THE GIRL STANDS IN AN UNEASY CROUCH, ONE HAND RESTING ON THE TABLE. It is dark, balmy and warm with so little breeze she can smell herself and for the first time in her fifteen years, the odor of her sexual juices has a positive meaning. Her skirt and panties are a dark pile on the bench, attached firmly to the picnic table she leans against. Nothing is real but the warmth in her belly and the ache in her thighs, caused by an hour of lying on the table while her date, Jimmie, (or Tom or George or Frederick) had 'closed' the deal he had spent seven dates and ten dollars selling to her.
She is no longer a virgin and there may be hell to pay.
AUTHOR'S FOREWORD:
It took no small amount of fortitude to present this script to the publisher. Very often the knowledge possessed by the writer, the scholar and the statistician takes on a relatively sterile mien after it has been researched, developed and edited, and one is prone to ignore many of the inferences so compiled. If the cause seems worth while, one is also prone to let the chips fall where they may. This book may worry and alarm many parents: to others who have felt the barb of factual occurrences it may point a finger we did not mean to point. The unreasonable thing about guilt is that there seems little point in throwing good money after bad, and what has happened, has happened beyond our best powers of recall.
To those who feel that what we have suggested can not possibly apply to their children, we offer our condolences. If fortune smiles on your smugness and by some unpredictable chance you manage to deliver your child as a young adult without having faced facts, then we are happy for you. There may be some justification for limiting adult responsibility to the raising of one's own offspring. Part of that justification should be the certainty that as a parent, you are mentally, physically and financially able to stand the consequences of failure. Another portion of such justification should be the certainty that your children are capable of equal recovery in the face of disaster.
The prospect of facing any situation similar to those case histories we have presented, which were less than a tenth of one percent of those available, might well chill the parental confidence of most people. This then is the crux of our opinion that juvenile sex education is a two-fold problem. It must first be recognized by the parent, and secondly left to professional educators. Both must possess an acute sense of values, sufficiently developed to understand the difference between ethics and morals.
We have taken a harsh attitude toward moralists and reformers because in researching the maladjustments of sexual delinquents, we invariably discover that the 'offender' has merely exercised a natural capacity in the face of a general condemnation made by non-participants who decry the act and offer as an alternative pseudo-solaces they do not themselves employ.
Sexual adjustment can never be a guaranteed thing, but a great hunk of humanity can grasp it for the reaching. The so-called Sexual Revolution in America by definition must preclude resentment born of oppression, and if we have added a weapon, we are satisfied.
Sincerely, Leland Garner
PART ONE
The Lascivious Savages
CHAPTER ONE
THE GIRL STANDS IN AN UNEASY CROUCH, ONE HAND RESTING ON THE TABLE. It is dark, balmy and warm with so little breeze she can smell herself and for the first time in her fifteen years, the odor of her sexual juices has a positive meaning. Her skirt and panties are a dark pile on the bench, attached firmly to the picnic table she leans against. Nothing is real but the warmth in her belly and the ache in her thighs, caused by an hour of lying on the table while her date, Jimmie, (or Tom or George or Frederick) had 'closed' the deal he had spent seven dates an ten dollars selling to her.
She is no longer a virgin and there may be hell to pay.
She can't see Jimmie but she can hear him, urinating into the park shrubbery. The romance is dispersed but the excitement remains. At fifteen she has become a woman and this is a frightening thing. Her half-apple breasts throb, her pert buttocks quiver and there is no pain despite the earlier certainty that Jimmie was going to split her in two and perforate her intestines with his rooting. She had orgasm which the books said was very difficult to achieve, and almost a second time before Jimmie quit. Her underbody is messed up but good and she wishes for some Kleenex or a towel.
For a moment the pulsation of happiness obscures the throb of fear, and she stands in childish confusion as these opposites battle for control of her unsophisticated mind. The deep, dark woods and the rough table top and glint of oxidized metal from Jimmie's car parked a few feet away are very unreal, but her eyes, staring out into the blackness see a million visions which are very real.
* * *
She had been barely six when her father found the better job. It meant a new house in a new neighborhood and her mother had said the school was much nicer. It wasn't much different to Janie, except that her room was larger and it was only two blocks to school where she was in the first grade. There were more kids to play with in the tract. But she was still alone a lot of the time. New neighborhood or not, her mother seemed to ferret out clubs and church doings and her father was away twelve hours a day because of the commute trip to and from the new job.
It was about then she had discovered herself because no matter how many games she played there always came the time when they were no longer fun. It had started with a persistent itch which had brought light scolding from her mother when Janie scratched. She had, therefore, learned to scratch when her mother wasn't looking and it was like rubbing between her toes. With no one to stop her, it developed into a very exciting good feeling. It helped her not be lonely and it occupied the long terrible time between her bedtime about seven-thirty and when she really got sleepy.
By the time she was eight, the nightly ritual, with some extra times, was definitely her most treasured game. It had some other importance too, though these peculiar flashes of understanding had no real basis. Words and gestures and giggles from the boys in school plus some mildly remonstrative words from her mother about wrestling and keeping her dress down and playing with one boy who used dirty words, had changed the itch to a funny drawing feeling in her stomach. She had further learned there were times after she went to bed when her mother and father went to bed early, but not to sleep, and by standing quietly in the bathroom she had almost to herself, she could hear through the wall into the little bathroom adjoining her parents' bedroom. After some confusion, she had decided that the great sound of water was from her father, because her mother, like herself, always sat down when she went to the toilet. Just how he made the sound was a mystery because even standing on her toilet seat, she could not get it to sound like a partially turned on hose.
Another good game was played with her best girl-friend and it was 'cow-girl'. The pretty blonde girl who rode the prancing white horse through the afternoon television program had inspired Janie and her friend to 'saddle up' on the back of the sofa and ride in wild hilarity over the hills in company with the handsome cowboy with two guns and a worried look on his face. She had been nine when one afternoon she couldn't stop riding and whooping, even when the breakfast food commercial came on, and the shock of the wonderful convulsions bursting in her urging, bumping body nearly made her cry.
She hadn't told her friend, but she had tried it at home without the whooping and the television and within a day or so she could make the excruciatingly good feeling come any time she wanted. But it didn't mean much till one Sunday afternoon in the patio. She and her father were playing and she was riding his back, playing cow-girl because he knew it was her favorite 'pretend'. It had started to feel good and she was whooping, when all of a sudden, her mother became arbitrary about stopping before she became too "boisterous', 'too overheated' so she wouldn't be able to eat her dinner.
Many new things happened to Janie after that, and they all seemed to have something to do with her games. Boys were mean and rough, but they were fascinating to be around.
They pinched and stuck rude fingers at her bottom when she wore her slacks and play suits. Mostly the feeling came when one of the boys would bump her hard playing hide-and-seek or skating in the street in front of her house. By the time she was eleven, she didn't need to ride the sofa or squeeze her slim thighs around her ragged teddy bear. She could do it fine with her fingers, or with the washrag when she bathed. She still had not confided her private discoveries with her best girl friend, but almost. They giggled and peeked at each other when they went to the bathroom at the same time and they talked together about strangely exhilarating incidents going to and coming from school, or playing.
She was twelve when the nasty boy up the block grabbed her one day and hugged her up to his fourteen year old body and made what just had to be dirty movements against her straining body. He had said something about 'feeling his hard-on' and she had felt it on her stomach before she managed to escape his grasp. She had run home in tears and her girl-friend had tagged faithfully behind. Sympathy soothed the tears, and curiosity broke childish reserve and Janie discovered her friend had also learned to accomplish the good feeling. She also learned some new words, and she was enthralled with her friend's storehouse of intriguing knowledge. They each counted the number of blonde, downy hairs growing on the 'pooch', and they shared the vicarious thrill of rubbing to each other, much as the boy had done to Janie. But without fright, tears or apprehensions.
Combined, their curiosity and inventiveness caused eyes, ears and fingers to explore every possibility, at home, at school and between themselves, which seemed to have some stimulating effect when talked about or attempted. Movies, magazines, records, all the myriad things they had previously enjoyed, they began to enjoy all over again. School now was a bore only because it lasted so long and kept them from getting together for their excited talk and the inevitable moments of mutual fingering and rubbing.
* * *
At thirteen, her world was split in two. One half of it had to do with being a teen-ager, a pretty, vivacious girl who subscribed to all of the hysteria and excitement of bop-records, malts, boy crushes and fan magazines and for the first time in her life she began to resent her parents. There were simply too many wonderful things to do in the time they allotted her between school and home. Instead of being allowed more freedom, a barrage of restrictions seemed to be aimed at specifically making her miserable. Two months after her thirteenth birthday she had her first menstrual period, and her mother explained the new restrictions, and refusal to let Janie date, the danger of being out after dark, the physical and mental risks of a rather badly explained surrender to 'temptation'.
It had all sounded very reasonable and right to Janie because it meshed with the general opinions she had gleaned from other girls and a few nearly explanatory books she had read from the library. There was one book the girls passed around surreptitiously because it had some graphic and intriguing pictures. For ten cents, the book's owner would rent it out one night. In the process of beginning this new segment of her life, Janie had inspected herself and determined she was still a virgin, despite the gymnastics she had practiced for several years.
She had her first evening date when she was fourteen and a Sophomore. It was harmless but terribly exciting and for several days, she played her game, now labeled as 'getting off, by remembering the boy's arm around her and his kisses, hasty, greedy and sweet. Again, things took on a new significance, and pictures of her very favorite movie actors and actresses in tender embrace were now garlanded with emotion. She began to identify all social arrangements with boy-girl proximities and she learned to make up her eyes and lips.
Despite the newly acquired understanding with her mother, Janie seemed to feel further and further from her parents and closer and closer with her teen-age school mates. She was allowed to date once a week, either on Friday or Saturday night, and because this was something less than many of her school friends were allowed, she began to select her dates with an eye toward making up for the rest of the week. By date time, Janie was a bundle of nerves. No matter the program, school dances, drive-in theaters, basketball games, she knew there would be some minutes, or many, stolen to indulge in the heady thrills of necking. The pattern was always the same.
First you hugged and kissed and tingled, waiting for the contest. She was always able to sense it coming on. First the hand, creeping from her ribs to the solid shape of her thirty-two A-cupped breasts. After two or three attempts, he would move his hand down to her hip, and this was permissible. It was when his hand moved around on her stomach she had to watch out. And some boys merely petted her hip, managing to creep her dress up an inch at a time until it was too tightly wrinkled to go any higher. There were a hundred dodges. He would tuck her defensive hand between them and try to get his fingers under her skirt before she could free herself. He would try to "knock her out' with open mouthed kisses that went half way down her throat and gain some ground while she was theoretically limp with love. Turns and twists and wedging knees and all the while, the sickening sweet headiness was growing. And the line, the pitch. The words always came soft and coaxing and plaintive, even from boys she knew didn't really care.
Afterwards, she always went to bed and got off as many times as she could before nervous exhaustion and natural weariness put her to sleep. By then, she was familiar with the hard, insistent shape the boys pushed against her hip or stomach or thigh. Intriguing as it was, it represented the enemy, the destructive invader her mother had been so explicit about.
She had no real desire to let a boy go 'all the way' with her, but it was getting harder and harder to keep from wanting his hands and fingers on her breasts and quivering thighs.
* * *
Her first drive-in date with Jimmie had been the most wonderful date of her life. So wonderful, that at intermission while he had gone to get some Cokes and pop-corn, she had sat in his car and 'got off by furiously fingering herself. In her mind, it was kind of like insurance against another hour or so of the devastating 'style' he had applied. Momentarily relaxed, she had discovered how wet the crotch of her panties had become and she could smell herself. In desperation, she had removed her panties and tucked them into her floppy leather handbag.
The date ended as the most terrible, most frustrating event of her life. Jimmie had discovered her pantiless bottom and had become almost a raving maniac, certain that she had removed them for his benefit. She had fought him off with tears, frantic hands and agile hips until time and the ever-present threat of parental censure had forced him to take her home. In the meantime, her memory screamed with quick, more intimate touches and the peculiar enthralling joy of struggling. By Friday night, she and Jimmie were going steady because he haunted her at school, afterwards and as a mysteriously adorable dream long after she went to bed.
He had begun the second date by not even putting his arm around her, and his explanation about not wanting to get all steamed up and left with a 'stone ache' made her feel very bad. This attitude lasted about seven minutes. That night, she had let him feel her up a little, as long as he kept his fingers outside her panties.
For the next week, she was confident that Jimmie understood how she had to feel about petting and 'making out'. Their next date was a school dance, and they left at eleven because Janie had to be home by midnight. With so little time, they skipped the preliminaries and went right into the deep kissing and the under-her-skirt feeling. At five minutes to midnight, she let him get one finger under her panties to rub the stiff black hairs, damp with emotional perspiration, then she cut him cold and demanded that they go.
By then, she had deliberately pursued the subject of 'making out' and 'giving in' with other school girls. Little by little, the resolution of yes and no began to take on a specific meaning. Boys, she found out, wouldn't put up with a 'cock-teaser' or a weeping date.
Anyway, all a girl had to do if she went too close was to twist and he couldn't get it in. The fable of 'stone-ache' was discounted because he could 'jack-off after a date as well as a girl could.
The fourth date was best of all for Janie, Jimmie had promised not to dig and combined with the hot kisses and the jubilance of partial surrender, she had discovered what 'love' was. For the first time, she let him un-snap her brassiere and feel of her near-bursting breasts. She had let him roll her panties down and massage her into trembling, then convulsive orgasm, and had permitted him every touch she had once reserved for the girl who lived two houses away. It was in no way similar because after the date, she had been faced with a sense of guilt and shame her cowgirl friend had never instigated.
Their fifth date was a teen-age party and they found a dark, secluded corner of the yard where the 'chaperone' couldn't see them and stood in furious embrace, kissing and rubbing until they were leg weary. Half out of her mind with want, Janie had boldly made a pretense of calling her home to say she was leaving the party, and the chaperone let them go off together at ten o'clock. That was the night, without the semi-danger of other oars in a drive-in, Jimmie had showed her his penis. After her first shock and fright, the excitement made her sick. He wouldn't let her touch it, and when they settled into the back seat of his father's car, he left it out to rub against her hip while they 'made out'. It was the wildest, had been her reaction, just thinking about it while he caressed her. It was, she had thought, very adult that way.
The next date was brutally painful and was spent mostly in argument, albeit they argued in close, intimate embrace.
* * *
He's coming back now and she reaches for her panties and skirt. The cloud shrouded moon shows Jimmie, a half naked, thin legged shape of gray. She feels like a very little girl but what they have done and what they will do again makes her regrasp the brash, sophisticated poise the 'other world' has taught her is hep. She is afraid to ask if she will have a baby, and more afraid to ask him what he'd do if she did. She uses his proffered handkerchief and turns her back to do it. He says things and feels and suggests they do it again but fright is coiling in her belly. She can see herself plainly.
She has become a cheap tramp, a schoolyard whore, a fallen woman. She 'puts out' and all the boys will be after her like she was a dog in heat. Her mother will die if she ever finds out, and for some reason, Janie is sure her mother and the whole world will see through her clothes. She is no longer a virgin, and the million wonderful things a virgin bride may expect are forever forbidden. She has committed a terrible sin and her mind is incapable now of planning a slow penitent return to the good graces of God. Or the love and adoration of her parents.
She is unaware that having stepped over a threshold, the steps to this inevitable plateau are worn hollow by ascending traffic. And there is no hand-rail for support or guidance.
CHAPTER TWO
OF ALL THE POIGNANT STATEMENTS GLEANED FROM THE RESEARCH involved in his work, the most significant came from Dr. Harold Collins, Director of the Hamilin Institute of Social Research:
"Any objective pursuit of the Nation's juvenile delinquency problem will embroil one in the massive recognition that until we, as parents and educators, resolve to admit to the existence of an irresistible sexual potential in the very young, we will court disaster. It is the level of the sexual threshold, not the intelligence quotient nor the environment which determines the behavior pattern of youth."
Definitively, 'sexual threshold' refers directly to the height of an individual's ability to accept an exterior stimulus as either erotic or nonerotic. In the face of present day social, ethical and moral tenets, the sexual threshold of any given child is a well protected secret, guaranteed inviolate by a theocratic devotion to decrying sin as opposed to observing fact. We have in every State of the Union, legislated against the concept that children are able to objectively contemplate sex in any form. Sexual awareness is a matter of legal permission, with the inconceivable exception of those cases where parental decision advances the age limit for reasons not required to be stated.
Contemporary psychologists and researchers are prone to arbitrarily add impact percentages to the Kinsey reports, and there is every reason to believe that the general dissemination of sexual information is instrumental in releasing repressed inclinations, but in the area with which we are concerned, we discredit this tendency. We doubt that many children under the age of fifteen have read Kinsey: in fact, few adults have read Kinsey. There were too few salacious passages and not nearly enough 'personal' accountings of sexual activities. But to a student of human behaviorism, there was ample, bold and definitive proof of Dr. Collins' opinions about our young.
Before advancing to the clinical evaluation of juvenile sexual potentials, it might be well to take a hard look at what our society says is the ultimate aim of all sexual knowledge: to promote the extension and harmony of family relationships within the common bond of legal matrimony. Some portions of our society include 'holy', the ambiguous term, as an attribute to matrimony, and wreath the divine state in a wispy veil only money can tear, but in the end, the structure of sex education is dedicated to marital adjustment.
The groom, hopefully over the age of twenty, is supposed to arrive at the altar clutching a penile erection easily fifteen years old, and the bride is not supposed to know what it is he has in his hand. This is the kind of idiocy which had produced a nation full of befuddled parents, frantic moralists and hysterical educators. And a goodly number of wealthy psychiatrists.
It will be the fate of this generation to finish its term of life in a state of confusion in relation to sex. There will always be some confusion about sexual matters, but as a populace those unruly, ungrateful, and brashly immoral teen-agers of today will be able to look back from the plateau of respectability of tomorrow and justifiably wonder what all the shouting was about. There will be some confusion among them, because unlike mathematics and science, sex is a subject treated primarily by the academically curious and secondarily by the academically correct.
As a people, we are passing through an era of disenchantment and this, we believe is a fundamental signal that we are healthy. Cynicism may have unpleasant connotations, but in the broad sense it implies distrust of unproven concepts, courage of one's convictions and sufficient initiative to discover an alternative for a rejected tenet. Strictly speaking, every great doer of history was a cynic in that he or she did not believe in the status quo. The thorn of disenchantment has scratched our youth, and if their budding cynicism shocks us we have only ourselves to blame for having told so many lies.
That their first area of rebellion is a sensual one, is simply because the human mammal possesses not only the superior brain among animals, but also the most mechanically capable sex apparatus, and through some mystical cynicism, Nature develops the sexual potential a long time before mankind sets to on the brain. A fact known to many, but refuted by most is that at an age when Tommie is barely able to tie his own shoes, he has learned to manipulate his penis effectively, and his younger, golden-haired sister struggling with the over-sized rocking horse is seeking, and often achieving, orgasm from the delightful irritation of her perineum.
We concur that the phenomenon is based upon sensation without sexual intent but we do not agree that either child will outgrow the sensate memory. We submit that with or without conscious intent, once the sexual threshold of a child is established, all subsequent knowledge is invited to cross that threshold before it is finally filed in the brain under a heading less critically personal.
* * *
Case in point: Betty B, in juvenile custody pending probation report. Age fourteen, an apparently average child in her sophomore year of high school, her detention was inspired by Mr. and Mrs. John L-, who had hired her as a baby sitter on numerous occasions. The complaint alleged that Mrs. John L-, having forgotten a gift intended for the hostess of a distant party, had returned to her home approximately an hour after departure with her husband, and had discovered Betty B. in the act of committing gross sexual indecency upon Mrs. John L 's seven year old son in the presence of his nine year old sister. Clinically, the 'gross indecency' was fellatio, or mouth to genital contact.
The boy, Frank, was discovered standing in front of Betty B., his trousers down about his ankles, presenting his penis to the lips of the baby-sitter while she sat on the sofa before an ignored television set. The daughter, Alice, was seated beside the older girl, and was fully clothed, albeit engaged in surreptitious masturbation. Any accurate evaluation of the circumstances immediately apparent was rendered impossible by the instantaneous hysteria of Mrs. John L--.
The monstrous nature of the offense was obvious to everyone except the presiding judge of the juvenile court hearing. In effect, his direction of the investigation was aimed at ascertaining the degree of responsibility before determining the logical dispensation of punitive or corrective justice. Two consulting psychologists, each experienced in socio-sexual attitudes among adolescents were assigned to search out the minds of the principals.
Herewith we present the objectively pertinent statements accumulated from seven hours of recorded interrogation:
"What's the sweat? He liked it and Alice liked to watch and I got a big kick out of it I didn't teach him a darn thing he didn't already know, anyway. The first time I ever baby-sat for Mrs. L I found out the kid was playing with it in front of his sister. You know, after you put them to bed you have to check them out once in awhile. Well, I checked three times the first night and he was always lying on the same side with the covers pulled up the same each time so the fourth time, I took off my shoes and kind of sneaked into the room. I don't know what Alice was doing, but he was sitting on top of her with his pajamas down. She had the covers up around her chin and I couldn't see what he was doing, except the way his arm was moving. I went back into the living room, kind of scared to let them know I'd caught them like that."
Asked what she thought about, Betty B. shrugged, but she did know what she thought about up to and during her next occasion of baby-sitting at the home of Mr. and Mrs. John L--. :
"More about his sister than about Frankie, I guess. I kept remembering how I felt the first time a boy ever showed me his dink and I was sure she didn't know what it was all about like you want to show your girlfriend how to tease her hair up in a beehive or fix her brassiere straps so she looks better, or explain how to make out with a boy and not do anything wrong Of course, I found out later she wasn't as dumb as she looked that first night You see something and you think that's it but it isn't I found out right after I started to date that there's a lot of things look one way and turn out to be different than you'd thought."
Intrigued by Betty B.'s total lack of moral consciousness, the psychiatrist began to reach for some clue to her attitudes. It immediately became apparent that her episodes with the two children were by-products of experience rather than of any basic inversion. A court appointed physician had already determined that Betty B. was still a virgin. Prior conversations with her parents had given reasonable weight to the assumption that she had received an average amount of moral instruction, with an equally average dosage of precautionary sex education at the time of her first menstrual effort, thirteen months prior to the discovery of her interest it sexual matters. Her menstrual inauguration, incidentally, corresponded almost perfectly with her first permitted date, other than innocuous daylight affairs largely concerned with extra-curricular school activities.
Both consulting psychiatrists were pleased but not surprised by the girl's willingness to talk about her sex life once they departed from the immediate problem of a specific accusation. She was childishly proud of the fact that she had never violated her mother's rigid evaluation of the hymeneal holiness, and her girlish ego was equally proud of her solution to the problem of demanding males and her own highly developed sensuality.
"It's pretty rough at first," Betty B. admitted. "Like in a drive-in movie. You start out cuddling and kissing and watching the picture and the music is wild and your date is feeling you up and each time you give him a growl he backs off and comes on right where he left off, and instead of having to worry about his hand under your skirt, you have to worry about his fingers under your panties, and it's rough. It the worst after a date when you first start. You get home okay and you've nothing to worry about, but there you stand at the door, all fired up and your panties are wet and your date is gone and you begin to wonder if he'll ever ask you to another drive-in. If he doesn't ask you again, you take it a little easier on the next boy who asks you for a date."
Remembering that Betty B. had been accused of committing a sex act normally reserved for sophisticated sensualists, the psychiatrists both pressed, in their individual way, for the point at which Betty B. had leaped a positive sexual chasm. At this point of interrogation, it became obvious that cultured queries were useless. The basic fault with all adult-child relationships became immediately apparent.
Sexual intercourse was a various term. 'Screw', meant the insertion of a male penis in a female vagina, and in her child mind, represented the ultimate in sexual accomplishment, not because it was biologically correct, but because it precluded the destruction of the hymen, or maidenhead, which she had been assiduously instructed to protect. The word masturbation, with its lingual derivative and psychic implications, was ignored in favor of 'jack-off' and 'fingering" neither of which implied anything more than sensation without ret-ributional complications. To the psychiatrists' amazement, fellatio was a 'blow-job' which inferred that any pleasure involved was aimed at the masculine participant, and what the girl got out of it was up to her. Queried about sodomy, Betty B. shrugged it off as a near impossibility under normal petting conditions. Queried further, she admitted that the school chums who had confessed to having tried it also confessed to considerable pain, both at at the moment and for some time afterward. It is pertinent, however, that the term sodomy was necessarily translated into 'Greeking it' before any level of communication was established.
Pursuing the nature of the original complaint, Betty B. was pressed for her basic emotional attitude toward fellatio, which on paper, assumes a hideous mien, rampant with degeneration, perversion and general lewdness.
Eventually, Betty B. admitted that she had never attempted fellatio before her adventures with Frank L--. The act had been suggested vicariously by dates, and she had thought about it many times, but with no real understanding of what it might mean to her. She confessed to having committed the act on five earlier occasions, but no amount of questioning revealed more than a briefly intense interest in the boy's reaction. Clinically, it must be noted that while the boy was capable of orgasm, which Betty B. described, he was incapable of ejaculation, a phenomenon she was aware of in some of her more critical petting experiences. Deft probing revealed that she understood orgasm, in herself and in the male, as 'getting your gun off after an indeterminate period of intense irritation of certain genital areas.
In the end, the court was faced with a dually registered opinion from the psychiatrists that Betty B. was a hopelessly normal girl, who had subscribed meticulously to every moral and physical instruction she had received from parental and pedagogical sources. She showed acute knowledge of right and wrong, at least in principle, but a larger sense of evaluation revolved around naughty and nice. In the opinion of the analyst, the problem was one of communication, in much broader sense than any specific act would infer.
The legally limited amount of investigation of the two very young children left a great deal of doubt as to the logic of putting the total responsibility upon Betty B. Mr. and Mrs. John L-were indignant at the suggestion either of their children had had any previous sexual interest in each other. Their adamancy was sufficient to terminate the court's interest: it was not inspirational enough to overwhelm the judiciary decision hat Betty B. was a problem, but not a criminal.
* * *
Condensed and edited, the record might show that Betty B. was a thoroughly depraved, completely immoral girl of fourteen, but it should be remembered that her confessed sexual life was gleaned from many hours of normalcy. She had never been a problem to her parents, and her school records added neither luster nor dullness to her character. She was a mouse-blonde of no extreme prettiness nor did she evidence any degree of abnormal physical development. She was just a high school sophomore who had in a year of permissive dating, learned what a thousand other girls in her school had learned: to exploit her sex drives and maintain her status as a 'hep' date without crossing the specific lines set down by her parents in sexual matters.
The origins of her childish sexual awakening were lost in the imperfections of young memory, but it was reasonable to assume that she had attempted masturbatory manipulations at least a year or so before she had positive recollection. There was no doubt that her sexual threshold had been established by the time she was nine or ten, which oddly enough was approximately the age of Alice L-, whose share in the triangle of child erotics was never completely established. A second look at Betty
B's confession would show that she had manufactured a sexual world of her own, based upon privately nurtured sex drives and gauged against the socio-sexual demands of her school set. She had responded to a strongly erotic incident between the two children, and what she had done with the boy was less important to her than the trauma of having been caught.
To satisfy justice, Betty B. was placed on probation until she was eighteen and returned to the custody of her distraught parents.
In epilogue, the senior analyst was required to extend himself beyond the 'ethical' limits in his advice to the parents of Betty B.. No specific publicity had been given the case, and it was forcefully recommended that no specific punitive pressure should be exerted on Betty B.. In brief, the analyst asked them to accept the fact that their daughter would require at least an average amount of opportunity to expend her blossoming sexuality since experience had given a name to the natural urges she would feel. Constricted by unrelenting surveillance, she could well become what she now was not, a sneaking rebellious female with her sexual capabilities converted into a passport to promiscuity and retaliation.
He inferred that the best gamble was that her sense of social right and wrong had absorbed a powerful lesson, and that while it was impossible for her parents to share the world in which she lived, it was imperative that she be allowed to believe they recognized the existence of this world. As to the nature of her sexual expression, he boldly told them it was none of their business, parents or not, unless they were willing to undertake a positive course of physical education to replace her own inventiveness.
Term of probation expired July 17th, 1964 without one single addition since the original date of assignment.
CHAPTER THREE
IF THERE HAS BEEN ANY ADVANCE IN THE SCIENCE OF SEXUAL ADJUSTMENT within the past thirty years, the medical and psychological forces must give up some of the dearly deserved credit to the philosopher. He is the man who over the centuries has taken dead aim on sin as it is defined in the theocratic areas of the world, and particularly, the United States; ours is the only nation in the world founded upon theocracy as opposed to politics. Debating the virtue of such a beginning is moot. Ten thousand thousand volumes have been written on the shape of America and its fortunate inhabitants, who are, measuring accomplishment against opportunity, the most sexually maladjusted people in the world.
History will mark the advent and decline of the Prohibition movement in the United States as the beginning of moral rebellion among our citizens, collectively and individually. For the first time in history, a major people successfully undertook a bloodless revolution for the sake of an individual preference for sensuality. Encouraged by the defeat of the Volstead Act, which in truth was nothing more than a legislation against sin, Americans began to stir restlessly under the bonds of theocratic dictate.
A rash of liberal religious sects broke out in every section of the country, each dedicated to an interpretation of the scriptures which might make Christian living more practical. Revolutionary concepts in the field of education were put into experimental force. And sex manuals, previously restricted to the shelves of medical libraries were released to the general public. In every field, there were charlatans and commercially astute opportunists, but once the dams were broken, the thirst for knowledge and understanding sucked up the flood. In tempo with this awakening, the science of communication wrapped the world in a highly reflective mirror, wired every mind for sound, and obliterated the snobbery which had always been associated with learning.
The sexual emancipation of our people is not yet complete, but it may never achieve completion in company with a thousand other sciences whose roots were never entangled with the parasite vine of sin. Considering the handicap, the horse has run very well.
* * *
Case in point: Approximately thirty years ago the medical profession stood up and publicly announced that masturbation at any age and in any frequency neither produced insanity nor physical deterioration. Ten billion human beings already knew this, but as late as 1953, Kinsey was moved to remark the intelligence of a mother who had frequently observed her three-year old daughter in masturbatory antics from impulse to orgasm. The child was a statistic, the mother was not, and we are constrained to consider Kinsey's example, one of the few personalized accounts in his work, from a number of angles.
In substance, the repeated masturbation was patterned. The three year old child would lie face down on top of her favorite doll, her legs well apart and drawn up with the peculiar infantile agility of permissive joints. So positioned after a positive placement of her genital part on the doll's body, she would begin rhythmic pelvic thrusts described as purely sexual. Her legs were tensed, her back sloped to nearly immobile shoulders, her face raised from the bed in suspended animation. In analysis, her pelvic urging was exactly that of a woman in coitus, using the dominant positions which has solved many cases of difficult feminine orgasm.
We now have a second picture, involving the maternal observer. Kinsey called her an intelligent mother, but we must assume she was more than that. She was obviously wise and experienced, for instead of committing herself to temper, disgust or fury, she stood in quiet observation. Her statement as to having 'frequently' observed this infantile sexuality was followed by a clinical count of the deliberately executed pelvic thrusts.
Once begun, the child completed forty-four deep pelvic thrusts, broken only by a momentary readjustments of her vaginal labia on the doll, rested a few seconds, then began a longer less erratic series of pelvic thrusts numbering eighty-seven, followed by a second pause before a final ten thrusts which seemed to be orgasmic in intensity, but were not. The child entered a condition of complete immobility, except for heavy breathing, and the unmistakable pelvic jerks during orgasm. The mother reported that at that moment, the girl's eyes were wide and vacant and her mind was oblivious to all external matters. For a period of two minutes the child evinced nervous relief and total relaxation, where-upon, she readjusted the doll and began a second excursion into the sensation she could hardly be expected to understand past the animalistic delight in pure pleasure.
Her second orgasm came after a slightly shorter series of pelvic undulations, and in a slightly different order. Tension and leg weariness may have been partly responsible, but the nature of second arousal and orgasmic response in adults is also varied. The child committed forty-eight thrusts, rested, executed eighteen more, then went into a lengthy series of fifty-seven thrusts. Again the moments of complete immobility transfixed her body, during which the thoroughly irritated nerves reached climax and the involuntary series of hip jerks occurred as before. Some gasping and tension-relief movements were observed, signally due to the inclusion of fleshly pain because of the ungentle irritationary methods.
The masturbatory episodes seemed to come on without warning, and twice through the exhausting routine, each culminating in orgasm, left the child relaxed and quiet.
Statistically, Kinsey noted twenty-three cases of female under three who positively reached orgasm under varied conditions. This is a moot figure, important only in that it proves the capability exists in the extremely young, and that obviously, naive mothers often fail to understand what they see.
The mother involved in the above history obviously knew what she was watching and was sufficiently enlightened to recognize the stupidity of protest. Her child's masturbation was purely a matter of pleasant sensation and indicated no erotic arousal in the sexual sense of the term. At the age of three, even the most precocious mind is not subject to much logic in matters of social obligation.
No doubt the mother's first reaction was one of maternal panic, followed immediately by a mixture of amusement and amazement, quickly inundated with logic. For daughter had not been 'fiddling" with herself in the infantile manner all parents observe. The child was deliberately courting orgasm and achieving it in a most undeniable fashion. Any positive negation sufficient to frighten the child into temporary abstinence would have been traumatic, psychiatric ally criminal. The infant had no moral responsibility and could accept none. The mother had a greater responsibility in the healthy development of her female offspring than she did to the pulpit from whence might come thunderous condemnation dedicated to maladjusted womanhood.
* * *
Medically, the most serious aspect of such infantile antics would be physical as represented by lacerations, perforations and infections. Balancing this questionable group of entries, the impact of repeated orgasm might hasten certain growth characteristics, or retard others, but the principal virtue would be the availability of a profound relaxation method during extreme periods of nervous agitation, either mental or physical. Nervous children masturbate, but self-induced orgasm does not produce nervousness. Guilt complexes and unresolved traumas do produce nervous exhaustion, to a degree no doctor would care to estimate.
Psychologically, a problem had been created which would begin as the mother's responsibility and gradually revert back to the girl. Apparently the child at three had not attempted secrecy. Being naked in bed with her doll, unoccupied by external amusements, and no doubt subconsciously basking in comfort, the urge to enjoy her private pleasure would come on with amazing regularity. Her mother's occasional presence in the room apparently had no effect, once her program had begun. Projecting the inevitable, we must foresee the day when the mother would be required to insist that her daughter confine her private manipulations to the privacy of her own bedroom.
Once regulation and semi-prohibitory elements enter the child's awareness, it becomes only a matter of time until some basic understanding of sex be added to the understanding of sensation. Clinically, this occurs between the age of five and adolescence, depending entirely upon the creation of a sexual threshold. There is no conceivable way to list the number and nature of external impressions which a sensitive child may turn into a sexual stimulus; it has been reasonably established that barring those situations wherein an adult or an older child deliberately institutes an emotional as well as a physical situation with a child, the tendency to react to physical exploitation measures the limit of pre-adolescent sex-play.
The subject mother is now faced with a highly responsive child, who must needs play with other children, attend school, and generally circulate among other human beings. Firstly conditioned to sensation, and secondly to social awareness, she would automatically establish a sex threshold based originally upon experience and solidified by learned choice. If it is no longer permitted to seek stimulus, then the mind must filter external impressions in an effort to find justification for the ultimate gratification of an undeniable sex urge.
Surely such a mother would seriously weigh her own physical and mental equipment before she could justify undertaking the liberal attitude originally begun. She would have to know many of the facts about nerve, flesh and bone, and she would need a thick blue pencil to edit sin from the script she must follow. She must also be a gambler, depending upon chance to insulate her child from exploitation by deliberately lewd acquaintances of both sexes. Such a woman would instinctively know that her daughter could not be expected to arrive at adulthood with her total sexual experience confined to masturbatory excursions on the impassive shape of a doll.
Instantly the goal becomes important.
Down the block, another mother, less enlightened but equally determined, has embarked upon a course of daughter-raising patterned strictly upon tradition. Her repeated prayers, garlanded in fear, is that she can deliver her daughter, educated, chaste, desirable and completely normal on the marriage market. She fears venereal disease, unscheduled pregnancies, social disreputation and in general, 'trouble'. Mostly she fears accidents, because she is certain she has brought her daughter up in a most moral and proper manner. The thermometer of her climate is based upon the number of years her daughter has caused her no 'trouble', and she is watching the run to the marriage wire with all the concern of an inveterate horse-player.
Bless her if she succeeds, but statistics are very adverse.
Definitely, her perspective of 'trouble' is vastly different than her daughter's. Maladjusted people may conform to an 'acceptable' pattern for the span of their life and millions do simply because they are psychic cowards. They find the schedule of frustration least objectionable and suffer the indignities of second class humanity for life. The test is simple!
In the thirty seconds prior to sexual orgasm, are one's thoughts fundamentally memories or primarily fantasy? Despite the fact that physical sex can occupy but a small percentage of any given twenty-four hours, there is no period in a human's life when the conscious mind is so thoroughly vulnerable to unadorned truth as at the onset of the orgasmic trance. The negated personality will delve deeply into memory and remain there. The objective personality will quickly forsake memory and traverse immediacy, arriving at orgasms always one step beyond reality.
We submit that the parental responsibility in sexual matters should extend, not to delivering a girl-child to the matrimonial altar in any given state of chastity or 'purity', but to delivering into adulthood a female prepared to face her emotional life without fearing the censorship of non-participants.
It is imperative to note that a sexual threshold can be established in a child without a specific sex incident, but the number of children who reach late adolescence without having experienced one or more positively sexual moments is extremely rare-and unnatural. We have not the right to assume that our three year old example could not have developed a sex threshold from the hands and tepid water in the instance of her first bath following the healing of the umbilical wound. The fact that it might have been purely a sensate threshold merely compounds the certainty, because the body is far more willing to accept sensation than the mind is willing to accept and orient to an idea.
If we assume that our two developed daughters acquired a socio-sexual awareness at about equal ages, then we are forced to assume that the 'pure' one went through approximately twelve to twenty years of emotional frustration because stimulation traveled a one way street. And if our society penalized the sexually emancipated adolescent, either mentally or physically, it is more than probable that she suffered less because her mental fortitude was of her own making. If for instance, we label trouble as an unwanted pregnancy, we already know it can happen to either girl. 'Good girls' slip consistently.
To one girl, pregnancy at sixteen is purely a physical problem. To the other, a similar pregnancy is not only a physical problem but a mental catastrophe.
American parenthood has talked out of both sides of its collective mouth for decades uncounted. Parents prate about a 'sense of values', deploring the patience required to survive the years during which their offspring hopefully acquire this mystic quality. On the other hand, they conspire to drop their children, male and female, through the sex trap with the noose of 'matrimonial adjustment' securely knotted about their necks.
Contemporary statisticians know that adult sexual adjustment, within bonds of matrimony or without, is considerably more prominent among those who have had adolescent sexual experience than among those who have not. The divorce rate is not necessarily an indictment of sexual maladjustment: it more logically an indictment of marriage, per se, as based upon the romantic concept that an emotion should outlast hair, teeth, ennui and the prostate gland. Facing the above statistical reference, it would seem that an intelligent people could develop the premise academically without suffering the indignity of having the subject adolescents show them the way.
The validity of this argument can best be established by taking a bold look at what adolescents do in an effort to keep emotional pace with the intellectual demands of adults.
CHAPTER FOUR
FOR CENTURIES, BOYS HAVE BEEN ACCEPTED AS NASTY LITTLE CREATURES and the vicissitudes of their sexual inclinations have been excused for sundry reasons. Part of this attitude is due to the fact that it has always been basically a man's world and every one knows boys grow into men.
The fact finders in sexual matters have come up with another interesting set of figures. The male, unlike the female, passes through a very irregular behaviorism curve from the moment of sexual awareness, up through and including old age. There is no mystery to this phenomenon. The male sex drive is indiscriminate, impersonal and as easily diverted as it is easily aroused. Most men will risk their worldly expectations for an exotic sexual adventure, and the same man will ignore an equally exotic occasion for the sake of a fishing rod, a ball game or a problem in economic accomplishment. The male ability to turn sex on and off, for one hour or ten years between turnings, has completely baffled women for thousands of years. It has also surprised a few, at both ends of the extreme.
Another positive examination of the male sexual patterns will insist that the male pursues his sexual inclinations with a great deal more directness than do females. Privilege born of maleness may account for some of this aggressiveness, but physical and psychological differences will be the largest force in the unbalanced situation.
Only the statistician is interested in the nature of male preadolescent sexplay on an unemotional basis. Most mothers become aware that their male child is capable of penile erection within one minute or one month of birth.
If she cares to investigate, she would find that this is fundamentally a physiological manifestation of an ability, rather than of a desire. What she is not told is that there is no reasonable way for her to discover when the physical is aided by the mental, and the establishment of a sexual threshold occurs long before she is equipped to cope with it. She may concede his ability to produce an erection and she is certainly able to understand genital sensitivity, but it would be difficult for most American mothers to admit that with a 'little bit of luck' her four year old can achieve orgasm. And there are many recorded cases of male orgasm among two and three year olds. In many of these early cases, the child received an assist from an older child or an adult, but this merely proves the capability, not the tendency.
The establishment of a sex threshold occurs when external stimulus inspires genital activity over and above the occurrences of accidental frictions or unrelated physical experiences. Excitement, muscular effort, heat, cold and a thousand other natural occurrences including rough or tight clothing will result in a child producing an immediate erection. Sex is established the moment the child associates a stimulus with his own physiological reaction.
We expect a child to avoid the shiny hot teakettle and similar shiny hot objects after a painful experience. If it feels good to rub his penis against the crib pillow, there is every reason to believe the human ability to utilize memory referral could become active when his maiden aunt's behind so completely resembles the pillow for size, shape and obvious softness. Learned restraint may prevent the boy from exercising his immediate reaction, but in delay, his mind is again busier than his body and determination is established. The rapidity and extent of a child's mental reactions are uncharted. Every mother recognizes and welcomes her offspring's ability to spend hours helping Jack climb the Beanstalk or to involve himself in Custer's Last Stand. Imagery is what a child uses to fill a nearly static intellectual capacity until time and experience provide him with a sense of values. At five, there is no tangible reward for diligent pursuit of the imaginary Indians. There is tangible reward in the shape and response of his penis after any given three seconds of sensual imagery.
* * *
As a typical example, we have the testimony of Christine D., a professional nursemaid called to testify in a violently contested custody case, involving a divorced man and wife and five under-twelve children. Christine D. had an impressive background in child care, and her general appearance was precise, half-pretty and dignified. She had trained as a nurse in a good school, and she had been caring for pre-adolescent children for nearly fifteen years. She had been in virtual charge of the five children for slightly over two years. Asked by the court as to the apparent effect of the long drawn out parental fight, she stated that in her estimation, her five children were reasonably normal. Asked to be specific concerning her use of the word 'reasonable', her testimony included the following:
"They took to me at once, largely because I treated them as I would treat any group of children from three to ten years of age. I always make a little extra effort upon being introduced to a new family, and though it may sound sneaky, I set about watching each of the children-when they were unaware of my presence. In this way, hostilities may be anticipated and peculiarly childish habits may be evaluated for their effect upon the group. At that age, seven years of difference from the eldest to the youngest can be terribly important, particularly in the development of sexual instincts."
The court came to attention. She expected children from three to ten to evince any genuine interest in sex? If so, in what areas?
"John, the ten year old boy, was an active and persistent masturbator and at the time I entered the household, was required to share a small bedroom with his nearly six year old brother. After a few days it became apparent that the younger boy was just beginning to play with himself but not yet in any real association with the older boy. Certain that they would soon engage in normal boyish duet, it became necessary for me to exercise extreme caution. There are many things a nursemaid must do for a five year old boy she does not have to do for a ten year old boy, and as most of these things have to do with bedtime, bath time and generally private areas the presence of the older boy had certain connotations.
"Personally, I had to be very careful while I assisted Tom in bathing and dressing. I avoided letting John see me handle his little brother, and I was extremely cautious about bending, stooping or any other violent posturing while attending the boy. Previous experience with small boys had shown me that the line between visual reference, such as an adult woman bending and twisting as she handles a nude, or semi-nude boy, is readily translated into a homosexual inclination. It is simply a case of availability, and in this particular household, there was no chance to separate the boys, even if it had been advisable."
She was then asked if she had ever discovered any homosexual act between the boys. Other than joint masturbation, her single knowledge was acquired nearly a year after her advent into the family. John, eleven then, had attempted and accomplished sodomy with his six year old brother, but the younger boy had suffered so much pain and discomfort no evidence of further indulgence ever appeared.
"The eldest girl, Myra, was ten, and the only one of the children who had a room of her own. Josephine, seven, and Ella, barely four, shared the original nursery. Myra was thin, quiet, introverted and a confirmed masturbator with well established habits from some undetermined age. She was not a virgin in the sense that she had ruptured her hymen in the process of developing her masturbatory pattern. I saw no reason to be worried about any possible collusion between herself and the older boy as they never fought and argued or engaged in any competition about food, favors or toys. I was concerned about Josephine, who was vivacious and energetic and at constant loggerheads with both brothers. I felt that she could, and eventually would, translate an unpredictable fit of temper or elation into a sexual impulse, and with less than slight cooperation on the part of her brothers, into violent male-envy and an attempt at subsequent subjugation. It must be realized that in a household containing five active children, accidents involving the toilet, bed-time nudity and just plain chance insure all the children against complete ignorance of the differences between the male and female child."
Specifically, then, the court asked for a current evaluation of the five children in relation to their moral and physical attitudes.
"They are good kids," was her statement. "It isn't a church going family so I have to be careful what I use as a threat to thwart progressively bad tendencies. Mostly I depend upon their affection and respect for me. When I say no, I'm generally obeyed."
Specifically, please.
"Well, John is twelve and has forsaken his brothers and sisters for baseball, his bike and all the things a boy that age-likes. He still masturbates at least once a day because the tell-tale condition of his underwear and bedclothes shows that. He spends a good deal of daytime away from the house, and what he does among his friends I can't say. It may be that Myra, the quiet eleven-year old and her eight year old sister may engage in some form of mutual masturbation and girlish tricks. In defense of her introversion, Myra would reveal her private sexplay to her more out-going sister, and Josephine would certainly join in the play. However, this is only temporary because Josephine is too full of life to be long content with a sister-to-sister relationship. If Josephine has introduced the five year old Ella to under the covers games, it would again be her adventuresome spirit merely exploring a challenging channel and she'd give it up once she became bored. Tom is now seven and is so overwhelmed by women since his older brother deserted the house he is developing a slightly surly nature. Sex-wise, he still masturbates and is going to have a hard time for a year or two."
Asked why, the enlightened nursemaid replied, as follows:
"To counter-act the predominance of women in his life he is generating a most manly attitude toward softness, sympathy and 'sissy' things. Privately he is going through a terrible doubt himself because he can not ejaculate following long, nearly brutal sessions of masturbation. I think he remembers how John culminated a similar act. I recently timed one of his futile efforts and after forty-five minutes, he was so exhausted and unnerved I was able to examine his bruised and swollen sex organ without awakening him. He is at the age where some one should tell him a great many things about himself-all children should be told long before they ever are, if they ever are, but my position is precarious and in this instance, parental interest was at a very low ebb."
* * *
For centuries, the policy has been to avoid sex instruction for children until the child could be physically instructed in the direction society wished the reproductive urge to take. Most children must obey the word 'don't' until they are fourteen or fifteen, or at least they must circumnavigate the negative with conscious effort. At mid-adolescence a child is difficult to approach with commanding logic. In the meantime, the problem has changed color.
"Save your virginity for the man you love and marry." Period.
"Avoid temptation."
"Be home by ten-thirty."
Out of any given hundred men, ninety of them recall that the sum total of sex instruction they received from their father was "Be careful."
The whole problem of sex instruction to children of both sexes is often shirked completely because when the subject of sex is tentatively broached to an adolescent, the parent involved becomes a acutely aware of an undetermined amount of previous knowledge, a conciliatory attitude and very little curiosity.
This might not have been so fifty or a hundred years ago on the farm or in a city, for that matter. On the other hand, few children of twelve understood anything about politics, nothing about aircraft, and the science of communication meant how loudly one could yell. Condescension from a super-wise adolescent is enough to chill a parent out of any weakly formed intention to converse instructively about the birds and the bees.
Parents, per se, know very little about sex anyway. And nothing about sex as it appears to a teen-ager. Parents know about budgets, scandal, paychecks, the high cost of offspring, myriad things involved with daily living, but precious little about sex. And what they do know is expressible only in language designed to completely mislead a child. Ambiguous terms based largely on emotional values are supposed to convey physical situations.
A mother who, from behind a slightly drawn window curtain, witnesses her daughter receiving a circumspect good-night kiss from her seventeen year old date rarely has the ability to explain what will happen to a nominally dry pair of nylon panties when the kiss opens up and tongues exchange insistence. "Don't French kiss," becomes a bit inane when every theatrical kiss on the movie screen and the television is executed with broadly opened lips, tipped back head and body length pressure to the point of bursting seams.
Sophisticated educators are of the firm belief that it is impossible for a parent to approach the subject of sex instruction. Sex is a very personal thing, and knowledge of sex implies more than an academic understanding of fact. For reasons of prestige, few fathers would admit to their sons-or daughters, that they had and still do, indulge in masturbation. It is the wrong word to begin with. Masturbation implies a psychic, introverted attitude, and to a teen-ager, 'jacking off has no connotations past lacks'.
Any adult can test their own ability to enter into intelligent sex instruction by saying aloud some of the things they think.
"I suck my husband's prick." Change 'my husband' to 'your father,' and gauge your own ability to explain a physical act which is practised by sixty-percent of the wives in the world. With the other forty percent lagging only because no one has made an insistent suggestion. If one is a father, consider the prospect of advising a son, or a daughter, one does not 'suck a cunt,' and 'lick it.' If these admonitions seem vulgar and lewd, be reminded that deviation in sexual congress is statistically universal and many percentage points more prevalent among educated, theoretically cultured social levels than among middle-class or sub-standard groups.
Few fathers know, or vocalize what is extremely obvious to students of social sexology; the current image of a youth with long, unkempt hair and tight pants and an arched back is definitely homosexual. The only other historical period resplendent with these male subversions produced the greatest era of homosexuality in European history. Fewer mothers understand that in buying their daughter up-lift brassieres and twenty billion yearly dollars worth of lipstick, nail-polish, 'fad clothes' and erotically unmusical beat records they are in the merchandising business. Exactly what, other than sex, does she believe she is selling when she puts her thirteen, fourteen and often, twelve year old daughter into provocative clothes, theatrical make-up and adult coiffure?
The single reason more mid-adolescent children don't get into 'trouble' as it is defined in the adult mind is that the more sensually precocious have a tendency to educate themselves-and they treat sex as it is, a basic animal capacity for sensation. Parents who would not gamble a dime on the turn of the dice, ignore facts, cultivate hope and depend upon prayer to get themselves through the hard years and up to the point where they can turn their children over to some other form of authority.
PART TWO Sex is a Soft Pink Shape
CHAPTER ONE
THE GIRL IS SIXTEEN, A LOW SENIOR, PRETTY, 'HEP' AND VIVACIOUS. Her black hair hangs straight and veil-like around her smooth cheeks, only partially hiding the madly accented eyes. Her lipstick is pale which she thinks gives her an ethereal look. She can fill a thirty-two A cup brassiere but affects a thirty-two B cup with stuffing. She wears black, very tight stretch pants over panties equipped with a pad which gives her undeveloped mons venus some significant pout and keeps moisture from telling how she reacts to the Beatles and 'him'.
"I'm in love. Really in love!" she announces to her parents.
Her father, pushing forty merely shakes the evening paper. He has bred his nondescript wife three times, resigned himself to her slightly flat buttocks, given up trying to kid himself that her breasts are not too pendant, and he would give his right ear for seven minutes with Jayne Mansfield, or three minutes with Tuesday Weld. He considers himself a good husband because he makes two hundred dollars a week and each of the five times he has achieved sexual intercourse with females other than his wife he had had at least four drinks. He knows his penis is five and a quarter inches long because he has been measuring it on a sporadic schedule since he was fourteen. For the first two years of his marriage, he had unsuccessfully tried to interest his wife in sucking his penis to orgasm, and had given up even her accommodative kisses as being a sandwich where a banquet was needed.
There is no crab-grass in his lawn and he has a neighborhood reputation for being a wizard at barbecuing ribs in the patio. He suspects the husband of his wife's best friend of being a homosexual, and privately is certain that if he'd had the guy in his tent in Burma, he would have proved it. He still masturbates two or three times a month, generally in the shower following a certainty that his wife was tired, angry, or upset over her bridge score of the afternoon.
"I really am, mother!" he hears from behind his paper. "Tommy is just the living end. I've never been so in love in my whole life!"
"You," our father is constrained to remark, "don't know what love is."
* * *
Historically, her third date, shortly after her thirteenth birthday accused her of being a cock-teaser. His logic was based upon fifty cents spent for two student-body admissions to the local theater, one box of popcorn and a half-dozen increasingly ardent kisses. His failure to get his hand into the neck of her sweater or under the disturbing fullness of her pleated skirt had been followed by a sneaky attempt to place her hand on his penile erection, straining the confines of his fashionably tight slacks. He never quite got around to explaining what he expected her to do with him in the comparatively exposed balcony seats, but there was little doubt as to what he wanted to touch with an amazingly clever middle finger when they began the journey back to her front door. For three days following this date, she savored the strange elation she remembered when his clumsy fingertip hooked under her panty leg and wiped across the slightly hirsuted pad of her pubic area.
More interesting was the difference between the shape of her date under his taut trousers and the illustrations in the semi-verboten physiology books in the school library. The diagrams of her own sexual apparatus were reasonably accurate, and the text was completely accurate where it described the seat of her sexual sensitivity. The clinical statements were understandable, but in all of the carefully read paragraphs, nothing was said about how a girl could, and should feel. This corresponded precisely with the hesitant and obscurely stated words her mother had tendered in relation to the sanctity of the hymenal membrane, which the physiology books showed as a small curtain, elastically endowed and irregularly perforated for some unexplained reason. Her private adventures with fingering had tested her own hymen, but it had been with some indifference because sensation had been adequate during the manipulation of the friable protuberance she now identified as her clitoris.
The mystery was boys. No one, including her mother, had ever explained why a boy should enjoy fondling her breasts or titillating her clitoris, which did a great deal for her own internal excitement, but nothing for her finger. Two facts were obvious. The hymenal membrane was inviolate and by its nature, a rat-fink. The second fact was that certain boys in school were more desirable to her feminine mind than strawberry sodas had ever been. Girl talk was always about boys. You were something if a boy of any posture haunted you between classes and at the gathering places. The attributes were varied, from haircuts, or lack of same, to a coughing, gasping hotrod. The contest was constant, from the lavatory at school to the local drive-in movie.
Words had new meanings. Square, droop, bingo and cool entered the scene. There were grippers, rippers and dopes. Juke-box and coke money was bread, and a jacket with flat lapels was dead.
At fourteen, our adolescent was thoroughly schooled in ice. If a boy said 'shit' she ignored the urge to blink. Goosed with a rigid finger, she either smiled or cooled it, depending upon the desirability of the male possessing the finger. She went to the sandbox, not the lavatory. She knew what a homosexual was before she had ever seen a male penis in erection. She also knew how to masturbate while standing in a theater balcony screaming incoherently at the homosexual image of a long-haired, guitar playing youth on the screen.
Girls were catalogued as chicken-butt, pussy and slut-guts. At fourteen, she actually believed there were men with a penis a foot long. And women who could accommodate this fantasy. Jism was the male fluid which made babies, tasted like starch and made impossible spots on wool. Joe you had to watch because when he popped, it went three feet and you had to aim it wisely or catch it in a handkerchief.
Mike was easy, it bubbled out bke a ruptured boil and got all over your fingers which was a problem unless there was kleenex in the car.
Fortunately or unfortunately, she was fifteen and a low junior in high school before the validity of her sophistication was challenged by a boy who was neither clumsy nor inexperienced.
This lad, two years her senior, introduced her to 'dry humping', a mutual masturbatory technique with socio-sexual overtones which completely altered our example's attitude toward herself. Up to this point, the growth of her sexual interests Was in tempo with the development of her mind and body, and regulated by her association with boys and girls of her own age and interests. Among other girls in the blatant competition to look and act 'sharp', she had fought a good fight, but fundamentally with her mouth. She dated often and spent the alloted time being mauled in the manner of eager, ignorant boys. Two or three times she had gone steady with classmates, but it had been done as a status symbol, rather for any deep mutual affection.
She learned 'deep kissing', and had nearly been brought to orgasm on a number of occasions by clumsy fingers and writhing body contact, but though she had tried secretly to urge herself over the orgasmic edge, her mother's warnings about temptation and the sanctity of the hymenal membrane had shifted her hips from under the pushy fingers and somehow managed to retain her panties, though they had often been physically disturbed. Orgasm followed each of these episodes, but always after she was home, alone and able to control how it was achieved. She still had to take more liberal girls' word for the ejaculatory nature of various boys because she had deliberately avoided Joe and Mike and a few other boys who might have been more troublesome than fun.
Sex to her was a self-indulgent. Most of her time had been spent in the frivolous world of being young, and how far she went with sex, alone or in the arms of a date, was gauged by childish standards. She knew how many times a week she could go to the theater, she knew how far her allowance went in the purchase of Cokes and hamburgers. She didn't really want a serious sexual involvement because she had learned to satisfy her physical needs with swift, manegeable fingers and she was aware that serious sex was not part of growing up. As a brainless, uncaring, completely misunderstood teen-ager, she and a thousand other girls of her age group had rather a positive attitude about virginity and sex-gymnastics. Virginity was a symbol of youth and as such was inviolate. 'Making out' was a deliberate excursion into excitement which became as habitual as powering her nose, and the boy involved was less important than how expertly he aroused her to the peak of sensual irritation she desired.
Strictly speaking, her most ardent kisses, her ready involvement with bodily contact and her skirmishes with permissive limits had been purely a form of emotional and physical masturbation.
* * *
Then she fell in love, which is a condition mysteriously different than going steady, or having a boyfriend. The most significant signal of this difference is a change of horizon. Immediately time entered her world. There remained for her nearly two more years of high school, and for him, a few months, then a minimum of four years of college. Youth became immediately a bore, and for the first time, tears and frustration entered the picture. There was suddenly a sweetly bitter pleasure in skipping the drive-in movie in favor of a secluded parking place where they could discuss the future and lament the present. Her parents and his became ogres, unfeeling and impossibly square.
Instantly her virginity became a problem; a grotesquely impersonal part of her anatomy which belonged to her father and mother. Love changed the character of many things with unreasonable certainty.
They no longer necked nor made out. They made love. Since they belonged to each other forever, there was little sense in making him struggle to remove her brassiere. His word that he would not 'get her into trouble' was sufficient to induce her to remove her panties. In his old car, seclusion was merely a matter of a short drive in any one of a number of directions. She learned to wear .full, pleated skirts again because they offered no resistance and could be quickly reorganized if some one chanced to discover them embraced in the back seat.
Up to then, when a boy tried to wedge himself between her thighs in a coital position, she had balked. It seemed necessary now because it multiplied the tragedy of being too young for marriage and too dependant upon her parents for the essential of life. For the first time in her life, she deliberately permitted some one else to manipulate her sex organ to the point of orgasm, and to fondle between her buttocks. For the first time in her life she really listened when her love lamented his own rampant frustration. That she clung to her virginity was monumental tribute to her maternal teachings and in an inverted way, equal tribute to her love for the boy. It had to be 'right' because their love was the ultimate in perfection.
Two logical things happened almost simultaneously. Her mind, conditioned throughout her early youth to finding a 'way' to express and relieve her sexual desires searched for a way now, and he furnished it with the irresistible argument that if he could masturbate her, she could do the same for him. She welcomed this suggestion for a personal reason as well as for the sake of their mutual love. Up to the moment, the male penis had been a frightening thing, bulging trousers, bumping her belly and thighs and always threatening her hymenal reverence. But this particular penis was hers as surely as was hers his heart and his lips and his fingers. It was frightening now only because it swelled and throbbed and strained for love of her. Further, she was undeniably curious about the lusting instrument, and she was not unaware that 'mutual sex adjustment' was reported to be the most important factor in preserving true love.
Because what they wanted to do for each other was neither private nor selfish nor naughty, they progressed from digital manipulation to 'dry humping' the first time he removed his trousers as she removed her panties.
Intrafemoral copulation is a science as old as man. It simply infers genital friction without penile insertion in the vaginal cavity, and in the energetic, it can become a most adequate form of sexual relief. In mutual tempo, it generally means the male places his erect penis high between the female's thighs, so that his penis rubs firmly against the vagina lips, or indeed, parts them to cause extreme friction against the clitoral prominence and the inner labia. It can be done effectively from the front or the rear with all the pelvic movement and muscular excitement of true sexual intercourse.
The variations will immediately become apparent, depending largely upon the sensitivity of the response mechanisms of the individual. The male penis is completely indifferent to where it finds sufficient friction to instigate orgasmic climax. It can come from between feminine buttocks, moderately full breasts, the mouth or the armpit. Under extreme psycho-sexual excitement, the female orgasm can be induced with a number of physical irritations, in very slight relation to her clitoral form. Persistent irritation of her perineum, that broad, relatively flat area formed by the pelvic 'sling' beginning at the mons veneris and extending posteriorly to include the anal aperture, will produce nervous and muscular agitation often sufficient to bring about orgasm.
Between two half-nude teen-agers, inspired by emotional understanding, imbued with adolescent inventiveness, and furiously aroused by preparatory fondling, there are few limits. There is further the powerful stimulant in the knowledge that intrafemoral intercourse is 'safe'. It invariably is preceded by, or leads to, oral-genital exchanges, and in some cases, anal intercourse.
The real by-product of intrafemoral intercourse is mental, however. In first occurrence, it represents the socio-sexual translation of sexual drives from the masturbatory, or self-regulatory, introversion and it is sufficiently similar to sexual intercourse in form and attitude to depict sex as an exchange between male and female. Its practice is a powerful antidote for the poison known as 'puppy love' because it corrects the perspective in which emotionally undeveloped young people place each other.
* * *
Her father is probably correct. He has lost count of the love affairs she has bounced giddily through in the past year. But he and his wife share one seeming certainty. Their lovely daughter displays none of sulky rebellion so common to her crowd. She bubbles in and out of love and seldom stays out later than her parents say she can. She is popular in school and her grades are good enough. He objects to the way she dresses and makes up her face, but fellow workers insist he is just old fashioned, and he is not without some pride in the way she is 'shaping up'.
Her mother has lost the fears she generated in the early months of her daughter's advent to high school. Sporadically intimate talks, generally occurring before and after a new 'steady' have assured her the danger period has passed. The hymenal dust-curtain remains intact. Her daughter has finished with sampling the attentions of any chance swain with the price of a theater ticket. She was developed a sense of values about men, and appears to be leaning toward the more serious, college minded youth.
The flittery whirl of teen-age society still enthralls her daughter, but time has gotten her used to the ephemeral nature of school girl fads in hair, dress and make-up. She is particularly proud of her daughter when the subject of offspring in general comes up at bridge luncheons and impromptu gatherings. She is grateful she can not enter into the weary discussions about the sexual antics of other children. It is a problem she has not had to face in the unpleasant sense of the word, and she is proud of her nearly completed job of daughter raising in times so difficult as to be impossible.
Her daughter is one in four, based upon the known averages of American female children.
CHAPTER TWO
STUDENTS OF SEXOLOGY ARE SHYING AWAY FROM THE TERM 'OVER-SEXED'. A new definition for a nymphomaniac is now available. It once meant a woman who could not get enough sex in any form, and it now is construed to mean a woman who can not be satisfied by any means, who is for all intents and purpose, psychologically frigid, but willing to try endlessly for that elusive orgasm. The 'old' nymphomaniac is now a female who possesses a high degree of physical and mental sensitivity and no inhibitions. Satyriasis, once described as a goat-like ability to breed every female in sight, is now known to be a mental condition. A man may desire to breed every female in sight but his constitutional limitations recommend that be very short-sighted. Algebraically, one nymphomaniac equals ten satyrs.
A sexually precocious child is not unusual. The problem ingredient is opportunity. The devastating ingredient is charm, more specifically labeled salesmanship. Almost every neighborhood has at least one of these 'monsters' and he must not be confused with the bully, the 'gang leader' nor should he be identified by his age. His feminine counterpart is not a tomboy, nor is she necessarily the prettiest girl on the block. They occur at every economic level though statistically the lower income groups evidence more examples, simply because of more opportunity factors and less parental restraint.
The case of John B., aged twelve, came to us from the files of an insurance company attorney who had been approached by the boy's father. He in turn had been approached by the father of a ten year old girl living within the tract neighborhood. John's father had been threatened with a huge civil suit unless he either 'tied that kid down or had him de-balled'. Considerably upset, John's father had relayed the threat to his wife, and was astonished at her reaction. Ten months prior to the 'complaint', she had stood at a garage window and watched her eleven year old son take down another girl's panties, induce her to mouth his penis, then proceed to turn her over and have complete sexual intercourse from the rear, twice in quick succession.
Following this episode, she had tried to check her son's advanced actions with a series of gentle, unspecific talks on sex. At the same time, she had made a point of snoopery. She was convinced that at least once a day, with any one of four girls under the age of thirteen, her son fornicated himself into a state of temporary satiation. Her bombshell was an unverified opinion that there were at least two small boys who had succumbed to their son's sensuality.
Credit to John's father should be forthcoming when he restrained the urge to beat his son 'out of his dirty little skull'. Instead, he consulted the family doctor. There he discovered that there not only was no cure, but that academically, the boy himself was better off for his adult-like actions than if he indulged in sufficient masturbation to quell his super-sensuality.
Needless to say, John's father immediately had visions of a linch mob, club-swinging policemen and sundry violent reactions from outraged parents of small girls and boys. Then the insurance attorney assured him he could be sued for his son's mass attack on the neighborhood small-fry, particularly since he and his wife were now aware that their son was so-inclined. Nor could he for any price, purchase insurance specifically designed to escape financial ruin if a civil suit were successfully prosecuted. Plus the fact that his son might well be committed to a juvenile corrective institution. The attorney reported that the boy was shipped to Nebraska to live with an aunt and uncle who lived on a two hundred acre farm, and John's parents moved out of the neighborhood.
* * *
Every adult male who received his elementary education in a public school can recall at least one or more girls whose apparent aim was to have sexual intercourse with every boy in school capable of producing an erection. Fortunately or unfortunately, few boys in the elementary grades are mentally sophisticated enough to take advantage of such a generous female.
Jennie O., aged sixteen and irrevocably committed to a correctional institution, left this official record behind:
At age eleven, her nick-name was 'Sandbox Jennie' by reason of using a sand-filled horseshoe pit in a public playground for her uncounted services to the boys who frequented the public park. Shortly after her twelfth birthday, her mother took her to a questionable medic for penicillin shots to combat a full-blown case of gonorrhea. The janitor of the semi-tenement apartments where Jennie lived eventually confessed that she had become infected from one of his 'friends' who had paid fifty cents for the privilege of having sexual intercourse with the dumpy, unpretty girl on a mattress placed behind the furnace in the building cellar. He gave her a dime of the fifty cents.
Her scholastic ineptness caused her to spend two years in each of the sixth, seventh and eighth grades; for nearly four years, she and a girlfriend kept a score in relation to how many of the elementary school boys they had sexual relations with, and in each case, there was a notation as to whether it had been done for lunch money or kicks.
She was arrested one week after the close of the school term, finally graduated from elementary school, a big, boldly breasted girl, her mouse-blonde hair bleached nearly white, her body encased in a cheap dress at least two sizes too small. The police found her in the back room of a sour-smelling beer parlor in company with five bleary-eyed patrons who had agreed to pay her fifty cents each for the dubious privilege of having sexual intercourse while she stood against a greasy, time dirtied wall. There wasn't room for her to lie down. After questioning, she admitted 'paying' the proprietor for use of the space before she accommodated her clients because the forty-three year old bar owner had objections to 'wet decking'. In an effort to establish some level of understanding, Jennie admitted to the female probation interrogator that since the age of ten, she had never missed having from one to ten orgasms a day, depending upon 'who got to me'. She further insisted she had never masturbated in her life.
"Who needs it?" was her indifferent reply.
It is useless to assume that Jennie O. was solely the product of her environment because the school she attended and the district in which she lived produced literally hundreds of girls of similar background and parental non-guidance, definitely not of Jennie's inclination.
A recently published biography of a famous, nearly notorious, negro blues singer indicated that from the age of seven until she was twelve, her step-father and two older brothers had daily intercourse with her, often rectally, and that it became so habitually pleasant to her the only real shock occurred when her mother gathered her up and took her to New York, leaving her male attendants in Baltimore.
If sensational cases involving poverty, ethnic clans and ignorance have no social import, then consider the case of Freda H., 19, admitted to the psychiatric ward of a private hospital in a state of total hysteria. She lived at home, in a better than average economic condition, and had been about to complete her second year in a secretarial business college at the time of her breakdown. She had a sister fourteen and a brother fifteen, and in the subsequent therapy, she revealed the source of her mental upheaval.
"It began when I was fourteen and Freddie was about nine. One night I caught him trying to have sexual intercourse with Alice, who wasn't a day over eight then. She was crying and kicking and Freddie was slapping her and trying to make her hold still. At first I was shocked, then I was mad, then I got well, frightened. Our folks were terribly strict about things like sex and stealing and being naughty. I knew if I told on Freddie, it would get him into awful trouble and maybe Alice too. Freddie just stood there and scowled while I quieted Alice and made her promise not to mention it to mother. I pushed Freddie off to his room and gave him a real good lecture. He said it wouldn't hurt her a darn bit because he had done it several times to the girl across the street and she was only eight, too. Then he said if Alice was too small, how about me, and he pulled his pajama pants open and showed me his stiff thing."
Here there were inconsistencies in her attitude, due perhaps to the fact that beneath her concern, Freda had her share of juvenile sex curiosity and was no doubt subject to the eroticism of the occasion. She had never seen a male organ in erection before, and her nine year old brother's blase approach to the situation made her ashamed of her own inexperience and lack of knowledge about socio-sexual matters. At least she was interested enough to listen to his childish proposition, but to the therapist she represented her partial surrender to be in the nature of a ransom for her little sister's safety. She would not submit to penile insertion, but she had agreed to stand and permit him to enact interfemoral masturbation from behind and between her thighs.
Four days later, her little sister came running to her in near hysteria. Freddie had tripped her in the garage, jerked her panties down and mounted her with more enthusiasm than gentleness. She was bleeding slightly and sick at her stomach. Again, Freda let fear of parental displeasure save her brother. She took her sister to the bathroom, washed her violated part and put vaseline on the laceration. And again, Freda attempted to bribe her precocious brother into staying away from little Alice by permitting him more liberties with his penis and his fingers. Within a week or so, she had joined ranks with him. Their modus operandi was not unusual. Being much taller than her brother, she could stand while he thrust his penis between her thighs, from the front now, and while he masturbated himself, and her with his inexpert undulations, he would mouth her budding breasts and feel of her buttocks and between.
At fourteen, Freda had the beginnings of an emotional awareness of boys in her school. Caught then between exterior 'crushes' and interior passion, she became nervous and mentally confused. The therapist determined that on many occasions with Freddie, Freda had not accomplished orgasm, and this in addition to all the other psychological short circuits instigated hours of panic. Her studies faltered and her face broke out in adolescent pimples, which she attributed to her 'sinful' behavior with her brother.
"One night, Freddie just wiggled and pushed and all of a sudden his thing was in. It hurt but he wouldn't stop and I couldn't yell because our folks might hear. He just kept right on and didn't stop until his knees gave out."
The therapist asked if she remembered having orgasm.
"No. I was terrified. Then Freddie laughed at me and said I was a goof. He told me that he'd never stopped with Alice, that she liked it and popped, he called it, and we had an awful fight, all in whispers so we wouldn't wake our folks."
After that night, Freda never let her brother touch her again.
Between parental fear and knowledge of Freddie's nightly sex adventures with Alice, Freda approached high school with a strange fear and a magnificently developed guilt complex, coupled with restraint. She felt first that her brother was a completely evil boy and his image lost all relation to reality. She forgot that he was yet a child and was incapable of long range planning. She further forgot her own original complicity was due only in part to fear, and that fear was not clearly defined.
Her private world became one of terrible fantasy. She imagined herself, and her ugly home life as being on display to her school associates. Each night, she would lie awake in trembling terror. If she heard the slightest noise from either her brother's room or her sister's room, she could not sleep. The therapist also discovered another factor which had plagued the girl. While she was in such mental and physical torment, it seemed to her that Freddie and Alice were devilishly gay and carefree. They seemed indifferent to their sins and the fact that her parents considered the young ones as good children was almost an insult to Freda.
She had become mentally and physically introverted by then, excluding herself from most of the school activities, refusing dates, generally closing off the world she felt must sooner or later blame her for Freddie's depraved nature. As he began to broaden his normal perspective in the upper elementary grades, she marked each of his playmates, which often included other girls, as subjects of his dirty sensuality. Once or twice she tried to reason with Alice and wound up being laughed at by the uninhibited child. By the time she was a junior in high school. Freda was thin, sallow and sickly and a doctor recommended a course of dietary foods, some blood tonic and a reasonable form of exercise such as swimming or tennis. She immediately blamed her condition upon her brother and sister.
In an effort to escape the frivolity and social activities of her senior year in high school, she convinced her parents to allow her enrollment in a business college which would give her graduation credits. This immediately exposed her to some more sophisticated girls whose attitudes toward sex and men made Freda feel even more forlorn than before. Every single inadequacy she experienced was blamed upon Freddie, who in the meantime was oblivious to his Icooky' sister's problems. By then, her parents were 'making allowances' for their oldest daughter and had transferred their parental hopes to the boisterously gay and scholastically excellent Freddie.
It must be here noted that the therapist discovered Freda had closed her mind to sexual matters for nearly five years. She had not masturbated, had permitted no boy to go farther than a good-night kiss and she had never tried to read or learn a single thing about sexual behaviorisms. Her only sexual adventures were in the form of nightmares in which men, sometimes possessing Freddie's face, but not always, chased her endlessly brandishing their over-sized sexual equipment. The therapist also determined that she had no concept as to what adult penile size really was. Significantly, the men never caught up with her in the nightmares. She would awaken in a state of quivering terror and often never go back to sleep that night.
Her eventual collapse had been motivated by a completely inconceivable occurance. A fifteen year old girl whom Freddie had 'dated' to a basketball game lodged a tearful complaint to her parents because Freddie had coaxed her into sexual intercourse behind the gymnasium, causing her to hemorrhage. The fact that her parents accepted the horrendous revelation without undue rage or too much surprise, and no corporal punishment whatever was too much for Freda.
As her defenses crumbled, she discovered Hell was not too unpleasant an her 'devils' were mystical. Personally, it amounted to having originally 'sold' herself for a counterfeit coin, living most of her adolescent life as prisoner of her brother's sexual precocity. When lack of parental wrath, at least expressed, made a ridiculous thing of her sacrificial attitude, she went to pieces.
She was and is, a difficult case because nearly every incident from the first night she had discovered her brother's incestual lust had become traumatic to Freda. It could be argued that she was not normally stable nor overly intelligent from the very beginning. It could also be argued that her parents, who were apparently average, could have with only a modicum of sexual instruction, altered Freda's early attitude and more important, formed a bridge between their seeming puritancy and her ignorance of their true attitude.
In epilogue, in the course of interviewing the family in relation to Freda's condition, the therapist talked to Freddie and discovered there had been no sexual interludes between the lad and his sister for well over a year. In the manner of teen-agers, they had abandoned one interest for another, or at least, one relationship for another.
CHAPTER THREE
THE PECULIAR THING ABOUT OUR CURRENT INVOLVEMENT IN EARLY SEXUAL activities is that it occurs at every economic level. The apparent difference lies in the ability of middle-class and the more affluent stratas to conceal the vagaries of their offspring with money and influence. Special schools, psychiatrists and Aunt Effie, who lives a thousand miles away get the 'rich kids'; social welfare workers, the police and charitable institutions get the 'poor kids'. This is a generalization, of course, but the pattern is well established. This is a national problem, affiliated with a dozen social and economic forces completely out of the hands of sex educators. But in viewing the nature of juvenile sex drives, we must consider all stratas because in our country, the hungry, scrawny and poverty-wracked ten year old can well wind up in thirty years as the community pillar.
If this argument seems shallow and bigoted, devoid of humanity and the milk of human kindness, it at least is a valid reason for including the unfortunate in our national scheme of progressive civilization. At no time in Judeo-Christian history has any other argument supported the enlightenment of the 'underdog' for more than twenty minutes at a time. "No profit, no fight," is still the predominate philosophy of mankind in relation to the total social structure.
To a five year old girl, sleeping cold and unwashed and hungry in a dingy room with from three to ten brothers and sisters, and often her parents, rights and privileges are defined as extremely personal moments no one can snatch from her. Her next oldest brother, sleeping a skin-thickness away, his under-nourished body a sprawl of half-nude, twitching arms and legs, has one advantage. He is stronger than she is. They both possess every nerve and muscle and bone they will ever possess, and they both lack the restraint of cultured existence. They are, for sake of example, an excellent source of insight to the sexual nature of children.
* * *
Delia M., at sixteen, arrested for soliciting on a Los Angeles street and as a first offender was remanded to the detention home to await probationary reports. She was cooperative and voluable and the following, gleaned from a mass of testimony, constitutes her sex history:
"Maybe I was seven when I got it good the first time. It's kind of hard to remember about things like that when you live in a cave with three brothers and two sisters and the hall door sags so bad it can't be closed. My ma never knew which kids were hers and which ones belonged to the other families living in the apartment house. At meal times, sure, but not after nine o'clock. See, the electricity was included in the rent and at nine every night, the old geezer who acted as janitor for the four apartment houses on our block threw the main switch. The only lights were little yellow bulbs at the end of the hall where the toilet was and the window that opened out on the fire escape.
"We had two beds for six kids and the ones who stayed out on the street the latest had to find a place where there was one. Mostly I slept with my two older sisters, but Mike, my older brother used to get pretty smart on the nights when my old man was sauced up and spent half the night chasing ma around in the other room. Maybe Mike fooled around with me some, but I don't really remember anything definite until I was seven. My next oldest brother, Pete, hung out with three other kids and they were about nine, I think. Anyway, they had a neat gimmick among them for stealing. Two of them would start a fight in front of a grocery store or a little shop, and while everybody was hollering and hooting and taking sides, the other two would raid the store for whatever could be grabbed before the block fuzz got around to busting up the fight. Well, one day they grabbed a cake in a cellophane wrapper and a hunk of salami and some little stuff.
"A girl-friend and I heard them cutting up the touch in the basement of the apartment all of them have a basement in New York. We wanted some real bad and the kid who ran the little gang was real smart. He gave each of us a little bite of the cake and then said we couldn't have any more unless we took down our pants. That was kind of funny because mine were so torn and ragged I didn't even have to take them down to make the pot. Anyway, it worked because we were hungry, and my girlfriend had done it with boys before. I remember it was pretty darn messy. There was nothing but an old crate or the crapped up floor, so my girlfriend decided to stand on the first step and brace herself against the walls and the guys took turns on her. I couldn't see much because it was pretty dark, but I got the idea when it was my turn. I wasn't scared and it didn't hurt much till early the next morning. I woke up hollering and Pete got scared and made me get out of bed and go with him to the fire escape so I could cry without waking up my folks. I was okay though, and I got it every day after that, unless the kids missed out on a sting and came off hungry."
She was 'forced' into school when she was eight because it took an over-worked truant officer that long to find her.
"By then I was getting cagy. I was kind of pretty like my ma, and P.S. was full of Polack girls with buck teeth and a lot of Hebe kids and some tough cookies from the dago turfs. Not all of them put out, mostly because no one went after them. I got to checking paper sacks and lunch buckets and there were some boys who had money for lunch. I bet I was one of the few babes in P.S. who could pop her nuts and eat a balogna sandwich at the same time. There were a couple of dozen places to take a boy and it never took very long. By the time we walked a half-block or climbed up a couple of flights to a roof top, the boy was all charged up and more than once I cut it in a telephone booth. I stayed strictly away from the Hebe kids because they had a lot of nasty tricks like trying to get you to blow them, or hanging it in you twice without stopping or hauling back and trying to pop off in your rear end."
Delia M. was thirteen, a few months into her menstrual cycle at the time of her first complete sexual experience with an adult male. By then, she was an accomplished prostitute in the sense that in company with other adolescents, she traded her favors for clothing and trinkets offered by shopkeepers. She frequented two restaurants which boasted booths with curtains, where for a ninety-five cent Italian dinner complete with red wine, and a dollar, she would masturbate a street 'hunter' into a paper napkin. These activities were in addition to complete sexual promiscuity among the boys who ranged the streets and alleys of her district.
Her oldest brother and two older sister had left home, and her father was sporadically employed as a handyman. Delia M. could remember no form of sex instruction from her mother except the advice that by raiding a public toilet, she could obtain enough toilet paper to form a sanitary pad against soiling her clothes during her period.
Systematic prostitution was impossible because she did not have enough money to buy the kind of clothes it took to hustle 'uptown', and in her own part of town, the free-lance competition was voluminous. The police, she recalled, were no problem because of the mechanical impossibility of handling thousands of 'split-tails'. Unless a girl was a junkie, a trouble-maker or was involved in rolling a drunk, a nominal amount of caution kept the fuzz off her back.
By the time she was fifteen, Delia M. had had it in New York. She had, in her own vernacular, come across the United States on her back. She was a little more vague about her activities in Los Angeles particularly concerning her modus operandi in obtaining 'clients'. While her history was interesting, it was not unlike a thousand others the probation department had heard. Their concern was Delia M., and what she represented to Los Angeles County, legally, criminally and socially. She was a sixteen year old streetwalker.
She was, however, no down-beat subject for a sob-sister. She was pretty, well-formed and quiet. Her clothes were cheap, but not gauche, and her language was remarkably free of four-letter words. She showed no surliness and very little resentment over her apprehension. Her health was perfect and she had never had a venereal disease. Queried about her fear of disease or pregnancy, she reminded the female probation interrogator that there was penicillin to be had for ten dollars a shot and a little caution plus a little luck took care of the pregnancy problem. As an aside, she admitted that since she had become vulnerable to pregnancy, she had never been without knowledge of where to find an abortionist with reasonable prices.
Her only tears appeared after the juvenile court paroled her to the Welfare Department, who in turn placed her in a vocational school for girls. She would be neither a prisoner nor an inmate, and freed of the necessity of selling her body for sustenance, she completed two years of secretarial training without a single incident to mar her record. At last accounting, she was working for a Los Angeles firm and doing very well at it.
Net evaluation is that Delia M., subject to an exceedingly low sexual threshold under conditions with more than average sex potential, had simply commercialized the only product she personally possessed. Traditionally, she should have wound up a diseased, bloated and thoroughly obscene thing with a police record and little chance of being more than a pustular burden upon society. This she did not become.
Net point is that juvenile sex can and does exist and the fact that protective culture neither eradicates its presence nor dooms the possessor places the burden of regulation squarely upon the backs of educators, not sin-and-thunderation shouters. Perhaps we can not make the world fool-proof because the fools are becoming more resourceful every day. But we can seriously reduce the hazards of growing up by making a sound determination as to what is fact and what is imagine.
* * *
Students of behaviorism patterns are wont to avoid blatantly psychopathic examples of inverted intellect in trying to establish norms. At first glance, the case of Gregory P. would seem to indicate many unaverage influences, but analysis of his problem after many weeks of psychiatric therapy showed him to be a most impressive subject for our present work. In brief, at the age of nineteen, half way through a junior symphonic concert of which he was the violin soloist, he suffered a complete mental block and not only failed to continue the concert but suffered a lapse of memory during which he could not remember a single musical note. The nervous collapse lasted three hours and he apparently suffered no lasting effects. Because his career was extremely important, heed was given to medical advice that he be interviewed by a psychiatrist.
It was immediately obvious to the therapist that Gregory P., forgiving his exceptional talent and his better than average economic background, was apparently high-strung, intelligent and devoid of the egocentric idiosyncrasies normally associated with artistic genius. Medical examination had shown no great fatigue factor. After several sessions, the therapist could find no rebellion responses in relation to the intense study, the aura of dedication surrounding his music, nor in the adulatory pressures from his parents and musical advisors. In response to very early questioning about girls, Gregory P. had admitted more than one sexual interlude, the first at about fourteen, involving a clarinet playing Junior in the high school band. The therapist, aware of youth's susceptibility, pushed the subject only far enough to be sure there was no sexual frustration involved. This occurred when it became obvious that the fringe benefits of being a virtuoso included easy conquest of feminine syncophants. Baffled by the total absence of deteriortory complexes, the therapist reviewed his notes and went back to the question of sex. By this time he and Gregory P. were good friends as well as doctor and client: frankness was difficult, tinged by the growth of mutual respect. Only after a thoroughly academic discussion of the universality of male masturbation did Gregory P. relax sufficiently to remark that he had begun masturbating at the age of five. Once begun, the finished picture soon emerged.
Gregory P. had discovered his penis and its erectile capabilities prior to age five, but masturbation was acknowledged because his first orgasm had occurred three months prior to his sixth birthday. At the time, he had no real concept of orgasm, and later, learned terminology identified the pleasant physical climax. He had reached orgasm, not because of prolonged penile manipulation but because of mnemonic imagery. Two little girls from his kindergarten class had engaged in a spirited tussle in the school bus after school. Immediately upon arriving home, Gregory P. had gone to the bathroom, and produced not only an erection but the memory of grunting, straining female bodies, squirming hips in skin-thin panties and bare patches of thigh. He recounted no thoughts pertaining to sex, per se.
From then on, straining bodies, male or female, and impromptu displays of bare legs and general anatomy caused him to seek immediate orgasmic relief, always in private. Gradually, his masturbation assumed a pattern not dependent upon a visual stimulation, but always responding to visual impact, regardless of his private schedule. He admitted experiencing orgasm thusly from once to four times a day until he was eight years old. Liberal arts programs introduced him to the violin in the low third grade, and immediately, his life was changed. By the time his fingertips were callused sufficiently to manipulate the strings of a three-quarter sized violin, he could play tunes. His first private violin teacher was a woman, whom Gregory P. at nineteen described as a 'beast' for looks. None the less, he followed every lesson, and all practice sessions with a masturbatory bout because his instructress had a distinct body odor at times and went through nearly violent conductory exercises while he sawed away at the musical score.
At age ten, two things happened. He observed his first fluid ejaculation, and his parents hired a more advanced instructor. By that time, Gregory P. was using his masturbation as an emotional governor. To insure himself of a progressive lesson, he masturbated before he boarded a bus to the music studio. He did the same immediately before school recitals, and often afterwards to quell his natural nervousness. He also developed the annoying characteristic of experiencing an erection the moment he entered a public toilet whether he intended to masturbate or not.
He entered high school at thirteen, already an accomplished violinist and a moderately famous youth. By this time, he was subject to violent responses too varied to count. A picture in a magazine, a bare leg, a particularly prominent breast shape on a woman, and unending unsexual influences often based upon previous masturbatory experience would bring on the feeling of a deep inner vacuum which always preceded erection and eventual masturbation. Apparently, he then became selective, storing minor impulses because it was not physically possible to masturbate every time he was so inspired.
The slightly older girl who introduced him to sexual intercourse when he was fourteen simply orientated his sexual mind. Up to then, he had never seen a female underbody, nor touched a girl's thigh or breast. If Gregory P's. memory could be trusted, the clarinet player was something of case in her own right.
"It was in the storage closet of the music department. She asked me if I'd ever made love to a girl and when I said, no, she made me promise this was the truth. She never did ask me if I wanted to make love. When I assured her I hadn't, she dragged her skirt up, spread her legs and hugged me up close. I was shocked, but not past having an immediate erection, which she proceeded to irritate by hard undulating movements against my body. She neither giggled nor talked, and I remember her tipping her head over my shoulder so I couldn't see her face. The closet was half-dark, and it was very exciting. We swayed and almost fell two or three times, and each time, she would plant her feet, hug me into place and furiously resume her rubbing. Finally, she asked me if I were ready and I must have been at least able to mumble agreement. She let go of me and stripped down her panties, standing in a dirty way, her hips thrust forward, thighs apart so I could see her crotch. I was too startled to open my trousers until she told me a second time. Standing almost in the same way she did, I let her shuffle forward. I had orgasm before her fingers managed to effect even partial insertion of my penis. I don't think she knew it because I was quite able to maintain my erection and together, we went back to hugging and rubbing and bumping until I had a second ejaculation. I haven't the slightest idea if she had orgasm, but we both wound up with watery knees."
Despite several other visits to the storage closet, Gregory P. recounted a tremendously increased schedule of masturbation, using a new technique. Instead of sitting on the toilet, or lying in his bed, he would stand in the remembered arch, close his eyes and masturbate directly to orgasm without hesitation. It took him three months to associate his desire with other girls. His second sexual partner was another school girl, but she was a conquest rather than an accident. The increasing pressure of his musical career inhibited his socio-sexual contacts somewhat, and he continued to rely on masturbation to control his sexuality until he was nineteen, experiencing a dozen or more coital adventures, but never in relation to his sex drives. Sex and his own interpretation of it possessed no viciousness, and it had no deteriorating effect.
His blank-out at the concert was the result of an unusual trio of conditions. He was moderately fatigued by the preparatory efforts required for a formal recitation. Circumstances had made it difficult for him to engage in his usual masturbatory innoculation prior to the concert at nineteen, he was beginning to control a great deal of his spontaneous urges. The third circumstance was the bludgeoning intrusion of a furious impulse rushing over his sexual threshold. Thirty seconds before curtain time, he had looked across the backstage area, half dark and clustered with excited people, and had seen two women, maternally interested in two of the adolescent musicians, standing in a taut, familiar arch against the auditorium wall.
Gregory P. had managed the first half of his recital but had not been able to pluck back the image just past his sexual threshold.
CHAPTER FOUR
HISTORY IS RESPLENDENT WITH GREAT MEN AND WOMEN WHO USED SEX AS the mainspring of their existence, and our moral evaluation of their deeds has nothing to do with the shape of their accomplishments. We boldly proclaim that sexual adjustment in marital arrangements is essential to connubial happiness. We have a great deal to say about the rights and expectancies of individual humans, and we have created countless 'systems' to insure equal opportunity for all. Despite this knowledge we profess to have, we are forcing our children to wage a war against our stupidity in an effort to claim what is theirs.
Recently a thoroughly dedicated, completely educated head of a big city School Board opened her spinster mouth in defense of the neo-intensification of school curriculums now including foreign language and higher mathematics in elementary schools.
"It is a biological fact that our children are maturing more rapidly that ever before, and it is our duty to meet this early maturity with academic challenge to insure intellectual ascencion."
What she really meant was that because today's adolescent seems precociously aware of socio-sexual interests we should smash them into the ground with new educational burdens. From her lofty plane of super-pedagogy, she was expounding the precise theory which has plagued society since the first sin and salvation thumper attacked his pulpit. The way to keep children from exploiting the natural functions of their mind and body is to keep them busy.
It is a biological fact that half the females in the world are nubile and betrothed by the time they are fourteen years of age, and boys of the same age are permitted any sexual license, providing they do not poach on the reserves claimed by their elders. This is a temperate zone average: in tropical countries and among certain races, the age of nubility, or the age at which cohabitation and pregnancy are feasible, is closer to ten than fourteen years.
There is a certain ridiculous unreasoning to the suggestion that we marry our offspring at fourteen, if for no other reason than economics. But it is equally ridiculous and unreasoning to insist that the inferred sexual capacity and tendency, does not exist. And if we measure the amount of sensual inspiration American children are fed against the stimulus available to the children of the noted half of the world, it is a wonder pre-adolescent sexual statistics aren't compatible with the war debt.
* * *
Much of our thinking in many matters is guided by semantics. A boy or a girl does not go through puberty. They arrive at puberty which is the term for designating the precise moment when the procreation of progeny is possible. It is virtually a technical term, because it arrives at a time when most parents do not care to discuss it. Common law states that unless otherwise proved, puberty arrives in the female at age twelve, and in the male at age fourteen.
Adolescence is another word for confusion. It infers an age from puberty to adulthood, the latter being a term applied to the moment when parental responsibility terminates. Socially, we have created some new classifications. We have pre-teens, teen-agers, young adults, and to-hell-with-them ingrates. Asked to define these eras sexually, most parents believe pre-teens are a-sexual, teen-agers are, female: susceptible to dirty old men and nasty boys, male: susceptible to the wrong kind of a girl, and collectively are 'good children' who heed parental guidance which seldom exists.
Young adults are sensible enough to wait until they have finished their education and have found the right girl (boy). To-hell-with-them
ingrates are those who married the girl (boy) despite all the 'things we have done for him (her)! ' and now have a baby they can not afford.
Semantics trap adults into collective lethargy until some direct 'trouble' brings them face to face with acute actuality. There is a school of thought which might infer that this is not a bad thing: teen-agers are impossible so why become excited until something worth a rise in blood pressure occurs? After all, a child of fifteen should have some sense of responsibility according to the last resolution adopted by the P. T. A. Responsibility was defined as the ability to know when her room needed straightening, conducting herself with respect for her elders and taking part in activities designed to give her pride in her home, her school and her country. She should further recognize that her father and mother are people, and that they have a right to live their lives in 'conjunction' with a young adult daughter, not in abject slavery to her lack of consideration.
Translated to match the primarily sensual nature of a teen-ager, this Utopian harmony means that if she keeps her pad neat, gets with the school drags, her parents are going to leave her alone if she leaves them alone. It follows then that the clothes she wears, the make-up she uses, the dates she has and the way she makes out is none of her parent's business.
* * *
In mind-summer of 1963, a Southern California town was rocked by a high school scandal following the discovery of three young girls walking arm in arm down a semi-deserted street at eleven o'clock on a Thursday evening. The oldest was sixteen; the youngest was fourteen, and least able to withstand the barrage of questions with which the patrolmen shook her composure. The three had been on a triple date and had volunteered to walk home when the car containing six teen-agers had 'conked' out. The boys had pushed the car down hill to a service station and the girls had set out to walk home. Nothing seemed too far amiss and the squad car took each of the girls home, receiving profuse thanks from the parents involved.
Thinking about it the following day, one of the patrolmen realized several things were amiss. In ten years of duty, he had never run across three pairs of juvenile neckers in one car. And after exploring the area, he decided that the only 'cover' for a necking session was an empty house, boasting a for sale sign. He went around the house and found no unlocked doors or windows. But there were two garbage cans full of beer cans, bottles and nothing else. The only window in the house not obscured by Venetian blinds was the kitchen, and the sink drain board was equally loaded with beer cans. When a check of the telephone number on the for sale sign turned out to be the home of the sixteen year old girl picked up the night before, and the girl's mother offered to loan the police officer the key if he 'thought anything was wrong.' he again drove to the girl's home. Only the extra key could not be found. The woman said her husband had a key on his ring, but would not be home until after six.
Tramps often break into empty houses and 'live' in the comparative warmth and comfort of borrowed quarters. When the police, in company with the worried property owner, opened the front door of the house at seven that evening, they found not one beer-loving tramp but nine teen-agers, four girls and five boys. In the five room house there were four, torn, lumpy and well spotted mattresses, a few odd chairs and one table which had originally been stored on the garage rafters, and a collection of dirty towels, Kleenex and many dirty glasses. There was also a record player and a stack of records.
The man who owned the house had the pleasure of seeing his daughter, stark naked, scrambling out from under an equally nude boy who had been having sexual intercourse with her on one of the mattresses. The other three girls were in various stages of undress as were their male companions. Eventually, Darlene M., aged sixteen made this confession:
"I snitched the key about a month ago because my boyfriend and I needed a place to make out after his car broke down. A couple of nights later, we were on a double date with a kid who had a car. We told them about the house, and we took the movie money and bought beer and the four of us had a party. Johnnie had already dragged a mattress out of the garage and we put it in what used to be my bedroom when we lived there. The water was on and Johnnie came one afternoon and jumped the electricity in the meter box so we could use the record player and lights. We only put lights in the closets. When you wanted to dress or undress or fool around you went into a closet.
"Well, we got some more old mattresses and hauled some of the furniture out of the garage. Kids would sneak there after school, or in the evening. Johnnie decided we ought to charge them fifty cents a couple, or if just loners came, twenty-five cents. He had to haul the garbage two blocks and dump the cans arid stuff in the trashcans behind an apartment house. Through a friend of his, he bought a gross of condoms and we sold them for a dime apiece."
In two weeks, the place had become a teenage house of prostitution. Two of her girlfriends had set up, one in each of the other two bedrooms. The price was a dollar and the boy had to buy his own rubber. Everyone brought their own beer, some whiskey and occasionally marijuana.
Eventually, the names of thirty-six teenagers were obtained, the youngest girl being thirteen, the youngest boy, fifteen. The group was strangely devoid of 'hoodlums' in the popular sense of the word. Only five of them had ever come to the notice of juvenile authorities, and none of them had what could be termed a 'record'.
Johnnie F. was seventeen, the son of moderately well-to-do parents in excellent community standing. Over the initial shock, his father expressed some jocular pride in his son for turning an empty house into a full-blown commercial enterprise in a meager thirty days. Johnnie admitted that if he'd been a little sharper, he would have carried the garbage out two days before the fuzz arrived.
"Nobody got hurt," was Darlene's half, belligerent attitude. "We didn't let virgins in. Most of the kids were going steady anyway. We just needed a place where we could kick it up a little. What's the difference if you do it in the back seat of a car or on a mattress? In the house, a girl at least had a bathroom to clean up in and her guy could use a rubber. That's how girls get into trouble, going under in the bushes or in a car or on the beach."
Asked what she thought about the two girls who sold their wares, she merely shrugged. "Cookie and May? Well, they only made two or three bucks a week each. They have stingy folks anyway. What's the difference if you take a dollar or a steak sandwich after a drive-in?
And it wasn't like peddling your butt on the street, because they knew all the guys who coughed up the buck."
About perversion? Darlene M. didn't even know two girls who made love, and Johnnie hated fags.
Of the eleven girls and twenty-five boys involved, only Johnnie F. and Darlene M. were prosecuted to the extent of suspended sentences for lewd and disorderly conduct. Thirty-four of the juveniles were placed on probation and remanded to the jurisdiction of their parents. In a town of eighty-thou sand population, the percentage points represented by thirty-six delinquent children was over-whelming. Plus the fact that the economic level of the indignant parents-few even permitted their children to be closely questioned, made specific investigation impossible.
Actually, Darlene M. may have been right-nobody got hurt. There had been no all-night orgies, no weekend binges, and no accidents. Serious trouble might have eventually developed, but this was speculation, based upon averages gleaned from an entirely different group of teen-age delinquents.
Parents and school authorities vouched for the fact that among this particular group of students, no indicative tendencies had been observed. The real shock to adults had come when the precise nature of the childish schizophrenia was determined. A group of average teen-agers, with average 'behavior responses' and scholastic acceptability had turned out to be a depraved, over-sexed, completely obscene gang of fornicators. This had to be the adult conclusion.
Darlene M. was not quite right-the parents got hurt, largely because they had set up standards of behavior, moral and ethical rules, and bulk-headed their attitudes with complete ignorance of juvenile sex potentials. Revelation taught the parents nothing except new fear. Returned to their care were three dozen children, all more or less experienced in sexual matters, each with a certain inevitable rebellion, and none of them equipped with a valve by which they could shut off their stream of sexual urges.
We have no doubt, nor proof, but it would seem reasonable to hazard that the mass parental attitude was one of sin and salvation, pounded into a resentful young mind in an effort to return the adolescent sensuality to the precise place it was thought to have been, ten minutes before Darlene's father and two police officers opened the door of the very unempty house.
In epilogue, Darlene M. met and married a young man spending his vacation on the resort town's beach. Johnnie F. joined the Navy one month after high school graduation. It is singularly consistent with tradition that immediately the threat of 'trouble' is over, the sword is instantly returned to the scabbard and all concern for the adversary is forgotten.
PART THREE
Games With Nasty Names
CHAPTER ONE
IT BECOMES REASONABLY OBVIOUS THAT A PRECISE DETERMINATION OF A child's sex threshold and the nature of that threshold is virtually impossible to ascertain. Incidents' do not indicate anything more than the capability to react. One thing is certain, however. A child is more directly attuned to sexual impulse than adults would like to admit. The child may not understand the significance of words and gestures and exposures, but understanding is not essential to reaction. In a highly sensitive child, erotic stimulation may not have anything to do with humanity, per se. Colors, sounds, shapes and attitudes in inanimate things may have as great an impact as patently sexual stimuli. Arbitrarily then, there is neither a cure nor a positive restrictor for the innate sexuality of a child.
Why should there be?
As a people, we have a national penchant for curing the world of its evils, and we also usurp the right to define evil according to our own tenets. We do not imply there are no situations and conditions which would not be better for some curing, but we stamp ourselves, individually and collectively as immature when we fail to recognize what should be cured and what should not be tampered with. Times are changing and will continue to change. But by simply taking a pencil and a paper and writing out the 'things' that are different than they were fifty years ago, one would discover that almost without fail, the 'difference' is mechanical. Alterations of attitude are a reflection of mechanical things, not because of any change in the brain revering an attitude. As for evil, the only bad things in the world are those things we do not want.
Mechanically speaking, sensuality is the human safety valve. From time to time, other safety valves have been tried: religion, enterprise, war, narcotics, credit plans, alcohol and at one time in history, fainting spells. Psychologically, all of these substitutes can be refined to some form of sensuality. Philosophically, why do we go the long way around to acquire a sense of well being we were born with, and which requires only a hands-off policy to function as a balancing agent against the best results of human stupidity?
A mother who discovers in 1965 that her ten year old child possesses a relatively low sex threshold may soothe her alarm by being assured that throughout man's history, billions of children have had lower sex thresholds, and fiddling with the little girl next door does not prohibit him from becoming President.
Sex is not a one way street. like all natural capabilities, the laws of compensation effect sex, and barring those who are psychopathic and thusly unmanageable under any circumstance, certain physical and mental limitations augmented by social influence will maintain a better balance than the threat of divine censure. There is something to be considered, however, in light of the undesirable directions the sex drive of a child may take.
* * *
Up to puberty, all children show a strong bi-sexual nature, largely because sex is fundamentally a matter of sensation at that period. For this reason, children instigate and accept a great number of semantically homosexual situations and contacts. The number of adult homosexuals is totally unrelated to the number of children who experience homosexual acts. There is some relation between childhood influences and the great number of adults whom we will call the pseudo-homosexuals for want of a better label.
Definitively, a homosexual is a person who for 'some reason' finds emotional satisfaction in intimate association with a member of his, or her, own sex. Past that definitive limit, the only justification for further investigation is curiosity, thinly disguised in academic robes. After a hundred years of clinical probing, the net medical and psychological appraisal of homosexuality is that it is neither curable nor predictable. In most of the countries of the world, (our own excepted) it has been decided that homosexuality is completely inocuous except as it is practiced against the will, or below the age of sexual distinction. Legislation is aimed at the maintenance of order, not the elimination of the disease'. America will eventually come to this same conclusion despite the sin shouters.
Socially, a homosexual can live undisturbed in America, enjoy excellent economic reward for enterprise and find adequate companionship. Those who become statistics are largely those whose social instability would manifest itself in other directions even if they were heterosexual.
The pseudo-homosexual can not live undisturbed in America, or in any other country in the world. Physiologically, they are bi-sexual, and their excursions into homosexual areas are instigated by a desire for erotic physical situations and are invariably surrounded by an aura of adventure and surreptitious near-criminality. This is because his or her choice of social attitude was originally heterosexual, and as heterosexuality is our social standard, citizenship in that mass demands conformity.
* * *
Simon J., thirty-four, a father of two, economically stable and domestically established. He was arrested in a public toilet in the act of committing fellatio on a nineteen year old negro transient. The negro was given a six month 'floater' and bus fare. Simon J. was given a suspended sentence for disorderly conduct and lewdness, with the provision that he seek psychiatric aid. (Judicial statements indicated the psychiatric recommendation was based upon the color of the passive partner rather than on the act itself.) In substance, Simon J. recounted his sexual history as follows:
At the age of twelve, he had entered into masturbatory bouts with a neighbor boy. Together in an unused shed, they would expose themselves, masturbate, 'knock cocks' and say dirty things. These occasions occurred daily, on a progressive basis. Within a month or two, they were systematically engaged in mutual fondling, begun under the guise of enlarging their penile size. Each would pull and stretch the other's penis until full erection made it impossible to distend more than the prepuce. Simon J. admitted that being Jewish, his circumcision and the resultant lack of foreskin gave him an unreasonable inferior feeling.
At about the time both boys were thirteen, they were joined in their shed activities by the other boy's twelve year old sister, a spinally deformed girl who had developed a vicious proclivity for self abuse. In adult recall, Simon J. stated that her pelvic structure was huge, and her monstrous buttocks were adult in size and shape. Her vaginal orifice was long and splayed, but due to the physiological imperfections of her super-short torso, vaginal penetration was restricted to a boyish forefinger. Neither boy knew how she had learned to fel-late their willing penile shafts, but she took over the pair of them. Much of the excitement was due to her unrestrained glee, her nearly hysterical pleasure in vigorous sucking, and the resultant ejaculation which Simon J. insisted she always swallowed.
Shortly there-after, Simon J. moved to another city. His next sexual experience other than reluctantly resumed masturbation occurred with the cashier of his father's dry-goods store. This woman was about thirty-five, divorced, overly plump and inexplicably aware of what a deliberately careless exposure of her cleavage, or a fat thigh did to her employer's fourteen year old son. He saw her only on Saturdays and would sit with her in the back of the store during her lunch hour. After the third or fourth such lunch hour, she ventured a hand to his obvious erection, brought on by her sensual slump in an old chair. Simon J. was more embarrassed by her low laughter and gentle chiding about the inadequacy of his penile tumescence than he was by her boldness. Over a period of a year, she often fondled his penis, but only twice to orgasm. He was never permitted to feel under her clothing, and she made no other erotic suggestions. She was eventually discharged, but Simon J. retained the vivid memory of her constant derision about the diminutive erection her fingers created.
All through high school, he struggled with two problems. One was his circumcision, the other was his feeling that his penis was undersized. He had many petting sessions with school girls, and managed intercourse twice. He admitted that penis size was an obsession, and that in the showers, following gym class, he spent much of his time staring at the other boys, measuring their limp penile structure and trying to guess how erection would alter the unimpressive dimensions. He did lose his concern about being circumcised because about half of the "boys he inspected were-likewise circumcised.
His first homosexual encounter occurred when he was twenty-four, married one year and almost a father. He had joined the Y.M.C.A. to further his handball ability. His opponent that particular afternoon was a brash, handsome young man of twenty-two. In the shower following an hour of vigorous handball, he exhibited the largest penis Simon had ever seen. Petrified with amazement and admiration, Simon J. had stared.
"He saw me and moved from his shower to mine. He said he'd noticed I was a cock-gazer before. Then he took my hand and placed it on his penis, which was already beginning to erect. In fascination I skinned it back and this completed his erection. It was at least twice the length and girth of my own, which was also beginning to erect. I went to pieces, I guess. Anyway, we went from the shower into a service room, dripping wet. I felt weak and sat down on a short bench and he stood in front of me, his huge penis bumping my face. All I could think of was the way Tillie, the hunchback girl had done. I didn't think about the young man, myself or anything. I knew just what to do, and once I'd taken the head of his penis in my mouth, I couldn't stop. I must have kind of blanked out, because the next thing I remembered was him patting my head and the strange taste of his semen in my mouth. I was revolted and ashamed and I just sat there rubbing my face until he left. My own penis was soft and I didn't think anything had happened because there was none of my 'come' on the concrete floor. I never played another game of handball, and I quit the Y.M.C.A."
A year passed during which he was in control of everything but his memory. Simon J. recounted that the size and shape of the young man's penis occurred as a memory at least once a day. By then, he had forgiven his own part in the episode to the extent of regretting that he had not 'remained conscious' during his oral attack on the youth.
His second homosexual venture had been more deliberate. He had accosted a youth in a bar, following a vicarious and hilarious interchange of information about the penile size of the bartender, the youth, and some dubious 'acquaintances' in the Army. Simon J. had rented a room in an adjacent hotel and had spent two hours in homosexual ecstasy with the man who had not lied about his penis size.
In all, Simon J. could recall only six other times in nearly ten years that he had given in to his inexplicable adoration of an over-sized male organ. In relation to the colored transient, he had as was his wont, given a quick look at the man poised at a public urinal beside him. The young negro had been impressive, and for a five dollar bill, had agreed to go into a toilet booth with Simon J.
The harried patient expressed no desire to be a homosexual, i.e., abandon his wife and children and submerge himself in a purely homosexual society. He loved his wife and his children, and was unable to relate his occasional desires with his average way of life. Men didn't excite him. A large penis did. He had also never made any attempt at securing a second liaison with one of his sex partners. He had given up his original excuse, based upon compulsion and boldly admitted his excitement when a suitable penis appeared. Despite a number of suggestions, he had never entered into anal intercourse. He had two fixations, one involving a childhood memory of the pleasure oral-genital contact represented, both for the passive and the aggressive partner, and another involving penile worship, based upon size, not virility. He readily admitted that his knowledge of feminine anatomy had long ago determined that his own penis was adequate for all practical purposes.
The therapist took his fee and signed a statement that Simon J. had complied with the court order, and that to the best of his knowledge, his patient fully understood the nature of his offense. He did offer a seriously considered list of precautions Simon J. might observe to prevent physical involvement with homosexual desires.
Thirteen months later, Simon J. committed suicide in a public toilet.
* * *
Not all pseudo-homosexuals commit suicide, and a great many children whose early sexual experiences include homoerotic incidents do not continue in later years. It is also not logical for one to expect parents to be always aware of what sexual entanglements their offspring may encounter.
Proper sex instruction might have changed many things for Simon J. He should have first known the reason for and the result of circumcision. He should have known at twelve, no later, what the average penile dimensions of males of his race and physical stature should be. Above all, he should have been apprized of the difference between purely sensate genital exercise and those which might have social import.
Such preparation might not have kept Simon J. in the purely heterosexual mass, but it might have clarified his own tinge of homosexuality. As it was, he became pressed between a rock and a hard place, and met his death without ever having a chance to make up his mind. We are aware of the group now rising In prayer, certain that Simon J. is better off dead than alive. For this bunch we have but one observation:
Statistics prove that among any given thirteen men, one will be a confirmed homosexual, one an active bi-sexual, and two will be compulsive masturbators until death. One will be a thief, one will be a traitor to his country given the opportunity, and the rest will temper their convictions if it means losing their job. Count the house, gentlemen, then pour everybody some more wine.
CHAPTER TWO
WHILE IT IS TRUE THAT THE PREDOMINATE PUBLICITY CONCERNING HOMOSEXUALS is male in character, the facts indicate that female homosexuals, both confirmed and of the pseudo-homosexual variety, out-number the men well over two to one. This oddity is due in great part to our social system which permits girls and women to exist in closely intimate situations without censorship. The secondary cause is the nature of the female sex drive, and the type of stimuli required to activate that sex drive.
If we remember that children are bi-sexual, or a-sexual for the first few years of their lives, and relate this fact to the intimate privilege of females, and observe how the female reacts to all forms of emotional pampering, we may justify the potential for homosexual attachments.
The female sex drive thrives on assurances.
Innately weaker, socially inferior, and domestically penalized, her libido responds in direct relation to her fears. In turn, she dispenses affection where it seems to be appreciated and if encouraged by adequate response, she will react on an accumulative basis. Little girls are short women. They learn at a ridiculously tender age the nature of their bargaining power, defined as softness. A five year old girl gains very little by displaying her equality with a five year old boy. She may beat him to a frazzle behind the garage but she gains nothing in our social perspective by proving her muscle. She gains by being cute, powdered, vivacious and gentle.
Any four agreeable females will exchange among themselves more endearing terms, more stated sympathy, and more bold-faced flattery in the course of an afternoon of bridge than they can expect from their husbands in a year. They do not discuss sex as men do, but they discuss intimate subjects, brassiere sizes, girdle problems, and common feminine hazards with an intimacy men never approach. This does not imply homosexuality-it merely sets the scene.
In childhood, the scene is set by an entirely different set of circumstances. A curious fact is that more little girls learn some form of juvenile sex play by themselves than do boys. The degree of physical indulgence may be moot, largely because the boy has a rampant shaft of flesh to which he may direct his attention. But the female, made aware of her difference very early, is curious about why. She is also inclined to early narcissism. At three years of age, she gets her hair brushed ten times as long and ten times as often as does her brother. This and a hundred other variances in personal attention can not but help to make her conscious of her body, if not of her genital part. It is, however, a remarkably short journey from the top of one's head to the crotch.
Most pre-adolescent homosexuality (involving thirty percent of the female population) is involved with exhibition, mild manipulatory exploration, and in only a few cases, to positive mutual masturbation. Opportunity and environment seems to be the major control factor. The net effect of any such homosexual contact is obvious. The girl learns first the nature of her physical response, to one touch or to digital penetration of the vagina. She learns secondly that another girl is a possible source of both physical and emotional collusion. And she learns of a relief valve not specifically denied her by parental censure. The average numerical incidence is very low, again because of opportunity and environment. Specifically, continued, or habitual practice of juvenile homosexuality was reserved for such play as was generated by sisters, or in cases where continuous association with the original partner was noted. And in cases where the homosexual play was instigated by an adult. But in all cases, we are prone to note the establishment of a sexual threshold, based upon a homosexual act.
* * *
Margaret M., undergoing psychiatric probe following her arrest while a Junior in a Los Angeles high school. Average student, pretty, moderately developed and of distinctively subdued mien. She was taken into juvenile custody following the statement of another girl that her acute vulvitis was caused by submitting to Margaret M. in a homosexual liaison, involving extended cunnilingus, vaginal abuse with a cylindrical device and excessive masturbation. First, the confession by Patty D., who instigated the investigation.
"My best girlfriend introduced me to Marge. This girlfriend and I had played around a little together, mostly after double dates or a dance or anything that got us charged up. We didn't really do much, rubbed each other off with our bellies, or maybe with our fingers while we talked about the boys we'd just been with. It wasn't really anything. We never used our mouth. We'd talked about that but had never had enough guts to try it. Well, the first time I went wih Marge, my girlfriend stood watch in the park lavatory while we went into a toilet booth. It wasn't very good because we were scared somebody would catch us. I sat up on the toilet tank with my legs way out and Marge just bent over and did it with her tongue. It only took a half minute, maybe because I was all charged up just thinking about it. She wanted me to do it for her but I was chicken. Then she asked me to finger her off and I tried but some one came in the lavatory and we got scared and quit."
Within three days, Patty D. and Margaret M. had made arrangements to meet at Margaret M's home, to 'play some records' and exchange girl talk. Her mother was in the house, but had learned to ignore her teen-age daughter's friends and their coming and going.
"We took off our panties right away and started to play with each other. Then Marge got out the thing she used. It was the leg off of an old stuffed animal and was about as big as two fingers. She had some big nickel balloons like you buy at the beach. She put the balloon over the cloth leg and we took turns working it in each other. It was pretty good, especially when she bent it up and dragged it out. After that, she sucked me and I fiddled with her. I had to go home at five-thirty."
After three more such sessions, which had included the 'girlfriend' Patty D. developed acute vulvitis which caused pain, a visceral discharge and swelling, causing the girl to believe she had a venereal disease.
In custody, Margaret M. was tearful, frightened and possessed of no bravado. She looked and acted the girl her mother insisted she was, a sweet, obedient, healthy girl who had maybe 'fooled around like girls do' but was probably influenced by the cheap tarts with whom she attended school. The therapist discovered otherwise.
Margaret M. could recall masturbating to orgasm by the time she was nine years of age.
At ten, she had confided her capabilities to a neighbor girl (in another city) and they had masturbated together with occasional vaginal penetrations in digital manipulations for nearly a year. At that juncture, Margaret's father had suffered an accident and was sent to a Veteran's hospital for three months. Her aunt, about thirty-two and single, had come to stay with Margaret and her mother, to mind the house and the girl while the mother worked.
"She got wise right away," Margaret said of her aunt. "I was scared she'd tell my mother, but she just laughed and told me all little girls did it. That night, she came to my room after mother was asleep. She got down on her knees beside the bed and whispered in my ear. She asked me if I was going to do it and I said no, because I was frightened and a little shocked by her nerve. She just laughed and slipped her hand under the covers. Before I could squirm away, she was rubbing me and telling me how hot I was, and she could tell by how wet I was and how my hips jerked. I soon forgot how scared I was because she was a lot better than the girl next door. I couldn't see in the dark but I knew she was doing it to herself while she did it to me. She made me come three times, each time putting her other hand over my mouth so I wouldn't make a noise. I could smell her hand and taste her a little, and I thought about that after she went back to her own room."
Their second indulgence was immediately after school the next afternoon. Alone together in the house, in daylight, they made a gay, voyeuristic occasion of their sex play. Asked what she thought about seeing her aunt naked, Margaret admitted her interest.
"I didn't have any hair yet and she was black hair all over her lower belly and inner thighs. I couldn't believe my little slit could ever grow to be as hers was, but she insisted it would. And her breasts were much bigger than my mother's-with blue veins and little goose pimples on the dark nipples. My own flat chest made me very jealous. She told me she knew how to make mine grow."
Margaret recounted the 'how', as a daily series of intense vaginal agitation, both by her aunt's mouth, and various vaginal penetrations. After approximately ten days, her aunt had induced her to commit cunnilingus in reciprocation for similar attentions. This unrestrained period of homosexual alliance went on until Margaret's father was released from the hospital and subsequently moved his family to Los Angeles.
During the next three years, Margaret had no socio-sexual experiences whatever, relying upon masturbation to satiate her aroused sexual interests. At the same time, her mother, suspecting nothing, began a desultory verbal sex instruction which mostly consisted of menstrual advice and repeated warnings about what men and boys would do if given the slightest opportunity. Margaret admitted being terribly boy conscious, but because of her early sexual experience and its intensity, plus her mother's constant warnings about virginity and chastity, she developed some guilt complex. She became concerned over her lack of a hymen, long destroyed by vaginal play, and decided no 'nice boy' would ever ask her to marry him. For a period, she refrained from vaginal penetration in hope that her hymen might grow back to its mysterious original shape. She was fifteen and a sophomore when she learned from another girl there was no chance for hymenal recovery.
"I went kind of wild then," she went on. "I did everything I'd ever learned to do, but I did it several times a day. Then I met a girl at school who had big breasts and a fat behind and she carried condoms in her purse. We talked a lot, and she told me about boys and I told her what I did. She came over to my house one afternoon, and I shower her everything. That was when I first really wanted to have a boy do it to me. She kept telling me how much better a boy was. I tore the leg off of my old rag dog and we put one of her condoms over it and she put it in me, then laid on me, reaching around to hold the end so when she started to pump, it was just like a boy."
Convinced that a boy was better than her fingers or another girl, Margaret had agreed to go on a double date, arranged by the other, more experienced girl. Tht boy put her through a violent session of 'making out', but stopped short of sexual intercourse because there were others present. Upset, but inwardly relieved, Margaret had not attempted to 'give away' her theoretical virginity again. During the ensuing year prior to her misadventure with Patty D., Margaret had brief, physically extreme homosexual liaisons with seven or eight high school girls. Not all of them relished the association.
"They didn't mind hugging and kissing a little and feeling. But even after they saw me use the dog leg with the balloon, they wouldn't do it because it meant busting their maidenhead. All of them were scared their mother would take them to a doctor for a check-up. Kissing was all right, but unless they'd done it before, I didn't get much out of it."
To every question pertaining to emotional involvement, Margaret replied in the negative. She admitted certain girls, more cooperative than others were her favorites, but she had never developed one homosexual 'romance', and seemed revolted at the thought. A number of suggestions caused her to show revulsions. Her sexual horizon was confined to soft and sympathetic situations, followed by self abuse or mutual masturbation if she could find a willing partner. She seemed non-preferential, although there was a marked degree of eroticism expressed when she was questioned about her feelings whenever she had introduced a novice to her brand of sexual antics.
She was aware of love and marriage and the sexual implication of man-woman relations, and she expressed hope that in time, she too would enter this mystic world of adult adjustment.
Psychiatric opinion was that Margaret had been caught up in the momentum of juvenile sex exploitation with due respect for opportunity. Two and a half months of concentrated exposure to the talents of her homosexual aunt had established a firm possibility pattern. Without such an exposure, her pre-teen involvement with the girl next door would have slipped into limbo, and Margaret would have entered the latency period normally created by social consciousness, parental warnings and general fears in relation to non-conformity. As it was, she made certain mental concessions but continued her self-abuse because of a neuro-sensate demand and a low level of personal control.
On paper, she was a confirmed lesbian, but the therapist was not willing to concede this assumption. Without the emotional evaluation, her acts in themselves merely constituted a known avenue of sexual relief, based upon environmental experience.
He was certain that institutional detention would not only permit her to continue her physical homosexuality, but invite emotional involvement. At sixteen, she was ready for emotional adventure, and if it were provided by another female prisoner in the form of understanding, tenderness, possessiveness and sympathy, the die would he cast. He was further certain that if left to her own devices, she might forego the homosexual associations, returning to self-abuse as a sexual outlet until such time as male-female relations were positively established.
In plain English, she was ready for love, with its emotional and physical aspects fully meshed. As a pseudo-homosexual, she needed a decision made for her she was not yet capable of making for herself. On the other hand, his prognosis was that if and when Margaret ever faced a breakdown in theoretically normal sexual adjustment, she would probably seek homosexual liaisons in logical rebound. She would, he believed, heed the lesson learned because she was neither rebellious nor over-confident. Heed them until she faced overwhelming disappointment, or became of age and emotional maturity to reverse a decision made by non-participants.
After probation, her parents moved to another city, thereby relieving the pressure on Margaret M. and themselves. We have no further record of her behavior.
CHAPTER THREE
ABOUT SEVENTY-FIVE PERCENT OF ALL SOCIO-SEXUAL ACTS AMONG PRE-TEENS are experienced by twenty-five percent of the total. By mid-adolescence, this ratio has altered to a more balanced percentage. But the one-in-four factor still holds good in the light of continued socio-sex performance, which simply means that a single sex experience does not preclude the formation of a habit.
Even an adult, long past the age where permissiveness is required, spends more time wanting than doing. If we total up the restrictive influences, plus the innate ineptness of children, it is not difficult to understand why many erotic adventures no matter their momentary import, are not repeated. It is further true that children do not always recognize the nature of their sex drives, which is equal to saying they did not know what was happening, nor what was going to happen nor why any of it occurred at all.
Kinsey noted hundreds of men and women who recalled at least one, and often many, total failures to complete a socio-sex act, even though both partners were physically willing. In children, these failures are generally related to the certainty that there was some positive connection between the failure and the restrictive influences, including parental warnings and general implied morality. In additional cases, the completion of a sex act frightened the perpetuators by reason of its intensity, physically and emotionally.
This is a valid reason for parents to maintain their poise in the face of an offspring's first apparent sexual exploit. It would take a very warped sense of logic to insist that an eight year old boy or girl had very much control over the circumstances leading to their participation in any kind of a sexual incident. We might add that the more drastic the incident, the more reserved should be the adult reaction. We are fundamentally referring to the obviously passive member of any sexual duo.
Punitively, a good clout on the ear might keep a nine year old boy from ever taking down the neighbor girl's panties again, but it would not stop him from masturbating over the memory. And if the clout on the ear was for the fifth time he'd taken her panties down, he would, with the logic of humans, estimate that four out of five times he could get away with it. There is nothing wrong with giving the girl involved some sound, gentle advise, but to raise a hue and cry which the child can not relate to the casual loss of her panties could give her either a claim to fame which she might like to augment by another such adventure, or it might relate in adverse order to an uncounted number of disorganized impulses of which her parents were unaware.
Trauma is a favorite word among students of psychiatric snoopery. It implies a wound to the libido which effects one and all of characteristics making up a personality. It can occur, they say, as a single incident, or as an accumulation of related incidents which eventually form a massive psychic-socio block to eventual reasoning. We can not get involved in a discussion of how traumatic experiences are healed, if they ever are. We are constrained to say that many physical incidents in childhood are transposed into traumatic events by over-active mouths attached to ignorant brains.
Any parent of a ten year old child is aware that the hard blow delivered in a rough and tumble on the grass becomes a tragic thing when associated with an angry, punitive attitude. In neither case is the child physically hurt to any degree. The world, per se, recognizes the science of MARY POPPINS, who made games of tasks and sugared the bitter medicine. This sneaky psychology, plus bribery, constitutes ninety-five percent of all adult supervisory measures, right up to the point where sex enters the picture. Faced with sex, the adult dons a fright wig and goes through all the contortions of a savage witch-doctor.
Sophisticated parents, reasonably aware of psychic reverberations, would be properly horrified if they had any concept of the National average attitude of parents toward sexual aberrations discovered in their children. Universally, the blame is always put on the other participant, but the volume of the hue and cry is indifferent as to from which mouth it exudes. Police and medical records reflect only a fraction of the punitive sadism inflicted upon children under the age of fourteen for theoretical sexual misbehavior. It is known fact that many of the corporal punishments meted out to children for sexual activities would not be forthcoming if the child smashed a front window.
There is a positive relation between parental fury over childish sex acts and the adult's subconscious sex drives in many cases. Records pertaining to father-daughter incestual crimes in a large Westcoast city indicate that of every hundred investigated cases, thirty-one percent of them originated during or following an instance of corporal punishment, and over half of these beatings were given for the girl's alleged sexual exploits, not specifically copulation. If we concede this to be an extreme, we must yet be aware that in matters pertaining to sex, parents may obviate an otherwise level head.
* * *
Recently in a western city, a psychopathic rapist induced a neighbor's five year old daughter to 'take a ride' with him. She was discovered the next day, wandering nude and badly mauled m a canyon some ten miles from her home. The search party, one of many in the area, who found her were appalled at the apparent physical condition of the little girl. Her feet were raw, her body was scratched and bruised and she was suffering from hunger, thirst and exposure. They bundled her up and whisked her to a nearby hospital. On the way, her most poignant statement was that she had 'got losted'.
Subsequent examination in the hospital after she was given severe sedation proved she had been sexually assaulted a number of times by a man neither gentle nor diminutive. Her vagina and rectum showed multiferous lacerations and her buttocks and breasts were spotted with bite marks. It was obvious she had been through a sexual ordeal calculated to destroy a grown woman, let alone a child of five. The attending physician patched her up efficiently.
By morning, she was able to sit up, smile at all concerned and tell the police who had committed the outrage. They arrested the rapist, he confessed readily and for the record, was serving a life sentence within four and a half weeks of the outrage.
Chronologically, the discovery of the child with the implication of forceful rape had caused her mother instant collapse. By the time the girl was washed and soothed, her mother was under deep sedation in an adjoining ward. The child's father was not able to take care of the child, and his job required daily attendance. Despite the fact that the girl seemed to recover swiftly, it was decided to leave her in the hospital until her mother had sufficiently revived to take the child home.
There was little need to question the girl because of the rapist's confession. She did however, volunteer some information. She had apparently never been afraid of the man because she had known him for some months. He had parked the car and turned on the radio and they had 'talked some'. Without the rapist's confession, the authorities would have been hard-pressed to understand just what happened. They' had taken off their clothes because it was hot. Things' hurt a little, and there wasn't any toilet so she had to 'pottie' in the bushes. She was unsure whether or not she had cried, and at no time did she express fear of what was happening to her even though it hurt.
She had accepted pain and intimacy beyond imagination because her 'friend' neither upset her with words nor 'hurt' her very long at a time.
She had ten times as much to say about her terror at being alone in the canyon as she had to say about her physical ravishment. She was not aware that the rapist had sent her into the brush to relieve herself and had immediately driven away. In her mind, she had simply gotten lost, and investigation showed she had wandered, barefooted, nude and bestially ravished nearly a mile before the search party found her sitting on a warm rock.
It took the combined forces of the police and the hospital to convince both the mother and father that the less said about the incident, the rapist, the hospital and the police the better it would be for the child. By immediately moving to a new neighborhood, the chance of malicious or unintentional reference to her ordeal was lessened and the excitement of a new home seemed to hasten the process of mental subordination.
* * *
At some later date it is quite possible that some specific instant of her ravishment may produce a traumatic response. It may occur in relation to a painful male intrusion, a shape, a sound or a mnemonic recall of sensation, pain or pleasure. If she remembers the act and the continuity, she may at some later age discover that she had been raped as a child, but without memory of a reactionary emphasis, the chances of traumatic maladjustment are very slight.
In another area, few children grow to late adolescence without witnessing some form of sexual behavior, either by other children or by adults. Children, taught that sex is a no-no, can witness only two kinds of sexual attitudes. One is obviously criminal because both parties are expressing high, illicit glee; the other is frightening because both parties are so deadly serious about their carnality.
Pornography flourishes because of the pure animal relationship between the observer and the depicted act or person. Few adults can objectively think of their parents in coitus despite the fact that they know it goes on. Sight of a very pregnant woman may originate many thoughts, but seldom does one try to construct in the mind an image of the moment when she got that way. With a child, the sight of sexual activity he or she does not understand can well create tall walls or deep pits or a broad sponge-like meadow, to which every successive sexual impulse is subject.
To list the number and types of experience capable of producing trauma is futile, as would be the concept of any sex education extensive enough to prepare a child for any fifty percent of the possibilities. Sex education, however, is not the only science which we are forced to approach with no real hope of total victory. It does not hold that no knowledge is better than some as an antibiotic against accidents which might occur from partial understanding.
There could be no way to prepare a five year old girl for the ravages of a psychopathic rapist, or any other violent sexual situation but the sum total of extreme sexual exposure is numerically small. The cases reaching a police blotter or a psychiatrist's couch are miniscule compared to the number of humans facing maladjustment because of small, seemingly unimportant traumas. The only court of appeal these people have is chance. And the same influence which produces at marriage, a psychologically frigid wife or a blundering impotent husband may inhibit the will to correct an ignorance which prevents happiness but is tolerable. Using as a directional base the presently known statistics involving juvenile eroticism and applying the art of sophisticated computer selectivity, it would be a relatively simple matter to determine the response capabilities of any age group in any distinct economic or geographical area.
* * *
As a generality, the three out of four pre-teens who do not repeat a socio-sexual performance will keep the psychiatrists rich because at least half of the group retreated with a traumatic scar. It is a logical biological assumption that the reason sex feels good is to keep the mammalarian specie interested in the activity. Once any healthy mammal has accomplished a satisfactory, or orgasmic socio-sexual act, lack of opportunity and learned negation stand alone as prohibitions against repetition. Learned negation includes all of the social and moral threats, from a sound beating to the promise of hell-fire for the duration of Eternity.
In a recent college level survey, a twenty year old Junior had a good deal to say about her early sex life, physically and mentally.
"I started playing with myself when I was nine or ten, I mean, to the point of getting off. No one told me a darned thing and I wasn't shown how by some other girl or some smart boy. Right then, the trouble started. I'd do it at night before I went to sleep, and every morning, I'd swear to never do it again. I generally missed on Sunday night and sometimes on Mondays because I was full of Sunday school righteousness and church was a big thing with my parents. By Tuesday, the itch was boss again and away I'd go. That's about the way it went until I started to Junior high-school and began to have chintzy little dates with boys. I went through the same thing about kissing and necking and using dirty words. About that time I had my first period and my mother came on with a lot of gobbly-gook about temptation and sin and chastity which scared hell out of me because I poked around for a half hour without finding anything that resembled a 'veil of chastity' where she said it was. I supposed, and rightly, that I'd rubbed it to death during the past three or four years.
"I went through hell then. According to my mother, I was condemned to hell without a boy ever having touched me. I talked a little with a couple of girls my age in school and they had the same junk in their head. I didn't say anything about how I was and they didn't either. For about a month I was very strict with myself. Then I decided that having already been consigned to hell the remaining barrier was to have some logical explanation for the loss of my maidenhead because my mother was sure to discover it was gone, if not immediately, the moment the man I would marry threw me out of the house when he found I was not a virgin. I had heard at school that the old dodge of saying you fell or got crooked one a bicycle seat didn't sell worth a darn. Anyway, I thought that mine was too far gone to hold up under that kind of a story.
"All this time I was fluctuating between being an angel and a finger-diddler. Finally my despair became so thorough I started to look like a zombie. I couldn't sleep and I couldn't face my parents. I don't know to this day if they noticed how I avoided looking at them when I talked, or used every excuse to get out of the house, or at least, into my own room. The plan came to me then. I'd pick the nastiest boy in the school, the one everybody talked about and set him up. I'd let him do it to me a little, then tell my mother. It seemed partially all right because any boy who was as nasty as he was supposed to be deserved anything he got for wrecking girls.
"I was fine until one certain, irrevocable instant when his peter slipped past the crotch of my panties. He was big and rough and a rooter but I beat him to the gun. He took me home about ten-thirty and I was so rum-dum I decided to wait until morning before telling my mother. I never did tell her. At breakfast the next morning, I felt fine. I listened to my mother and father talk about all the things they had talked about the previous morning. My dad wore the same suit, my mother the same housecoat. They both told me how nice I looked and gave me some compliments about my school work. I figuratively held my nose and leaped into the boiling cauldron of Hell. From that day to this, I've done whatever I want to do when it seems right to me. Which is every chance I get if the boy is nice."
Her attitude about promiscuity and eventual marital relations?
"Who's promiscuous? I'm twenty. Half the girls in my high school class are married and have at least one kid. They get it any time they want it and a lot of times when they could stand to forget all about it. My machinery is just exactly like theirs. As for being a virgin when I marry, nuts. This is no time to go back to those horrible years when a nothing could cut you like a knife. Anyway, any man who expects to marry a twenty-one or two year old virgin is a clod I want no part of."
Fifty percent of the women in America build their sexual lives based upon attitudes formed at a time when " a nothing cuts you like a knife."
CHAPTER FOUR
SO FAR WE HAVE AVOIDED WHAT WE TERM PSYCHOPATHICALLY IMBALANCED SEX. We approach it now, completely aware that it represents a small part of the sex picture, and equally aware that a great number of apparently psychopathic sex incidents involve no psychic imbalance at all. We have still to prove at this date that deviation from a social norm is indicative of lunacy, mild or malicious. This is not, however, a treatise concerned with the stratas of mental conformity. We are concerned with the sex potential of the young, and any mother or father will immediately admit that a large share of parental fear during the extreme youth of their offspring is dedicated to the concept of 'sex fiends'.
Rape, child molestations and sex murders occur often enough to justify parental concern. A great many indictable sex crimes are committed which never reach the courts, and an even greater number occur which remain a secret between the doer and the done. Much of the latter occurrence is because there is some doubt as to who did what and who was done.
Kinsey reported that seven percent of his female sampling reported having had some form of sexual contact with adults by the time they were twelve years of age. Two observations are pertinent here, one being that pre-adolescent recall is not trustworthy unless an incident had some particular significance, and the other being that in acquiring this percentage, sampling did not include more than a miniscule number of females born after 1940, and none raised in the post-war decades involving stuffed brassieres, stretch-pants, and progressive education. The laws remain the same, but the point at which a teen-ager calls the law is primarily a matter of personal choice. Much of this same tolerance extends deeply into the pre-teen years.
* * *
Consider Sandra G., thirteen, hospitalized with her eleven year old sister after staggering into a police station, seventy miles from her home. Both girls were disheveled, weeping and sick. Upon examination, it became evident that both girls had been subjected to rape, vaginally and rectally, in conjunction with brutal lacerations over most of their bodies. This is what Sandra told the police matron:
"Right after lunch, Mary and I went down to the beach we only live a couple of blocks away. We had our suits on under our slacks and sweaters and we each had twenty cents for Cokes. It was foggy and cold, so instead of sunbathing, we went up to the concession stand for a Coke. These two nice boys were there and they had been driving up the coast from San Diego, looking for a sunny beach. They didn't pay much attention to Mary, but they asked if I wanted to go with them maybe some of the beaches just north were sunny. They were real nice and they had a car. They promised to get us back by five so we went."
She had even kidded her little sister about having a boyfriend all to herself in the back seat of the car. The two boys made no overt moves on the highway, but after fifteen miles or so, they decided there was no chance of finding a sunny beach and they suggested turning up into the hills above the fog line. They could stretch out and get their quota of sun without any ocean or beach sand. They found a level place off the road and behind a patch of mesquite.
"They had an old blanket and we stripped down to our swim suits. Right away, the boy with me got to playing around and kissing me and the other boy was teasing Mary. One of the boys turned the radio on in the car and he and I started to do the twist. After awhile, we got tired an flopped out on the blanket and began to neck a little. I didn't mind that, in fact, it was fun until he got to feeling me. Mary was laughing at my struggles and so was the other boy. I got a little scared then because the boy was so strong. I knew he was a lot older than I was because he had hair all over his chest. I could tell he had one on, too, because it bulged his swim trunks and he kept trying to rub it on my stomach.
"I said we had to go home, and after a little bit, the boy and Mary went around and got into the car. I started to get up when the boy I was with just grabbed me. He called me a C.T. and told me if I didn't give it to him he'd take it. About then, Mary yelled, and the boy wouldn't let me get up. I was frantic. I could hear Mary crying and protesting and the boy saying dirty things to her. I'd done it once with a boy already, but I was terrified thinking of what my mother would say if I let anything happen to Mary. So I told the boy I'd let him do it to me, and the other boy too, if they'd let my sister alone. He called up to the boy in the car and told him what I'd said. They both agreed to let Mary alone."
Followed then a rambling description of what the two near-men did. While one stood by, naked and completely patient at first, the other proceeded to have violent sexual intercourse with Sandra. Without letting her up, the second boy mounted her slim, partially developed body. Sandra also remarked that once she heard her little sister half crying and half giggling as she watched from the front seat of the car. With their first lust expended, she recalled that they began to 'fool around' with her. Over her first terror, she had evidently ceased to be a reluctant participant in the hill-side orgy. She admitted being at least indifferent when her original partner wished to have a second coitus. He had pulled her down on top of him and made entry, holding her above him.
At that moment, the complexion of the entire affair changed. The second boy had mounted her back, brutally forced his penis into her anus and Sandra was unable to recall any further succession of events. She did remember it beings nearly dark as she lay on the blanket, torn, bruised and deathly sick from repeated exchange of partners.
Apparently the two young men, aware that in so abusing Sandra they had committed themselves to rape and subsequently, trouble, had moved from Sandra to her sister. When she finally was able to stand, the two boys were in the back of the car, Mary a nude and folded shape between them. One of the boys saw Sandra standing and got out of the car. When he threw her in back, she saw that they had done the same to her sister they had done to her. Her plea to take her and her sister back to where they lived was ignored.
After dark, one of the boys got into the back seat while the other drove. Sandra reported that this order of travel was reversed every time the boy in charge of the nearly unconscious girls wearied of sexual exploitation. This ordeal went on for nearly twelve hours. At dawn, the two boys had driven off of a county road, forcefully dressed the two hurt and terrified girls and left them.
Hospital attendants admitted that Sandra was sufficiently developed to make her precise age a question, particularly to boys only four or five years her senior, but there could be no question as to Mary's age bracket.
As neither boy has been apprehended at this writing, we are unable to label either as a sexual psychopath. It must be remembered that 'the entire affair was begun on a note of gaiety and careless friendliness. However innocently the two girls went along with the suggestion of finding a sunnier beach, the implication was that they were not inaccessible. Sandra's confession that she 'had done it with a boy already' would indicate that her kissing and struggling and protesting might not have been very convincing. Once a start was made, the momentum of sexual ascendancy progressed until the gray light of morning brought sanity to the minds of the sex-drugged men. Their brutal acts were unforgivable, criminal and despicable; the girl's mother should have her head examined. The clothes she brought so her daughters could be taken home fresh and clean included a brassiere for Sandra which contained a half inch of padding.
* * *
Parents who are unaware of their children's sex threshold take a great risk when they dress a twelve-year old, or under, in sophisticated clothes in any company. She may be pert, childishly cute, and vivacious. She may be the best baton twirler in the seventh grade, and destined to be the Queen of the Campus if they ever save enough money to send her to college. She may be also driving the man next door out of his mind, let alone Uncle Harry, her math teacher and not rarely, her own father. Under normal circumstances, all of these men would look, think, and keep their hands above her shoulders.
Dr. Harvey P., pediatrician notes the case of Alice D.:
"Eleven, pretty, slightly thin for her age, O-type blood, no extensive history of childhood disease. Development, moderate.
"Symptoms: bladder distress, necessitating three to six trips per night to the bathroom."
In the presence of his office nurse, Dr. Harvey P. made a pelvic examination, the first he had made since Alice D. was two months past her ninth birthday. There was first, absolutely no trace of a hymen, nor of recent lacerations or abrasions. There were further, no signs of an infection, no vulvitis, no indication whatever of disease. In the three or four minutes of elapsed time between placement of the child on the examination table and the doctor's initial touch, the clitoral structure had become tumescent and the inner vaginal labia had produced a nominal amount of moistness from the Bartholin excretions. The child giggled continuously during digital manipulations of a purely clinical nature. Privately alarmed by the absence of the hymen, the doctor extended his examination to a digital inspection of the uterine tench. This unusual probe in a girl of such an age caused the doctor to note two facts. Her vaginal cavity was considerably above average, and deep probing caused obvious spasms of the perineum, notably the pulsation of her anal sphincter. At the same time, her thighs twitched uncontrollably and Alice D. shuddered as if with chill.
Dr. Harvey P. prescribed sandalwood oil, and set up an appointment after hours with the girl's father, a rather prominent merchant. Upon hearing the doctor's opinion that an adult male was having frequent sexual intercourse with his daughter, and that while now, the sum-total of damage was an irritated urinary meatus and a super-sensory awareness to slight contact, the next danger was psychological and an inevitable danger was pregnancy. The father seemed amazed that the physician could deduct so many possibilities from mere examination, and some insight into human nature caused the doctor to pressure the interview. After two hours, the father admitted that he had been having sexual intercourse with his daughter for slightly over five months. In essence, his confession was as follows:
"Last winter. You remember how cold it was? My wife bought Alice several pair of leotards to wear under her clothes. They were black. She was barely eleven, but you know how kids are, nowadays. She had her hair all curled and she wore a turtleneck sweater and fiddled with her eyes. She was nuts for football, and so am I. It drove my wife nuts, the two of us in front of the television watching whatever game was on, Saturday and Sundays. Sometimes at night, too. Anyway, I always flopped out on the sofa and Alice sat on a hassock. It was warm in our house, she couldn't stand the leotards and a skirt or slacks in the house so she'd he around in the black leotards and a blouse or a sweater and we'd watch the football games. I won't say I didn't look at her some. She was cute, and she wiggled all the time and the way kids talk now, you forget they are ten or eleven. One afternoon, she brought me a fresh beer and some crackers and flopped down in front of me, kind of spoon-fashion. It was a pro-game, the Colts and the Browns and a real exciting game. I'd had two beers.
"Doc, the next thing I knew, I had a hard-on, right up against her little bottom! It was nothing, I swear it! I backed off, you know, just to be sure she wouldn't feel it. I gulped the beer and asked her to get me another anything to get her off the sofa. It didn't do any good. She was all legs and giggles and her little butt bounced around and the next thing I knew, she was back on the sofa and I was in real trouble. She kept banging me in the ribs with her elbow every time a good play came up and it seemed to me she was deliberately trying to push her butt where I didn't need it. Right in the middle of the third quarter, I didn't care. My wife had taken off to spend the afternoon with a friend so she wouldn't have to listen to the ball game. I put one hand on Alice's hip, and there wasn't a thing between my palm and her hide but those leotards. I hung on though."
The break-down came two weeks later, under almost identical conditions. After a rambling recital of his own mental anguish and self-condemnation, he admitted that he looked forward to seeing and feeling his daughter's body any time it was possible. He also began to believe she was aware of how he reacted because she never went back to sitting on the hassock to watch the television. By then, he had ceased to 'back away' and he was sure she had been conscious of his erections many times. By then, he was letting his uppermost arm and hand lay over her, and he confessed to pressing areas he knew to be erogenic, mostly to see how she reacted. This he did during particularly exciting plays when she was close to hysterical glee.
Specifically, he had touched her mons venus at such a moment, and there had been no protest.
"I just kept on rubbing and she kept on wiggling and the next thing I knew, she was humping my finger and hollering for Y. A. Tittle to toss another pass before half-time. He didn't make it and the commercial came on, only Alice didn't stop humping and she didn't get up. She just pressed back and raised one leg and there we were. I was half out of my mind, Doc. I slipped my hand down inside the leotards, they stretch easily, and she came up for my fingers. I was scared, ashamed and half-sick but I couldn't stop. I thought if I could just get those leotards down and my pants open, I could get off between her legs with all the humping she was doing. I remember asking her if she liked what I was doing, and she giggled and nodded her head. I just kept on until the half-time was over. By then, she was all over me, and I had her leotards down around her thighs.
"It didn't work. I got my penis between her legs and she didn't seem to notice at all. But she was humping harder and bouncing around and the next thing I knew, I was rooting. It was barely in when I came, and she didn't know that either."
Significantly, her total lack of understanding or shock was interpreted as permission by her father. He wasn't too sure about rupturing her hymen because she never bled nor cried out. The following day was Sunday, and he had tried to talk his wife into staying in the house during the early afternoon game in the belief that her presence might keep him from further incestual activities. She had not succumbed to his promise of low volume and no shouting.
His statement that Alice had skinned out of her leotards before the pre-game analysis was over, leaving a short skirt to cover her hips and thighs was followed by the father's assurances that he lost every vestige of restraint. He even came to the sofa, bringing petroleum jelly as a lubricant against what he thought was a dangerous disparagement of physical capabilities.
Since that weekend, there had been hardly a day passed without he and his daughter engaging in sexual intercourse. The real reason for her multiple trips to the bathroom at night was to meet her father, who could not leave his bed until his wife was asleep. Their most used place was the bathroom because it had a secure lock in case the unknowing mother awakened. He would sit on the lidded toilet and Alice would straddle his thighs, effecting coitus with more enthusiasm than comfort.
While he had cautioned her against the slightest indication of their incestual arrangement, he had little fear of her childish inability to contain their secret. The football games had effectively cut off their tendency to include the mother in confidences.
Dr. Harvey P. was in a most difficult position. Obviously the father had no wish to go to jail, nor to reveal to his wife what he had done. Hippocratically, the physician was bound to seek another solution other than the legal answer. There was also the problem of what Alice would do if her source of pre-adolescent sensation were eliminated. It might also be noted that psychoanalysis has observed a positive reaction among women whose childhood sexual references include a male penis. If the experience was pleasant, as was Alice P's, the memory of a large, overly proportionate male organ often prevents a grown woman from being satisfied, psychologically, with the same organic growth when she is an adult. If the experience was unpleasant, traumatic reaction is invariably one of fear, revulsion and frigidity.
In the subject case, a partial solution was accomplished by sending the girl to a private school, away from home and the atmosphere associated with father, football and fornication. Success or failure of this course of action seems moot, but so would a prison sentence for the father, disgrace for the girl, and destruction for the mother. To say nothing of the physician's peace of mind.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE CURRENT OF THOUGHT AMONG UNINFORMED ADULTS IS THAT SOME monstrous influence has suddenly appeared which is wreaking havoc among the youth of America. This influence wears many labels, depending upon the personal convictions of the individual adult. When a group of meddlers get together and discover they share the same fantasies, they form an association or a 'club', and with accumulated ignorance, start a crusade. Fundamentally, these groups are the sorry heirs to the disease known as 'reformation fever'. Their theory is that the way to eradicate a basically human impulse is to take away a material 'thing', created by man in the image of his needs. If may even be that in basic concept, reformation was created to sate a basic human tendency to counteract psychic frustration.
Specifically, the reformers are now attacking all forms of communication, having arbitrarily decided that if our youth are not exposed to words and pictures about sex and violence they will not indulge in same. This is precisely the sick thinking that preceded the passage of the Volstead Act. Attack the material thing, not the reason for it.
Sex and violence occur in massive volume because we live in a violent, sexy world, and every human who is born into it comes equipped with the machinery required to keep sex and violence 'on the road'. The economic pressure of our time affects everyone, from the richest to the poorest; the politics of international relationships puts distrust, hate and cupidity before the eyes of the world in constant parade, and the dispensation of knowledge is so expanded that even an uneducated man or woman thinks objectively of space travel and the chemistry of medicinal dosage. Since time immemorial, the individual human has resorted to emotional outlets outbursts, if you wish, when the pressure of his environment becomes oppressive. We were born with the capacity and the equipment for more sex than is required to populate the world, more's the pity. We were also born with an adrenal gland, specifically designed to pour stimulus into the bloodstream at any moment the brain is challenged by danger, justified or unjustified. It may be also noted that we were not born with knee pads to facilitate long sessions of prayer.
* * *
Exhaustive clinical research indicates that a child reacts to specified sex and violence with responses nearly identical to those of adults. The difference is that with children, the degree of stimulation is apparently not important. Once the sexual threshold is established, the sex drive can and does translate many nonerotic things into positive stimulation. Neither Mr. Sears nor Mr. Roebuck ever intended to produce pornography, but by testimony and analysis, it has been discovered that more male ejaculations have occurred over the corset ads and the lingerie pages of their famous catalogue than over any other single source of inspiration, except the Bible, the latter having some advantage in age and psychic response potentials.
The single thing deliberately erotic photos and literature can do for a child with a low sex threshold is to sophisticate the mental requirements of a sex impulse. It must also be remembered that in exploring the effects of pornography, psychological research has discovered that in ninety-seven percent of the studied cases, the reaction was autoerotic. Voyeurs, Peeping Toms, and girl watchers do not become psychopathic rapists or indiscriminate seducers. A rapist may look before he rapes, but it wasn't the 'look' that triggered his dementia in the first place.
The second important factor in reducing the value of pornography in the scheme of juvenile delinquency is that real pornography is expensive and very difficult to come by. Even 'girlie' magazines and the motley collection of nudist journals and risque paperbacks cost money, and the sale of same to minors is supervised by steely-eyed clerks and magazine shop proprietors who have no wish to risk their business for the sake of the occasional dollar and a half some teen-ager might wish to spend. And again, these 'smut' sources need the translation ability to become inspirational. This is so even in adult reaction, and it is the adults of this country who spend two billion dollars a year purchasing books, magazines and photographs of hopefully erotic nature.
Recently in Los Angeles the police did raid a teen-age 'pornography cult'. On the face of it, the police walked into a loft equipped with an eight and a sixteen millimeter camera, a steel trunk loaded with 'stag' films, countless still photographs and a moderately elaborate set-up for processing film. The club roster numbered in the high twenties, the age bracket was between fifteen and twenty. Economically, the loft rent and utilities amounted to fifty-five dollars a month. The retail worth of the stag films was known to be about six hundred dollars. The still photographs would have brought about a thousand dollars on the pornographic market. Monthly dues were ten dollars, paid even by each of the nine girls who had loaned their charms to about four hundred glossy prints, in black and white and color, alone and often in enthusiastic company with one or several of the male club members. Obscenely excellent enlargements were myriad.
Joyce C, seventeen and possessed of a face and figure most obviously photogenic had this to say:
"So what's the problem? We didn't sell any of the stuff, just made it and looked at it. I was one of the original six who started it off. We were all members of the school photography club. Some of us liked glamour stuff, but in school, it was no go. At first we formed a small club and used one of the boy's garage darkroom. We did our shooting on the beach or in the hills or in the garage with some cloth backdrops. Mostly it was arty stuff, but every once in awhile, one of bugs would pop a sneak shot. None if it was any hairier than the stuff in our photographic journals and magazines. Then we chipped in and bought a developing unit for black and white movie film, and we cooked up the idea of making a movie. An art film, like.
"We had to shoot it in the hills because we didn't have a studio or enough money to buy props. We took a romantic short story and by changing it a little we made a shooting script. It called for a couple of hot scrambles between two secret lovers. I was the girl. There were only six of us to do the acting and run the two eight millimeter cameras. We couldn't afford a lot of retakes so we decided to make the love scenes but good the first time around. Anyway, the lead was my steady boyfriend and we'd 'been the route a lot of times. Later, we dubbed the sound into a tape recorder and ran them both at the same time. It was pretty rough in spots and it knocked us all out, just putting it together and editing. It ran forty minutes and was a real charge. Then we decided to add some scenes, mostly sexy because there was no doubt about us all going for the film.
"That's when we got the idea for a bigger club. We knew two or three more bugs who could get dough out of their folks. All we had to do to get them into the club was show them our film. Every time we cooked up a new idea, we'd invite a new bug or two to join. By then, we were really turning some hot stuff. But there were some things we talked about shooting that the girls, me included, didn't want to do. One of the guys borrowed a couple of real sex films from a friend. After we saw some other girls and guys cutting it up the lid was off. But to buy fifty buck hot stuff took money. So we recruited more club members."
From the confiscated evidence, no form of sexual activity, including homosexual acts between girls, was 'too rough', after the voyeuristic nature of their association was admitted. The only time they bought outside material was when something 'good' came along at a price they could afford. They had discussed peddling their productions but had been afraid of some one of them being identified. Closure of their club came about because one of the girls had gotten pregnant at a 'club meeting' and her mother had wormed the truth from the girl.
If the above account seems to refute the contention that pornography is basically a stimulant to autoeroticism, a quick survey of the chronology involved in arriving at a pornographic cult will show a number of motivations hardly associated with juvenile delinquency. It was obviously not an average situation, from beginning to end, but it graphically illustrates the ability of young minds to translate, or prostitute, sterile art and mechanics into desired sexuality.
* * *
There is no argument with the concept that unlimited pornography might well sophisticate a child to the point of seeking progressively undesirable sexual achievement. A picture is a fine educational tool. There is also the residual effect of a picture or a graphic passage in prose, which could well form a constant image in a childish mind to the extent of crowding out more mundane but academically important matters. Over-emphasis is one of the consistently offered arguments against early and specific sex education. The inference is that sex is so much more attractive than algebra the latter would certainly suffer neglect. This is a question of semantics. If we treated sex on the same graduated scale we teach mathematics, from simple addition to advanced calculus, at the time when a juvenile mind was ready for algebra there would be ample room for it.
Thirty years ago, sex manuals (? ) were adamant in stating that most of the maladjustment in marital sex was due to the ignorance of the bride and groom, and also to the erroneous nature of sex misinformation acquired in adolescence, largely from washroom sexologists and braggarts. The biggest step we have made in thirty years is to make available to our youth some physiology books, wherein love is the synonym for passion and the drawings or graphs resemble nothing a child can see looking down or at a friend. We have never seen a drawing or a photograph of a male penis in rampancy except in one or two of the highly specialized tomes certainly not available to an adolescent girl. Why shouldn't she know what it looks like and why? Every date she enjoys between thirteen and twenty is going to produce that mysterious tumescence in her boyfriend.
We could label at least part of a young boy or a young girl's interest in pornography as genuine curiosity, directly in relation to feelings they have which no one cares to explain. There are few available examples of highly erotic prose which do not contain two elements in addition to fairly clinical descriptions of a sexual act. One element is passion, as opposed to love, and the other is implied responsibility for one's acts, either stated directly or implied. In conjunction with 'washroom sexologists' most. teen-agers manage to educate themselves with remarkable facility by relating a number of incomplete impressions, and many of them come from so-called pornographic sources.
The flaw in this system of 'letting the kid find out' is that the adolescent will find out, but in doing so, continues to wear the yoke of secrecy and threatened condemnation. There is a vast difference between restraint, and condemnation for error, but too often, the latter is used because it takes less time to say. The second flaw is that if the child is required to find out the hard way, the same initiative may attack all the mysteries adults propound by half-truths. Every physical experience a child has from date of birth is a fact. Words spoken by parents and educators must match those facts or the child begins to doubt everything. Youth may swallow fairy tales, the Christmas story and a multitude of improbable 'learning', but when the words come in relation to something the child has already experienced, they had better be the truth.
* * *
There are a few women who enjoy pornography as well as do most men. There are also a number who do not react to specific forms of pornography. Many a well-intentioned male has been severely disappointed because a set of lewd and expensive photos caused emotional vomiting in his female companion. If we bar the false modesty and controlled morality, we still find women who do not feel very active response to pornography. These same women will become enthralled with a book or a story whose theme is fundamentally pornographic, but this is because it is served up on a pseudo-romantic platter. In this light, obscene movies may 'get to' a woman totally unaffected by still photos. Oddly, if a woman does like pornography, she is as interested in feminine displays as she is in masculine displays which again shows us that pornography is largely effective in the area of imagery rather than in the fields of 'instruction'.
Again, we are discussing the impact of hard core pornography and it is a very safe estimate to say that less than three percent of any adult group, male or female, have ever even seen such material. The percentage which falls into the hands of children of any age is infinitesimal-and below the age of socio-sexual experiences, the whole thing reverts to an item of curiosity, not sensuality.
* * *
The accusing finger pointing to violence and crime as depicted on television and movie screens belongs to a hypocrite. He is shaped exactly like the Chaplain who holds prayer over battle-garbed soldiers, blessing them out of danger and into complete victory over the enemy. Victory via authorized, systematic murder.
It can well be argued that somewhere, someone is going to be affected by nearly everything at one time or another. We remember a news report concerning four ten year old Indians who tied 'Cheyanne' to a tree and left him in the woods overnight, causing frostbite. Three thirteen year olds hung a 'rustler' in a decrepit barn, too. WEST SIDE STORY and THE WILD ONE may have shown some boy or girl or some group of same how to 'bug the fuzz'. -likewise, Sebring and Indianapolis make traffic casualties. Baseball starts fights in the grandstand. Halloween causes heart attacks.
We are now down to poking the eyeballs out of all children at birth, sewing up their mouth and driving plugs into their ears.
The truth about violence and crime in relation to inspiration is that in children, adolescents and young adults, the mental ability to translate impulse makes any specific source of stimulus unimportant. An eight piece military band and the accompanying soldiery can start a psychic response which, with opportunity, can wind up in a riot. It can also make an old soldier cry. There is no way to weigh the individual's reaction to scenes of violence. Far more children are impressed by the 'good guy' than by the 'bad guy'. To sidetrack intense examples of contest might well influence, or fail to influence a hundred times more potentially good minds than bad minds.
The few cases where in the interests of creativity and commercial profit, a picture or a script is produced without social value are very rare. But contrary to the wail of reformers, these exceptions are not produced in the name of conspiracy to corrupt. If so, how did corruption flourish in the days when no form of the communications media existed for ninety-five percent of the population?
The human libido needs some violence to keep in balance. And boxing gloves, basketball games and 'contests', particularly as spectator sports, do not fulfill the innate requirements for physical and mental expressions of violence. We don't recommend expending this need by ganging up on old ladies in Central Park, but we do not look upon such activities as anything other than misdirected impulses, pressured out of youth by environmental forces they did not create.
It is an undecided area of psychic response, but it would seem that if there were any valid argument for the suppression of these accused 'inspirations', we would have fifty times as much juvenile delinquency of criminal nature as we now have.
All children he, steal and sneak it is part of being a human being. If grandfather stole watermelons an apples, he was as huge a thief as the present day boy who steals hubcaps and in some cases, the entire automobile. The urge has no relation to the boodle. And war on the turf is no different than war in Vietnam it is merely a question of semantics and of course, profit and loss.
IN CONCLUSION: THE WORD
WE HAVE MADE NO ATTEMPT TO FORM THIS WORK AS A MEASURING STICK against which a concerned parent may stand their offspring in analysis. The problem is not to identify and label each form of juvenile sexuality, nor to provide a guide for parents who might not care to have a homosexual girl or boy, or who would rather have a daughter adept at being a fricatrice than to have one whom the boys in the Senior class consider a good 'lay'.
We have attempted to make parents aware that in the sweet, thin and demure child they are sure is an innocent angel there may lurk a potential for sensuality, the fact of sexuality and the will to exploit sex as a physical reaction to stimulus. She and the dumb kid next door who is struggling with fifth grade arithmetic possess drives and urges and all the required equipment to stage an orgy given one iota of inspirational opportunity.
No one but either child will know the precise moment when mind and flesh join in the beginning of an exquisite journey, by the very ecstasy of it, a million miles removed from the daily pressure of growing up. The secrets of childhood sexuality are much closer in nature to those involved with cowboys and Indians and race cars and tea parties than they are to school books and Sunday School. A pre-teen thinks in terms of imagery, not in terms of cause and effect. There is also reality in being young, a horrible awareness that everything in the world is too big, too expensive and stored just out of reach until one is grown-up. 'When you are twelve; when you are sixteen; when you are in college; when you are on your own!' these are seemingly distant heavens dangled before the young as a negation to being a human being now.
Of course, a child's relief valve is sex, just as it is for most adults. And as we, in our mad drive to hasten the mental processes, surround the youth with science, sensuality and pseudo-success, we hasten the day when juvenile fingering and animal curiosity must join forces with social awareness. Adult diseases, fevers, fads and fancies sift downward to up-reaching adolescent minds. If we as adults have become disenchanted with restraint, with inexplicable moral and ethical tenets which would not stand the test of trial, then we must expect this same disenchantment to affect our children.
Whether one considers this bludgeoning precocity as good or bad is hardly worth discussing. It exists, and ignoring it will not make it go away. If we treat 1965 children with the restraint attitudes and punitive measures of 1865, we will not get the nicely behaved and tractable adolescents we think our grandparents had. We will get maladjusted, frustrated creatures who can't conceivably live long enough to enjoy one level' day in their lives.
* * *
In every part of our land, the first day of school brings together a teeming mass of children which educators must sort and classify, coax and coddle, in the eventual hope of organizing the group into progressively absorbent humanity. There are tall ones, pretty ones and ugly ones. Some need glasses, some a hairbrush. A few need shoes and a few more need a willow switch. Only a dedicated pedagogue could face this ordeal, semester after semester, trying to plant seeds of knowledge in ground not yet proved to be fertile or unfertile.
The single component all these children possess is sensuality, certainly in varying degrees, but they possess it, not as a learned concept but as a gift from nature. There is no qualification such as 'legal right', 'authoritative privilege' nor 'noblesse oblige'. It may have begun to function at four, or waited until the age of fourteen, but once begun, every successive thought after beginning is checked for sexual stimulus before it is stored in the brain.
This single known receptiveness is the one we consistently ignore, many times until it is too late to either develop or restrain. Reward for our national ignorance is the privilege of sitting back and deploring the depravity of our adolescents, who simply did what nature intended them to do within the environmental framework of an adult, and theoretically sophisticated, world.
The only difficult thing about sex education is the ineptness of the teacher. We long ago disbelieved that parents could educate their own children in the exigencies of mathematics and history, and there is no reason to believe parental knowledge and intention could be better qualified in sexual matters. Nor is it the job for moralists, evangelists or reactionary thinkers. It isn't a job for intellectual snobs, either.
No matter how it wounds the delicate sensibilities of mother and dad, the task of sex education must fall to those who, knowing the clinical evaluations of juvenile sexuality, must yet be able to understand the difference between 'sexual intercourse' and 'fucking", and above all, the difference between 'love' and 'passion'.
If this seems to be a job past reasonable capabilities, we hasten to assure the adult world that if such a job is not done by adults, the kids will do it for themselves, and guess who will have to foot the bill for the mistakes they make?
