Abraham Gelperin, city-county health director, found that these young people had received little or no formal sex education. One boy, 14 years old, had contracted gonorrhea. These teen-agers do not recognize the fact that sexual promiscuity can lead to venereal disease, said Dr. Gelperin. "Adults as well as youngsters should receive basic (sex) information from all sources in what might be termed education for family living." (p. 729)
Of course, I wonder what impact that this news brief had on T, who's polyamory sensibility is, like mine, pretty limited. More than once, he's brought up STDs as a reason he has no interest in shared group sex.
On a more amusing note, I discovered this letter-and-advice exchange:
To which the experts responded:"I recently read in SEXOLOGY that 'the female does not ejaculate.' I am 76 years old. In coital experiences with several wives, I have sensed the emission of fluid at the time of the female climax." ~ Mr. A.D., Oregon
Well, now doesn't that just take the cake? The very question that, next to anal sex, has captivated public curiosity and the very answer that many sexologists routinely provide hasn't change in almost fifty years. Go figure.The only answer we can give you is that which has been established by science: No woman ejaculates. What you think is an ejaculation is probably lubricating fluid secreted by the Bartholin glands of the woman during intercourse. The amount of flow of this glandular secreion aries in different women." -- Editor(pp. 735-6)
Not all of Sexology's contents were necessarily progressive -- abortion liberalization was not a platform issue, for example -- and its fixation on fixing fixations certainly smacked of a psychiatric power trip. But it did discuss sex.
Ultimately, the sexual revolution would make its psychiatric content look like so much antiquainted claptrap and, when the last of the obscenity laws were overturned, Sexology have to fight for its life against the onslaught of print erotica. It updated its language and ran more explicit images. Its board of consultants came to include such experts as Kinsey-peer Dr. Wardell Pomeroy and cutting-edge transsexual expert Dr. Harry Benjamin. It competed as best it could in a marketplace flooded with the likes of The Joy of Sex and, however inferior, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex, not to mention the above-ground explosion of dirty books.
As near as I can tell, Sexology folded in the late 1970s -- I've yet to collect the later issues to know for certain -- and although I don't see much in Sexology's midlife that today constitutes actual sex-positive thinking, I'm reminded that simply discussing sex was bold and brave. Sexology was a start, and in a time when postal inspectors could still seize your publication.
I'll try to keep that in mind the next time I run counter to their ejaculation stance and gush in fulfillment. I'll try to remember that Rome wasn't built in a day. Hopefully, I'll do it from the arms of that now quite mature, former fourteen-year-old who no longer spends his allowance on "a little sex digest." Instead, he spends it on our mutual pleasure. Now that's progress.