There are few subjects that provoke such dynamic reactions as teenagers and sex. To consider the two as they relate to each other in a single work is to court disagreement, for everyone has something to say about adolescents and their sexual patterns. Enunciations are issued from the Vatican, and from the corner grocer, the educator, police administrator, psychiatrist and from the milkman, shop foreman, and barber. Everyone speaks out on youth and sex. And, usually, it is agreed that the two topics warn of a hot mixture that threatens society with perverted values, immorality, and even eventual extinction.
Teenaged Americans are an important force in their nation's total wealth, both economic and emotional. Today's teenagers spend vast sums of money on every imaginable item that is manufactured and sold. They are more affluent than their parents were. They are more influential, too. Advertisers court the members of the "Pepsi Generation" as a solid block of buyers for anything that's new, "in," youthful, bright, or sexually oriented: cars, rugs, Hondas, soap, travel, rent-a-cars everything.
America, more than any other nation, is youth-centered. Until the emergence of the African nations, the United States was the teenager of the world of nations. And, with the muscles of youth, it showed its strength and vigor and leadership. It brought respect to the young. This, remote as it may seem, is important to the present consideration of America's teenagers and their sexual attitudes and behavior.
"It is not unusual that so much is written and said about teenagers and sex today," says Robert Collingworth, Ph.D., a sociologist on the faculty of Michigan State University at East Lansing, Michigan. "When we consider the American teenager, we are really making a self-consideration of our-self and our nation of the things and spirit that made our country what it is or isn't today. Many nations fairly well ignore their youth until maturity, and without too adverse effects. But this is not so with America. Our teenager is cuddled and scolded and analyzed and questioned, much as if he were a suspect insome horrible crime. Why? Because through him we are questioning ourselves; seeking answers for our own. insecurity, our origin and place in the world, both as an individual and as a nation."
And Alberta Peering, 'a well-known Eastern psychologist, claims, "Teenagers today, usually through sex, demonstrate no more or no less than the very principles that have become the foundation of our country. Sometimes these principles largely pleasure-centered are not very pleasant to view, but they are the mirror's reflection of what we are as a nation."
The teenager as a mirror of his nation's sex mores will always be a matter of speculation among professionals. But upon the matter of the teenager's indulgence in sex and its aberrations, there is almost total agreement. The teenager of the 1960's is sexually sophisticated, promiscuous, atuned to sexual deviations, and generally follows a pattern of behavior that is more sexual than that of any group of young people in the world.
What is the reason? There are many. Affluence, says one authority. Parental permissiveness claims another authority of equal reputation. The Bomb, the population explosion, environment, government any number of rationalizations are offered as the reason that young people are as they are today. But, with every authoritative discourse on the subject, there is a counter discourse taking an opposite viewpoint. So the teenager and his sex life continue to confuse and befuddle.
Environment is cited most often as the reason for the teenager's wayward sexual life. Generally, it has been accepted that a deprived environment fosters promiscuity. There are abundant case histories to substantiate this claim. However, there appears to be an equal number of cases of teenage sexual looseness from environments that are not deprived and from the homes of parents who have been the opposite of neglectful or poor.
The following case histories demonstrate the dynamics of the problem from both sides of the question. The cases are taken from those of environmental influence. Each case calls the other a liar as it relates to the cause of teenaged sexual promiscuity.
CASE HISTORY ENVIRONMENT
Tracey Dore was born of an over-privileged family. Her father was a corporation lawyer. Her grandfather and great-grandfather had also followed the law, and the firm of which her father was the senior partner was one of the most successful, and affluent, in the state.
Tracey's mother was socially inclined. She was bright, too, having graduated with honors from an Eastern woman's college. Mrs. Dore considered her family her career, however, and devoted her time to that endeavor. She was also active in civic organizations, an art club, the country club, her upper-status church, and social entertaining. Mrs. Dore considered herself the perfect helpmeet for her prominent husband.
Until Tracey was five years old, the Dores contented themselves with the family residence along the lake of one of the nation's better suburbs. When it became apparent that Tracey was not meant to have brothers or sisters, Mr. and Mrs. Dore decided to build a new residence in the same area. The new house was ultra-exclusive, though smaller than the family "mansion." It was here that Tracey grew up.
A bright child, Tracey did well in school. She was popular with her peers and favored by her teachers and adult associates. She was very pretty, having been gifted with bright blonde hair, round, hazel eyes, a clear complexion, and a mouth that seemed sexually persuasive. Her body, from her early teen years, was that way too. Tracey's breasts were large and mature and the cause of considerable attention from the boys in her classrooms. Her legs were good and lithe, and her hips flared. Merely walking caused every part of Tracey to move in a sensual rhythm. She had the tone of an athlete, too. Her movements were quick and agile: She was possessed of strength.
Although the Dore family was wealthy and influential, they were less given to status symbols and snobbery than many of their neighbors. The Dores were familiar with money and the luxuries it bought. Their wealth was old wealth, in the family for generations. And, better than most rich, busy people, both parents were attentive to their daughter, aware of her activities, and determined that she should grow up a "good," well-adjusted personality. Tracey, quite obviously, thought otherwise.
When Tracey entered junior high school one of the most exclusive in the nation she immediately discovered that boys found her attractive. And she found that she enjoyed them much more than she had anticipated. Tracey had been allowed rare dates from the age of 12, but these were only for supervised parties and outings of the young people of the community. They were not dates, except in the sense that boys asked girls to accompany them to these activities. The Dores permitted a few such "dates." But once in junior high school and having arrived at the age of fourteen, Tracey was overwhelmed with the attention she immediately received from the opposite sex. And she was astounded at the number of activities boy-girl dating activities that were available to the young people of the school. Until this time, Tracey had largely contented herself with many close girl friends, talk about boys, some social activities, church, family, and plans for the future.
Now she became immersed in thoughts of boys this and little else.
Coincidental with her new-found attraction to boys, Tracey began masturbating. The following is the girl's own description of the circumstances surrounding this event. It has been taken from Tracey's first interviews with a psychiatrist who had been retained by the Dore family to curb their daughter's savage appetite for sex.
"It happened in the bath tub," Tracey explained. "I well, I discovered a part of my body that I didn't know I had [clitoris]. Everything seemed to open up for me or maybe it was me opening up to everything else but I'll tell you the feeling I had made me think I was going to faint or die. And I didn't care. I remember thinking that if this was what death was all about, well, I was happy to die even wished that I could die more than once, or maybe repeatedly."
"Did you penetrate yourself during masturbation?" Tracey's psychiatrist asked.
"No," she replied. "I didn't put anything in me, if that's what you mean. I just--just...." (The therapist has explained that Tracey, naturally a fluid speaker, seemed suddenly tongue-tied.)
"Go on, Tracey," the doctor encouraged.
"I just kept rubbing that spot on my body," she said softly, somewhat reminiscently, it seemed to the therapist. "And then I seemed to grow or swell, kind of blow up until I actually did burst, and that was when I thought I was dying or fainting or something like that."
Undoubtedly, Tracey, because of her background, her morality and personal cleanliness, suffered considerable guilt feelings over masturbation. But she could not rid herself of the habit. Nor did she cease it until she found another to share the guilt, to take on the responsibility of her masturbation.
Mr. and Mrs. Dore finally consented to Tracey's dating an older boy from school. He was seventeen. He drove his own car. He was quite handsome. He had quite a reputation around the school as a sexual sophisticate. Tracey kept this information from her parents.
The Dores, who insisted upon meeting the boy, Tom Buffer, were very impressed with his manners. They commented again and again on his courtesy, grooming, and the poise he displayed when in the presence of adults.
Tracey's date with Tom was simple. They went to a show an outdoor drive-in type. Before the first feature was completed, Tom produced a bottle that had been hidden in the glove compartment of the car. He handed it to Tracey. She declined the liquor. Tom did not force the issue. He swigged from the bottle several times before returning it to its hiding place.
Soon Tracey and Tom exchanged intimate kisses. Tom was very expert, and Tracey learned quickly. Within five minutes her tongue had become as deft and piercing and tantalizing as Tom's. .
Tracey has explained that she wanted to appear more worldly to Tom than she really was. And perhaps it was this wish that moved her low in the car seat, that made her tongue shoot more hotly into her young lover's mouth perhaps it was this that made her arch her breasts until they crushed against Tom's heaving chest. Perhaps.
Or perhaps it was merely the natural call of the young and healthy toward the instincts of sexual commingling.
When Tracey first felt Tom's hand creeping up the inner side of her leg and beneath her skirt, she gasped. Then she smothered the new cry that wanted to escape her lips. She smothered it by a strong, responsive tongue-kiss that meant to the boy that would mean to any boy that she loved his aggression.
Tracey did love the feel of Tom's hand upon her inner thigh. And she admired the deliberateness with which his fingers moved, the way they separated panties from flesh in a wide opening that allowed him a full cupping of her body, and it seemed to her that his hold upon her would quiet the pulsation that struck against his fingers. But it did not. Instead, it encouraged heat and yearning and pulsation. And again Tracey muffled a cry as Tom began a light spinning, a caress that was gentler than her own had been, a stimulation that was greater than she had learned to give herself.
Tracey became entranced by Tom's loving touch. So engrossed had she become with her growing, bubbling sensations, that she did not notice the boy's new maneuver. But soon she felt him arch strongly, and then she felt the suddenness of young male passion against her body. Tom was now partly nude. Tracey, by instinct, and by stories that had been related to her by more adventurous girl friends, knew what her date wanted. Slowly, she reached out her free hand. And then she became dazed to the double stimulus of touching and being touched.
"It was like I always thought love should be,"
Tracey has related to her therapist. "It was mutual, you know. like I was loving him and he was loving me at the same time. And then, at the end, when I ... when it was over, well, it was as if I had been melted by love by what Tom had done to me. And I knew he felt the same way. I knew what I had caused to happen to him. It didn't even bother me."
Apparently, Tom had some misgivings about sexual intercourse with Tracey Dore. They dated for many weeks, and during all this time their intimacies were restricted to mutual masturbation. Tracey knew that Tom had had intercourse with other girls. She wondered why he did not persuade her toward the act. She had never given him any reason to doubt that she "would go all the way."
The answer was never supplied for Tracey Dore. Nor, years later, for her psychiatrist. Tom became disinterested in Tracey. He began "going steady" with another, older girl, and he ceased dating all others. At first, Tracey was very upset. She had fancied herself in love with the attractive boy. Now he was gone. And gone before they had fully united sexually. She couldn't understand it.
From the beginning of her relationship with Tom, Tracey dreamed of the moment that they would have sexual intercourse. Although thrilled by the manual love they did know, and brought to climaxes by it, too, Tracey was certain that "real" love would top all thrills she had ever known. When Tom and the chance for it suddenly departed her life, she was left distraught, insecure, and, even for one so young, physically wanting. But not for long.
Tracey became the subject of much dating by her boy school chums. The Dores, recognizing that their child had suffered traumatic reactions as a result of the broken romance, became generous about Tracey's dating habits. They also became less particular about who the boy was who desired their daughter's company.
A high school senior named Bill was the first to date her following the break-up with Tom. They attended a school dance, then drove directly to a lovers' lane section of the suburb.
Bill was different from Tom. He let Tracey know from the beginning that any love-play from him was only meant as stimulation for the act of intercourse itself. And after a half hour of violent tongue kisses, Bill's mouth upon Tracey's breasts, her hands exploring his hard body, and the constant pressuring of their bodies against each other, they were in the back seat of the car, prone, and readying for love-making.
Tracey was not embarrassed when Bill removed parts of her underclothing. Nor did she look away from the quick exposure he made of himself. But she recoiled slightly when he gripped her, adjusted her, then lunged to her youthful giving; she recoiled, even fought a bit, against this act of first entrance and unity. But Bill was an expert lover. He did not hurry after the first contact had been made. Instead, he remained nestled within the cradle of love she had given him. And from this togetherness, the warmth and excitement of joining, Tracey herself began the first hip thrusting movements of a woman in an act of love.
Tracey was disappointed in her first experience with intercourse. She did not achieve an orgasm; the act seemed less than that which Tom's hands had provided. She wondered if love the absence of it for Bill was the cause. She had only a short time to wonder about it, however. Bill, revitalized and vigorous, pressured for a new encounter. Tracey gave it.
This time, feeling, Tracey later reported, like a woman familiar with every aspect of love and sex, she was slower and more consciously aware of the act she was committing. She moved hard, but slowly. She held herself tightly against the young man. And finally, after arching high, she discovered that a new sensation was sweeping her--a sensation that seemed composed of two parts
the fullness of Bill moving upon her, and the friction contact that was being caused at a higher spot of her body that place that had already been responsible for masturbatory thrill. Tracey became inflamed with feeling, mad with longing, tense and taut and ready to unleash all the pent-up fury of young womanhood. She was bloated and full, trembling, stammering incoherent words as her mouth opened at Bill's ear. And she was breathing as he was breathing, hard and raspy and dry.
Tracey's sensations bloomed and exited her body at the exact moment the same experience began for Bill. They thrust and spun and pumped. They mumbled words that were foreign to their ears, words of obscenity, lust, and a heaven-hell feeling. And then they slumped in exhaustion, still entwined to each other.
Both rumor and professional opinion speculate as to whether or not a girl as young as Tracey could become almost totally addicted to sex. Granting the intense psychological problems such a subject would have, many authorities feel that a single sexual encounter would not produce a true addiction for sex, that the process is-likely to be more gradual. But other people who deal daily with sexual problems doctors, psychiatrists, and psychologists have known many cases wherein a girl, even a mere child, upon the successful completion of her first orgasm through sexual intercourse, became so consumed with sex and the benefits derived from it that it became almost her total preoccupation. This is the way it was for Tracey Dore.
Tracey didn't even bother to pretend that she was in love with Bill. That, she now knew, didn't matter. She sought his company for one reason alone. Sex. They shared it plentifully. They never failed to achieve the maximum in sexual thrills. They dated steadily until Tracey turned sixteen. Then, for some reason that was never adequately defined for the psychiatrist, Tracey became bored with her schoolboy lover. She did not, however, become the least bit bored with sex.
During summer vacation from school, Tracey attended an exclusive summer camp for wealthy girls. The first night of her residence, she forced a sexual encounter with the senior camp advisor. And from there Tracey jumped off to a multitude of summer sexual experiences, including, for the first time, a departure from intercourse with her introduction to cunnilingus and fellatio. Before her period at the camp ended, she was dismissed for unlady-like behavior. The Dores were shocked. Tracey didn't care. Her interest in parents and home had ceased; her lust was for boys and men and the thrusting of her body to them.
During Tracey Dore's senior year of high school, she became pregnant. Her family sought, and failed to secure, a legal abortion. Then her father used his influential law firm's contacts to find an underworld abortionist. Tracey was aborted, successfully and illegally. Three months later, she was again with child. This time, the Dores did not secure an abortion for their daughter. They referred her to a leading midwestern psychiatrist who, after many interviews with Tracey, decided that it would be best if the girl had the child, then put it up for adoption. Tracey seemed disinterested in the entire affair. She hated only the inconvenience of a growing, bloating body.
During Tracey's psychotherapy and during her pregnancy, she continued to indulge heavily in sexual intercourse and a number of deviations. Sometimes she reported the events to her therapist, sometimes she did not. She rarely sought to gain any real insight into the problems that motivated her to promiscuity.
When she should have been graduating from high school, Tracey was giving birth to a baby girl at a private hospital in a distant state. There is little evidence to indicate that Tracey suffered remorse for the turn her life had taken. She returned to her parents' home and immediately set off on a course of devastating sex. She had it with boys, young men, middle-aged men, and twice with men in their sixties. She, because of her parents' persuasion, returned to psychotherapy, but her part in the treatment was largely a sham. During it, she continued her steady pattern of sex. She had it abundantly, and with almost anyone who sought her.
When she was seventeen, Tracey acquired a venereal disease, was treated for it and cured, returned to the man she had suspected as carrier, had intercourse with him repeatedly, was again infected, again cured, then discovered that she was once again impregnated.
The Dores acted decisively this time. They hospitalized Tracey at an exclusive private mental hospital where she was treated with both drugs and psychotherapy. She left the hospital only long enough to deliver and put up for adoption her new baby. Then she returned to the hospital where she remained in continued incarceration for a period of two-and-a-half years. When she was discharged, it was believed that she had gained sufficient insight into her problems to curb her immense sexual appetite. And she did, too. Shortly after leaving the hospital, she married a promising young lawyer in her father's firm, and at this writing is living a successful, nearly-normal sexual life with her husband.
CASE HISTORY ENVIRONMENT
Kitty Quinn was the offspring of several generations of poverty. Her parents, originally sharecroppers in the South, relocated to the North when Kitty was just a baby. The elder Quinns never really adjusted well to the city. They were distrustful of it, loathed its cement-encased activity, and constantly yearned for a return to the land of their heritage. Kitty seemed a foreigner to her parents. And they to her. Raised in an urban area, the child was as different from the parents as it is possible to be. Sometimes Kitty wondered if her folks were real. She entertained many fantasies about birth and adoption, all of which placed her in a superior role to her parents. Was she perhaps a wealthy girl, lost and taken in by the Quinns to be raised? she would question herself. Would her real parents some day arrive to claim her?
Kitty's fantasies are easy to understand. The Quinns were pathetically poor. The father labored in non-union shops for small wages. His work was never secure. Seldom did he work more than a few months steadily. To supplement the family income supplement in a way that still provided only the merest essentials Mrs. Quinn also worked as a domestic for families in a middle-class suburb. Her wages were meager, and since her jobs were attained through an employment agency, she had to share a percentage of her wage with the company.
During the years when Kitty Quinn was five to ten years of age, she was "watched-over" by neighbors while her parents worked. But after Kitty turned ten, she largely took care of herself and her two younger sisters, ages three and five. Kitty didn't mind being unattended by her mother and father. Actually, she preferred it, for she was a dreamer, and aloneness made opportunities for greater fabrication of the dreams. Without the parents, symbols of her poverty much more than the run-down residence and neighborhood, Kitty's dreams could soar as high as she desired.
When Kitty turned eleven, she began to communicate with boys. Until this time, .she had been shy and introspective. These qualities seemed to disappear coincidentally with the beginning of her menstrual cycle. Then Kitty could not see enough of the boys, talk to them, be with them enough.
The neighborhood offered Kitty an abundance of young male companionship. Many of the children of the slum area were regular truants from school. Many belonged to gangs that ran the streets night and day. And all of them seemed to possess the despondency of poverty, seemed to show in their eyes and manner that there was nothing ahead for them but hopelessness. And all of the children of the streets were ultraoriented to sex. It was the one thing that put them on an equal basis with the affluent and successful.
Kitty Quinn, during her period of psychotherapy, described for her psychiatrist the circumstances of her first encounter with a genuine, sexually-aggressive act toward herself by a boy of fifteen. She was eleven at the time. The anecdote follows and has been developed from psychiatric notes recorded during Kitty's initial therapeutic interviews.
Kitty, dressed in a neat but tattered dress that was much too short for her maturing body, leaned on a fence and watched the neighborhood boys engage in a rather unorthodox baseball game. There was little equipment for the competition. There was also little skill. But there were a great deal of activity and much cursing. Kitty was used to the obscenity it was as much a part of the streets as broken pavement, littered front yards, and deprivation.
While Kitty Quinn leaned on the fence, she was aware that her body was framed between the broken boards. She had considered this at the beginning. She was anxious for her body to be revealed to the boys on the field, all of whom she knew, many of whom she admired a great deal, and a few of whom she had made subjects for her daydreams of love and romance. Kitty noticed how some of the boys glanced at her. She was pleased, and she felt confident, too, for she knew that her body was blooming, knew, too, that the absence of underclothing except for panties was clearly revealed to all the boys because of the light material of her garment.
The baseball game ended unorthodoxly, too. A fist fight developed, endured, then ended, and with it went the end of athletic activity for the day. Kitty continued to linger by the fence. She scuffed the toe of her right shoe against the ground. And then she stopped. A boy, Harry, fifteen, but tall and strong for his age, stopped in front of her.
"Hi," Kitty said at once.
"Hi, yourself," the boy answered. "What did ya think of the game."
"Crazy," she told him.
"Yeah, crazy," he agreed. "But did ya see me hit that long one."
"Was that you?"
"Sure it was me, Kitty," he exclaimed. "You know that. Stop teasing."
"Yes, I saw it," she said, smiling and blinking her long, dark eyelashes.
"What are ya goin' do now?" Harry asked.
"Go home, I guess. It's almost time for the folks to get home from work."
Harry turned and noted the sun setting fast in the west. Then he turned to Kitty and said, "Ah, you got plenty of time yet. Besides, your old lady don't care if you're home on time or not."
Kitty nodded, then asked, "Why should I stay out? What have you got in mind?"
"Thought maybe you'd like to see the Scats' Clubhouse."
Kitty nearly gasped aloud. The Scats were one of the toughest gangs in the neighborhood. She hadn't known that Harry was a member. But she did know that girls were never allowed inside except when the members wanted except when they wanted a girl there for special, sexual reasons.
"The Scats' Clubhouse!" Kitty exclaimed. "Yeah, sure."
"I didn't know you were a member."
"Well, I am," he said. "Joined a month ago."
"Gee."
"Come on, it's a pretty nice dump. I think you'll like to see it," Harry said.
"Are you allowed to take me inside?" she asked.
"A Scat is allowed anything he can manage."
"Is anybody else there."
"I don't know."
"You see, I wouldn't wanta..."
"Yeah, yeah," Harry interrupted. "All you chicks are the same. At the beginning, that is. Come on, let's go."
Harry tucked his hand under Kitty's forearm and pulled her away from the fence. She followed, walking at his side, very aware of his hot touch upon her arm. She felt older than her eleven years. She felt richer than her right, too. Rich in the knowledge that a boy liked her, wanted her, and sought to be alone with her.
The clubhouse was located at the very eastern end of the slum neighborhood. It was a garage, long deserted and taken over by any who claimed and held it against gang aggressors. Presently, it belonged to the Scats. But ownership could change in a single night of fighting. The garage was part of a complex of buildings: deserted store, four-family flat, and a barber shop. The property was totally neglected by the owner. Occupancy of any of the buildings was ignored by the police to a large extent. As long as gang fights and other crimes did not issue from the area, the police were content to leave the area alone, and leave it to those who chose to occupy it. At least, the police reasoned, the property offered a focal point from which they could pick up suspects when they wanted. With a gang clubhouse in the garage, a roundup of suspects for any crime was always easily accomplished.
"Gee, a garage," Kitty exclaimed.
"Yeah, but wait until you see the inside," Harry said excitedly.
Importantly, Harry withdrew a key from his pocket and unlocked the garage door. He pushed it open. Then he walked in, beckoning for Kitty to follow him.
Kitty had a sense of mystery and intrigue when she entered the clubhouse. These were forbidden grounds: She felt a part of it, felt herself as a forbidden being, but one who wanted to be less forbidden.
It was very dark inside. The windows were covered with old draperies, and the structure itself was of the type that made all the interior darker than normal. And the sun had set further in the west.
"Well, what do you say about it?" Harry asked. "I can't tell. I can't see," Kitty explained. Harry grunted, said something unflattering about "chicks" and their eyesight, then went to the corner of the garage and lighted a kerosene lamp.
Kitty looked around. She was surprised that the Scats boys with the dirtiest habits had established a semblance of furnishings within their dwelling. There were seats that had been ripped out of cars and buses. There were many pillows and quite a few straw mats, giving the impression that a Chinese restaurant had known the burglary of the Scats. There were some chairs, most of them of the overstuffed variety with the stuffings sticking out like foam from a bubble bath. The springs seemed solid, though. There was no jutting wire that Kitty could see. There was a rug at one end of the garage floor. It was worn and threadbare.
"Real cool, eh?" Harry asked.
"Yeah, cool," Kitty replied.
She smiled at Harry. He grinned back at her. She again observed how tall Harry was, how he seemed much taller and more attractive since they had entered the garage, as if this place was his dominion and he had grown to fit it. Kitty noticed, too, how Harry's black leather jacket an item that was standard equipment for gang members, regardless of the weather, seemed to glisten in the light. It made her feel strange to look at it. It made her feel hot and charged with recklessness.
Kitty turned away from Harry and walked to one wall where an array of pictures had been hung. She looked at them and felt new heat sweep her body. The pictures were pornographic in the most vivid sense. All of them were of nudes. Many depicted men and women in various love embraces.
"Bet ya never thought the Scats dug art, eh?" Harry said, a little self-consciously.
"Um no," she answered softly, still staring at the paintings.
"We got some new ones, too," Harry said. "Here, I'll show you."
Harry turned and went to a dresser in the corner of the room. He opened the lower drawer and withdrew a packet from it. Then he moved to Kitty.
"These ain't for hanging. At least not yet," he said.
He handed Kitty the packet. She took it and noticed that the dozen pictures felt glossy beneath her fingers, indicating that they were photographs. They were. They, too, were pornographic.
Kitty really did blush when she looked at the first photo. It was of a man and woman performing an act of sexual intercourse. Kitty had seen such photos before, but always in privacy with girl friends or alone. Viewing them in front of Harry made her feel odd. But she dutifully looked at each photo, even the last several which displayed the subjects in postures of cunnilingus and fellatio. Then she handed them back to Harry.
"Great, ain't they?" he said.
"Great," she repeated.
"And it's a cool clubhouse, ain't it?" Harry said. "Real cool," she answered. "Wanta sit down?" She looked around. "Where."
"Any old broken chair will do," he said, grinning.
"I'll take the floor, thanks," she answered. With that Kitty squatted on the floor, burrowing her young buttocks into a straw mat. It pricked. She moved a bit. It still pricked, but she endured it.
Harry glanced at her, rather pointedly looking at her bare thighs, for her dress had crept high above her knees. Then he sat down beside her. Harry looked around, taking in all of the clubroom, then expressed what a psychiatrist later called, "a crude but insight-filled explanation for the reason poverty-riddled children team up, meet in gangs, and establish a 'home' of their own."
"Gee, but I like it here," Harry said. "Even when I'm here all by myself just sitting or sleeping doing anything or nothing. I like it."
"Better than home?" Kitty asked.
He sneered. "Better than any place."
"Why?" she asked simply.
"Because here I'm something more than I am any place else in the world." He paused, looked around, then said, "I feel safe here. Safe. like nothing can happen to me."
Kitty, unmindful that Harry spoke of inner things, of security and the lack of it away from his gang and their possessions, looked around and laughed, then said, "Bet a girl's never been here before."
Harry did not answer. He glanced at the straw mat between his crossed legs.
"Has there ever been a girl here before?" Kitty asked.
"Sometimes," he admitted.
"Oh." She sounded hurt.
"But not like you're here now," he explained. "The girls who have been here well, we've brought them in, if you know what I mean."
Kitty thought she knew what he meant, but she, for-some unexplainable reason, wanted to hear about it from the boy.
"How do you mean?" she asked.
"We brought chicks down here on purpose."
She cocked her head, indicating her lack of understanding.
"Sometimes we stole the chicks from some gang we sliced up," he said softly. "We brought their gals here. For fun." He paused, then as if to excuse himself he added, "Hell, once they were here they didn't mind a bit. Jeeez, you know how the chicks are. They like the winners. Some of them do, anyway."
"But nobody's been here like me before, eh?" Kitty inquired.
"Not by me," he answered.
"But the other guys have brought their own chicks here, eh?" Kitty persisted.
"Maybe. I don't know."
"But you haven't?" she said, pushing.
"Naw."
Kitty seemed satisfied, even a little victorious. She and Harry talked of other things for awhile, then he changed the subject.
"Feel like having some juice?" he asked.
"Liquor?" she asked.
"Naw. Wine. It's all we got right now."
It seems incredible that a girl of eleven should even consider a drink of any alcoholic beverage, but the reader, and all, must remember that the young of poverty are as familiar with drinking and other so-called vices as the average adult of any economic classification.
"Will ya take a drink?" Harry asked.
"Yeah," she answered. "But only a small one. Hell, I gotta get home for dinner." Harry laughed. "The hell you do."
"I do," she insisted. "Since when?"
She furrowed her brow, then she, too, laughed, and in these few seconds the mood of their togetherness changed. Gone was all introspection. Gone, too, were their individual reflections upon the inner turmoils of their lives turmoils that as children they did not understand but which were, nevertheless, present in their beings.
Harry pushed to his feet, went to a refrigerator which stood solemn, without electricity, and minus food in the corner of the garage. He opened the door and withdrew from the inside a half-filled bottle of wine. He brought it to Kitty, carrying it in front of him like some crazy torch bearer out of a surrealistic drama.
"We'll be a little better stocked on grub and drinks after this Friday," Harry explained, squatting on the floor again and placing the bottle in Kitty's lap.
She hesitated a moment, then raised the bottle and took a long swallow of the red wine. When she brought it down, she stifled the urge to choke and handed the bottle to Harry. He drank from it. Then he rested it on the floor between them.
Harry was quiet for a few moments. He seemed to be thinking deeply. Then he said, "How did ya like those crazy photos?" referring again to the pornographic pictures.
"They were kind of dark," Kitty criticized, suddenly feeling very humorous and devilish.
"We may be taking our own pix soon," Harry said as seriously as a businessman discussing a new venture. "The guys figure we can take better pictures than those and sell 'em." Kitty nodded.
"Of course we gotta steal the camera and equipment first," he said. "But we got a heist all planned. There's a big market for crap like that, ya know."
"I suppose," she said.
Harry took more of the wine. When he brought the bottle down, his eyes feasted on Kitty's maturing body. And his look, suddenly candid, caused a reaction in the eleven-year-old girl. She felt a quivering at her breasts and in a moment realized that her youthful nipples had hardened were hard and pressing vigorously against the material of her dress in a way that pointed directly at Harry. She felt flustered. She reached her hand out for the bottle of wine. Harry, still watching her, continuing to rove his eyes over all of her form, handed her the bottle and watched her take a long swallow of the liquid.
"That burns," she said.
"Yeah. Right in the belly," Harry agreed.
"It makes me feel hot all over," Kitty said. She was surprised at her words. They seemed like a confession. And they seemed to come from some part of herself that she had never before recognized, or even knew existed.
"Hell, you think that's good, wait until we get some real booze in here," Harry said. "We got a liquor store lined up shouldn't be long."
"What ya really need is a hi fi," Kitty offered.
"No electricity," he answered unhappily.
"Can't ya get it?" she asked.
"Can't steal that kind of juice, chick," he answered, laughing. "And I doubt like hell the utility company is about to set us up in a garage that doesn't even belong to us."
"I suppose not," she said.
"I know not," he added.
They each drank from the wine bottle again. Now, Kitty felt eloquent and confident. She felt disposed to rise and dance around the room. And she did start to rise, but faltered and stumbled back to the floor. Harry was very quick to catch her. His arms went around her small waist, and he pulled her to him.
Kitty went to the leather-jacketed boy willingly. She was dizzy and he offered steadiness. And, besides, the cool leather of his jacket against her cheeks made her feel comfortable and good. She stretched, resting her upper body in the cradle Harry had made of his arms, and stretching the rest of her body straight out, on an angle that bisected Harry's position.
"You're drunk, ain't ya?" Harry said softly, looking into her face.
"I guess so," she answered.
"You're pretty, you know," he said.
"You're drunk too," she said. ; .
Harry laughed. But only for a moment. Then he stopped. Then he lowered his face and captured Kitty's mouth with his hungry lips.
Kitty had been kissed by boys since she was ten. The kisses, largely, had been implanted by peers of more impulse than practice. Not so with Harry, however. He did things to young Kitty's mouth that made her head swim in a hotter circle of confusion. And his hands were busy while he kissed her. They touched at the young bumps of her breasts they parted the bodice and touched flesh, fingered all of it, tweaked at her small nipples, then dived lower to knead and caress under her dress and at her young, shaking thighs.
When Harry brought his mouth from hers, his hand continued to play at her thighs. They did not pressure or urge for greater closeness. They merely patted and smoothed her flesh, all of which made Kitty think in terms of his tenderness, his gentle ability.
"Didja ever do it?" Harry asked in a husky voice.
"No."
"Why not?"
"Cause I can get knocked up now," Kitty said, staring straight into his eyes. "My old lady said so. I can't let that happen to me."
Harry sighed. Then he said, "Have you ever done anything else?"
"Like in those pictures?" Kitty asked.
"Yeah."
She shook her head. "Will ya?" Harry asked. "I don't know..."
"Please!" he interrupted.
"How," she said, finishing the sentence he had cut off.
Harry sighed again. "I'll show ya."
She closed her eyes and shook her head again, the motion causing her cheek to cuddle deeper into his leather jacket.
"Please," the boy said again.
Kitty did not answer. But she changed her position slightly, just enough, apparently, to indicate an agreement that she could not bring herself to verbalize.
Harry shifted his position too. And he made an adjustment of his clothing. Then, slowly, his fingers laced into the thickness of Kitty's brown hair.
The eleven-year-old girl did not resist this fellatio introduction to sex. By her eyes, her expression, by the mood she cast as she reclined on the floor, poised close to Harry's lap, she seemed a vacuum of feeling, an automaton performing as she had been told to perform, a child of the streets obeying a command of early sex that was stronger, more incapable of denial, than any command from home or school or church.
Kitty was very inexpert as a fellatist. But expertness was not needed for attainment, and in almost no time at all, Harry was lurching, cursing, whipping his body as his fingers tightened in her hair and jammed her closer and closer and closer-jammed her so deeply to him that she could not escape the final volley of his pent-up desire.
Then there was awkwardness. A great deal of it. There was silence between the two young people for a long time, and when they did finally speak, it was as if their words sought to escape the reality of what they had done inside the Scats' Clubroom.
Kitty became Harry's chick. She took her part in gang fights, intrigues involving other gangs, thefts, hijacking, and all the activities of the Scats' and their chicks. And she became a sexual property of the gang as a group-a requirement of any girl who belonged to a member.
Kitty, from the ages of 11 to 14, confined her sexual activity to the membership of the Scats to this and to Harry whenever he demanded. Strangely, Kitty was thirteen before she experienced sexual intercourse. Until this time, she confined herself to fellatio pleasures for Harry and his colleagues. She had attained somewhat of a reputation for this specialty, and it was much sought after by all the boys.
During her thirteenth year, Kitty became pregnant. She sought an abortion and, through the help of the Scats, found an illegal practitioner. She was aborted, but because of an inconsistency of her menstrual cycle she was in a more-advanced pregnancy than she had thought. She hemorrhaged badly, and was finally taken to a city hospital by Harry. She was given emergency treatment, several pints of blood, and eventually was out of danger. It was then that the police began their questioning.
Kitty was loyal to her butcher-abortionist. She did not reveal his identity, not even at the threat of her own imprisonment.
Kitty, upon release from the hospital, was investigated by the juvenile court social agency of the city. The conditions of her life were considered intolerable. By probate court order, she was removed from her home and parents and placed in a foster home of upper middle-class bearing. After three weeks, she fled her foster-daughtership, returning stealthily to her old neighborhood and the Scats. She was able, with the members' help, to hide out for three days before she was apprehended. After a new review of her case, she was incarcerated at a girls' training school from which she also escaped. Kitty's freedom lasted longer this time. She made contact with Harry, and with him fled to another section of the city where they immediately set up business as pimp and whore. Within six months, Kitty was arrested for prostitution, jailed, then returned to the training school. Here she remained for a solid year. She was released, placed in a new foster home and remained there for nearly a year. But it was not a quiet year of rehabilitation for Kitty. She made it her immediate business to seduce both of her foster brothers, one of whom was a year younger than herself. When, through her pregnancy, the facts of her foster-home residence became known, Kitty was placed in a new girls' school that had facilities which enabled her to give birth to a baby son, which was immediately placed for adoption.
During Kitty's tenure at both training schools, she was exposed to sessions of psychotherapy, both in group sessions and as an individual patient with a psychiatric case worker as therapist. It was felt, however, that Kitty Quinn was beyond the ability to gain insight to her problems or to respond in any dramatic way to alleviate the promiscuous pattern of her life.
* * *
The promiscuous teenager knows little loyalty to class or economic background. They spawn in every environment. That the poverty-classed are more disadvantaged and more apt to fall into sexual patterns at an earlier age, there is little doubt. But the advantaged youth is drawn to sexual misconduct too, often at a rate that matches that of the underprivileged.
Environment is important, let there be little doubt, but this condition alone does not assure personality adjustment, stability, and proper values. Hostility and rebellion churn in our young in the young of every socio-economic group established in the nation.
The case histories which follow in this book will depict the young in tortuous sexual situations. The purpose is singular to present for better understanding the communications of the young as we seek to understand them and as they in turn look for self-understanding.
CHAPTER TWO
PARENTAL PERMISSIVENESS A SEXUAL GREEN LIGHT
Permissiveness of parents, especially the mother, either subconsciously or by conscious acts, is one strong factor that contributes to a teenager's sexual delinquency. The parent of this decade is far more permissive than any parent at any time of history. Parents' own desire to retain their youth and their success in this accomplishment is a motivating force. And there are other reasons such as the mother's desire to work her own emotional problems out through her daughter or son; the father's "emotional absence" and physical absence from the home.
By now, most people have heard the story that was nationally publicized concerning a mother and her sixteen-year-old daughter, who was almost psychotically promiscuous. When all the mother's efforts failed to curb her daughter's gigantic sexual appetite, the mother, fearing a pregnancy, took her child to the family doctor and had her fitted for a diaphragm. If the girl's promiscuity could not be controlled, at least she could be protected from an unwed and unwanted pregnancy, the mother reasoned. But lo, some months later the child presented herself at the parent's knee and complained that she was pregnant.
"But where was your diaphragm?" asked the enraged mother.
"In my purse," explained the girl.
This story, although enunciating permissiveness, presents another motivation for young-aged sexual meanderings. Hostility. Some professionals claim that hostility is the strongest emotion involved in a teenagers' early introduction to sex and their pursuit of that activity. This is said to be particularly true in the case of girls. Boys, it appears, find outlets other than sex for their hostile emotions.
Today's parents are quite concerned with status. This urges permissiveness with their children. In the upper middle-income spectrums of society, children are often treated as status symbols, causing parents to allow early dating, the premature use of make-up, parties, etc.
"It is far easier to be permissive than strict," claims Dr. Royal Abbott, psychiatrist in San Francisco. "Parents today have an almost psychotic need to be loved by their children. If they are not loved and if the symbols of this love are not shown parents feel threatened. Therefore, we find situations where parents are permissive in order to be loved or admired by their children. Young people can put a lot of pressure on their parents for something that is wanted. We all know this; many of us have experienced the situation. So, it's not at all surprising to find parents allowing their children to do things that they should not yet be allowed to do."
Dr. Thelma Fishbien, a psychologist, has spent twenty years involved in the problems of youth and their parents. She feels that a basic insecurity that parents feel results in ultra-permissiveness.
"When parents have arrived at the age where they have teenaged children, they begin to look at their own lives. There is a basic insecurity in us all today. Parents feel this. And when they look at their children, see their gayety and hear their laughter and watch them awaken to the opposite sex, parents very often feel a severe resentment for their children. The parents ask themselves many questions: Where would I be today if I didn't have the responsibility of children? What fun I might now be having. Would I perhaps be more attractive at middle-age without the burden of child rearing? Would I be richer? Have more things for myself? Not have to deprive myself of the personal things I've always wanted. Would I? I wonder?
"Parents are aghast at these preposterous self-reflections," Dr. Fishbien continues. "They cannot show these feelings. To do so would be against everything they have learned and considered right about parenthood. So, because they have these feelings of resentment for their children, and because the feelings are real and not understood, the parents, to compensate, become extra-permissive, allow their child to do many things before the young people are of an age to do them. There are more parents feeling this 'insecurity' of their emotions as they concern their children today; therefore, we cannot help but have more permissiveness, sometimes with drastic and heartbreaking results.
The following case concerns mother-permissiveness and the effects it has on the sexual life of one teenager, in this instance, a girl of fifteen.
CASE HISTORY
Norma Jean was an ambitious girl and was said to have caught this spark from her mother, an attractive woman who had carved quite a career for herself as a television woman's fashion editor. When Norma Jean's mother married in her late twenties, she gave up her career and devoted herself exclusively to her husband, son, and daughter.
The Alberts lived in an upper-income neighborhood, noted for its exceptional school system and a parks and recreation program that had been developed for the community's young people, a program that was admired and used as an example by many less affluent communities throughout the country. Mrs. Albert, from the time Norma Jean was a baby, was active in community affairs. To many, it seemed that she had never quite been satisfied with home and family as her only career. Friends thought she still longed for the glamour of fashion and television cameras. Mr. Albert, a certified public accountant in business for himself, was civic minded, too, but he was busy at the office and had less time for such endeavors than did his wife. He heartily approved of his wife's many activities, however, often stating, "A person has to participate in his community in order to be happy in it."
From interviews with both Mrs. Albert and her daughter, it became apparent to the psychiatrist who treated the young girl that the mother was a "forceful, sometimes dominant, ambitious and status-conscious woman of above-average intelligence, looks, and poise."
Norma Jean's life until she was fifteen was quite uneventful. She lived a happy, well-adjusted life in a better than average environment. Norma Jean was similar to most of her peers in every way. She was attractive, probably more so than her friends because of her mother's former connection with the fashion industry. Norma Jean was allowed the use of make-up at age twelve, and she was allowed "party" dates when she turned thirteen. It was about this time that circumstances began to seem different to Norma Jean, she has reported. At this point of her life, her mother became ridden with sudden ambition to be elected to the presidency of the school P.T.A., a prestigious position because of the school's high standing among all secondary schools in the nation. It was at this time that the mother began to urge the daughter to more dating, even appointing certain boys as-likely subjects for her daughter's affection.
"It seemed as if I was being used as part of her campaign," Norma Jean has reported. "An envoy, or something. Mother would meet one of the women who was influential in the P.T.A., and she'd learn that the woman had a son. Well, she practically forced me to look the boy up in school. Usually, he'd ask for a date. When I told mother, she was crazy with happiness. She'd actually go right over to her notebook where she kept notes on the P.T.A. and the members and everything and then she'd scribble some note in it, as if I had just won her a vote. I was a little disgusted with her."
Mrs. Albert was elected first vice president of the P.T.A., a position that almost assured her eventual elevation to the higher post. But this caused no calming in her campaign to move higher. It did not cause any lessening of her attempts to toss her daughter with the child of one who might prove advantageous.
Norma Jean recited for her psychiatrist the circumstances under which she met the boy who was her first sexual lover a boy who forced indignities upon her that scarred her life and established a future that was to be laden with promiscuous capers.
Norma Jean had just turned fifteen. She had dated considerably with her mother's consent and her father's implied consent, for he left those things to his wife since she was thirteen. During those years of thirteen to fifteen, Norma Jean had known an introduction to sexual feelings. She had traded kisses, hot ones of the sharp tongue variety, and she had known the quick clutching of boys' hands upon her breasts and at her young legs. But she had remained a virgin, even when that status sometimes seemed in doubt of survival.
A few days following her fifteenth birthday, Norma Jean encountered her mother in the study of their home. Mrs. Albert was at her desk, working with the files of the P.T.A.
"Oh, Norma Jean, I didn't hear you come in, dear," said Mrs. Albert.
"Hi, Mom," replied the girl. "What are you up to?"
"More work. That school just swamps me with it." She said it as if she had been put upon, but Norma Jean knew this was a sham. Her mother enjoyed loved anything connected with a group of which she was a member.
"Well, you've asked for it," Norma Jean said.
"Yes, I guess I have." Mrs. Albert paused, shuffled through some papers, then picked up one of them and glanced at it. She turned to her daughter. "Norma Jean, do you know a boy by the name of Rod Baker?"
"Do I ever!" exclaimed the girl, rolling her eyes in a manner that indicated both her knowledge, and her disapproval, of the boy.
"You say that in an odd way," Mrs. Albert said. "What's wrong? Don't you like Rod?"
"Like him?" she answered. "I loathe him. Simply loathe him and so does every other decent girl in the neighborhood."
"Good heavens, why?"
Norma Jean looked away. She flushed a little. She did not immediately answer her mother's question.
"Why don't the girls like Rod Baker?" Mrs. Albert asked, her voice lilting with curiosity.
"Because he's a pig for one thing," Norma Jean said.
"Oh, really now," exclaimed her mother.
"It's the truth, Mom," the girl said. "He's just impossible."
"Well, I suppose a boy like Rod would be a little conceited, he's so . "
"Conceit is not his problem," Norma Jean interrupted. "He's well, he's a sex maniac for one thing."
"Norma Jean really," reprimanded her mother.
"It's true. Just ask any of the girls who have gone out with him. And he doesn't have a reputation just with us either. We know a few girls one especially who doesn't go to our school and she'll tell you about Rod she'll tell you plenty about him. And she has a reason to know had it for a long time and had to drop out of school for a year."
"What ever do you mean, child?" asked Mrs. Albert, a bit aghast.
Norma Jean looked away again. But quickly she returned her eyes to her mother's and said, "Rod got this girl pregnant, Mom. Then she had to go to one of those homes and have the baby and adopt it out and everything. It was just terrible for her. It still is, I guess."
Mrs. Albert's face paled. Norma Jean has reported that she looked as if she "had been slapped in the face." But in a moment, color flowed again, and she smiled at her daughter.
"We can't believe all rumors we hear, Norma Jean," Mrs. Albert said. "If we did, well, society would be controlled by rumors."
"This isn't a rumor, Mom. It's the truth."
"Well, I don't want to hear about it. It's a rumor as far as I'm concerned," she said, looking away.
Soon their conversation ended and Norma Jean left the room. But the next day, Rod Baker again became the subject of a mother-daughter conversation. It happened at the breakfast table on a Saturday morning. The two women were alone.
"I mentioned Rod Baker to you the other day," Mrs. Albert said.
"Yes, you did," Norma Jean replied, nodding, feeling a stab of curiosity for what was to follow.
"Well, you know his mother's very important in the national chapters of the P.T.A. Or perhaps you didn't know it."
"I didn't, but so what?" asked the child.
"Mrs. Baker has told me that Rod thinks you're very attractive. "Big deal."
"Don't make so lightly of it," Mrs. Albert said. "After all, he is just about the most attractive boy at any of this suburb's schools. And there aren't many boys who own their own foreign sports car and fly their fathers' private airplane."
"Rod Baker can fly away, far, far away, as far as I'm concerned," said Norma Jean.
Mrs. Albert made a frustrated gesture and said, "Sometimes you really are impossible, Norma Jean."
"Well, what's all the big pitch on Rod Baker all of a sudden?"
"It's not all of a sudden. I've always thought Rod was a delightful boy."
"But you don't know, Mom."
"I know enough," she said rather sharply. She sighed, then looked her daughter straight in the eye and said, "Norma Jean, Rod Baker is going to ask you for a date. I want you to accept."
Norma Jean recoiled a bit, looking at her mother as if the woman had turned into a monster of some grotesque design.
"Mom, you just have to be kidding," the girl said.
"I'm not, I assure you."
"But why?" she asked.
Mrs. Albert reached out and grasped her child's hand. "Isn't it enough that it's important to me?"
Norma Jean withdrew her hand, saying, "No, Mom, it isn't enough. What gives, anyway?"
The woman hesitated, but only for a second, then said, "Mrs. Baker is tremendously important to me, dear. More important than almost any woman in the P.T.A. And, darling, try to understand, that I do so want to head that organization, become a national officer eventually. I've worked so hard. And I well, I need this, dear. I really do."
Norma Jean did not reply. She remained very silent, and, during that period, she has reported, she had a fantasy of Rod Baker and herself having sexual intercourse while her mother looked on with an approving smile on her face. (Norma Jean's therapist thought this fantasy was of significant importance because it indicated the transfer of desire from mother to daughter, in fact said that the mother, by her problems, wanted the attractive boy for herself, but because this was too anti the society in which she lived, Mrs. Albert desired the boy for her daughter, in effect acquiring the young man for herself by extension of her own child.)
"When's he going to ask me for a date?" Norma Jean finally asked her mother in a kind of monotone.
"Very soon, I think," the woman replied. "And you want me to go out with him."
"Yes."
"Despite the things I told you the other day? Even if Rod is so fast that he forces himself upon every single girl he ever dates-_ in spite of this, you still want me to go out with him?"
"I've already told you how I feel about rumors," Mrs. Albert explained.
"They're not rumors, Mother," Norma Jean said, gasping the words out like a plea for understanding.
"I don't want to talk about that anymore."
"But you still want me to go out with him, don't you? No matter what kind of a boy he is, you want me to have a date with him, eh, Mom?"
"Yes," the woman sighed. "Yes, I do." Her voice had turned weak as if she were suddenly exhausted.
Mother and daughter looked at each other for a few moments. They seemed like adversaries, combatants who had met to settle some subtle thing that neither of them fully understood.
"Will you have a date with Rod, dear?" Mrs. Albert asked.
"Yes," the girl replied despondently.
"And will you be nice to him?"
"Nice to him!"
(This phrase, Norma Jean's psychiatrist has said, was consciously misunderstood by the daughter, her interpretation of the phrase being that her mother wanted her to have sexual relations with the boy be nice to him. But it is possible, the therapist claimed, that this phrase evolved from the subconscious of both the women, that the hidden meaning was sexual and truly understood as that by both mother and daughter.)
"Of course," Mrs. Albert said. "You know, mind your manners; don't let this thing about the rumors get to you so that you act rudely to Rod."
"Oh," Norma Jean sighed, then added, "They're not rumors, Mother. You just don't know."
When Mrs. Albert started to speak, Norma Jean interrupted her and said, "I know, you don't want to talk about that."
"That's right, dear."
"All right. I won't talk about it. And I will go out with Rod Baker. I'll go out with him just as soon as he asks me."
By coincidence, or by the caprice of the mothers, very-likely both of them, Rod Baker asked Norma Jean for a date just two days following her conversation with her mother.
"All right, Rod," Norma Jean said. "Friday will be all right, I guess." She hesitated, then asked, "Where are we going?"
"There's a real jazzy party up in Trektown, I thought we'd go to it. It should be a bang."
"Trektown!" exclaimed Norma Jean. "But that's way up north at least three hundred miles!"
"Yeah," Rod grinned. "We'll fly up. You know, the old man said I could have the plane for the night." He laughed hard, much as if he had issued the greatest joke ever.
Norma Jean, when she told her mother of the date with Rod, had thought the woman would show dismay at the fact that she would be flying three hundred miles in a private airplane. But Mrs. Albert was not dismayed. She smiled. She seemed very pleased.
"That's a long way to go, even in an airplane," Norma Jean said, hoping, it appeared, that her mother would at least agree.
"But not very far to go in that delightful plane of the Bakers', " Mrs. Albert said. Then she sighed and added, "My, how things do change. Now my daughter comes up to me and tells me she's flying three hundred miles on a date with a boy. Oh, well, that's the modern generation, I guess."
Norma Jean looked at her mother quizzically. Somehow the woman, in just a few words, had twisted the entire situation around, making it appear that her daughter wanted the date, had presented the circumstances of the date, and that she, the mother, had indulgently permitted it permitted against her better judgment, and now must worry and fret until her child was returned safely to the home, the date completed and behind her.
"Mrs. Albert was able, at least consciously, to resolve her own guilt for this unorthodox and threatening date that she had herself arranged, had even coerced, upon her daughter," said Norma Jean's psychiatrist.)
During the week that Norma Jean awaited the event of her date with the notorious Rod Baker, she had many conflicting emotions. At times, she felt like a young girl condemned. She even had the thought that perhaps she should discuss birth control measures with her mother. When she thought of this, she laughed almost hysterically, picturing the scene of a daughter at her mother's knowledgeable knee asking how to prevent a pregnancy that was certain to issue from the boy the mother had insisted that her daughter date. At other times, however, Norma Jean felt a smoldering interest and curiosity about Rod Baker. He was very handsome, three years older than herself, and he had the added attractiveness of the pre-knowledge that he was sexually oriented and sophisticated. And Norma Jean did feel awe that she, a mere girl of fifteen, was about to embark upon a date that included the boy of the night flying the family airplane. She knew that it was, to say the least, chic. But she did not mention the event to her girl friends. This was a departure from the normal procedure for Norma Jean and the other teenaged girls of the community. Usually they shared everything, especially information about boys, dates, all the secrets of youth that are charming and sweet because they are secrets the secrets of a group.
Mrs. Albert bought Norma Jean a new dress for the occasion of Rod Baker's courtship. When the girl first saw it, she thought that it was intended for another. It was extremely seductive looking; the skirt, a bell-shaped, cocktail-dress type, stood out in a circle from her shapely legs, framing them for the attention of any who desired to give it. And the neck line of the dress was plungingly low. It swooped in a V from the ribbon shoulder straps to a spot just below the bottom of her breasts. Norma Jean, being naturally large busted, looked almost half-exposed. And when Mrs. Albert presented her child with the new strapless bra she had also purchased, Norma Jean was certain that the purpose was to expose her young breasts completely. The bra pushed her flesh upward, bunching it and making her look large, an effect that was entirely unnecessary.
"Well, what do you think, dear?" asked Mrs. Albert, cooing her own enthusiasm for the new frock.
"It's a little scanty isn't it?" replied the child.
"Oh, I don't think so," said Mrs. Albert, standing back and viewing the total effect of the gown. "This is what they're wearing today, dear."
"I suppose," said Norma Jean. Then she looked at her mother and said, "You like it, don't you?"
"Very much. You look beautiful, dear."
When Rod Baker arrived to pick up Norma Jean for their date, Mrs. Albert was present. And, to Norma Jean's surprise, she acted the very concerned parent.
"You are careful in that plane of your father's, aren't you?" she asked Rod.
I'm a pro, Mrs. Albert," he answered, grinning crookedly.
"Norma Jean's only flown in commercial planes. Jets. This will be quite different for her."
"It sure will be," agreed Rod, grinning wider.
Then Mrs. Albert quizzed Rod as to where they were going, the time she could expect her daughter home, and the activities that were on the agenda for the night. When he answered each query, she wondered about the airplane again.
"But where in the world will you land? The North is so wooded," she asked.
"There's a landing strip right by the cabin."
"The cabin!" the mother exclaimed.
"Sure. You know, where they're holding the party."
"Oh, yes."
The young people took their leave of the Albert residence. Rod drove directly to the local airfield, where the family plane was kept.
Norma Jean watched with interest as Rod prepared the plane for flight, pushing it out of the hangar, revving the motor, listening professionally to the steady whir of the prop. And, as she watched, she told herself that she would really be excited about this kind of date had the boy been anyone but Rod Baker.
"We're all set," the boy announced, walking from the plane to Norma Jean.
Together, they walked to the plane and entered it. Quite solicitously, Rod arranged Norma Jean in the seat next to him. He fastened her safety belt for her, making sure, the girl noticed, not to lose the opportunity to bring his hand in contact with her lap, thigh, belly, and breasts.
Rod lifted the plane gracefully from the earth. The sun was setting as Rod first moved westward, then slowly turned the plane to the north.
Norma Jean was not foreign to air flight. But it was different being in a small plane. Moving rather slowly and able to look at the ground and pinpoint definite landmarks that she knew, for some reason, frightened her. Her belly pinched tightly, and every so often she was certain that she would faint. She couldn't understand it. Flying, nor heights, had never caused this feeling in her before.
Rod Baker handled the plane very expertly. Norma Jean would probably have been impressed with his skill if she hadn't been so frightened, but this feeling persisted. She felt blood withdraw from her face, and she knew that she looked pale. And the tightness in her belly continued, adding to it a sharp-pointed reaction at her breast ends, a side effect that she couldn't understand either.
Several times Rod Baker looked at Norma Jean. But he did not speak to her until he had brought the plane to a level and made some adjustments on the instrument panel. Then he looked at her. He smiled.
"You're afraid, aren't you?" he said.
"Yes," she admitted.
"You don't like heights, eh?" he asked.
"They never bothered me before."
"Ummmm. Something deep involved here," he said, pinching his face into a studious expression.
Norma Jean did not answer. Instead, as if testing herself again, she looked out the plane window. The farm land that they passed over was like a giant checkerboard of browns and plowed blacks, light yellows, and the darkness that was woods. Looking at it, Norma Jean again thought that she would faint. And this time, with the feeling there came a trembling at her thighs.
"You know, it means quite a lot when a girl's afraid of heights," Rod said, glancing at her and grinning.
"What does it mean?" she asked, hearing her voice falter.
He grinned. He looked straight ahead and pulled back on the stick, nosing the plane higher. Then Rod said, "Fear of heights in girls usually means that they're frigid."
Norma Jean did not know how to reply. But she decided that naivete was the best approach with a boy such as Rod, so she said, "Frigid? You mean she's cold?"
"Yeah. Sexually cold," he replied.
"Oh," she said softly.
"Do you know what it means to be sexually frigid?" Rod suddenly asked.
"No. I couldn't very well," she said.
"It means they get no jazz out of makin' it with a guy. No bang. Climax. No kick at all."
Now, Norma Jean's cheeks turned torridly hot, and the heat seemed to encompass the rest of her body, too. She did not speak. She didn't want to look away from Rod either. That would involve a visual awareness of the high height she was at, and she feared a return of the temptation of fainting.
"But I guess you really know all about that, don't you?" Rod said. "No."
He looked at her. "Don't kid me."
"I'm not."
Rod laughed. Then he made another adjustment at the airplane's controls. Then, to Norma Jean's shock, he raised both hands and deliberately brought them away from the stick.
"Rod!" Norma Jean nearly screamed. "You're not steering the plane!"
"Yeah, how about that," he said casually.
"Rod!! "
"Stop crying, chicken," Rod said. "You don't see me worrying, do you?"
Norma Jean looked from him to the land far below her window. Then she observed that the plane had not dipped and nose-dived downward as she had expected. She turned and looked at Rod Baker again.
"I've got a buddy on board," Rod said, smirking. "You know, an automatic pilot. It's jazzy makes it possible for me to keep both hands free."
With that, Rod made a lunge at Norma Jean. She recoiled as far as she could to her side of the seat, but because the motion crammed her against the small plane's door, she became petrified with fright actually froze to her recoiled position.
"Man, you're going to fall right out of this bird if you're not careful," Rod said.
Norma Jean said nothing, but she began a horrible trembling at every part of her body.
Rod swung his arm around the frightened girl. He urged her toward him, and her body did in fact move into close position with the boy. And then Rod's other hand moved to her breast, ascending from the safety belt to the open V of her gown.
Norma Jean gasped. It was the only sound to issue from her. She did not cry out, did not seek to restrain the boy's embrace, for, in truth, she could not. She was in the middle of two horrible frights: the boy and his aggressiveness, and the altitude of the plane.
"I think a little kiss is in order," Rod said, lowering his face as his hand slid into the neckline of her dress.
Norma Jean gave her lips. They were cold. Her mouth opened, not by desire, but by the force of Rod's biting, shooting tongue. She did not grip it and draw upon it. She merely endured the roaming exploration it made. And then she endured the exploration of Rod's hand as it went inside her dress and bra, felt flesh, cupped all of it, kneaded, pulled, then moved forward until he could twist her nipple between his thumb and forefinger. Norma Jean did emit a few sounds, and they entered Rod's mouth from her own, but they were not sounds of passion; they were not the answer to the boy's own sexual craving. They were sounds that came forth from fear and confusion and from the strange turn her emotions had taken.
Very soon, when Norma Jean continued silent and inactive, Rod Baker broke his embrace, saying, "Man, you know, you are frigid."
He turned to the controls of the airplane. Norma Jean remained quiet, saying nothing, thinking of heights and the darkness that now totally enveloped their journey northward.
Rod pointed out the long line of lights that indicated the landing field by the cabin where the party was in progress. Norma Jean leaned forward and followed his pointing finger. It was the first sign she had made of consciousness since Rod had touched and kissed her. He took it as total forgiveness, and, in a way, it was just that, for Norma Jean was so happy to be reaching the ground and safety again that she would have made friends with the devil.
Rod taxied the plane almost to the cabin door. When he and Norma Jean alighted, there was a group of people waiting to greet them. Most of them were older than Rod, some even in their middle years.
Then, it has been reported by the girl to her therapist, there were several hours of total confusion during which she remembered very little. Norma Jean does recall that upon reaching the ground, she felt giddily happy. She laughed, even hung closely to Rod Baker's arm. She had no explanation for this feeling except to say that she was "so relieved to have gotten away from the heights."
The party was livelier than anything Norma Jean had imagined possible. All of the people seemed to be very wealthy. She was never able to determine quite how they fitted into the eighteen-year-old Rod Baker's life, but it was apparent that they were all friends of some long standing. There was a great deal of drinking and almost every nook and corner of the cabin contained couples involved in deep petting. Once, when Norma Jean accidentally walked into a bedroom, she unexpectedly came upon a couple who were involved in an act of intercourse. They hardly noticed her, but she shut the door quickly and left the room.
Rod drank a great deal. Soon he was very drunk. And Norma Jean, contrary to anything previously in her life, drank too. And the giddiness returned. And the flare of affection for Rod Baker returned too.
By midnight, everyone at the party was very drunk. There developed then an impromptu dance by two girls whose only talent seemed to be the dismissal of their clothing as they danced around the room. Soon both the girls were naked. Then two men stepped forward and swept them out of the room, heading, Norma Jean guessed, for the bedrooms at the back of the cabin.
"You feel like dancing?" Rod suddenly asked, slurring the words drunkenly and looking into Norma Jean's face.
"I don't feel anything," she replied. Her voice showed the signs of drink, apprehension, and the relief she had experienced upon arriving at the cabin.
"Well then, come on feel something. With me." Rod gripped her forearm and urged her onto the front porch.
The cool night air struck Norma Jean's face, but it did not sober her. And when Rod urged her off the porch and in the direction of the beach and lake that rested at the bottom of the hill that the cabin fronted, Norma Jean broke into her giddy, almost hysterical laughter again.
Soon Norma Jean's feet sunk deeply into sand. She heard the lap of water against the shore. She heard crickets and other night sounds. And she saw the glistening water far from the shore where moon rays struck it and sliced it. She felt strange, distant, remote from everything, and she felt happy, too strangely happy, all of it made up from the complexities that had that night overwhelmed her.
Norma Jean felt Rod's eyes on her body. The moon made a kind of frame around her, and she knew that her body was presented in the very best possible way, that she looked as seductive as the dress she wore.
"Come here," Rod said.
Norma Jean walked over to him.
"You're a crazy kid, you know," he said.
"I guess I am," she answered, staring straight into his eyes.
"Mixed up like," Rod continued. "You go from one thing to another thing hating the heights and freezing me out, then laughing like a nut and liking me. What gives anyway?"
"I don't know," she said. "What does give?"
"This for a starter," he replied.
Both Rod's hands closed around Norma Jean's waist. Then he pulled her close. She felt her breasts touch his chest, her waist smack against his, her breath mixing with the alcoholic odor of his breath. And she did not care. Not about anything. Her presence, the crazy airplane ride, the liquor everything, crashed upon her and jabbered her mind and emotions into a turmoil; it was as if she had been greatly changed, would never again be the same girl she had been only hours earlier.
"Are you ready to kiss me properly now?" Rod asked.
"More than ready," she brazenly replied.
Rod looked surprised. But Norma Jean could see his faint smile in the moonlight. It made her want to be even more daring, to show that she could be as loose and dirty as any girl Rod had ever known.
"And I'm ready for something else, too," she said huskily, bringing her hands to Rod's shoulders and pinching his muscles with the tips of her fingers.
"Oh, yeah," he said softly.
"Yeah," she answered, saying it like the answer to a challenge.
Rod started to pull her close, but Norma Jean took a quick step backwards. And then she did the most amazing thing. She unzipped the side of her dress, shrugged the straps from her shoulders, and for a moment stood before the eighteen-year-old boy, the top of her dress hanging at her waist and her bra-encased breasts heaving with the breathing that now issued from her delightful body.
"Man, you really are crazy," Rod Baker said. "Good crazy."
"Crazier than you think," Norma Jean said.
Quickly she shimmied her dress to her feet and stepped out of it. Then she raised and smiled at the boy again, standing revealed to him in nothing but a strapless bra, half-slip, nylons and high-heeled shoes.
A gasp of appreciation escaped from the boy's lips. Then he gasped again as Norma Jean dismissed the remainder of her clothing. But then there was no time or element that could produce further sounds until they were to be made up of hard pumping love-sounds.
Norma Jean, acting upon some emotion that will never be clear, suddenly played the part of a mature, sexually-sophisticated woman. She dashed toward Rod, crushed her naked body against him then raised her hands and loosened his collar and tie.
"Get rid of all that," she whispered.
Rod shook his head unbelievingly. Then he, too, quickly attained nudity.
Their bodies made a hard, smacking sound when they crashed together in a desperate embrace. They kissed stickily, their tongues swooping and playing and darting deeply. And their hands implored the passions that their kisses created. Norma Jean's fingers worked over the small of Rod's bare back. His pinched at her buttocks, fought between their bodies and caressed at her large, now-hard breasts.
Very soon, they stumbled away from the shoreline to a group of bushes that veiled the back part of the beach. Then they slumped to the beach and stretched long together in a new embrace. And finally, Norma Jean, acting as if love-making was a regular occurrence in her life, rolled to her back and stretched her arms out to Rod.
He lowered between the double V of arms and legs. He snuggled close, then closer, then thrust forward with all his might. Norma Jean cried out, but the sound was made to seem happy and welcoming, for her hips immediately began a hard, rhythmic pumping to the tune of Rod's downward thrust and withdrawal. Her stomach muscles tightened and rolled in waves from just below her breasts until they were lost at the action their unity had made. And her hard nipples bloated larger, harder, more cracked, as if they were berries bulging with sweet juices that would soon be uncontainable.
Rod Baker was an excited lover. Overly excited, probably made that way by the unexpected aggressiveness of Norma Jean. He quickly finished his trip to the end of current passion it was not the end for the girl. As he gasped, then collapsed upon her moist, bare body, her hips continued to churn, to thrust and whirl, and her throat continued to issue the small, harsh sounds of approaching climax. She was not to know this thrill, however. Not until hours later when she and Rod, fully clothed again, excused themselves from the party group and moved to an upstairs bedroom. Then Norma Jean, fifteen and previously unsullied, knew her response knew the confusion of her mixed-up life in a single, body-exiting stream of excitement.
Norma Jean was not afraid of heights during the airplane ride home. It was as if this fear had been greatly diminished. But her life had been changed, had been brought to a loss of virginity and a crossroads of promiscuity because of a mother's desires and ambitions.
"We cannot say for sure, of course," said Norma Jean's therapist, "but I would venture to say that had there not been mother-permissiveness in this case, we would not have had the problems of a young girl making love to an overly-sophisticated boy, from which she jumped off and into the deep water of a regularly wayward life."
And what about the fear of heights? All these conflicts that Norma Jean experienced on the way to the cabin party?
"Oddly enough, the boy, Rod Baker, was right in a way," explained the doctor. "Height fear sometimes does identify frigidity in women, but this is not necessarily so in this case or other cases. It seems that for the girl this was a part of her confusion that night. And it was a confusion created by the mother who actually coerced her child into a situation where her sexuality was threatened."
CHAPTER THREE
MASTURBATORY HABITS OF TEENAGED GIRLS
Masturbation, despite the so-called enlightened sexual decade of the 1960's, still carries a stigma and its resultant guilt feelings. Once, all sorts of terrible maladies were appointed for the person who masturbated: insanity, anemia, infertility, etc. Generally, the fear was directed to boys, the thought of a girl masturbating being almost too evil to comprehend. But girls did masturbate. They do today. And undoubtedly they will continue in this pattern as long as man inhabits the earth.
But what of the masturbatory habits of the teenaged girls of today? Do they turn to self-love out of need? Curiosity? Is it a therapy that is used to keep a girl from premature sexual relations with a boy? Is masturbation a satisfaction that is demanded from every young body?
The answers to these questions, and many others, are best illustrated through the subjects themselves and the case histories they have contributed to this work on "teenaged sexual habits."
CASE HISTORY
When Amy first experienced a sexual climax as a result of self-masturbation, she pretended that it hadn't happened that she had not felt the sensations that had raked her body. Why the self-deception? one might ask. The answer is simple: Amy thought such feelings issued only from the dirty, the uncouth, and those people who were destined for a life of misery and guilt.
Amy's reactions to masturbation were not much different from those of most of the girls of her age group fourteen. She came upon the experience accidentally. It is worth reciting the exact experience as it was described by Amy to a psychiatric case worker, for from this we see some of the guilt feelings and fear that commingle with a girl's first excitement from a sexual source.
Amy was fourteen when she deliberately masturbated. Before this event there had been some signs of approaching sexual awareness. Amy, along with her girl friends, talked a good deal about boys. And she dreamed of boys and men, too. But the most significant experience to signify the coming masturbatory period of her life occurred when Amy spent a week-end at a girl friend's house. The girls spent a long time in Clara's bedroom. They talked. They laughed and giggled over events that had happened at school. They talked of boys and romance, movie stars and romance, and the thrill of someday having a boyfriend of their own.
Finally, when the conversation had run dry and the girls had showered and made ready for bed, Amy, on impulse, began a wrestling game with her friend. They giggled, trying to muffle it so the adults of the house would not hear. And they rolled all over the room, falling from the bed to the carpeted floor and all over the floor. During the play-scuffle, Amy's pajama top flew open, exposing her bouncing young breasts. The same thing happened to the girl friend, especially when Amy began a heavy assault of tickling at the ribs. Amid their laughter and combat, Clara's leg somehow became jammed between both of Amy's thighs. As Clara tried to wrest her friend from the position atop her, Amy felt the constant, rubbing contact of Clara's knee at the exact point of her own thigh's joining. It was a good sensation. Amy liked it. She even tried to increase it by bringing her thighs together to hold Clara's knee. And the sensation did increase, but not to an end. The girls suddenly rolled apart, gasped for breath and lay flat on their backs. The game was over and so was the sensation that had held Amy so excitingly.
It is doubtful that this event caused any conscious-level effort for Amy to pursue the sensations she had felt to a higher degree. But accident once again brought her the sensations that she was soon to know as a result of a self-masturbatory act. It happened in the bathtub.
Amy enjoyed lounging in a sudsy tub as long as she was allowed. She also enjoyed using a big sponge on all of her body. This particular night she gained a different feeling when she soaped and massaged the area at her breasts. The nipples popped alive and the roundness of her flesh seemed to fill. She couldn't understand it, but she liked it. But this feeling was soon forgotten.
After soaping and rinsing several times, Amy scooted lower in the tub, totally submerging her body except for neck and head. The sponge had escaped her fingers, and she could feel it at the bottom of the tub near her thighs. She opened her legs, attempting to capture the sponge. She missed it. She tried again. Still the sponge eluded her grasp. And then the procedure became a game for Amy. She opened and closed her thighs in quick succession, and just that quickly she forgot all about the game of catch the sponge. A sensation swept her body. Amy recognized it as a feeling similar to the one she had experienced when wrestling with Clara. It was very exciting and seemed to be growing, when suddenly it died. The good feeling was gone. Amy was desperately disappointed.
As she rested in the tub, recovering from the unknown thing that had risen within her, then left, Amy noticed that she was breathing very hard. And her mind buzzed with thoughts and fantasies, all of which were sexually oriented. Then Amy sought to investigate the origin of the feeling she had known. She reached her hand slowly to her thighs. She touched herself, then investigated more thoroughly. Although the contact felt good, it fell far short of the earlier feeling. But then Amy made a higher touch, and the feeling was there again, bunched as if it waited upon a pinpoint to be jiggled into some torrent of fantastic feeling. Amy sighed. She later described the sound as "the kind I had never heard before not from me or anyone."
Instinct moved Amy when she, without pre-knowledge of masturbation, gently spun her finger in a circle upon the highly-sensitized part of her body. Soon she began gasping and moving in the tub, arching a bit, slightly circling her hips in order to intensify the feeling her speeding hand conveyed, and the sound of the water's splashing was like a giant surf that deadened her ears to all other sounds. And then, suddenly, she had arrived at the crest of the high plateau she had created. She did not want to go on. She was afraid that, if she did, some terrible moment would be upon her that would find her body split in parts, shattered, sent shooting in every direction. But neither could she keep from continuing; she could not deny herself the end to all that her bodily sensations promised. She shut her eyes tight and spun her hand faster. And then climax took over, became her being, soul and all of her as she was racked with the pleasure-pain of immense release.
After the first experience, Amy promised herself that she would never again do such a thing, that she would assert will power and not become a slave to the habit that begged for almost constant attention. Amy, of course, broke every promise to herself. She broke it nightly, sometimes several times in a single day. And she became inventive about her masturbation, devised new methods of performing the act, some simple, many intricately devised, such as causing a friction contact against her clitoris by wrapping her legs around the bed post and exerting herself hard against it.
Amy attempted to find out something about masturbation. She sought books in both the school library and public library on the subject. The file cards indicated that there were such books available; however, they were kept in the "closed shelves" of the public library and were not issuable to under-aged girls. Then Amy sought to talk to her best girl friend about it. When she asked the girl if she had "ever given herself a feeling like making love," the girl looked at her in a horrified way and said of course she hadn't. This ended any incentive to find one to whom she could talk about the problem. And by now it had become a problem, for Amy, raised by unknowledgeable and prudish parents, was riddled with guilt. She was sure that she was "abnormal."
"perverted," perhaps going insane.
Amy's guilt lasted most of her young life. At sixteen, attempting to find a substitute for masturbation, Amy became involved in a series of sexual affairs with boys and older men, some in their middle-years. She did not know the benefit of sexual gratification, however, and returned nightly to her masturbatory habit.
Finally, at age nineteen, Amy married. Sexual intercourse in marriage was no more beneficial than premarital promiscuity. And she could not deny herself the simple means of gratification that were available to her by the uncomplex act of masturbation. She continued her masturbatory practice in marriage until, after five years, she and her husband were divorced. Then, deciding that there was no chance for happiness in her life until she resolved her problems, she sought help through a social agency, was assigned to the case load of a psychiatric case worker, and eventually responded to weekly sessions that gave the young woman considerable insight into her problems. But a new marriage, convenient for Amy's particular psychology, probably must be credited for her eventual happiness even more than her long periods of psychiatric introspection. Amy met and married a man who was different from many. Although he was fond of sexual intercourse, he was also fascinated with the procedure of masturbating his wife. Strangely or perhaps not so strangely when we consider that neurotics attract other neurotics for marriage it was he who, upon their second date, masturbated Amy to a climax, then entered her and knew the gratification of sexual intercourse. This arrangement proved ideal for Amy and for her husband. At last reports, they were living a successful, very functioning life.
CASE HISTORY
Rigidity in upbringing often produces wayward patterns for teenagers. This was the case of Judy S.
Judy's father was a lay minister in a little-known Protestant denomination. He raised his daughter, Judy, and her two brothers with a clinched fist, never hesitating to use it to invoke his will. And Mr. S's will was constant obedience, prayer, and an utter lack of communication for his children with peers except for those children who attended his church. So severe was Mr. S.'s discipline of his children, that except for necessary conversation with teachers, they rarely communicated with an un-church-oriented person, especially young people their own ages. Finally, when Judy was fifteen, she learned that she did not need others for excitement. She found it in masturbation, and eventual incestuous intercourse with her seventeen-year-old brother. In fact, it was her brother who taught her the rudiments of masturbation.
"Hi," Judy's brother, Harold, said to her, unexpectedly entering her bedroom one day.
"Hi," she answered, turning from her side to her back in order to see him.
"What'cha doin'? "
"Nothing."
"Me too."
"Not much, is it?" she said, smiling.
"Not nothing," he answered, also smiling.
"Did Ma and Pa come back yet?"
"Nope." He hesitated, then said, "If they were back the old man would be calling for a prayer meeting."
"Harold, you shouldn't talk like that," Judy said.
"Why not? It's the truth."
"But if Pa heard you..."
"He can't. Not unless he's got more 'in' with God than we've been able to discover."
"Harold," she said scolding again.
"Boy, Pa's really got you buffaloed, hasn't he?"
She looked away, then turned quickly and said, "No I just do what he says, that's all."
"And how much fun do you have?"
She lowered her large eyelashes.
"Go on, tell me what you do for fun? Heck, you're pretty enough, and you are fifteen and what have you done for fun. Nothing. That's what."
"It's the same for you."
"Heck it is," he exclaimed.
She looked at him, cocking her head in a quizzical fashion. Then she said, "You mean you do things Pa doesn't approve of?"
He looked around, then at his sister, and said, "Naturally. Heck, Judy, I'm seventeen! That's a man's age."
"Pa doesn't think so."
"That to Pa!" He made an obscene gesture. "Harold!! "
"Ah, I'm just sick of it, Judy, and you should be too. Praying, praying, praying all the time. No friends, no fun, no nothing except what Rev. Stupid says for us to do."
Judy was shocked by her brother's references to their father. She had never heard such anger, such bitterness from him before. Yet a part of her admired her brother's brazenness. A part of her wished that she were that way too.
Harold glanced at his sister, then moved over to her bed and sat down. He smiled again, and this time his eyes flickered over her body, seeing the womanly lines that could not be hidden by the ultraconservative sweater and skirt.
"Did you really mean what you said, Harold?" Judy asked in a soft, secretive voice.
"What's that?"
"About me being pretty. Did you mean it?"
"Sure I did. Heck, you'd have the guys flocking all over you if you ever got to see any of them." He paused, looked around again, then said, "You ought to do like I do. Sneak out to meet the gang, you know, to do things together."
"You don't!" she exclaimed, bringing her hand to her mouth as if she were hearing the most horrible confession.
"I sure as the devil do. Right out my window at night. And sometimes I make up reasons to stay at school, 'cept I'm not really there. Heck, it's the only way. I'm not ashamed of lying to the old man."
"But if he ever found out..."
"I'd have an answer for that too," he said. "The Navy. I'd join the cotton-pickin' Navy if Pa ever gave me a bad time."
"Oh, don't," Judy said. Her voice had changed. Suddenly, she had a very genuine fear of being without her brother Harold.
"Hope I don't have to," Harold said.
They were both quiet for a long time. Then Harold, looking around in a secretive manner as he reached in his hip pocket, said, "Want to see something? I mean, really something!"
"Sure," she answered feeling at that very moment as if she had already committed some horrible sin.
Harold withdrew a folded envelope from his pocket. He grinned, somewhat evilly, Judy thought.
"What's that?" she asked.
"You'll see." He very carefully unwrapped the envelope, then withdrew from it a packet of small-sized glossy photographs.
"Pictures?" Judy asked.
"Yeah. Special ones."
Judy glanced at the door of her bedroom, sensing that what was about to take place was a forbidden act, one for which she and her brother would have to bear the most vile punishment. She finally looked away from the door. Harold, still grinning, handed her the photos. Judy took them, noticing that the palms of her hand were moist.
"Go ahead, look at 'em. They're a bang," encouraged Harold.
Judy looked at the first photo. Then she looked away, holding the pictures outstretched from her body and saying, "Oh, Harold, I can't! They're terrible!"
"Go on. Don't be chicken."
"I can't!"
Exasperatedly, Harold frowned and said, "How in the world do you ever expect to know anything about life if you don't look into it."
"But these..."
"Yeah," he interrupted. "They're dirty. And I say, so what?"
Slowly, Judy brought her hand back to her lap. She lifted the two fingers that concealed the photo. Then she peeked a look.
Judy has never been able to accurately describe her introduction to pornographic photographs. She recalls nothing about her feelings at this time; however, she remembers in rather vivid detail the words that passed between her brother and herself. (Judy's analyst ventured the speculation that Judy's mind worked overtime recording the dialog between her brother and herself, and that it did this as the rather complex system of the mind sought to save her from remembering her feelings, feelings that were no doubt erotically aroused by the pornographic photos, for which she felt a horrible guilt.)
The first photo that Judy viewed was that of a man and woman having anal intercourse. It confused her.
"Go on to the next," her brother urged.
"But but what are they doing?" she asked, holding the first photo out.
"You must be kidding," he exploded. "I'm not Harold."
"My God, you're worse than I thought you'd be," he said.
Then, sitting closer to his young sister, and, it has been observed by Judy, acting very much like a teacher giving special instruction to a backward pupil, he leafed through the photos, commenting in candid terms about the action that had been recorded by the photographer.
Commenting on the experience years later, Judy has stated that there was only one photograph that truly excited her. Of the half-dozen pix exhibiting various poses of intercourse, cunnilingus, and fellatio, there was one of a young girl masturbating. The pose had been closely photographed, showing the minute details of the self-love act. And Judy saw that the girl's eyes were closed, that there was an erotic expression on her face that told of some unseen, and yet unknown, glory. The model's anatomy and her own action upon it were vividly outlined.
"But this is different," she said to her brother. "It's not like the others. There's no man. What's she doing, anyway?"
Harold reached and took the photographs from her. He returned them first to the envelope, then to his pocket. Then he looked at his sister and shook his head.
"What's the matter?" she asked. "You look well, mad or disgusted with me, or something."
"Nothing's wrong, kid," he answered. "I was just surprised at your question, that's all."
"Well tell me what she's doing. Then I'll know we'll both know."
Harold seemed a little tongue-tied when it came to an explanation of a masturbatory act. But he finally said, "Well, she's making out with herself."
"Herself?"
"Yeah."
"But how in the world can she ever do that? There's got to be a boy."
"Not for this, there doesn't," he explained.
Judy shook her head and repeated, "To herself." Then she added, "Gee, she must be crazy or something."
"Naw, she's not," Harold said defensively. "All the girls do that. And the fellows do, too, but in a different way."
"You do, too, Harold?" she asked, aghast.
He nodded.
"And girls do that? All the girls? The kids in school and everything?"
"That's right. They get a charge out of it."
"A charge?" she questioned.
"Yeah, kicks. A bang. You know, it's-fun."
Judy wanted to ask more questions, but at that very moment she and her brother heard the front door open and they knew that their parents had returned home. Quickly, Harold jumped up from the bed and took a position by the door. Then, when his father called, he left the room, patting his hip pocket as he moved, assuring himself that his pornographic pictures could not be viewed.
Judy remained quietly in her room for a long time. She kept thinking of the films, the way the men and women had looked without clothes, and especially the way the girl had looked as she masturbated.
That night, alone in her room and safely beneath the bed covers, Judy felt a restlessness that had never before been with her. She rolled and tossed and could not get comfortable could not coax sleep to come and take her into darkness. Again and again an image of the picture of the girl stimulating herself crowded into Judy's mind. She tried to rid herself of the thought, even covered her head with a pillow, much as if this would make the thought go away. But it did not. A clear image of the obscene photo persisted. And with it, there came Judy's first urgings toward her own body.
She rolled on her back and stared at the ceiling. Even the darkness seemed to form images for Judy to view, all of them vile and from the creation of the photos she had viewed earlier that day. And she became acutely aware of her breathing, which had become labored, of that and the way her belly indented dramatically with each breath, forming a kind of slide from her young breasts all the way to the place where her thighs joined. Soon, Judy reached behind her and lifted the curtain of her window. Moonlight gleamed upon her, framing her for an unusually, and unusually attractive, self-view of her body and the way it crinkled the bed clothes. Judy threw off the covers and stretched her body long and straight. Then she looked at herself again. She was suddenly tantalized with the temptation to lie naked in the moonlight. For awhile, she resisted the thought, but finally she could not withstand the urge any longer. She sat up in bed. Then she gathered the hem of her long, heavy wool nightie in her fingers. She pulled it upward, over her head and free from her body. It was like a revelation to her. She felt cool and refreshed and very attractive. She hid the nightie beneath the mattress, then glanced downward at her young breasts. They were rising, much as if they asked for a kiss from their maiden. And then Judy looked lower, saw her belly pinched tightly with lines showing some strain, then stared at the thick panties she always wore beneath her night dress. They seemed disgusting and a disfigurement to her beauty her natural beauty that was revered by the moon and the night. Moving slowly, as if she were making a most important unveiling, Judy brought her hands downward to her side, rolled the panties down a bit. then rapidly pushed them from her body and off the tips of her toes. And now she was free naked and free, and more delightful than she had ever imagined herself to be.
Judy leaned back, settling her head into the pillow. Her breathing quieted. A long time passed. And then she was asleep, naked beneath the moon in her bed within the privacy of her room, and asleep, dreaming dreams that never merged to consciousness at any time of the future. But, while sleep possessed her, demons played their tunes within her subconscious, urging her to action, to self-expression in love through masturbation. And the demons were determined to corrupt, according to the dictates of every adult Judy S. had ever known. And corrupt, they did.
Judy, crying a soft, sleep-filled sound, rolled from her back to her side, then to her back again. Slowly, her legs raised, knees separating, feet planting firmly into the bed. And then there was another movement: Judy's hand wandering from breast to ribs to waist, and last to that unsullied temple of promises. The girl's hand caressed, indented, moved again, pushed a bit and finally arrived at an auxiliary position of sensitivity, a plateau from which the sleep-drenched girl of fifteen could leap to the plunging thrill that orgasm offered.
Judy pretended sleep to herself all through the act. But even self-deception must meet discovery, and so it was with the strict pastor's daughter. Her breathing increased and she tried to stifle it. She could not. It was then that she allowed herself to recognize that she was truly awake erotically awake and masturbating. She buried her face into the pillows, being very careful not to make a break in either her posture or the ever-speeding rhythm that she played upon her body. And when, involuntarily her hips began a spinning and arching that forced creaking sounds from the bed springs, Judy tried to subdue this sound too. But she could not. Nor did she could she now care, for her entire body stammered as if she were the captive of some horrible machine that shook her, trembled her entire body, rippling her with excitement and the fear of what that excitement would cause.
Judy bit hard into the pillow just before she brought her hand to a halt. She felt the dryness of the material and knew that it was no dryer than her mouth, for she was as if she had been rung dry with emotion, as indeed she had.
Quickly, much as if she wished to continue or re-establish the disguise of unconsciousness, Judy returned to sleep. But upon awakening the next morning, she investigated her naked body, saw that she was unchanged, then remembered again the delightful feelings that she had accomplished by herself. She felt as if she had the most profound secret, a happy discovery that allowed her feelings and emotions and thrill, without the risk of her father's wrath. All that was necessary was to keep her secret activity that way in every respect.
Judy did suffer severe guilt feelings; however, she was, it was later discovered, able to rationalize them: Her father, who was an authority on sin, never mentioned this particular sin; therefore, it could be considered acceptable. And she doubled her other efforts to please her parents: She prayed harder and longer, became more active in church activities did all these things as she longed to be alone in her room, naked between the sheets, and spinning herself into a delirium of sensations that she guessed must be akin to the heavenly rewards her father so often mentioned.
By the time Judy turned sixteen, she had become a habitual, and proficient, masturbator. She has estimated that for two years she failed to masturbate nightly not more than five or six times. She even remembered the situations that kept her from the act. Visiting relatives were staying at the house. During the visit, one of the young girls about her own age shared her bed. She could not risk discovery, and subdued the urgings that came upon her in regiments of strength.
Although Judy and her brother, Harold, never again mentioned the pornographic photos he had shown her, they did from that day grow closer. Judy never confessed her masturbatory habits, although she has stated that she was tempted to do this on one occasion. Harold, on the other hand, confessed all sorts of secret, lurid details of his life, all of them accomplished behind his father's pious back. Judy was proud that her brother trusted her so thoroughly. She wished that she might bring herself to share her own secrets. But she could not, at least not until the two of them had broken the ages-old taboo of incest. Then she had a secret to share. It was Harold's secret, too.
They were alone in the house. They felt free, for it would be hours before their parents returned from the church where they were attending a funeral. The incest began innocently enough began with an excuse for a rough house game; then the game brought Judy to her back upon her bed with her brother perched at her flapping, fighting thighs.
Suddenly Judy's resistance stopped. Harold loosened his hold upon the girl, but she did not move to take herself away from his embrace. They looked into each other's eyes. A silent message was conveyed. Judy, sighing, moved slightly. Her brother brought a hand to her hip. He closed his fingers on the skirt that held her. She did not flinch. Nor did she protest or seek to escape this evil thing when her brother's hand moved to the hem of her skirt, lifted it, then wandered to the panties, which he quickly separated. Harold's eyes blazed. They held surprise as much as passion. And they continued to hold on a line with Judy's while he withdrew his hand, made a rearrangement of his clothing, then brought both his hands beneath his sister's skirt to swoop upward, grip her hips, then flatten them as she arched to meet him.
At the beginning there was difficulty, and at the end, for Judy, there was disappointment. The act of intercourse had failed to bring about a climax, something with which she was already dramatically familiar. There was an exchange of words between brother and sister following the incestuous act. Each tried to reassure the other that the fault was their own. But there were no vows of abstinence, and there was none until quite unexpectedly, Harold, following an argument with his father, carried out his vow and enlisted in the Navy. Then Judy was completely alone.
Although Judy never received a climax through the means of sexual intercourse with her brother, she did submit even encouraged the act many times. That she did not become pregnant is one of the mysteries of physiology. Inquiring as to why she submitted to her brother when she did not really enjoy the act, Judy has replied that she wanted her brother to like her, that she didn't want to disappoint him, that she feared if she did he might take revenge by informing upon her, even at the risk of his own discovery, and that she constantly hoped that she might reach an orgasm, know the same spine-tingling thrill she had accomplished by herself.
Judy continued to live at home with her parents until she was twenty years old. Then she married a boy of her parents' choice, a member of the same community and church in which Judy had been raised. After ten years of married life, Judy consulted a physician regarding her apparent infertility. There was nothing organically preventive of child-bearing. But during the conversation, Judy felt the urge to ramble on about her life, her past, even the incestuous affair she had fulfilled with her brother. The physician rather casually suggested that a psychiatric review of her life might lessen some emotional block to pregnancy. Judy complied with the suggestion and sought psychiatric counseling.
Unfortunately, it is not known how Judy S. would have responded to therapy, for after the initial interviews, which have provided the basis for this case, she and her husband were killed in an automobile crash on a busy city freeway.
* * *
Guilt has always been synonymous with masturbation, and it is within this sphere that the act can, and does, harm those who practice it. From medical records, it appears that boys are far less-likely to be bedeviled by their adolescent habit of masturbation, than girls. But generally it is accepted that boys are less traumatically inclined in regard to early sexual experiences of any nature. Girls, very-likely because there is a much more involved investigative need in order to find that of their anatomy that provides sensation, sometimes carry the guilt of masturbation for years. Sometimes it is even carried into marriage, a status that is meant to gratify the sexual needs of the partners. Many girls who were early masturbators have, through their early, intensive acts, relinquished the right to a sexual climax by the natural means of sexual intercourse. This is particularly true if the clitoris has been the exclusive point of the girl's sensitivity. In such cases, it is not unusual that the glorious point for masturbation becomes the retarder in marriage. In such cases, too, compromises, either spoken or unspoken, are worked out by husband and wife, often providing the husband with the duty of masturbating his mate. Some doctors feel that this is the only basis upon which a successful sex life can be established in marriage for the early, excessive masturbator. Many husbands accept this duty without complaint. Some do not. And most psychiatrists and doctors feel that when a man does not willingly, even lovingly, accept this responsibility, he is bound to be the long-term loser.
"Love is expressed in many ways between married people," says Dr. Robert Erskin, gynecologist at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, Michigan. "And truly, it does not much matter how it is expressed, just so long as it is conveyed. There is a vital need for this between a man and his wife. I have seen married couples who have passed their silver wedding anniversary, still acting like newly-weds. Some of them I know. Some I know have worked out a mutually gratifying and successful love-life between them that, to some people, would seem to disobey all the rules in all the books. But they are happy. They are in love. They have community and communication. These things, I think, are far more important than the compliance with a code that cannot apply to all people."
CHAPTER FOUR
TEENAGED LESBIANS
Mountains of copy have been written about lesbianism, its greater popularity, its horror, and the motivations and problems behind the abnormal practice. We know today that the housewife and mother of children might have a girlfriend lover as casually as prison inmates in a woman's reformatory. We know that there are houses of prostitution exclusively for the lesbian. We are told that bars exist for the gay trade alone. We read that there are reasons behind the surge of same-sex lovers, both male and female. We have been oriented to these motivations, namely mother domination, father-figure complexes, broken homes, broken-down morality, broken hearts, economic and social competition, equal rights, civil rights, human rights almost anything can be taken, dissected by the professional or non-professional, and claimed as the cause for the problem of lesbianism. And so it may be. And so may it also not be.
Interpretations of problems are often lost in the translation from professional to layman, lost even in the transfer of ideas without interpretation. Moods, personalities, language, subjectivity, and personal problems can cloud the truth of the lesbian scene, steam it with vapors that prohibit objective reporting. For this reason, this chapter, like all the book, will not attempt definitive answers for this complex problem. Instead, situations will be presented by the subjects themselves as they responded to a team of university psychologists during a two-year study of lesbianism on college campuses. The study, part of a broader-scoped study concerning the sex life of female students at coeducational institutions, is to be released early next year. The work was made possible by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. The following portion has been edited from taped transcripts for the sole benefit of this report on Sex and the Teenager. Names of the subjects have, of course, been changed. And because of the pre-publication status of this material, the names of the study, the investigators, the university, and the university press publisher, must necessarily be withheld, both in the content of this book and in the bibliography.
Subject: Eighteen year old female. Negro, a college freshman, case name, Gloria.
Do you date men? Rarely. Why is this?
I don't like them. I really never have. But you date them sometimes. If you do not like them, why do you sometimes go out with them?
There are some activities on campus that near. ly demand that you have a male date. Some of these events I like to go to, so I get a date.
Q. If it weren't for this, you would not have much to do with men, is that right? A. Absolutely right. Q. Do you consider yourself a lesbian? A. I do.
Q. Are you certain? A. Very certain. Q. Why?
A. It's rather obvious, I think. I like girls.
Q. Many girls like other girls without being lesbians. What makes you make a stronger interpretation of this kind of situation?
A. I'm afraid Dr...., that you're trying to convince me, or at least make me have some doubt, as to the exact emotions I have for other girls.
Q. Now you're confusing me.
A. I think what you're attempting to do is establish that I don't know what a lesbian is that I don't know what I am.
Q. Well, what is a lesbian? And what are you?
A. A lesbian prefers to have her sexual affairs with other girls rather than men. I'm that kind of a girl, so I'm a lesbian.
Q. There are different kinds of lesbians. What kind are you?
A. I beg your pardon.
Q. Do you play an active or passive role in the act? A. Both.
Q. Have you ever had sexual relations with the opposite sex? A. Yes.
Q. Frequently? A. No.
Q. Will you tell me at what age this occurred and the circumstances surrounding the affair? A. Yes, I'll tell you. Q. Thank you.
A. I was twelve years old. My uncle he lived with my mother and me made love to me. He was almost like a father to me. Funny thing though, this very second right while I've been talking to you I had a kind of flashing thought about him.
Q. What kind of thought?
A. That this man wasn't my uncle. I remember that he used to sleep with my mother lots of times. He was I don't know if he was supposed to be my father's brother. My father ran away when I was very small. Then I remember this man living with us.
Q. And he forced you into a sexual act?
A. I don't know if we can call it 'force,' or not. It just kind of happened. You know, was happening without me really knowing how it came about.
Q. This man who you thought was, or was, your uncle, had sexual intercourse with you, is that the way it went?
A. That's part of it.
Q. What's the rest of the story?
A. Well, pretty soon he didn't seem satisfied with intercourse anymore. Now you have to understand that this man and I well, we got together practically every time we were alone in the house together. But pretty soon he started doing something else.
Q. And what was that?
A. I don't know the medical terms for it, but he started just just making love to me with his mouth.
Q. At the vaginal area? A. Yes.
Q. How did you feel about this? A. I ... liked it.
Q. And had you liked sexual intercourse too?
A. Not at all. It used to hurt, and my uncle wasn't very gentle. When he wanted me, he wanted me right then, with no fooling around. And he was a very big man, and sometimes I cried, the pain was bad.
Q. This is a little difficult to understand, Gloria. Here we have your uncle, or at least a man, who apparently enjoyed having sexual intercourse with you when you were only twelve. But then his pattern changed and he merely gave his cunnilingual attentions to you.
A. Is that what it's called? Cunni...
Q. Cunnilingus is the term that is used to explain oral love upon a woman-the mouthing or licking or tonguing of the genitalia.
A. Oh.
Q. What's wrong?
A. I guess I'm a little embarrassed. Hearing it explained in cold terms like that makes me feel a little funny.
Q. I see. Well, back to the alleged uncle. Tell me, when he ceased intercourse and confined himself to cunnilingus, did he have a reaction to the act? Did he experience a climax?
A. I don't think so.
Q. Did you?
A. Yes.
Q. But you did not have an orgasm from the act of intercourse? A. No.
Q. Did you and your uncle continue as lovers over a very long period? A. Yes. And let me say this. About what we were just discussing my uncle switching his technique, so to speak, I think I know the reason for it. Q. Tell me about it, Gloria.
A. Well, I don't think that he ever intended that that cunnilingus should be the entire act, that he should be doing that for me without getting anything out of it himself. But, you see, I could never, never stay very long. Sometimes he would just start caressing me there and I'd have a climax. And then I'd be through. I couldn't bear to be touched then, not to have anything done to me and not for me to do anything, either. My uncle always looked very disgusted, but I remember that he was known to be a patient man in other respects. And besides, he started to do some other things while he was doing that to me. You know shift his weight around and change his position so that he'd be stretched out with his thighs and his-with all of him by my face. And I know he wanted me to to love him that way. Orally.
Q. Did you ever do this?
A. Just once. I hated it. But I didn't get very far, for my mother came upon us and went into a fury. After the uncle went scooting, my mother beat the daylights out of me, and all the time she kept saying how men were dirty and that at least I was lucky that my uncle hadn't 'put' that 'thing' inside me, because then I'd be going crazy and winding up in a mental hospital for the rest of my life. My mother didn't know that we had practiced intercourse. J didn't tell her. I was just scared to death. For years and years. And I guess I still am.
Q. And that was your last experience with a man? A. First and last.
Q. And then you went to women, or girls? A. Yes.
Q. Is there any experience of your life your rather young life that indicates to you the reason for your lesbianism?
A. Certainly. I'm sure that all this business with my uncle made me afraid of men all men, especially the sexuality of them. As an example, I think I still am, for in the classes where there is a man professor, I do poorly, but when I have a woman instructor, I do exceptionally well in my work. And I think there's another reason for it, too. I'm a Negro. Being a Negro is not like anything else in the world. In spite of civil rights and everything else, being colored is very different than you, or any white person, can imagine. I think this affects our sex life some of us anyway because I remember always thinking of the world as white, and me as dirty black. And I remember the stories my mother used to tell about the South, how white men raped colored girls and everything. I think that some place along the line of growing up, I got feeling that man was white all men and that the worse thing that could happen would be for his--his ... penis to enter a girl. To enter me. And so I think I was diverted away from men and toward women at a very early age.
Q. How do you account for the fact that your uncle your first sexual partner was colored. By the way, he was, wasn't he?
A. Yes, he was colored. And I account for it this way: My uncle, any black man, was really white as far as my subconscious went. Because he was a man, he was really white-male and white together, don't you see? So it didn't matter how he looked on the outside. That could be a disguise or something to my girlish mind. But to me, male and white were the same horrible thing, and I just could not ever have anything to do with them.
Q. Are white girls sometimes your lovers?
A. I'm going with a white girl now.
Q. And you've gone with other white girls? In what ratio, please, to colored girls?
A. I prefer white girls. I go with them most of the time. I've only been involved with a couple of Negro girls, and it wasn't very satisfactory. But do you see my reasoning? Am I right in these conclusions I have come to?
Q. I think there are areas where you are somewhat correct, but I also think that there is a great deal here that is not touched in such an interview as this one.
A. You mean that because I'm a lesbian, I should have a psychoanalysis?
Q. Not necessarily. But, if you are dissatisfied with your life, if you failed to function well, well then, it might be indicated. What do you think about it?
A. I don't know. Sometimes I'm pretty unhappy.
Q. Well, at least you know that should you want an interview or even treatment, it is available to you here at the university by merely seeing your counselor and arranging an interview with a qualified therapist.
A. I'd probably get just a case worker some hammy character who doesn't have it to make it all the way as a psychologist or psychiatrist.
Q. Oh, no, I don't think so. I'm sure a well-qualified therapist would be made available to you. And there's something else, too, Gloria, that I'm going to take the liberty of mentioning, although it has little to do with the purpose of this interview.
A. What's that, Doctor?
Q. Consider this. You volunteered for this study. I'm sure there's a reason that you don't recognize. I'm sure you submitted to this interview to a psychiatric interview because you wanted this lesbianism this distortion of yourself to be presented to a therapist, in this instance, myself, and I think that you subconsciously wanted this because you had hoped that you might resolve your problems by this single interview. So, you see, I think you really do want help.
A. It's possible. It makes a little sense, I guess. But I'll have to wait and see.
Q. Yes, do that, Gloria, then when you're ready, go ahead and make the arrangements for treatment.
A. I might do that.
Q. I hope you do. And thank you very much for your contribution to this study. We all appreciate it.
A. Thank you, Doctor...
Subject: Nineteen-year-old sophomore, white, case name, Jennie.
Q. You are a very pretty young lady, Jennie. And
I understand from the pre-interview of this study that you are very popular with the male students on campus. A. Well, thank you for the compliments, but I don't think it's as strong as you have put it.
But thank you anyway. Q. Do you like to be flattered? A. Any girl does. Dr...., I can just tell that you're working up to something else. Q. You're quite right, Jennie. A. Then why don't you just go ahead and proceed with the interview for this study. Q. Right. Jennie, are you a lesbian? A. Not actually.
Q. What do you mean by that remark? A. That I have had affairs with girls. Q. Are you bi-sexual?
A. I guess you could call it that. I've also had sexual relations with boys. Q. Do you have a preference? A. Yes, I like girls best. Q. Why?
A. Oh, I've never considered it too much, but I guess you could say I'm happier "with them.
Q. Do you perhaps mean more sexually comfortable with girls?
A. Maybe. But as I said, I've never considered it very much.
Q. Is there perhaps an element of sexual gratification here? That is, do you receive a greater thrill from sexual relations with girls than you do with boys?
A. That seems pretty right.
Q. Do you experience an orgasm with both males and females?
A. Sometimes.
Q. Is there a greater intensity when your climax is achieved with a girl rather than with a boy?
A. It depends upon the other person. You know, I really can't understand it myself. Sometimes I wish I could.
Q. Then this dilemma is upsetting for you, isn't it?
A. A little. There are times when I wonder how this would affect my future, and I even get wondering if perhaps the security of marriage might straighten things out for me. One girl I knew and went with for almost a year finally got married and she never considered having another lesbian affair. Maybe it will turn out like that for me too.
Q. Maybe. But tell me, when you already admit that you prefer females to males, why do you even bother with boys?
A. I don't like to think of myself as totally queer! I'm not that much of a rebel.
Q. Then you believe in some of the principles of the society in which you live?
A. I believe in many of society's rules.
Q. But you will violate them in secret, while on the surface you appear as an average above average college coed, is that right?
A. If you say it is, Dr. ... But frankly, I'm not going to worry about these things or try to analyze them until I get older.
Subject: Eighteen-year-old female, white, college freshman, case name, Ginger, daughter of a professional man.
(It was suggested by one of the study commission members that a bit of background regarding this subject would be helpful for a better understanding of the transcribed material.
(Ginger is the gifted daughter of exceptional parents. Her father is a research sociologist at an Ivy League college. Ginger's mother is a concert pianist who has played the major symphonic engagements of the nation. Ginger, too, is a gifted musician, excelling at piano, violin, and the harp.
(Ginger's environment, from the moment of her birth, was culturally and intellectually centered. Her scholastic testing scores during her secondary education, denoted a near-genius level. And, contrary to the usual testing achievement results, Ginger was shown to vary no more than .00039% between subjects tested. Ginger did equally well in physics, chemistry, trigonometry, English literature, American literature and the Romance languages. Ginger was also pretty, popular, accepted by peers and adults alike, served as school cheerleader, editor of the Yearbook, president of the National Honor Society, and held office in more clubs than any one student in her school's history).
Q. Well, Ginger, I am delighted that you volunteered for this interview. Do you know the purpose of it?
A. Yes, sir. I've already been interviewed once, you know.
Q. That was the pre-interview. It was to establish your willingness to cooperate and other things.
A. This is supposed to be something like a new
Kinsey Report, isn't it? Q. Not exactly. We're trying to establish sexual patterns of female college students.
A. But can any kind of pattern really be established by interviewing the students of just one college? These things vary, I'd say, from one climate to another, the type of school, its prestige and the students who are attracted to it. Isn't that right?
Q. Of course. But we're making a beginning and will in fact unite our studies with those that are going to be made at other schools.
A. Oh, I see. That's very interesting.
Q. Yes. And now to the interview.
A. I'm ready. I'll try to answer all your questions as honestly as I know how.
Q. Fine. Ginger, you're only eighteen, which is young but not necessarily a sexually-unsophisticated age. So tell me, do you consider yourself sexually sophisticated?
A. Do you mean do I consider myself knowledgeable about sex about all elements of it?
Q. Yes.
A. I would answer yes to that.
Q. Have you, or do you, have sexual relations?
A. I have had, but presently I am not involved in a love affair. Q. Why?
A. I'm trying to figure a few things out for myself. I've broken off with my lover it was my idea. This way I can investigate my true feelings about love and sex. and everything.
Q. It's unusual to find a girl as introspective as you are about sex and love. Is there a reason for this?
A. No doubt. Of course I've always been pretty intense about my feelings. I like to know why I do the things I do, whether they're good or bad. But there's another reason: My love affair has not been very conventional.
Q. Then it has been unconventional?
A. Yes. You see, my lover for the past six months has been another girl. She's well, she's a complete lesbian. She's also very charming and sweet and considerate. When I told her I was breaking off in order to think things over, she didn't raise a single objection, although I know she wanted to. And if she had, truthfully, I don't think I could have resisted her arguments. Not any of them. You see, it's quite possible that I'm in love with her in love with her just as strongly as some girls fall in love with boys. And I have to think about it, figure it all out.
Q. Is this your first lesbian affair?
A. Yes.
Q. Have you had sexual affairs with boys? A. Not intercourse. I've petted with them, of course.
Q. Did you like it? Find it at all gratifying?
A. Yes, right up until the time when they started to get serious started to force me into having intercourse; then I'd get frightened and not like any of it anymore.
Q. Then you are still a virgin, right?
A. In respect to men, yes.
Q. Do you mean that you consider yourself not a virgin because of your lesbian experiences? A. Yes. You see, to me, virginity means more than a displacement of the hymen. I look at it in terms of climax. Q. You've experienced sexual climaxes with this girl?
A. Yes. Every time.
Q. You say that with a rather proud tone. Are you proud that you've experienced this?
A. Perhaps. I do know that many women even women who have been married for years, happily married like my mother, never experience an orgasm, so perhaps it is something to be proud of whether it comes from another woman or from a man.
Q. Would you say that your ability at achieving a climax with this girl is the strongest tie between you?
A. Undoubtedly. And of course, because of this, other things seem right too. We enjoy the same things, we're considerate of each other, things like that, and I think these things develop because we have shared such a harmonious sex life.
Q. But this same kind of harmony could be found in a heterosexual life, too, couldn't it?
A. I don't know. I've never had that experience.
Q. You mentioned that your mother has never known a sexual climax. How have you come upon this knowledge?
A. My mother told me. I suppose that seems odd. Maybe it is, but my parents are unusual. From the time I was a little girl, we've shared almost every thought. Mother was away a lot on tour, and my father always deeply involved in extra projects at the colleges where he taught, so when We were together, we talked about everything. And every question I asked was always answered.
Q. Did you ask your mother if she achieved sexual climaxes?
A. No, not like that. I don't remember the exact circumstances, but I do remember asking her if there was some 'end' or 'result' from two people making love, and my mother replied that for some women and all men there was, but that she was not one of these women, and then she explained what was to be expected from an orgasm. I asked her if she was sorry that she didn't 'get' a climax, and she smiled and looked a little woeful and said that yes, she was sorry that she didn't have that experience to add to all the other wonderful experiences she had already had in life.
Q. This is very interesting. Do you think that it is possible that you have felt a little superior to your mother because of having climaxes, but that you also feel guilty about it, and because of the guilt you have contented yourself with a lesbian as a lover instead of a man? You know, in order not to show mother up too badly.
A. Perhaps.
Q. And isn't it also possible that when you were involved with boys that you denied them access to you out of fear of achieving a climax, for if that had happened you would have topped your mother in very definite terms achieved with a man what she had been unable to achieve?
A. It seems to make sense.
Q. So you cling to the climax more than the subject, I would say. The subject, being a female, is less threatening to you. Yet you are able to continue to feed that part of yourself which seeks to defeat the mother, probably due in your case to the fact that your mother has always been such an astounding success in her profession.
A. I really don't know. This is part of my problem, I'm pretty sure. It's one of the things I have to figure out for myself. That's why I've taken a little break in this love affair-to think things over and get them straight in my mind.
Q. I hope you succeed, Ginger.
A. So do I.
Q. If your university counseling service can help, don't hesitate to call upon the people who are available to help you.
A. Thank you. I'll remember that.
Subject: Nineteen-year-old female, college junior, white, case name, Roberta: an exceptional female athlete.
Q. You plan to be a physical education teacher, don't you, Roberta? A. Those are my plans at the present time. Q. It seems like a likely profession for you. I see that you may be a member of the Olympic track team. A. I hope so.
Q. Do you know just what you volunteered for in this interview? A. Oh, yes. You want to find out why I'm a lesbian.
Q. No. As a matter-of-fact, I didn't know you were a lesbian.
A. I'm surprised. Everyone seems to know it. And every time there's an interview concerning sex, I'm usually asked to participate, so I naturally assume that people want to pick me apart and see why I am a lesbian.
Q. No, I'm not interested in picking you apart. I'm only interested in collecting data for this investigation of the general sex life on a college campus.
A. Don't feel bad. I don't care. Pick me apart all you want. I really don't mind a bit.
Q. All right then, we'll do it your way. Let's pick a bit.
A. Yes, let's.
Q. How long have you been a lesbian?
A. Since I was fourteen.
Q. Have you ever had relations with males?
A. Yes. When I was fifteen, I tried boys for several months and I didn't really enjoy them very much.
Q. But you always enjoy girls?
A. Yes.
Q. Any particular girl?
A. Sometimes. But right now, I'm playing the field.
Q. You mean you go out, and have sex, with different girls?
A. Yes. Right now, I like that better than being tied down to a particular girl. Also, I get quite a bang out of making the new freshman girls when they enter school. And believe me, they're not all as shocked by me as you might think.
Q. I think you like to shock people. Is that right? A. I guess I do. I like to see the expressions on their faces when I say something that really jars them.
Q. Are you an active or passive partner in a lesbian affair? A. Can't you tell? Q. No.
A. Well, I'm surprised. I thought it stood out like a sore thumb. I'm active, of course.
Q. Why 'of course'?
A. Don't I seem more like a man an aggressor than a passive girl?
Q. I think that's irrelevant. Tell me, is your entire life now planned around your lesbianism? I mean, has this had an effect on your career, the things you do, everything?
A. Oh, yes, decidedly so. If I weren't a lesbian, I doubt that I'd be interested in becoming a physical education teacher. But, because I am a Lez, there is an inducement for me to enter this field of work.
Q. What is the inducement?
A. The young girls who will be my pupils, of course. And if that seems too candid for you, just remember that a lot of men enter the teaching profession for the same reason to be around young girls. Young boys, too, for some of the queeries.
Q. I imagine this is true in some cases. And your answers cannot be too candid for me.
A. You don't shock, eh?
Q. No. Now then, you've stated that for roughly five years since you were fourteen you've involved yourself with girls as sexual lovers. You've said, too, that you did have affairs with boys during your sixteenth year. Tell me, do you have an explanation why females are more appealing to you than males? A. I feel differently about them. I guess that's the only way to explain it. Q. Will you go into it a little more deeply, please? A. It's like this. I'm strong, not really rough, but as strong as a girl can be. It's almost as if I wasn't meant to be a girl at all. I've always been able to beat most boys at physical things.
But the girls, the average girl, well, I feel a little sorry for her. She's so weak kind of needs taking care of. And I like to be that way with girls, look after them, protect them, things like that.
Q. You mean look after them in a fashion that is more often the role of a male?
A. Maybe. And when I make love to them, even when I'm being strong and kind of masterful, I still am gentle, too. And it seems that they're my responsibility my property, actually.
Q. When you mentioned love-making just now, you referred to it as the kind of an act that a man would perform with a woman. Do you make love to girls that way?
A. I'm not all oral, if that's what you mean.
Q. How do you make love to your girls?
A. Very much like a man makes love to a woman. I have what I guess you'd call an overly-developed clitoris. I I use it like a man with a girl.
Q. You enter her?
A. Sometimes. Sometimes just the contact of my clitoris against hers will be sufficient to give us both a climax.
Q. And this is satisfying to you?
A. The most satisfying thing in the world.
Q. How often do you have affairs?
A. As often as I can. Sometimes it's as if I can't get enough.
Q. And you find all your partners on campus. All the girls with whom you cohabit are students here?
A. Almost exclusively. I did go with a waitress in town for awhile, but that didn't last long.
There are more girls attracted to other girls on campus than you might think. I've had many girls from the theatre art majors. They seem to gather in force there. Of course, there are more queer boys there too, and maybe that makes a difference.
Q. Does it bother you to defy convention?
A. Not a bit.
Q. You are not uncomfortable being a lesbian?
A. Not at all. And as far as convention goes, sometimes it seems to me that it would be more unconventional to be straight. As I said before, there are more homos of both sexes on this campus than you could ever imagine.
Q. Assuming that this is true, do you have any opinion as to the reason? I'd truly be interested in your opinion if you have one.
A. Well, I've thought about this a good deal, and I've discussed it with friends, too. Now, in my own case, I really think there is a physical connection between lesbianism and myself. But most of it is emotional, and I think there are a lot of reasons. Competition is one of them, I think. There's a lot of it today. In everything. Sometimes a girl doesn't fit into competition and because she doesn't, she's made to feel off-beat, so she really becomes off-beat by turning to those things, and they're usually sexual and directed at the love of someone of the same sex. And another reason is the conventions you mentioned. People today get so sick of conventions and being like everyone else that they'll do almost anything to show that they are different. You see, there is a certain phoniness connected with being conventional. We see people being conventional about all the things that show, things they can keep hidden. So when we become queeries, in a way we're being more honest than the dopes who live one kind of life on the outside and another on the inside. At least our lesbianism shows all the time for most of us it does, anyway.
Q. Do you ever entertain any ideas about not living a lesbian-oriented life?
A. Not any more.
Q. You did once?
A. Oh, yes. At the beginning and for quite a few years after it started I used to remonstrate with myself. I'd tell myself all the things that I was giving up. Things like married life, a family, children, things like that. But then I stopped fighting the thoughts that it was bad and disgusting, and now I don't have this conflict within me any more.
Q. Have you considered psychoanalysis as a method of resolving your problem?
A. It's not a problem for me.
Q. It's against the law.
A. So is almost everything.
Q. Then you've never considered entering treatment for the purpose of putting this problem to rest, if not solving it completely?
A. No, you see, it's too late for me.
Q. At nineteen, it's too late?
A. Yes. I'm hooked. I just can't see myself as the happy little female being led by the hand by the big, strong male. I can't see myself wiping little kids' noses or giving birth or fixing dinner for a husband or doing any of these things that so many young chicks think are so divine. It's just not for me. I'm hooked on the girls, and I don't have any intention of changing. I couldn't even if I wanted to.
Q. Analysis wouldn't necessarily stop you from being a lesbian. It might do nothing more than make you more comfortable with your way of life.
A. I'm comfortable enough.
Q. I wonder if you really are.
A. I am. You can be sure of it.
Q. Well, should you ever change your...
A. Change my mind? Don't worry, I won't.
* * *
The previous dialogues of teenaged lesbians represent a cross section of economic, social, and environmental backgrounds, making it seem that this aberration develops at any level of society. It is equally interesting that of those girls interviewed, all were attractive, and would be an easy subject of affection by males. This fact was so apparent to the interviewers, that one of them spoke out in a special note added to his report, stating the following:
"In every respect these girls who are lesbians appear to be what is termed 'normal.' They are intelligent, attractive, witty, quick, and female-toned. There is none of the culprit or villainness in them. They are like their peers in every other respect except this fact of the oddity of their sex life."
CHAPTER FIVE
THE RISE IN DEVIATIONS AMONG TEENAGERS
The newspaper boy had one of the busiest corners in the neighborhood. He was sixteen, a hard working high school junior, and he supported his own needs by daily attendance at the corner, selling the three daily papers issued in that city. Adults knew him and liked him. He was a neighborhood fixture. His appearance was that of the average high school boy, except for one item. He wore a sweatshirt. It bore the inscription "69," and below it, in smaller lettering, "Breakfast of Champions."
Upon investigation it was soon learned that the paper boy's inscribed sweatshirt was not out of the ordinary. The majority of the boys in school wore them. Some had different lettering, but all referred to the number that has become the symbol of deviational sex.
Adults, buying papers from the boy, would notice the sweatshirt, buy their paper, and say nothing. A few would smile shyly. None seemed the least upset that sexual deviations were now brazenly advertised on teenaged clothing. None, it seemed, concerned themselves as to what manufacturer, wholesaler, and retailer made profits by plying the lure of sexual deviations upon the young.
An observer of the "Breakfast of Champions" newspaper boy selling his wares was moved to investigate the issues of that day's newspapers, sensing that there might be some comparison between international, national, and local news and the boy with the dirty sweatshirt. Some of the news items of that day pointed up the hypocrisy of our day and our society.
The newspaper contained several articles concerning teenaged vandalism at a city park. Another article told of a fifty-one-year-old man who had killed his forty-five-year-old wife's lover. A number of columns discoursed on the deliberate lies one political party attributed to the other. And there was a considerable spread devoted to a recent court case concerning an obscenity trial, in which the prosecution sought to ban the distribution of an important book on the grounds that it would "corrupt our youth."
And the newsboy, numbered 69, sold his papers.
This anecdote has, this reporter believes, important implications. It describes a flamboyant advertisement by youth of their own disregard for conventions it shows that today's teenagers are not only becoming more deeply involved in sexual deviations, but that they are advertising their activities.
Why? What lies behind it?
"Youth is rubbing his nose at all adults and authority," says Dr. Jacob Kaslimeir, a Toledo psychologist. "All evidence points to the fact that young people today are experimenting more with deviational patterns than at any time during history. We can ask why, then look to ourselves for the answer, for the teenager is the product of adults and adult responsibility. Or adults' irresponsibility."
Teenagers are feeling their muscles earlier these days. The advertising world has helped to make them aware of their power. And buying power soon becomes a sense of other kinds of power. Thus the teenager today, sometimes embittered and hostile, often wishing to vent his fury on an adult world, and frequently given to exploiting and embarrassing the adult world whenever possible, seeks to, and often does, top anything and everything that adults have ever dared to do. "We can do it better, Pop" "You're not 'IN' watch us!" "Man you went out with 23-skidoo."
There is a growing concern among the professionals who deal with teenagers that the upsurgence of deviations among teenagers will eventually rob them of the true joy and beauty of sex.
"If a young person becomes deviationally oriented," says Dr. Mary Skourus, a public health physician, "they may very well gain false impressions as to what true sexual fulfillment really is."
And a Southeastern psychiatrist recently wrote in a Menninger Clinic Bulletin that, " ... the rise in sexual deviations among the young is a part of an increased effort of us all to attain greater thrills, know more responses, different responses, and to, in short, pursue and attain an orgasm that is unreachable, but is, nevertheless, constantly sought."
Is the search for intense orgasm the whole motivation behind the rise in teenaged sexual deviations?
"This is only part of it," stated Dr. Hardy Wilksboro, a criminal court psychiatrist. "Everything in life today is faster, higher, harder, faster, more long-lasting. Play a little game with yourself. Read the advertisements of the day and apply them to your own life. You'll see what I mean. The world of advertising and mass media pretty well tells us what attracts us: speed, sports, girls, etc. So play the game in reverse, read and listen to the ads and see how they fit into our lives. I believe this is the clue to rising sexual deviations among the young. They have to be 'hep' in a world that is getting forever more 'hep.' So kids have to live up to what's said about them. They have to be ultra-sophisticated. They can't let anyone know that they are really children, playing a game of sex of which they have little true understanding. And so kids and deviations are part of the scheme of things today. It's unfortunate the kids are the eventual losers but that is the way things are."
But how do teenagers become acquainted with deviational acts? Do they achieve the thrill they anticipate? Does it blight their lives? The following case histories show some teenagers and their involvement with sexual deviations. Neither space nor attitude allows for a full discourse upon the motivations and personal psychology of the participants. Their cases are presented as a method of communication between our young society and the older society which seeks to understand its children.
CASE HISTORY
Clara was eight years old when she decided to investigate the party-noises in the downstairs rooms. Her mother and father, well-to-do and popular, entertained a lot. This particular night the noise seemed especially high to young Clara. She crawled from her bed to secretly view the activity.
Clara didn't see much. But what she did see, her psychiatrist later claimed, formed a distorted pattern of what sex was, how it was conveyed from male to female, and the meaningfulness of love.
When she reached the bend of the carpeted stairs, Clara crouched down and settled at a point that allowed her a partial view of the activities in the living room. Everyone she looked at appeared to be drunk. This didn't shock Clara. Her family and their friends always drank a lot. But what she couldn't understand was that most of the men and women were only half-dressed. Nudity was for bedtime and bath time! She couldn't understand it. But as she watched the four couples displaced equally around two card tables, she noticed that their loss of clothing had something to do with the cards they played. After a series of cards being dealt out, there would be much laughing, and those who were apparently the losers would discard another item of clothing. Soon nearly everyone was completely nude. Clara wondered what would happen next.
First there was more drinking, then someone placed records on the hi-fi. Couples moved together to dance. Clara wanted to laugh. The people looked so ridiculous dancing without clothes, especially the men and ladies who were fatter than average. But she did not dance. She decided that it was time to return to her bedroom.
Later that night, Clara was awakened again. This time by strange noises coming from her parents' room across the hallway. Quietly, she moved from her bed to the hall. She paused. The noises sounded stronger. She was compelled to continue on, enter the room and investigate the strange sounds, at the same time that something cautioned her, told her to ignore them and return to her own bed.
Clara crept across the hallway. The door of her parents' room was open a crack. Clara pushed it open another few inches and looked inside.
Moonlight sliced through the room. It framed her parents and their activity. Lying crosswise on the bed and in opposite directions, their heads bobbed and shook and moved as if they were dogs burrowing a bone. Clara couldn't understand what it was that they did. She knew that it had something to do with sex and the party that had been held downstairs. She knew, too, that it had something to do with nudity. But she could not understand her parents' role in this strange night drama. It was confusing and a little disconcerting, as if this scene made certain demands upon herself demands that were equally confusing. Clara continued to watch her parents in their love activity. The sounds that issued from both her mother and father confused her too. But soon, fearful that she would be discovered, Clara returned to her own room. She crawled into bed. After a while, she fell asleep.
This was the extent of Clara's spying upon "forbidden sex." She was not persuaded to again view her parents' parties or their own secret activities in bed. Actually, her views of sexual distortions were briefer than those of many children; however, the experience explains a pattern that makes one wonder if Clara, as a younger child, might not have viewed the same, or greater, sexual activities, especially during the early, subconscious-forming years of her life.
Clara began dating when she was fourteen. Unlike many of her girl friends, she was not boy-love-bitten. She was not beside herself with joy at the prospects of dating. And she did not particularly enjoy herself when she did go out with boys. But she did comply with the conventions of her young society. She permitted her date a maximum of petting without "going all the way." She did not experience any arousal within herself. That was to come through the unique means of an older man and a sexual deviation.
As Clara arrived at her early teen years, her parents began to include her in some of their adult activities. She was always in attendance at the Sunday afternoon cocktail parties that had become a custom for her parents. She didn't especially like the events; however, one middle-aged man who was always in attendance paid her a lot of attention. Soon Clara began to look forward to seeing the distinguished looking man named Bradley. And for the first time she felt the ripple of emotions that told of a "crush."
There is every indication that Bradley sought to encourage the fourteen-year-old girl's affection for him. He brought her small gifts and treated her as a man who courts a woman. The others of the Sunday afternoon party group, including Clara's parents, thought the situation was charming, often commenting on it in the presence of Bradley and Clara, saying such things as, "You two really are steadies, aren't you?" and "Better watch out, Clara I can see the glint in Bradley's eye."
Bradley did indeed have a glint in his eye. It was for the girl, and was made up of those complexities that sometimes will cast a man of midlife with a girl of early teens, or even younger. And the glint in his eye told of ambitions. It told, too, of opportunities he would soon create wherein his ambitions would be fulfilled.
Bradley made the opportunity during a weekend party at his own summer house. The usual Sunday afternoon cocktail party crowd attended, including several small children and Clara. She was the in-between age member of the group, too old for the other children, too young for the drinking adults.
(It is interesting that Clara's parents prided themselves on including her in so many of their social activities. Their motivation for this should not have produced pride, a psychiatrist said. Instead, the parents should have recognized their inadequacies as parents, for the inclusion of their daughter in adult, seductive-permissive parties, planted the seeds for their child's seduction, and for the distorted pattern it followed. Their entire life, in fact, worked toward making their child a follower of sexual deviations.)
By early evening of the Saturday that initiated the week-end party, everyone, including Clara's parents, was quite drunk. It was then that Bradley invited the child to explore the land around his summer home. "Who knows what we might find?" he said.
Clara has admitted being thrilled at the prospects of an adventure with the handsome Bradley. She has stated, too, that she had no pre-sense that the adventure would include her introduction to a sexual act.
Hand in hand, Bradley and Clara explored the woods adjacent to his property. Within the woods, it was dark. During their wanderings, Bradley maintained an easy banter with the girl. And she responded in like fashion. Soon they arrived at a clearing. Bradley suggested they stop and rest. Clara agreed.
The first sign that Clara had that Bradley entertained a sexual desire for her and for this day came from his eyes. They could not leave her young body. Constantly, they roamed from the dip of her bra top, to the tightness of the bottom of her play suit, to her long, bare legs.
Clara was not particularly surprised when Bradley initiated a conversation that hinted at the sexual, when he referred to her beauty, and when his body came into close proximity with her own. She was surprised that he kissed her so arduously, however. She had expected hesitation. There was none. He pressed her close to him and plunged his tongue again and again into her fresh, young mouth. And soon his hands were upon her breasts, teasing them into greater fullness and making the ends hard and hurtful and alive with passion.
Clara does not recall the exact circumstances that brought about a change in their postures, but suddenly she found herself fully stretched upon the ground and lying crosswise at Bradley's lap. He held her tightly, was bent over and kissing her hard, but when the embrace ended Clara became aware of something else: Bradley had begun to remove his clothes, and she saw his naked body.
Slowly, gently, Bradley urged the child toward his taking. She did not protest. Something deep within her young body told her that this was the thing to do, that this, fellatio, was the medium of love that she must learn.
Under the guidance of Bradley's hands curled into her hair, Clara, within minutes, became a proficient fellatist. Bradley uttered animal sounds and writhed beneath the fury of her young, hot lips. But it was Clara herself who made the act beneficial to herself. Near the end of her frantic motions, she shifted and wrapped her thighs around Bradley's leg. She squeezed hard and in motion with her bobbing, shaking head. And at the end when Bradley groaned and gave up all that had been churning and pent-up, Clara created a mad scissors grip and experienced the reality of a sexual climax: Somehow, amid a distorted combination of her growth and experience, the fourteen-year-old girl had combined orality with friction-pleasure release.
The next day, Clara and Bradley met for another sexual episode. This time the man attempted to have sexual intercourse with her. Although she allowed herself to be undressed and lay nude with her middle-aged lover, she refused him entrance and insisted upon repeating her fellato endeavors that had been learned only the day before.
And fellatio became the child's pattern. Through the years, with Bradley, other men and a few boys, Clara obligingly committed fellatio, while continuing to reject sexual intercourse. At nineteen, she suffered a nervous breakdown which required hospitalization for over a year. During the year, she participated in sessions of psychotherapy from which her problems were somewhat resolved.
After the patient's release from the hospital, her therapist stated, "Clara, like many young people today, seem to grow up with distorted ideas of the sex act. For some, this becomes the prime means of sexual gratification, often causing deeply-seeded problems to come alive and erupt in the form of emotional stress, a nervous breakdown, or outright insanity."
CASE HISTORY
When the class decided on something new for kicks, it was Vera M. who suggested that they swim nude at the beach of the city park. This was not unusual. Vera was usually the first with any off-beat suggestion.
Sixteen years old, with an impish expression and a wicked figure, Vera was a leader of the young set in her community. She had given up virginhood at fourteen, had "gone steady" with a dozen boys, had been expelled from school for behavior unbecoming a female student, and generally had conducted herself in a manner that awed her parents, school officials, and the juvenile authorities who eventually became concerned with her case. Vera, it seemed, was determined to "top" anything that anyone else could think of for thrills.
The nude swimming episode ended in a police raid which the youngsters escaped. There were many other such incidents until Vera decided that sex alone provided enough kicks for all. It happened on a night when she was dating an eighteen-year-old boy. Another couple double-dated with Vera and her boy.
"What are we going to do tonight?" asked Tim, Vera's date.
"Too cold for swimming," Vera offered.
Everyone roared laughing as they recalled the circumstances of the escapade months earlier.
"I've got a bottle with me," Tim said, holding up a pint liquor bottle.
"Big deal," said Vera.
"Well, it's something."
"Not much. Come on, let's ride around a while," Vera suggested.
The other boy jerked the car into action as Vera and Tim settled deep into the cushions of the back seat. As they moved through the night, dipping into first one drive-in restaurant, then another, hoping to find friends and excitement, Tim pulled Vera close to him. She went willingly, even if somewhat boredly. She allowed his kisses-"sloppy kisses," she called them once and she allowed the intimacy of his hands sliding within her blouse. Vera felt little response. Her emotions were tuned to greater thrills, to excitement that had something to do with teenaged status more than with bodily reactions.
Vera, while she gave herself in embraces, kept observing the couple in the front seat of the car. They sat very close together. Vera could see the boy's right shoulder moving, and she knew that his hand had slid inside the hem of her girl friend's skirt; knew, too, that the boy's hand moved in a stimulating caress. And to Vera it seemed like kid stuff. To her it seemed an admission of youth and inexperience.
It unnerved Vera to see the couple in the front seat, she has claimed. Something within her was challenged, maybe her leadership of the young set, or maybe just because an excitement was being created that she had not herself initiated. And it was this, it was later psychiatrically established, that led Vera to an experimentation with community sex.
Leaning over the front seat Vera suggested that the group find a location where they might "have room for some fun."
One of the boys, Tim, offered his father's fishing cabin if they were sure to clean it up before they left.
Vera ordered that they head immediately for the fishing cabin.
It was very dark when the four young people made their way from the car to the cabin. They crowded around Tim as he boosted himself through a window he was able to open from the outside. And they giggled and jammed into the cabin when Tim opened the front door.
They raided the ice box. They found a halffull bottle of liquor to join Tim's pint. They found some records to play on the hi-fi. They danced.
Something special burned inside Vera this night. She has stated that she felt disposed to "top anything she had ever done before."
She snuggled her body close to Tim as they danced. She slightly ground, then crushed, her thighs against him. She felt his quick response to the action. It encouraged her to burrow closer. And from the corner of her eye Vera saw the other couple dancing in the same fashion. It provoked her competitive spirit.
"Switch partners," Vera called out when the music ended.
She hurried to the other boy and went within his outstretched arms. A new record started. They danced, Vera cuddling close as she had with Tim. And from this new boy she found the same hard response to her closeness. She encouraged it by thumping close, then away, then close again, and she smiled to herself as each new motion brought forth a greater response.
When the record ended, Vera turned around and said to her friends, "It's hot in here. I'm getting rid of some clothes."
The others laughed and shouted their approval as Vera pulled her sweater over her head, boldly revealing the white flesh of her body except for a black lace, strapless bra.
"Good old Vera," shouted Tim. "Always the first to jump into the water." He stripped his shirt from his body, baring a hard, brown chest, which was only lightly sprinkled with hair.
"Yeah," agreed the other girl. "Vera's the leader follow the leader." With that the girl stripped her blouse off.
The other boy shouted, too, then disrobed to the waist. And the four of them resumed dancing. Soon it became a game. At the end of each record, the partners would strip away another article of clothing, change partners, and return to dancing.
Vera, down to nothing but a skirt and the undergarments beneath it, felt the thrill of leadership, even felt that she could get her friends to do anything that she wanted. She was not sure what it was that she wanted, except that it hinted at some exceptional activity. She peeked from Tim's chest and saw the other couple embraced and kissing involvedly. And then she knew that she wanted them to share some community of sexual thrill.
Within fifteen minutes, Vera arranged that the four of them should change partners several times, by the rules, reducing their attire to nothing. Vera made Tim dance close to the other couple. She wandered her hand from her partner's neck to the boy next to her. She gripped him.
"Jeeez," he moaned. "You're wild, Vera."
"Yeah, like a jungle cat," she replied.
She released the boy, then urged Tim, her partner of the moment, toward the fireplace and the bear rug that fronted it. She forced him to a sitting place. Then she turned to the others.
"Over here now," she said. "It's 'nature' time."
"Nature time," Tim repeated. "What's that?"
"That's for doing what comes naturally, and doing it together," she explained.
The boy made a grab for her, saying, "Now you're talking."
She pushed him back. "I said 'together,' and that means the four of us."
When the four of them were seated on the rug, Vera's girl friend looked a little bewildered and said, "I don't quite see how."
"You'll see," Vera told her.
Vera and Tim embraced, stretching long and prone upon the rug. The other couple did the same. The bodies of the four of them touched and thumped from time to time, adding, Vera was sure, to the excitement of the kisses that they traded. Several times Vera felt both the other boy's and her girl friend's body come in contact with her own nakedness. It excited her. And what excited her the most was the fact that she was somehow breaking rules of privacy that had always been obeyed. It moved her to increase the violation. Her hand sneaked out to caress at the other boy's chest, even as he was busy touching and kissing his date.
Breathing hard, Vera broke away from her own kiss and said, "All right, kiddies, let's get original."
She waited as the others' eyes turned toward her. Then, very deliberately, she placed her hands against Tim's chest and pushed him flat on his back. She hovered over him a moment, her breasts dangling downward. Then she began a violent series of kisses upon his body, touching at all of him as she moved constantly lower. And at last she was at his thighs. She paused only long enough to motion to the other boy to come close. When he did, she jutted her buttocks toward him, indicating her wish for his entrance. When his hands were placed on her hips and he had attained a posture on his knees, Vera bent to the oral love of Tim. At the same time she whirled her buttocks. The boy behind her quieted them, then lunged forward. And then the three of them quickly established a rhythm of multiple love.
"Hey, how about me?" the other girl exclaimed.
Vera motioned with her hand.
The girl scampered close, then sprawled in a way that placed herself in direct proximity with Tim's hungering mouth. Then they, too, became joined and the four young people moved as a single unit of giving and receiving, lurching, whirling, bobbing, thumping and thudding and incessantly approaching the crescendo-zoom of outlet that their young bodies demanded.
The frolicsome multiple sex that the young people enjoyed was only the beginning. They developed refinements and innovations, joining other teenagers with them. Within months, the ultra-excitement of deviational sex consumed them, making them forget normalcy and everything but their ambitions for more bizarre sexual accomplishments.
And Vera was the leader. She continued in this capacity until complaints from school and parents brought her to the attention of a social worker who arranged for the girl's psychiatric treatment. The treatment was a long time rejected, and Vera did not know its true benefits until she had suffered a nervous collapse and was hospitalized for many months.
* * *
Teenaged Americans are big for thrills and kicks. They drag cars at hair-raising speeds. They play "chicken" with hundreds of horsepower beneath the hood. They constantly seek, it seems, to top in excitement any previous generation of young people. In this endeavor they all too frequently succeed.
Sexual deviations are not confined to the young. Actually, sexual deviations are a product of adults, especially the suburban, the sophisticated, and the bored married couples. But again we must remind ourselves that our children are nothing more or nothing less than reflections of our own patterns, habits, and desires. Because of this, sexual deviations will no doubt continue to attract the young will continue to do so until new standards are established and new examples are set by all adults.
CHAPTER SIX
MOTHER INSTINCT AND SEX
Even if all girls are not necessarily intended to become mothers, many of them have a strong mother instinct. Oftentimes this instinct to mother, look after, and supervise a male, has a direct relationship to the young girl's sexual attitudes and practices. It can, and does, cause heartbreak and maladjustment. And it appears to be a growing trend among many of America's teenagers. Frequently, it is based on things other than genuine concern for the male.
"Girls who wish to psychically castrate a male, often have the so-called mother instinct," says Dr. Samuel Greenberg, a New York psychoanalyst. "It is their way to compensate for the true, subconscious motivation to destroy or cause destruction to the male."
And Herbert Steingold, a clinical psychologist, proclaims that, "Mothering a male is in effect weakening him; therefore, the girl who has this attitude toward males really wishes to destroy him or lessen his place as the masterful and ruling."
Some girls display mother instincts toward boys because of their own inadequacies as females. It is not unusual to find a girl who doubts her femininity to seek out a boy who is less a male than his peers. Perhaps he is a cripple, in some way deformed, or has a severe handicap of a mental nature. Perhaps his personality is unacceptable to all but the mother-instinct-persuaded girl. He may be a neurotic or psychotic. Criminals attract such a type girl. So do the often-referred-to "mama's boys."
But why would a modern, teenaged girl want to mother a boy, even psychically?
"Because she has known so little of mothering herself," claims a juvenile case worker from Chicago. "This decade has found parents and children growing further apart. Or, if there is a togetherness, it is too often of the status-driven type, or the community sponsored. So we have girls growing up who have known little nurturing of their own development. We have mothers who are embarrassed to show love and devotion to their child. We have fathers who are like strangers to their children because of the demands at the office. And thus we have some girls coming to maturity who seek to give to a boy that which they have not known themselves mothering, affection, guidance."
The case histories which follow are of mother-instinct-oriented girls. The cases are of the "sick" variety in that the mother instinct of the girls has provided for sexual experiences out of context with their age and backgrounds. The cases are true unfortunately true, we might say, for they display attitudes that are unquestionably those that work to the disadvantage of teenagers and their young society that work to the disadvantage to us all.
CASE HISTORY
Millie Hardy's troubles started with her father, her psychiatrist has stated. The girl's mother was dominating and castrating of the husband. She sought, and succeeded, to demean him at every opportunity. The father did not protest. He accepted humiliation and degradation at the hands of his wife without a whimper. He was a physically strong man, but had himself been dominated by a mother. His marriage to Millie's mother was little more than the continuation of a mother-dependent relationship.
During Millie's early years, her father was a favorite playmate. Kind and gentle, he was a willing partner to any activity Millie desired. As she grew older, however, this relationship became something else: She began to use his love for her as power.
"Millie learned as an early child the principle of male castration," said her therapist. "It is unfortunate that her only example of female-male relationships was that of her mother, who would not let the father be a man."
During the years of fourteen to seventeen, Millie's relationship with boys was unusual. She had many boy friends. She treated them all badly, but because she was pretty and sexual looking she remained in demand by the boys. She seemed not particularly interested in any of them not, that is, until she met Jack, a spastic.
Millie found Jack in her history class. He was new to the school, having transferred from out of town. Jack was not particularly bright, and it appears that this, too, attracted Millie to the badly-deformed boy. She would walk to different classes with him, not minding the slowness of his pace or the crooked, lurching way his body moved above the twisted limbs. Her friends thought she was crazy to be attentive to a cripple. But they did not reckon with Millie's own deformity her warped emotions.
Millie was more considerate of Jack than she was of any of the many boys she had dated. Somehow, with him she felt disinclined to pick and bicker and seek to embarrass. Finally, she accepted a date with the crippled boy.
Jack drove his own car, one especially equipped to accommodate his handicap. He called for Millie exactly at eight o'clock.
Millie's mother and father were both a little awed at the boy's appearance. (He was grotesque looking because of a shrunken body and constantly rolling, uncontrollable eyes.) Millie's father was over-solicitous of the boy. Her mother was too silent, much too against his courtship of her daughter to risk any prolonged conversation.
As the young people departed the house, the Hardys watched from the front door. They saw their daughter holding tightly to Jack's arm, not for support, but to support him.
Most of their first date was spent talking. Millie was given to many reassurances to Jack, telling him that he was attractive, that he shouldn't feel that his disability prevented him from a normal life, that his personality made up for those things he lacked. Nice things for a girl to tell a crippled boy? Yes, but the motivations behind it were dirty.
"Millie was glad Jack was a cripple," said her psychiatrist. "It saved her from having to 'crippie' him castrate him, which was her all-consuming passion for any male."
"Why?" one might ask.
"Millie's father was a weak character," said the therapist. "Millie and her mother controlled him, moved him, made him do their will. This was Millie's male experience. She had to find a man she could control castrate or one, like Jack, who was already disabled."
Before many dates passed, Millie and Jack were petting in heated fashion. The activities were awkward because of Jack's disability. But Millie was an attentive young lover she held the boy, kissed him, moved his broken body close to the health of hers, all the time practically purring with the instincts of a mother. And soon, Millie was masturbating the boy, doing this without the mutuality of benefit for herself. (Psychically, this must have been a madly fulfilling moment for this castration-driven girl.)
Millie allowed Jack to commit her to an act of sexual intercourse. This, too, was awkwardly achieved. And the aggressor was Millie. Jack was placed on the floor and she adjusted them; she pounded her body to his.
Millie and Jack began thinking of marriage. It was then that Jack's father was transferred, and the boy moved out of town. For a long while Millie was distraught. But then she met a boy who was also already partially castrated, a boy with a handicap, one whom she could dominate. He was a Negro.
Mr. and Mrs. Hardy were shocked when their daughter brought Louis home for dinner one evening. Later, they expressed their "concern" that she should be attracted to a boy who was colored.
She claimed that she was a liberal even more, threw back in her father's face his own liberal views upon which he had raised her. The Hardys, feeling that too much objection would cause Millie to become more deeply involved with the Negro boy, withdrew their objections and decided to wait out this period of their daughter's experimentation.
Millie and Louis became sexually involved upon their third date. Her mother instincts were blooming and she was prepared to shelter the Negro boy from the cruel white world. But then she learned that she did not dominate him, that he did not need her solicitude. During a hot petting session, Millie sought to tease, withhold that which the boy wanted. He took it forcefully, committing Millie to a near-rape. She never saw Louis again.
After this Millie floated from one off-beat character to another. She knew as lovers another Negro, another spastic, a married man, a one-armed boy, and, finally, a homosexual who was unable to perform sexually with a female.
Millie's pattern did not change until she married the homosexual, contenting herself with the rationalization that he might eventually prove himself "a man." This was unlikely. It was also something that Millie would have rebelled against had it occurred.
After three years of marriage, Millie became impregnated by another man, told her husband, suffered his tears, then attempted suicide. She was unsuccessful, hospitalized, and psychiatrically treated.
"The mother instinct was strong in Millie," said her doctor. "But it was not genuine. It was a mere cover a disguise for her hostility and wish to castrate all males, and this was learned from attitudes that had once been directed toward her father."
CASE HISTORY
Debbie's father was a policeman. Her mother was hard working. As a child, Debbie played with dolls and played being a wife and mother, all of which delighted her mother very much. "It's nice today to think little girls still want to be like their mothers," she would say.
In high school, Debbie was considered somewhat wild. She was great pals with her brother, who was only a year her senior. Through him she met many boys, some good and some bad. Debbie seemed fondest of the so-called "bad boys." Something about them attracted her to them. According to a statement Debbie made to her therapist, she used to dream of herself as a reformer who would rehabilitate a bad boy, then marry him and live a life of happiness with a houseful of children.
Debbie met Barry through her brother, Bill. He was a perfect subject for rehabilitation. At seventeen he had already served time at a boy's reformatory on two separate occasions. Car theft was the crime. Barry was belligerent and wild, ready and willing to do anything that impulse suggested. And impulse suggested a great deal-breaking and entering, purse snatching, car thefts, gang fights almost anything to break the monotony of a high school drop-out's life.
Debbie was fifteen when she met Barry. She was overwhelmed by his dark good looks and tall, strong body, but it was his wildness that attracted her the most. She felt that she must look after the boy, keep him from crime and harm, make him socially acceptable, and one day make him her husband. She feel deeply in love and did not hide it from anyone, not even her police officer father.
"You're not to see that kid again," her father told her one day. "Jeeeez, what would people think if they knew my daughter went with one of the town's worst hoods?"
"I don't care, Dad," Debbie said honestly. "I intend to see Barry whether you want me to or not."
"But why?" the father exclaimed. "What in the hell has he got that decent boys don't have?"
"Barry needs me," she explained. "If it wasn't for me he'd be in worse trouble right now."
"Don't see him," the father commanded.
"I won't promise that," she countered. "Not ever."
Debbie's father "grounded" her. She was not allowed out of the house except for school and church for a solid two weeks. Debbie took her punishment without protest. She also disobeyed it. Working through her brother, Bill, always sympathetic to anyone's punishment because he had known so much of it himself, Debbie arranged for Barry to be waiting in his car at the corner of the street at midnight each night. Her father was working a night shift, and escape was a simple matter. After using pillows to simulate her sleeping form beneath the covers, Debbie simply went out the ground floor window of her bedroom, hurried to the corner, climbed into Barry's car, then zoomed off with him for hours of conversation.
There is some evidence that Debbie actually did have a good effect on Barry. He got a job, bought a car, kept away from crime. He even talked of returning to school for night courses. It would seem that Debbie's mother instincts had some influence. What their total results would have been we do not know, for the young people were separated permanently by an event caused by themselves.
It was especially interesting to her therapist that Debbie's first sexual experience with Barry occurred immediately after an evening when her mother instincts had been particularly strong. It occurred, too, during the period when she was believed to be sleeping in her bedroom, still grounded by the edict of her father. Here are the circumstances of that evening as Debbie recalled them for a case worker at a large city facility for unwed mothers:
Barry swung the car door open for Debbie and she climbed in.
"Any trouble?" he asked, grinning.
"Naw. Scratched myself on the bushes though." Debbie raised the skirt of her dress and looked at the long surface scars on her thighs. Barry looked too, still grinning, his dark eyes wild and anxious.
"You're a good chick," he said. "Come on, let's take off."
"Where to?" Debbie asked.
"How about the lake? Nobody will disturb us there."
"Great," she replied, boosting over to sit very close to the boy.
They parked beneath the shelter of trees when they arrived at the lake. It was very dark.
It was also a mild, lovely night, and it made Debbie dreamy and filled with deep things she did not quite understand, except that they concerned Barry and her love for him.
As they sat in the car, sometimes smoking, the car radio's volume turned down so that music issued softly, Debbie talked to Barry of his plans for the future. She asked if he had made arrangements for night school yet. He had not.
"But you have to darling," she said. "If you don't you'll be a ass."
"What's wrong with being a ass?" he asked, bringing his hand behind her neck and drawing her face very close to his.
She smiled, then said, "Nothing, I guess, as long as you're my ass."
"I am."
They kissed. There was something urgent about their kisses this night; something was bursting with energy and made up of fantasies of a life that was to come.
"Promise you'll see about it tomorrow," Debbie asked, breaking away.
"All right, chickie. For you, I'll promise."
"I'll go with you," she said. "Meet me right after school, and I'll take you down to the office where you can talk to a counselor about the courses you should take."
"All right, all right," he said kiddingly. "Here you go, hen-pecking already and we ain't even "
"Even what?" she asked a little breathlessly.
"Never mind," he said.
Barry gripped Debbie harder, bringing her close to his hard, young body and making her breasts crush against his chest. Now, their kisses became intensified. Soon, Barry's hands were on
Debbie's breasts. They kneaded madly at her sweater, bunching it upward. And then they were beneath the sweater and inside her bra, touching at flesh, tantalizing at the young nipples that grew and hardened beneath his touch.
Debbie sighed and sighed as Barry caressed her breasts. She moved her mouth from his, then buried her lips into his neck. And then she raised them and mouthed furiously at his ear, catching the whole of it within her mouth and holding it as she shot her piercing tongue deep. And her hands implored at the young maleness of his body. She caught him fully with her hands. She held him. She squeezed, released, and squeezed again, and soon Barry's moans matched her own. And soon there was no place to go except toward ultimate gratification.
Barry forced Debbie back on the car seat. His hands jammed her sweater up to her neck, and then they moved behind her to unhook her bra. He pulled it from her and dropped it on the floor of the car. And then he dived forward, catching one breast in his mouth and working furiously at the hard, waving nipple. Debbie's hands shot to his head. Her fingers curled into his thick, wavy hair. She pressed him close, then closer, then gently swayed his head from side to side, from one breast to the other, aiding his quest, aiding her own quest, too, and feeling her passions grow and grow and grow, just as the boy's sign of his passion had grown. Debbie's hands moved over his body and gripped him again. And again she brought the excitement of her manipulating fingers to the seventeen-year-old boy. Barry groaned. He raised. He stretched back and made an adjustment of his clothing. Then he leaned forward and again caught Debbie's breasts in his mouth as she felt the heat of male flesh pressing at her hand. She did not hesitate. She gripped him and manipulated him.
Soon, Barry was moved to provide a greater sign of his love for the fifteen-year-old girl. He pulled back from her moist, gleaming breasts. He stretched her next to him, made her legs dangle on the floor. And then he brought his hand slowly upward on the inner sides of those legs, caressing as they moved until they arrived at the place that had been created for more intense caresses. He provided them. Abundantly. And the action upon her body moved Debbie to greater effort. Now her hand was like a machine that would not stop. Now she circled and pulled and yanked and jammed and relaxed before starting the entire action over again. And all the time she knew the penetration of Barry's giving knew that miniature action conceived by children to show what they could expect when they came together in a blazing act of love. And soon it was determined that they would come together. Immediately.
Breathing hard, Barry stilled Debbie's speeding hand. He stopped the action of his own. And then he was half lying, half kneeling, above the fifteen-year-old girl, posing himself where they were determined that he should tread.
Debbie helped with the complications of their first sexual joining. She clutched him, then arched and received him. And then she raised and lifted and withdrew in a steady, thumping rhythm of sexual intercourse. She felt her passion rise, reach a peak, then scatter into a million pieces of separate feelings, each as intense as the other, each trying to outdo the other in the sensations they provided.
Debbie and Barry came together twice more that night. It was nearly dawn when Debbie crawled back inside her bedroom.
Regularly, they met at night. Regularly, they made intense love, without caution, without regard for anything except the closeness and thrill that they could achieve together. They achieved a great deal. More than some adults. Their bodies became attuned to each other's, and soon they had gone through enough refinements of their act of love to draw from each the same thrill at exactly the same time.
Within three months Debbie discovered that she was pregnant. She told Barry. He reacted nobly, but frightened. Then he stole a car, was arrested and sentenced to a two-year sentence at a boys' prison camp. And then Debbie told her parents of her pregnancy. After the initial shock, arrangements were made for her confinement at an unwed mothers' home, out of state and out of sight.
* * *
Other emotional elements become involved with the mother instinct of teenaged girls. Hostility is one of them. Hostility was no doubt a strong drawing force for Debbie's attraction to the criminally-centered boy, Barry. No doubt she gained some secret emotional satisfaction from the fact that her father was a law enforcement officer. Her love affair with a young criminal aligned her in complete opposition to the father.
CHAPTER SEVEN
CRIME THE TEENAGERS' APHRODISIAC
A great deal more lies behind the alarming increase in crime among teenaged Americans than their desire for material possessions. Many factors are blamed, some authoritatively, some without much evidence. But to those people who daily deal with youngsters who have run afoul of the law, there are strong indications that a parallel exists between sex and crime.
Lt. Amos Mozler is the fictitious name of a big city juvenile police officer who was interviewed for this report. Because of his work, which is constantly under the pressure of the press, his superiors, and an often irate citizenry, he has asked to remain anonymous. Here is what he says about the rising crime rate among teenaged boys and girls:
"I'm not a psychiatrist or sociologist, but I don't have to be to know what bothers these kids who get involved with the law. I don't know the rudiments of it, either, but it is concerned with sex. Crime excites the kids of today. They like excitement. And I think they need it for sex need it in order to get over the embarrassment of sex and the fact that really and truly they don't know very much about it, despite the way they try to act so sophisticated and all-knowing."
Lt. Mozler has a greater insight into the young than he claims. According to Dr. Harlan Stevens, a Midwest psychiatrist, teenagers feel insecure about their sexuality and sometimes turn to crime to bolster it, show their manhood or womanhood, or increase the adrenalin of their own sexual urges.
"We're all familiar with the young person who tries, as other young people term it, 'to act big.' This is where crime often is motivated by sexual urges that the young person is not yet ready to handle emotionally. He is not ready for intercourse, is even embarrassed by it, so the performance of a crime will give him status, bolster his ego and permit him an experimentation with sex that he might not otherwise attempt at an early age. And for some teenagers crime is an actual aphrodisiac, truly serves to heighten their sexual desires."
Lt. Mozler, during his interview for this report, cited many case histories of young people involved in crime and sex. Some of the youngsters are presented in the following case studies, showing them as rebellious, crime-sex-oriented youths who by their very actions indicate that they are crying out for understanding, help, and a better example from their parents and other adults.
CASE HISTORY
Paul M. traveled in a gang from the time he was ten. Born of poverty, raised in it, he was a child of the streets. Both his parents worked.
When they worked. Often, Paul was left to shift for himself amid the rubble and grim of the slum neighborhood. Early in life he learned the ways of a gang. From the group he found strength and courage he could not know as an individual. And from the group, particularly the older boys who were the leaders, he learned how to steal, mug, break and enter, jump wires of a car, and, in community with the other members, make love to a protesting girl. He had his first such experience when he was fifteen. It followed the successful combat with another gang over a jurisdictional dispute.
"Man, that rumble lifted me up," laughed Dick, leader of the gang.
"Anything lifts you up," complimented another member.
The dozen or so boys laughed hard.
There followed a discussion of the night's possibilities. The gang felt inclined toward action sexual action, exhilarated as they were from the rumble. Dozens of possibilities were discussed and rejected for one reason or another. Finally, it was decided that the means to sex was this night deemed to be accomplished through sex.
"A bang," their leader told them. "I'm worked up and I feel like a bang."
The subjected was selected: A chick Dick, the leader, had observed on Avenue B; a girl who, amazingly, Paul knew slightly. It pleased him that this placed him in a position of importance with the gang. He supplied such information that he had, particularly that the girl worked nights in a candy store.
Then the arrangements were quickly made. There had been such capers before, but not with young Paul in attendance. Duties were assigned by the leader. Paul was to encounter the girl, Marie, as she left the store. He was to start a conversation and walk alongside of her until they reached a half-demolished building. The others would be waiting there. Paul was also assigned the job of suddenly grabbing her and forcing her into the building where the others awaited. Inwardly, he gulped when he heard his duties. Outwardly, he presented a pose of casual confidence.
"And because your job's the toughest," said Dick to Paul, "you have the privilege of being first after me."
"Thanks," Paul said.
The gang, dispersed in order not to raise the suspicions of citizens or police, made their separate ways to the broken-down building near the candy store. Paul, walking alone, wondered how he would react when faced with performing sexually before the eyes of his critical peers. He worried about it too. Especially did he worry about the matter of potency. He had heard that this sometimes bothered a boy, that when a girl was ready, he might not be. He wondered if there were something special he should think of in order not to fail. He wondered if there were pills he could take. But even as he thought of it, he realized some aphrodisiac effect from the rumble completed and the gang venture that awaited his attendance.
Paul was waiting outside the candy store as Marie left her work for the night. She was a pretty girl, one whom, in fact, Paul had had quite a crush on for some time. He felt his throat go dry as Marie stepped onto the street. She smiled, recognizing Paul at once.
"Hi," he said. "Whatcha doin'? "
"Going home," she replied. "What else is there to do around this crummy neighborhood?"
The way she said it made Paul think that she was hinting for a date. His heart flipped. He wondered if it could be true, if she really would have gone out with him had he ever asked.
"You walkin' home?" Paul asked, half-hoping that she had made some arrangements to be picked up by someone.
"How else?" she complained.
"Well, I'll walk along with ya," Paul said.
"Great," exclaimed the girl. "I hate walking these streets alone at night."
"Don't blame you," Paul offered.
As they moved down the street, Paul on the outside, the girl on the inside, closest to the deserted building and eleven strong boys who waited, Paul wondered why he was doing now, what he could not bring himself to do upon his own volition. He would have given anything for a date with Marie, yet he had never had the courage to ask. She was older, pretty, and acted very grown-up. Yet now, with the gang behind him, he was walking with her, carrying on a conversation, and acting in every way like a boy who was an "operator." From time to time Paul stole glances at Marie's moving body. He saw her breasts jiggle and imagined what they would look like bared. When he considered that he would soon know, he felt like running. But there was the presence of the waiting gang to deter him. This was a more evil fear than any crime or challenge.
"Are you still running with that lousy gang?" Marie asked in the way of making conversation.
"Yeah. And they ain't lousy," he replied.
"All gangs are lousy," she said. "Everything's lousy about living around here. That's why I'm working in the candy store. I'm saving money, and when I'm through school I'll have enough to get away from here. Far, far away."
"No kidding, is that why you're working?" Paul asked, impressed beyond his admission.
"The only reason," she said. "Why did ya suppose I worked?"
"To help out at home," he suggested.
She laughed, then said, "You mean I should work so my old man and old lady can have more dough for booze. Not on your life!"
"No, suppose not," Paul said softly, noticing that they were within a half-block of the place designated for Marie's abduction and rape.
Marie and Paul fell silent. As they walked, Paul noticed for the first time that the girl's body from time to time struck his, made an actual contact of breast to his forearm. Paul was awe-stricken. He wondered if the girl knew it was happening, even wondered if she perhaps intended the contact. If she did, well then it meant that she liked him, that she was trying to encourage him. He felt horribly upset, didn't know which way to turn: He wanted to save Marie from what awaited, yet he could not reject the dictates of the gang and its leader, Dick. He wished fervently that something would suddenly upset the plans they had made: Perhaps the appearance of a policeman; a counterattack by the rival gang; the sudden appearance of others on the darkened street. Anything! But there was nothing. Only the darkness, the click of Marie's heels upon the pavement, and the half-wrecked building that they approached.
"You know, you're a funny kid," Marie said as they moved forward.
"I am?" he questioned softly.
"Yeah. You're kind of shy. But cute."
"You think so," he said, still speaking in a low voice so as not to be overheard.
"Yeah. I've always wondered why you didn't go out with girls, why you haven't ever asked me for a date."
"You've wondered about that?" he asked, his voice rising excitedly.
"Sure. Why? Shouldn't I?"
"No, that's fine. Great, really. I just never never-ah, hell, it doesn't matter anyway."
They had arrived next to the building. Paul looked at the girl. She looked at him and smiled, then she deliberately brought her hand over a bit to brush against his. Paul wanted to take it in a sign of love. He wanted desperately to do this. But he did not. Instead, he gripped her hand tight, jerked her to him, then quickly brought his hand holding hers around her waist as his other hand shot up to clamp across her mouth.
Paul wrestled Marie into the confines of the building. She groaned shocked, muffled sounds. Once he saw her eyes. They blazed fire and sudden hate, scalding into his face as if they wanted to kill. Then he avoided her eyes and concentrated on moving her to where his fellow gang-members waited. Marie fought hard. She kicked, losing both shoes. She sought to free her pinned arms to do combat with her sharpened nails. Paul held her strongly, and as she struggled within the circle of his arms, he felt the rise of the passion that he had earlier doubted, had in fact questioned as a part of himself.
Within seconds, there were other rough boy-hands to assist Paul in his struggle with Marie. He released her as she was pulled from his arms. He stumbled back, happy to be lost in the rush of bodies that lurched to bind and gag the pretty dark-haired girl.
Paul's head buzzed with confusion. There persisted the muffled moans and stifled screams of Marie. He remembered the feel of her soft body as it had bumped against him, that feel that been intensified because it had, he knew now, come from the girl's own willingness. He remembered her words, too, those words that spoke of acceptance and desire, all directed toward him without his knowledge. He wondered. He tried to avoid looking at the place that had been made ready for Marie, a corner of a broken-down room with a mattress in the middle. He tried not to look that way.
"Hey, Paul, get up here," commanded the voice of Dick, their leader.
Paul hesitated a moment. Then someone pushed him at the back, saying, "Go on, man, it's your privilege, you know. You're right after Dick. And, man, you did a hell of a lot better than we expected you to do."
The compliment meant nothing. But his leader's command did. Paul moved forward. Then he stopped and looked at the girl on the mattress, thinking how beautiful she looked with a flashlight bean centered on her body, from which all her clothing had been ripped.
"Choice, eh?" said Dick to Paul.
"Yeah, choice," he answered in a low tone.
Paul stepped closer. He bent a bit. Two boys were at Marie's head. Each held a wrist flattened to the mattress. Her mouth was gagged, and Paul could tell that it had been crammed way down her throat. He could tell by the way her veins had bloated and throbbed. Her eyes had been left uncovered, though. He wished that they were not. She stared directly at Paul. Her eyes smoldered, and if eyes could spit and show defiance and hate and a trust betrayed, Marie's eyes did exactly that to Paul.
"Get ready, man," Dick said to Paul. "This ain't goin' ta take me long not long at all."
Paul watched as Dick moved to Marie's feet, held and spread by two other boys. He continued to watch as Dick reached forward and snapped away the last bit of panty cloth that still covered the girl. Paul glowered at the girl's breasts and felt shock for the way her nipples had indented as if they intended to withdraw from the reality of the moment and the scene. Dick, now on his knees and facing the girl, must have noticed the girl's nipples too. He reached with both hands and cruelly kneaded at her breasts, seeking, it seemed, to force life into the nipples, to make them straight and alert as if they were aware of his presence. But he could not. The nipples remained withdrawn, cuddled within the white moulds of breasts as if they offered refuge. They were an effrontery to the gang's leader. Dick savagely struck Marie across the breasts. Her eyes did not move. They stared past her first attacker, glued upon Paul.
Dick remained true to his claim. It didn't take him long, not long at all. And Marie had ceased her struggling. She only stared at Paul.
"All right, man, your turn," Dick said to Paul, pushing himself upright and making an adjustment of his open clothing.
Paul moved to Marie's feet. He looked at her, trying to view the nakedness of some objective body, not the form of the girl he had lured to a devil's den. His passion was still strong, made that way in part because of the leader's action preceding his own readied position for sexual assault.
"Go on, go on, there's others waiting," Dick said.
Paul looked at him. Then he looked at the naked girl in front of him.
"Go, man, go," encouraged Dick again.
Paul nodded. He prepared himself and felt surprise that he was ready. Then, avoiding Marie's eyes as much as possible, he lunged forward, duplicating the action and movements of his leader while he relinquished his virginity in view of his fellow hoods.
When it was over and Marie was given her clothing and released, Paul wondered verbally to Dick about the police. Marie knew him what if she snitched? Should he lay low for a while?
"Girls of this street don't talk about stuff like this," Dick said. "This chick won't either. Just steer clear of her."
Paul did. For the rest of his life.
"Sometimes an act of sex takes encouragement from crime, and this is the way it was for Paul," explained a police psychiatrist. "If it had not been for the successful rumble of the night, if it had not been for the gang plan for rape, Paul may very well have dated the girl, even felt himself her protector rather than the rapist he was."
CASE HISTORY
Three girls and three boys met at a drive-in restaurant. The girls were in one car, the boys in another. They were only slightly acquainted. They shared cigarettes and coffee and conversation for an hour. Then they wondered what they could do with the balance of the night.
"Too late for a show," said one of the boys.
"Who gives a twit about a show," complained a girl.
"I meant a drive-in, you know, for making out," explained the boy.
"Who needs that for that?" said one of the other girls.
"Well, come on, let's decide what's for kicks tonight?" asked another of the boys.
"I need hub caps baby moons," said the driver of the car that held the boys.
"Hey, now you're talking," said one of the girls.
"Yeah," agreed her friend. "Stealing's real kicks."
Everyone seemed to agree. It was decided that the six of them would travel in the car driven by a girl. They crowded into it, then slowly moved along neighboring residential streets, looking for some sign of the car carrying the hub caps worthy of stealing. They found it at a corner parked beneath a street light.
"Too much open space," complained a boy.
"Yeah," agreed a friend. "That street light is an open invitation to the fuzz."
The others agreed, all except a single boy.
"Well, if you guys are chicken, I'll do it myself."
"But not under that light," protested one of the girls.
"Watch me," said the boy, opening the car door and stepping out.
They all watched as the boy casually approached the car, even stood back and inspected it as if he were viewing his own possession. Then he stooped at a rear wheel, dislodged the hub cap with a screw driver, placed it beneath his arm, and went to the other rear wheel. He took the other hub cap and also collected it beneath his arm. And then he sauntered to the front of the car. As he was ready to stoop and dislodge that gleaming half-moon, a figure appeared, walking down the street and directly toward the boy.
The other youngsters who had parked across the street held their collective breath. The hub cap thief looked up and saw the stranger approaching. He did not run. He did not act other than casually and confidently. He stooped and dislodged the first of the front hub caps. And then the stranger was next to him. The boy looked up. He smiled.
"Kind of late to be working on a car, isn't it?" the stranger asked suspiciously.
"Yeah," replied the boy in a steady voice. "But I thought I'd better take these hub caps off and into the house before some smart-assed kid decides to steal 'em."
The boy walked to the other side of the car. He bent at the last hub cap to be taken. The man looked at him, then turned and looked at the string of middle-class homes that lined the block.
"You live in there?" asked the stranger.
"All my life," answered the boy. "Course I been away to school most of the time."
The stranger watched as the boy lifted off the last hub cap. The boy straightened and flexed his back. Then he said, "There, now I'll sleep better. So damn much crime and stealing going on around here, you just can't take any chances at all."
"Yeah, guess you're right," the stranger said in a more satisfied tone. "Well, goodnight. Be seeing you."
"Sure you will," said the boy.
He stayed by the car, pretending a final inspection as the stranger continued his walk down the street. When he turned at the corner, the boy walked to the car that held his friends. He climbed in, depositing the hub caps on the floor. Then the car sped off amid wild, young laughter, amid a new community of togetherness that had been achieved by the group through risk and crime and the stimulating effect it had on their young emotions.
They drove directly to a city park. There they shifted positions so each boy was with a girl. And then, in a harmony of aphrodisically-risen passion; they made love to each other, committing together a sign of their youthful rebellion against society, standards, authority, and expressing for the benefit of each other the lust that their young bodies could show.
* * *
It has been predicted that juvenile crime will continue to be a troublesome social problem for many decades to come, perhaps for the rest of this century. Many reasons have been proposed as the cause: Parental permissiveness, status goals, image seeking, improper associations with parents, family, and peers, and the population explosion.
All of these matters no doubt play a part in the rise in crime among teenagers. No doubt they will continue to contribute to juvenile delinquency for many years to come. But, according to authorities on the subject, sex is also back of it all, acting as an element that pushes young people toward acts against society, both as an aphrodisiac for their own sexual instincts and as a means of bolstering a sexual confidence that they truly do not feel. And what can be done about it? What can we do?
"There is one vital antidote for this important problem," says Rupert D. Villiani, a clinical psychologist associated with the faculty of an eastern university. "Sex education of the young must be brought into a realistic relationship with the problems that stem from sex. To date, I have found no adequate sex education programs in the public schools of this nation. This is monstrous! It is inconceivable that a nation that has made so many advances in such a short time should continue to be so backward in the way of the sex education of our young. And this type of education is the only way that we can adequately cope with the problems of crime among juveniles. Without it, we will continue to know the heartbreak and the waste of young lives."
It seems incumbent upon every person who has children to strive for sex education programs in our schools. Talk about it at P.T.A. meetings, present the question to teachers and administrators, and insist with all the might of a taxpayer that your children have a right to this type of education. It might be the very thing that keeps them from juvenile crime.
CHAPTER EIGHT
JEALOUSY AND SEX
Jealousy is one of the more difficult emotions to explain or understand. As it applies to teenagers and the way they handle it through expressions of sexual actions, it is even more difficult. But there is a close relationship between the jealousy teenagers experience and the pattern it often establishes for their sex practices.
Jealousy is an emotion that has raised havoc with many lives. It has been recognized since earliest times. It has caused crime and murders, heartbreak, and broken homes. Broken heads, too, especially from irate wives whose husbands have "cheated." Even so-called "normal" jealousy causes a great deal of unhappiness in the world. But with teenagers, jealousy takes a different turn, becomes symbolic of manhood and womanhood and frequently results in furious expressions through sex. Let us look at some of the case histories that jealousy and sex have provided the courts, the psychiatrist and sociologist, and the clergyman and police officer.
CASE HISTORY
Tina, who was raised by maiden aunts, lived a sheltered, usually-unhappy life until she turned fifteen. Then she became absorbed in school activities, for which she seemed to have a special flair. Her shyness continued, however, and she was barely able to talk to members of the opposite sex, including male teachers. But she was popular. She was pretty, too, and caught the attentions of the boys even if she did not seem to give the same attention back.
Tina's mind was something else. Here, fantasies of boys were spun almost constantly. Here, she dreamed the dreams of a normal, even if somewhat shy, teenaged girl.
Tina was made to face up to her shyness when she met a boy named Luke. He was attractive and one of the most popular boys in school. And he seemed to ignore her shyness and make her talk, even though it was apparent that she was too flustered to carry on a conversation.
"You shouldn't be so shy," he told her honestly one day when they were backstage of the auditorium preparing for a school assembly.
"I I can't help it," she explained in a meek voice.
"Sure you can," he said. "Just practice not being shy. Practice on me."
She raised her eyelashes and looked at him. She could not keep from smiling. Then, embar-rassedly, she glanced away again.
"See you almost did it," the boy said encouragingly.
"Almost did what?" she asked.
"Almost stopped acting shy with me."
"Oh."
"Do it again," he urged. "What?" she asked.
"Look at me and smile at me," he said simply.
Again she raised the long eyelashes. Again she smiled, this time holding it a little longer before she looked away.
"Hey, that was great," exclaimed the boy. "And now, how about the next step."
"What's that one about?" she inquired.
"All it takes is for you to say 'yes'. "
"To what?"
"To me asking you for a date."
"Oh."
"Hey, don't look away. It's not as bad as all that. Just look at me and I'll ask you."
Tina's eyes returned to those of the boy. Her mouth puckered in the beginning of a smile.
"How about going to the show with me Friday night?" the boy suddenly asked.
The girl started to drop her eyelashes.
"Uh, uh," scolded the boy. "Face up to it and to me."
"Well, gee, I don't--don't." Her sentence died an embarrassed death.
"I won't take no for an answer," Luke insisted. "I don't know if I can," Tina finally blurted. "Will you if you can?" Luke asked. "Well, sure, but..."
"Great," he exulted. "That's all I have to know. Now all you have to do is make it okay with your folks."
"I live with two aunts," Tina said, much as if that should explain all sorts of difficulties.
"Well, make it okay with your aunts then," the boy said, grinning. "And I'll call you tomorrow night I will, that is, as soon as you give me your number and then I'll pick you up at seven on Friday. How's that?"
"Fine," Tina said. "Just--just fine."
She gave Luke her phone number. And then she found an excuse to leave him as quickly as possible.
To Tina's surprise, her aunts agreed to the date with Luke. And then to her own surprise she conversed rather lengthily with him when he called on the telephone. And at last he was at her door, shining and bright and ready to escort her to the show.
Midway through the first picture of a double-film show, Luke took Tina's hand in his and held it. She started to withdraw it, but finally did not. Later, he played with her fingers, rather conveying, she later explained, some mysterious kind of love-making, as if his fingers told her the things that he wanted to do with "other parts of his body."
The date passed platonically. They established a pattern of regular companionship, however, and Friday nights became date nights for Tina and Luke.
After a few weeks, hand-holding was not enough for the popular and virile young man. One night he parked the car on a darkened street and attempted to kiss Tina. She refused him, was actually frightened of his advances. He did not press further; however, he was very silent on the way to Tina's home. She was sure that he was mad at her.
The next Monday, Tina noticed Luke walking a pretty girl to class. She steamed with the fury of jealousy: She knew that he did this now because she had refused him kisses the previous Friday night. She ached with remorse, remonstrated with herself that she had not given the very thing that she herself desired. Kisses. Signs of affection. Expressions of love. Tina has stated that her mind blazed with hundreds of thoughts, all evil, horrid, and directed toward herself for having refused Luke the simple wish of kisses. Tina was sure that Luke was through with her, that he would never again present himself at her doorstep. But he did the very following Friday night. She was overjoyed. She fled happily into the night with Luke's hand securely in hers.
Later, when Luke again parked the car on a secluded street and reached out for Tina, she went to him willingly, even attempted with kisses to make up for the lack of them the week before.
Several dates later, the young couple had progressed their desires to the touching of each other's body. And a week later, Luke attempted to have intercourse with Tina. She refused him tersely. They drove home in silence. And during the next several school days, Tina found Luke in constant attention of the same pretty girl she had seen him with before.
Jealousy swept Tina like a forest fire. She couldn't think of anything but her loss of Luke. Several times, he hardly talked to her in the halls during change of classes. She knew that it was the end, knew, too, that if it was, it would also be the end of herself. But, true to the pattern that had been set, Luke showed up for his regular Friday night date. Tina nearly fainted with happiness. But she was not so pleased that she could make a gift of her virginity when it was later asked of her by the boy. Again, silence prevailed during the ride home. Again, Tina discovered Luke with the other girl. Again, she remonstrated with herself. And again, Luke showed up for his usual date. And again, Tina was overjoyed to see him, to be with him, and to have the opportunity at last to present herself, all that he might want of her, for his pleasure.
The young people came together in a violent act of sexual intercourse that night. To Tina's surprise, she was desirable and sexual, and received for herself thrills that she had not expected possible. And she was so proud of Luke he had taken contraceptive precautions had a packet ready in the glove compartment just in case...
Soon, shows were bypassed by Tina and Luke on Friday nights, unless, that is, they were of the drive-in variety that provided the uttermost privacy for love-making in either the front or back seat of the car.
But an evening dawned in spring that was that night to bring heartbreak to Tina. More sober than she had ever seen him, Luke arrived for their date. Very quickly, he explained that he didn't have much time, that he had merely called in order to talk to her. Then he told her. They had to break up; he had a new girl and had promised complete fidelity of his mind and person. Then he drove the stricken and silent Tina home.
The week-end was a torture for Tina. She created scores of fantasies that showed her coming upon Luke and another girl upon whom she, Tina, raked her anger. She knew that Luke would not be calling for her the next Friday night not ever. She couldn't eat. Nor sleep. Nor do anything except wonder what had gone wrong and who the girl was that Luke had chosen over herself.
Monday Tina saw Luke with the girl he had squired between classes at other times. Tuesday was a repetition of Monday, and the rest of the week's days followed the same pattern Luke steadily with another girl.
Swamped by an abnormal jealousy, Tina could do nothing but entertain the most devious thoughts for revenge and hate all directed toward the girl, not Luke.
Tina waited until a Friday night to give vent to the fury of her jealousy. She armed herself with one of her aunts' long, sharp hatpins. She waited in the shrubbery by the school where she knew that the girl stayed late in rehearsal for the school's senior play. And then, when the girl appeared, Tina sprang and like a maniac rammed the hatpin again and again into the girl's face, her chest and breasts, belly, thighs, hips every place that Tina was sure Luke had known in betrayal to her own person.
Tina was arrested, placed under probation and the constant attention of a case worker, from whom this case history was acquired for presentation in this report. It was the black villain Jealousy who had moved shy Tina to an assault that fortunately did not result in death.
CHAPTER NINE
SUMMARY
It has been stated and restated, in this report and scores of others, that teenagers are a reflection of adults and adult society. There is little questioning of this rather broad statement. But perhaps there is something else here that escapes the common viewpoint.
"I think that we should treat teenagers better than we do," claims Dr. Maud Hansen, a university psychiatrist. "Today we tend to put extra loads on our youngsters and still expect them to behave in a socially acceptable manner. And they should. But we place too much blame and too many burdens upon our youth. The young become easily discouraged, and I assure you, the loads we place upon them prompt discouragement. Look what we tell them: Be good, responsible, bright, athletic, attractive and popular, love us, your parents, love your neighbor, self, the other guy, turn the other cheek, climb before you leap but get up the ladder of success quickly so we can be proud of you. We tell them all of this and much more. We tell them that we are actually a little embarrassed by our failures as parents. And so it is little wonder that our children are confused, law-breaking, and anti-social. When the young have standards that are unattainable, they'll often go into reverse, disrupt those standards rather than even come close to trying to meet them."
"And what advice can parents take today?" Dr. Hansen was asked. "After all, there is so much of it today."
"I believe that parents should learn to become comfortable with their children," Dr. Hansen replied. "They have to stop feeling guilty for their parental failures, either real or fantasized, and they must learn to enjoy the whole personality of their child, not just those parts of their offspring that look good to neighbors, the school, and our society. Truly, youngsters are quite satisfying as companions. We should make it our business to discover this."
Teenagers will, no doubt, continue to baffle and confuse through the ages. Especially will their sexual attitudes and practices always be resented and misunderstood by many. But if we can at least establish a beginning for ourselves as adults, a beginning that continues to seek communication between other adults and the teenaged population, and if we keep the channels of communication open through conversation, books, and other media, we will have made a giant stride forward in solving the complexities of our youth a step forward toward solving many of our own adult problems.
