Case Studies of Women and the Traumatic Sexual Experience of Defloration
Consulting Psychiatrist: Richard H. Hoffmann, M. D.
Introduction
Woman, the virtuous, inviolate Virgin-How has she come to be raised up in this role, revered and eulogized?
Does this seem to be a pointless question, as empty as asking why the blue of the heavens is esthetic to the eye? The sky could be no other hue, and it was fashioned by a hand other than Man's. But there are underlying reasons why Woman as a Virgin is held in high esteem. And an examination of such reasons is significant in understanding this volume and the objectives for having assembled it.
Ours is a patriarchal society whose codes, ethics, and morals have been shaped according to the concepts and interpretations of the dominant male. It is a Christian society and as such-but for the exceptions which prove the rule-a monogamous one. A woman was intended as a mate for life-taken by the husband according to the vows of obedience and subservience. Man, the master and the aggressor, made the selection and fashioned the rules of the choice. A fundamental rule: Her chastity, her "purity", undefiled by any man, the irrefutable sign of which was her virginity.
How much of this status derived from the ego of Man? How much from a society founded upon Christian religion and morals? How much from the biology of the female and the inseparability of her sexuality and the act of procreation, the identification of the father and the stability of the family unit?
All of the afore mentioned figure in no minor respect in the exalted status of virginity. But time and the gradual transition of custom, the emergence of Woman as an intellectual force as well as a biological one, as companion to Man as well as wife and mother, as co-student and educator, as associate in business and in the labor force, as a participant in community and govern mental affairs these changes have elicited new and unsuspected talent and potential in the human female. These capacities have been deeply integrated into the "mechanisms of functional performance" of contemporary society. But this new and expanded role of the female has occurred within the hardly altered context of the traditional morality, the rigid modes of long-established sex conduct and restrictions. Young girls are in closer and more familiar contact with boys. Teeners go out unchaperoned. There is the increasing exposure of young people to the literature of sex, more intimate understanding of the sex act through education, the introduction of the automobile into our society and its place as a vehicle for "courting"; the liberal availability of contraceptives; the presence of young married couples in the school environment. There is deeper understanding of sexual maturity and the inception of cumulatively more forceful sex drives at chronological age levels of 15-16-17, when premarital sex remains strictly "immoral", sinful", and, insofar as the female is concerned, "damaging to her marriageable status". As non-virginal, the female becomes "damaged merchandise". The language describing the loss of virginity is negative and condemnatory: defloration, defilement, violation. With the license of marriage, the inception of sexual intercourse becomes: a fulfillment, a flowering, a realization of womanhood.
Insofar and so long as the marriage endures, the woman's sexual role remains socially sacrosanct; but with divorce or widowhood, she is once again a "deflowered woman" and assuming a more sensual but less "respectable" identity, requiring an understanding and forgiving man as a new marital prospect.
While male immorality is not condoned, premarital chastity for the male is not extolled. In practice, there persists an attitude of undeclared sanction that it makes sense that the male should have some "experience". Certainly, no issue at all is made of male chastity as a prerequisite for marriage. The chaste male often conceals such a state out of embarrassment as a reflection on his manhood, his virility.
It is in this connection that the female condemns the existence of a "double standard". And in a society of increasing sexual laxity, wherein the male strives for and demands female sexual copulation as the price for his dating and continued interest, the status of the virgin is maintained. As a matter-of-fact, in the direct ratio that she becomes more rare, does she become a "greater prize" for the marriage bed.
The female is forced to grow up and respond sexually in contemporary society against a background of ambiguity, paradox, and hypocrisy. As a result, she is subjected in all her thoughts, responses to, and participation in sex activities to distorting psychological pressures. She is exposed to many sexual provocations and stimuli; she is continually being lured and tempted to engage sexually and rewarded with social success if she succumbs. Her own biology urges her to strive for sexual expression in direct proportion to her innate sex drives.
The results: inner turmoil, emotional instability, a sense of guilt; and more contorting fear, the threat which becomes focused exclusively upon the male organ, the single object threatening her defloration. The phallus becomes both an object of dread and a "fate devoutly to be wished".
The issue is finally reduced to "her moment of truth", the piercing of her maidenhead. From childhood on, she has imposed upon her the sexual attitudes of adults: her parents, teachers, religious counselors. The connotations remain with her-sexual intercourse as sinful, debauching, degrading. Fears are instilled within her to prompt her withdrawal from situations of sexual participation. As a child, she is warned against male strangers and the mysterious things they might do. There is the ever-present threat of rape and the images of terrible violence, the threat of sex deviates and molesters, the awed silences gapped with terror, in connection with sex crimes reported in all of the media.
Those women arriving at adulthood, still chaste, still virginal, find themselves confronted by an act of defloration which becomes and assumes an awesome event. Confronting male desire, primed for a totally pleasurable experience, she is to experience, in addition to the psychological pressure, a ruptured hymen, the pain of sudden dilation and blood flow.
The result, in many instances-more than the general public is aware of-is female frigidity, continuing emotional and even serious mental problems. Psychologists, social workers, psychiatrists, general practitioners and gynecologists encounter a prolificacy of such cases. At the very least, the rude and gross act of defloration tends to lessen, the pleasure associated with the sex act. The common prevalence of what is characterized as female frigidity may well relate to the act of defloration.
This volume presents a representative selection of cases dealing with the subject of defloration. Such works can do much to better acquaint the male with a problem in which he prominently figures and of which he is little aware. For the female, these cases may serve to give her a deeper insight into troubling thoughts and fears, and a basis for a more effective and satisfying adjustment to male-female sexual relations.
Richard H. Hoffmann, M.D.
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The Psychologist Virgin
Laura is a tall, beautiful, strikingly attractive brunette, twenty-seven years of age. She has poise and the look about her of a woman who has been involved in the world of business, the prototype of the "career woman". There is something too studied, almost guarded about her "naturalness". Her legs are long and shapely and she crosses them over her trim, stylish, highly feminine foot gear in the approved Vogue manner. Since she is by profession a psychologist, she begins to discuss her problem in a rather detached, professional manner, which she noticably begins to lose as she is taken up into the emotion-charged episodes. She has a serious sexual problem which has begun to envelop her entire life and present itself as a barrier to all of the natural joys and expressions "the flesh is heir to", her tranquility of mind, her identity as a woman.
At the time of the interview, she is established as an industrial psychologist at a government installation. Since it is part of her job to ascertain the reason for absenteeism among employees, and to make herself generally available to discuss situations which trouble them and reduce their working capacities, she is placed in a highly personal relationship with such people.
"The larger part of the problem of these workers," she begins hesitatingly, "is of an intimate and generally sexual nature having to do with male-female relations on every level: boyfriend-girlfriend, engaged couples, husband and wife, pregnancies and abortions, instances of rape. You know, Doctor-the entire range of such emotional problems one would be expected to run into in such a place and in my position."
When asked to describe several typical episodes in order to better observe the subject and her reactions, she cited the following: "There's a Puerto Rican girl, Angela, nineteen years old. She is very intense and passionate, and has been involved in many physical relationships with men; but she is not promiscuous and thinks only, during each affair, that marriage is her single-minded objective. She had been absent intermittantly; she reported to the sick room several times, until finally I insisted upon talking to her.
"She told me that she had attended a party with her current boyfriend. They had all drunk a lot of wine. She had become very excited, and on the couch in the comer of one room under the subdued lights, she had removed her panties and he aroused her with clitoral manipulations of his hand until she finally lost control of herself. She spread her legs and closed her eyes expectantly, aware and eager for him to mount her as he had many times before, and which she justified in her mind because she considered herself 'engaged'. She was entered, and she engaged in intercourse in an excitatory way, despite the fact that there were several other couples in the three rooms of the apartment and in other comers of the room in which she was present.
"She explained that this was not unusual at their parties, but what she discovered-and it came to her as a terrible'jolt to her ego and degrading to her person-was the fact that her boyfriend had played a trick on her. He had deliberately excited her in order, at the last moment, in the dim light, his friend might mount her and engage in sexual intercourse with her. This he had done. She considered this an unforgivable betrayal and assumed that he could not love her but considered her as nothing more than 'a lousy little whore'. She explained that in her rage, trying to get back at him, she had taken a bottle of rubbing alcohol from the bathroom and flung the contents in his face. He slapped her viciously, tore her clothes off, and generally ridiculed her before the entire company. Now all she could think of was how to kill him. She had taken a knife but she found she could not do so because she loved him too much. Now she was all tied up in emotional knots and could not work, but she needed the job and did not wish to lose it."
Laura was asked whether she had encountered and counseled as many male employees. She said that she did and was asked to describe any current cases. The one which followed became a revealing introduction to her own problem.
"Arnold H is a man of thirty-seven. He is a pleasant, congenial person, married for fifteen years. He had four children with a wife who had become stout and untidy, and he could no longer respond to her sexually. 'This is kind of embarrassing,' he told Laura, 'but as a psychologist, you're sort of a doctor, and I suppose you know all about these things, and I need advice. I'm still a young man, you know, but when I'm with my wife, I can't get an erection. It bothers me that maybe something's wrong with me or maybe I'm getting old. It's on my mind all the time and I can't keep my mind on my work'"
Laura confided with the prompting of the analyst, who noticed her obvious nervousness, there was more to the case than she had described.
The man had insisted that she examine his sex organ to reasure him of his virility. She knew it was not in her province, but her own mounting sexual excitement allowed her to proceed to the point where he removed his garments and exposed his naked sex organ to her. Maintaining a professional detachment, she began touching him, and when he became aroused, showing signs of erection, he began to raise her dress. Momentarily overcome, Laura responded by allowing him to bare her to the waist, and sitting upon the edge of the desk with parted legs, he arrived at the entrance to her vagina.
Up to that moment in the conversation, Laura, although under obvious emotional duress, managed to maintain her composure; but then she burst out weeping. "When he started pushing that thing, trying to get inside me, I couldn't stand it. I wanted him to, but I couldn't stand it. I then began crying. I pushed him away. He became very frightened that I was going to report him to the authorities. I told him not to worry about that but to get out and never come back."
The analyst asked her if incidents like that had ever happened before, and she admitted that several similar episodes had occurred. In one instance, a young Negro whom she had described as "sexually attractive" had been reported to her by one of the girls in the plant, stating that he had raped her. The girl said she had not reported him, but he continued to pursue her, and she wanted to be left alone. Since the alleged rapist was also an employee, Laura called him into her office. She questioned him about the rape incident. She found herself demanding all of the details, and, as she became more sexually stimulated, carried the interview beyond the bounds of professional propriety to the point where the young man pressed himself in between her naked thighs and attempted an entry. After a similarly hysterical outburst, she frustrated his advance and drove him from the office.
Laura went back to the early origins of her problem:
"I was always extremely bright, even as a child-bright in the academic sense. I began reading books and other materials quite advanced for my years. I was curious about sex in a normal way, I suppose. Perhaps I required answers more than an average or less imaginative child might. My home was Orthodox Jewish, and there was always a wall of silence between the children and anything dealing with the subject of sex and the intimate parts of a person. There were two children-my sister and myself. She's three years younger than myself, but an outgoing, very extroverted type, not given to the kind of troubling thoughts I experienced when I could not get answers to my questions. I began reading whatever I could find out the subject. I managed to get books on sex eugenics, a poor book with much misinformation. It was filled with archaic ideas and language, such as the hazards of exposure to continuous masturbation which would end in lunacy and the terrible scarifying threat of venereal disease with illustrations of the afflicted organs in-gonorrhea and the chancres of syphilis. It was very frightening.
"The most upsetting was the fact that the more I dwelled on sexual subjects, the more excited I became, and the tendency to touch myself grew. When I responded with masturbation, I kept on imagining that things were happening to me and that I was actually losing my mind. All this began a pattern in me, as I can understand now in retrospect. The more anxious I became the more interested in the subject of sex and wanting to find out. It was my first interest in the subject of psychology. My interest was really abnormal psychology, distorted attitudes, and the consequences in the misshaping of personality.
"And that's all I could think about-sex. I seemed to see all men and boys naked before me. I imagined their sexual parts, their desires; I imagined the threat they were to me and what they would do to me if they had the chance. Every sex crime in the newspaper I read about, I imagined and dwelled upon, especially when grown men, with their large sex organs, molested little girls. I could see it happen to me. I could almost feel the force of the organ beginning to penetrate me. I would actually feel the physical pain, and I would bury my face in my hands, trying to drive away the image.
"I was always considered attractive, and I matured quite rapidly. Boys were attracted to me, but I always avoided dales with the excuse that I had studying to do. If I went on an occasional date, all I could think about was sex. I wanted the boys to touch me and, at the same time, I was terribly afraid that they would. So I did spend practically all of my time with my studies, and I was an excellent student. I graduated from high school at sixteen and immediately entered college. My major was psychology, and that's where I became exposed to all of the literature on the subject of sexual ambivalence, perversities, and the grossness of abnormalities. I simply could not read enough of this. It occupied so much of my waking hours. I used to masturbate regularly then, even while I was reading, or just keep my hands under my skirts.
"I began to frighten myself, to think that there was something abnormal about me. I found that I was doing strange things I was ashamed of. For example, we lived in an apartment house adjacent to another one, and we could look out the back window into the apartment directly across the way. One day a family moved in with several young men, and at night once, when the lights were out in my room, I could see one of the young men undressing. I watched him remove his trousers, and when he took his underthings off, I saw him completely nude. I was shaking all over; I couldn't stop. I began to wait every night after dark. There were three young men, apparently brothers, and very often I would see them and their sex parts. Once I even saw one touching himself, and I became so excited that I masturbated then and there. Then I found myself walking directly up to the window, afraid and yet so excited that I wanted them to see me.
"But by that time, my head was so filled with fears of abnormalcy that all I could think about were the terrible things that could happen. And I imagined some men looking cruel and secretly being sadists who would cruelly whip me and make me suffer with pain during sex. Other times, I would think of some cruel callous man who would so rupture me on first contact that I would become frigid. Always my head was filled with what could go wrong, and it caused me to sink deeper into a personal shell and become more isolated.
"Then one day my mother found a contraceptive in the toilet bowl, and she realized that my younger sister was engaging in sexual intercourse with one of the boys in the neighborhood. They would come into the house when no one else was there in the afternoon. My mother was terrified, and didn't know how to talk to her. She felt that I knew all about such things because of my college training. Both of my parents considered me a model child and completely unassailable, and never subject to sexual temptations.
"I agreed to talk to my sister and her boyfriend. I found myself all excited by the prospect. My sister cried and explained that she just found herself responding, had no control over herself when he was near her. I insisted upon talking to the boy. He was in the bedroom alone with me, and I asked him all of what I considered the appropriate psychological questions. I asked him whether he knew what he was doing, the dangers involved. I wanted him to ex plain how he went about having intercourse with my sister. That is a pattern I seem to have adopted quite early. I could pretend to be quite profesional, and the men-a little awkward and embarrassed-would never refuse and then get carried beyond the point of control of the discussion. I asked this boy, William, if he always used a contraceptive and if he had had trouble entering my sister and whether he entered her through the anus, and if he used his mouth on her intimate part. I knew that I was using the situation as an excuse, but I kept on getting more involved and more excited.
"He was not the brightest kind of boy, and it was easy for me to lead him on, and I found myself on the bed exposed to the waist and having him on top of me to show me how he entered my sister. And that was the first time I had a male organ at least partially enter me. The sudden pain of it was so piercing that I cried out furiously and kicked him away from me. The noise attracted my parents and my sister who were aware of the fact that I was having a discussion with her young man. I did something I'm very much ashamed of. I accused him of trying to attack me. I told him if he ever came to the house again, I would report him to the police. He did not return, and my sister never saw him again.
"Despite the unpleasantness, I was so excited by the thought that his most intimate part had begun to enter me that I masturbated with great frequency. And there were many times when I actually walked the street in the neighborhood where I knew that young man lived, hoping somehow that he would see me. I didn't know what I would do, but I wanted to expose myself to a compromising situation.
"Then when I graduated and received my degree, I was placed as an industrial psychologist in my current position. I've been here three and a half, almost four years, and I have been subjected to a continual succession of emotional and sexual problems that have tormented and exhausted me and driven me to near distraction. I want to have sexual relations with a man. I want to be rid of the imprisonment of my virginity. I just want to be free to feel."
At this point, the young psychologist burst into tears once again.
Subsequent to this visit to the analyst, she continued to visit for a period of eight months. Then one day she appeared in his office in an unnaturally stimulated state and and told him about the following experience:
"A young writer came to visit our installation. He was doing a series of stories. He interviewed me and invited me out for coffee. Somehow, I felt that I had found a man I could talk to. He seemed to know a great deal about psychology and problems of an emotional nature, and before I realized it, I was talking about myself. He called to ask me out one evening, and we spent the larger part of the evening in the park behind the library just talking. I was so excited by his presence. I kept watching his hands. I kept wanting him to touch me. He must have sensed my anxiety, and he didn't.
"I knew he was employed in the government information office, and when I left him all I could think about wa how badly I wanted to have sexual relations with him. I stayed awake half the night thinking that this was my opportunity to get beyond my problem. I thought maybe he would invite me out again and perhaps, as we got to know each other, something would happen. Then I thought he might not invite me, and I couldn't wait, I couldn't take the chance. I was so agitated by the time morning came around that I didn't go into work that day. I had an apartment in Manhattan at that time and I lived alone. I wanted to call him. I had my hand on the telephone perhaps twenty times.
I didn't know what to say. But I finally, by 4:00 in the afternoon, got myself into such a state that I don't believe I was even rational. You'll find this difficult to believe but what I did was-I called him, and I said to him outright and directly, and I repeat this almost verbatim, " 'I'm lying on the couch. I'm wearing no clothing. I'm thinking of you. I want you to come over and make love to me.' "
Laura's face brightened, and she said jubilantly, "And he did."
Four months following her affair with the writer, Laura met and married a man with similar interests to her own.
Psychiatric Commentary:
To cope with children of more than average intelligence and impressionability requires the attention of extraordinary parents as well. Laura B apparently did not have such parents, and in a home adhering to orthodox religious precepts which forbade discussion, even outward recognition of sex, Julia's heightened imagination led her to many misconceptions.
First and foremost was her approach even to finding out about subjects of a sexual nature. Sex was secretive, forbidden. Sex was "bad" and "many bad things could happen if one indulged".
It is the abnormalcies, the exceptions, the cases of maladjustment which were her primary interest. It was an unhealthy vantage point.
Led by her own maladjustment and an interest in psychology, and thrust into a position where her duties involved dealing with people's sexual problems, difficulties were forseeable. Disclosure of indiscreet handling of employees in her charge could have led to scandal and a dismissal clouding her entire career. She was fortunate in the solution of her problem.
The importance of the place of the parent and society in the proper dissemination of information pertinent to sexual subjects is forcefully demonstrated by this case.
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The Lord's Bride
Many brides has the Lord, but none so true and loyal and beauteous to behold as Virginia B. The interviewer cannot refrain from wondering if dark shadows still pass her image of a celestial Heaven free from taint and sin and sexual desire, The interviewer had met her at the suggestion of the human relations counselor with whom, at the time, he was doing a series of articles. The girl at that time was seventeen years old but a fully-formed Madonna in appearance, with a large womanly bosom, a slim waist and ample rounded hips which justified the description "voluptuous". Though her clothes weren't stylish but of a somber tone with a dark gray skirt and a black, rather severe blouse, she exerted a sensuality similar to the Italian actresses who have figured popularly in motion pictures in this country. Her sexuality is natural and earthy, without the adornments and embellishments of cosmetics and padded garments.
Virginia was a seriously troubled girl who needed desperately to talk, to bring out into the open a thought which was so terrible to her, that she had fallen into a state of melancholia with thoughts of suicide which prompted an uncle of hers to bring her to the human relations counselor. The deeply religious girl, who had fled the convent where she was undergoing instruction as a novice, in her desire to become a nun in the Roman Catholic faith, refused to discuss her problem with a priest. She considered it of a nature so sacriligious that she dared not, despite the deeply inculcated training of the Confessional, reveal this sin in the House of God. She had refused, as well, to tell her uncle the nature of it. He had brought her to the human relations counselor without the knowledge of her parents, rigidly orthodox people who would not have agreed to this treatment.
"If I dared, I would douse myself with gasoline and set myself afire as the Buddhists have in Viet Nam," Virginia told the counselor. In response to his questioning, she said, "Maybe this would burn the evil out of me, but suicide is against my faith, and I'm afraid of eternal damnation."
In the world in which she had grown up, Hell was a real and actual place, and Heaven as literal as the ground upon which she walked. There was an altar in her home to which her parents, of Italian extraction, attended with frequent solemn observance. There were Crucifixes on the wall with the image of the Lord Jesus and figurines of the Virgin Mother Mary conspicuous in various parts of the house. Virginia had attended parochial school, attended Mass every morning, and had become much impressed with the dogma of sex as original sin.
Sex was sinful. Yet she had sexual urges. "I feel-I feel between my legs so much," she said in a suffering and plaintive voice. "I feel between my legs all day. It never stops. Then, when I am asleep, I cannot stand it. I must touch-rub it, and I'm so ashamed." She began quietly to sob, "Why am I bad? I do not wish to be bad." Virginia grew up with this conflict intensifying-her tendency to strict religious experience and her biological fulfillment as a woman.
"Always I have wanted to become a nun. A nun is beautiful, free from sin. The Virgin Mary has such a beautiful face, and I have always prayed to be like her. I think of men and the evil they do with women. I think of it, but in stead of prayers for their sin, I have a feeling between my legs. When I was little, ten years old, a small boy exposed his sexual part to me. He made me touch it. I was afraid, but I wanted to. Then he put it in behind me. It hurt, and I was frightened, but I let him do it. I knew then that I was evil, but I did not let myself think about it. I told myself that it was not a sin if he did that to me from behind.
"When my brother, Anthony, would have friends stay over at the house, I used to watch them through the door getting undressed. I would see them naked, and I would think of them doing the same thing to me that the other boy had. The feeling between my legs was so strong that I could not stand it. I used to put my own finger inside it, and then-I even used the end of a hairbrush....
"When I was sixteen, I was returning home from the store when I passed an alleyway, and suddenly a man stepped out. He had on an old brown coat. As I started to walk by him, he opened his coat, and I saw his sex part all stiff and extended. He pushed at me, and I felt it touch my hand. I cried out and stepped back so suddenly that I fell upon the ground. He turned and began to run away. A man came by and helped me to my feet. I was trembling. He asked me if the man had done anything to me. I shook my head, afraid to say anything. I said I was all right, and I started to run home.
"My hand was burning where his part had touched it. I closed the bathroom door behind me and washed my hand, scrubbed it, but I could not get rid of the burning sensation. I felt the burning for days after. Then I had the idea that the man was the Devil himself who had appeared to punish me, because he knew that I was evil. I began to believe that he would come again and that he would pierce me with his part and I would be on fire inside me forever. I began to pray for forgiveness, and I vowed that I would never again touch myself between my legs. For a long time after that, I did not.
"Now that the time was drawing near that I would be going away to the convent as my parents had long ago planned for me, I was very happy. Now I felt when I devoted myself to the Lord I would be free of such temptation, that my soul would be pure and all of the sinful thoughts would leave me forever.
"But at the convent I met a girl. I liked her. She was friendly and gay. The Sisters criticized her for being too loud and talkative and dancing all the time. But she made me feel happy. Then she began to tell me about her feelings. She always felt between her legs. She saw me undress and she said I had very beautiful legs, and she put her hand under my clothes and she touched me and made me very excited. Then she made me touch her. And after that, at night, secretly, when no one else could see us, we touched each other many times. I was afraid. My heart would beat so, but she knew how to touch me so that the feeling came to a great outburst I had never known before. When she started, I could not stop.
"I began to have the same bad thoughts as before. Then I went to sleep one night, and I had this dream-this dream...." at which point the girl sobbed incessantly and could not continue for perhaps ten minutes. Her dream, as she later described it, was one where she saw the naked image of the Lord's figure on the Cross and his phallus in erection exactly as she had seen it on the man in the brown coat. The figure seemed to be coming directly at her. So shocking and devastating was the effect of this dream upon Virginia that she dressed herself and immediately, that same night, ran away from the convent. This was the incident that she considered sacrilegious, too terrible to confess to a priest. This was the incident that resulted in her uncle bringing her to the counselor for advice and guidance, in the hope that it would raise her out of the state of melancholia into which she had fallen.
Patiently, the counselor explained to her something of the biology of the human being, of men and of women. He explained the "God-given" power in the ability of Man and Woman to procreate, to reproduce themselves. And that the sexual feelings which came in all normal men and women, and started in them from childhood on, was the "early budding that would one day burst into the full bloom of motherhood", that she was not evil nor sinful, that she was a natural, normal woman like other women.
On one level she excepted this. She honestly did not know that this was a feeling common to women in general. She felt that she herself was evil and that the girl she had met in the convent was like herself. She considered that they were few and that such women would be punished as she had been punished once with the appearance of the man in the brown coat and then the shattering dream at the convent. The normalcy of it she accepted. But she said, "A nun cannot be like other women. She must be free of such desires if she is to become a bride of the Lord."
Her uncle reported that Virginia B was much better, brighter, and beginning to respond to people. She no longer considered, however, that a life as a nun was appropriate for her. She felt "unworthy". Now, for the first time in her life, she began to date boys. She was not, however, untroubled as she expressed herself during subsequent visits with the counselor. "I know I should not be going with some of the boys. They are wild and say things which shame me when I go to drive-in movies in their cars. And sometimes they want to park, and I let them." She described one such instance where the boy, who had been drinking, forced her to remove her clothes and tried to seduce her, but because of his excessive drinking was unable to consummate the act.
The human relations counselor explained something of the nature of over-compensation. Now that she had decided in her own mind that she would not be a nun, she was in a sense, making up for lost time. He advised her to select her friends with greater discretion and not to place herself in such compromising circumstances.
The advice, as might have been anticipated, was not taken, and the result was that, at a beer party in a large public park in a wooded area late at night, she exposed herself rather wantonly to one young man, who mistaking her as promiscuous, not only seduced her violently himself but helped three of his friends to do likewise. So overwhelming an experience for a virgin was both painful physically and psychologically disruptive. It exposed the sexual act to her as a painful and ugly one about which she need no longer feel doubt. Once convinced that it was horrendous and a bestial experience, she returned to the convent to continue her studies and this time to emerge as a nun.
Psychiatric Commentary:
The Lord's Bride
Sex as "original sin," as lusting after flesh and springing from an innate baseness in Man's nature-it is this "hell's fire attitude" in strict religious homes that shows up in psychiatric literature as a root cause of many psychological problems. It clashes with the psysiological character of Man (and his mate), his biology, his "glands" which are early stimulated to sexual responses.
Touching the sexual parts by children, leading to masturbation is a normal physical reaction, whether in a state of wakefulness or nocturnal self-stimulation and "wet dreams". Such behavior is bound to set off feelings of guilt in the average youngster because of the established moral codes. But for Virginia, showing early signs of sexual maturity in a home where religion is ever-present, and the Virgin Mary is held up as the ideal for the female, the conflict became critical. There was no compromise for a child whose religious training shaped her for a "life's service to God". As a prospective nun, purity of soul, of mind, of body, measured a woman's suitability for a "Bride of the Lord". When sensations of a sexual nature coursed through her body and stirred her thoughts with sexual images and moved her to manipulate her sex parts, it set up a deep-felt turmoil in Virginia. When the passage of time advanced both of these forces, her religious faith and her sexual desire, the path to the convent as a nun in training seemed like a way out of this dilemma. Virginia hoped that this demonstration of her spiritual intent would quiet the desires of the flesh. Instead, she encountered a young and passionate novice who introduced her to homosexuality.
Her sexual hallucination of the Lord arose out of the burning abyss of her guilt. It was a subconscious self-punishment for her involvement in perverse sexual activity even as she was in training to become wed to Christ. The experience was shattering, and her flight from the convent followed. It is reasonable to assume that Virginia would have remained free of a formal dedication to the Church if she had not suffered from violent and painful rape. Normal sexual contact proved itself to be "a base lusting after flesh" of which she was now convinced she was better rid of. She would now remain a nun without misgivings.
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The Naughty Virgin
Charlotte R, eighteen years old, a bright, animated girl, slightly plump but sexually appealing was apprehended by the authorities with a group of seven teeners who were interrupted in the midst of a "sex party" in a summer home into which they had forced entry. An account of the condition in which they were found was described as follows: "They were all nude. One of the girls was on the couch, and two of the boys were performing sex acts with her-one in the normal way, the other at her mouth. There were two girls, faced to the wall, bending over forward, with their rear ends sticking out. They were playing some kind of obscene game, a version of Blind Man's Bluff, I guess. One of the boys had a handkerchief tied around his eyes, and he was trying to guide his way to put his sex organ into one of the girls. That's when we grabbed them. We ordered them to get dressed. We brought them into town, and we notified their parents."
Under questioning, a long list and description of lurid sexual activities for two years previous was written into the record. Although the current group formed the nucleus for such activities, they were by no means the only young people involved. Each one was responsible in his own way, at various times, for introducing other boys or girls or both into the group. The initiation ceremony demanded that they engage in sexual intercourse with any boy or girl of their choice. The act had to be performed before the entire group.
In trying to determine the origin of these activities and the influences in the town which might have provoked them, it soon became obvious that Charlotte R was the unofficial "ringleader". Her name came up repeatedly in the questioning of each individual boy or girl. She was variously described as "the hottest", "the wildest", "the most imaginative", "she would come up with the craziest ideas". "You could always count on Charlotte to get a party going someplace." She arranged parties in which the boys could use only their mouths on the girls' private parts (the practice of cunnilingus). At another time, she had everybody put up two dollars, and the girls and boys had a masturbation contest with the winners collecting the money.
One instance came to light where, through a domestic servant in the town, Charlotte had been able to bring in two grown-up men and a woman for the teeners to engage in sex practices with. In one instance, a young attractive matron, mother of one of the teenage girls, who had come to one of the group parties "to discuss the matter of her daughter's promiscuity", remained herself to become one of the participants and to engage in sexual intercourse with all the boys that were present during the party.
The orgiastic rites were many and varied. At Charlotte's prompting, one of the boys had been able to make contact with a prostitute and through her to purchase "dildoes", instruments simulating the male sex organ. The girls used these thereafter to stimulate themselves and to masturbate. Vying with each other, and always aroused by Charlotte's urging, the girls used the dildoes in the dark of movie houses and even, as one teener admitted, secretly during class at a local high school.
Charlotte was subsequently examined by a psychologist. The report indicated that she had been sexually promiscuous since the age of nine. And it was during this interview with the bright, vivacious teener, who was not at all disinclined to discuss her sexual activities, that the fact of her virginity became known. The male organ had never entered her vagina nor had she ever penetrated her vagina with a dildo. She had encouraged petting on any level, the feeling of her sex organs, touching of her breasts, the practice of fellatio on the male organ, and finally the entry into her anus to bring her male partner to orgasm.
A medical examination was ordered to confirm this fact. Charlotte R was not only technically a virgin but her maidenhead was still intact.
Charlotte explained the condition of her virginity in this way: "When I was little, I remembered my mother used to put me on the potty and she would point to my sex organ and its small opening, and she would tell me that nothing was supposed to go into it until I became a big woman. Then she would hold up her hand with one finger out, and she would say that men have a sex organ like that and they try to put it into the hole that little girls have. And that I was not to allow it. I remember that far back that she told me that. And, she kept on telling it to me in that same way, using her finger and showing where on the man his private part was.
"I remember when I was about six or seven, one time we had visited the hospital where my aunt Jean had given birth to a little boy. On the way home, my mother told me how the baby was born. She used her finger again and said that when the male organ became stiff and went into the female, it would become wild and excited. Then it would let out a fluid into the woman and the woman would become pregnant and that's how babies are born. That was the reason why men had their private part, and women had theirs. It was intended only to have babies, and babies could not be had until men and women were married. She said it was fine to have a baby when you were married, but sometimes a baby would be born like a horned devil to a woman who was not married. That was the punishment for being dirty.
"When I was eight, almost nine, there was a man who used to tend to our lawn in the back of our house. He seemed a grown man to me then, but I think he was about my age now, eighteen. We had our garden equipment in the garage, and one time he asked me to go and get a rake for him. When I went there, I found that he had followed me inside the garage, and he closed the door behind us. He began to feel me with his hand under my dress, and he touched me on top of my private part, rubbing it. It felt wonderful. I remember I let him do it, but I covered the entrance to my private part. Then he unzipped his pants and took out his private part. He made me stroke it with my hand, and he picked me up and tried to get inside me. but I began to struggle and cry out. I told him he couldn't do that. He couldn't go into that, where my hand shielded me. Then he took his private part and entered me from behind. I let him do that. Then whenever he came back every two weeks, I would go into the garage and he would do it again. He would rub me to get me excited, and he would enter me from behind.
"After that, I used to take little boys in the neighborhood into the garage and I would rub them and show them how to enter me in the same way. I knew I had to keep it a secret, but I didn't think it was very bad. All I had been told about was that the man's sex part could not enter the vagina.
"I had a playmate, Enid. She was a year or two older than I was and more developed. I told her everything I was doing with the gardner. Then one afternoon, when the gardener came again, I asked him if Enid could come into the garage with us. Then he touched Enid the way he touched me, but when she opened her legs, he began to push himself into her front part. I started to tell her no, that she couldn't but she just opened her legs and began to help him. Then he got inside her, and she began to bleed. He told me to go into the house and get some handkerchiefs and not tell anybody what it was for. He was all scared and perspiring, I remember. He stayed there in the garage for about an hour or more, trying to stop the bleeding.
"It wasn't bad after that, and he told Enid to keep a hankie in her panties, and then when it was bloody to put it into the garbage can, then put another hankie in there, and pretty soon it would be all right. And if her mother or anyone found out, we were to say she fell while she was climbing a fence and was hurt that way. To scare us, he said that if anyone found out what had happened, they would send us away to prison school for bad little girls.
"I didn't think that I was really bad. I thought that I was just 'naughty'; when I did something mischevious, my father called me naughty. But the way he said it, it was just like it was the teeniest bit of being bad. I thought that Enid, because she had let him go inside her in that way, was very bad.
"For a long while after that, about three years, before Enid moved away from the neighborhood, we were always doing sexy things with boys. I used to do practically everything. Enid just liked the boys to get inside the front of her. I was afraid of that, and I just wouldn't do it, but it made me all hot to watch her. Then she moved out of town very suddenly, and I never saw her again. Thinking back on it, I believe that she had gotten pregnant, and her family left town because of the scandal it would make. That's what I imagine, anyhow.
"I started the parties when I was about thirteen. I had played with a lot of boys, and I had brought a few girls into the group. Once it started, the kids were always after me to arrange something. It was a gas. And what harm have I done?"
Charlotte looked up to the psychologist with her bright pretty face. The question was asked ingenuously. "Can I really be called bad and all those terrible names? I'm still a virgin, and that's a lot more than some of those parents of the so-called nice girls can say for them."
Charlotte R was entirely serious. Her early misguided training, and the ideas which had been re-enforced in her behavior over the years had distorted her notions of moral and immoral, of bad and "naughty". It seemed a certainty that Charlotte would remain a virgin until after marriage. She had managed to maintain such a state despite the most compromising of circumstances. But it is difficult to predict the extent to which her premarital experience would allow her to function in a sexually normal way. She had built up strong guards against vaginal intercourse and had transferred her sexual responses to other parts of her body. This sexual pattern, maintained for several years, could remain with her and deprive her of the capacity to respond to normal sexual intercourse.
Psychiatric Commentary:
In a society which adheres to a code of sexual puritanism, ignoring substantial alterations in sexual behavior, "confusion", and "mixed-up ideas", are to be expected.
In Charlotte R's case, the confusion is piteously obvious. As a youngster, she is told in the vaguest terms about the "do nots" of sex. This is in keeping with the pervading sex codes which make it awkward for parents to discuss sexual matters with their children. The level of such discussions even among the most enlightened parents, is ordinarily low, inept, and piecemeal. For Charlotte, it was more destructive than helpful. In her child's mind, all other types of sex behavior except vaginal penetration was de rigeur. At the worst, it was only "naughty", not really bad.
Such an attitude was bound to sprout "contaminated blossoms". Her gradual involvement in orgiastic group behavior seems explainable. Still a young teener, she is a veteran at anal intercourse, fellatio, manual masturbation of the male, the employment of vaginal stimulation through artificial devices, and other sex practices.
But she is still a virgin. Consider the incongruity, the distortion of values! Charlotte, the "naughty virgin", who has lived her youthful years steeped in debauchery, is still more eligible, more suitable for marriage, because she remains a technical virgin, than a young woman who had had one single normal sex experience rupturing her hymen.
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The Virgin War Bride
At the time that her fiance was classified for active duty during the Korean War, Gertrude C was a beautiful, highly-sensitive young woman of twenty-four. She had her fiance, Carl, give her an engagement ring five years ago. They had grown up in the same neighborhood and been considered "steadies" since they graduated from junior high school togther. It had been a common agreement of theirs, as well as their families, that they would delay their marriage until Carl had established himself and was able to support a family. But on the very same day, within hours of his imminent departure, Gertrude became distraught and, weeping, pleaded that her fiance marry her before leaving.
A highly impressionable young lady, given to the writing and reading of poetry and continuously imaginative dreams, Gertrude expressed fear of something happening to Carl. She felt that she had to marry him, and she remained inconsolable despite all of his quiet reasoning. Finally, to quiet her, he agreed that they would go up to City Hall where the waiting period was being waived for just such situations and they would be married in a civil ceremony. They would keep it a secret and the families would still be able to have an elaborate church wedding when he returned.
This is what they did. They had a quiet dinner after the ceremony, and she went to the depot with Carl's folks where she kissed him long and lingeringly and pl-edged in the traditional vows of young lovers, "I will always wait for you."
There was no question about the consummation of the marriage. Both young people had been brought up to believe in, and to follow without personal conflict, the accepted moral tenets of society. In their long relationship, they had kissed and embraced but had never gone beyond the bounds of propriety.
In those situations similar in many of these respects, that involved thousands of young couples during the same period, the stage was set. This particular case, with all of the classic values, called for the ultimate of possible consequences. Gertrude and Carl had grown up together and were very close. Neither of them had dated with any other young people. They had been engaged "officially" for five years. There was never any doubt in their minds about eventual marriage and sharing their lives together. They had, despite normal emotional responses, kept themselves from engagement in a sexual relationship. Under the duress of wartime conditions, they were parted. Just before this, in a highly emotion-charged civil ceremony, they were married. The marriage was never consummated. Gertrude promised to wait for him. Further, and most crucially, Gertrude was a sensitive, highly impressionable young woman who, as mentioned before, wrote poetry and experienced an active dream life.
All of the ingredients were contained here, in the extreme sense, for a truly tragic aftermath, provided that Carl did not return. For whatever the odds are, in this instance, he did not; he was killed in action in Korea.
It was all of six years later, now at the age of twenty-nine, that Gertrude entered the office of the psychiatrist to undergo treatment. Still attractive, womanly, and showing the effects of strong emotional and sexual repression in her restless, nervous movements, crossing and uncrossing of her legs, sensuous rubbing of her own wrists and hands with her fingertips, Gertrude was willing to disclose only the remotest hint of her problem. She explained that she had come to the psychiatrist at the urging of her husband of four months because their marriage had not ben consummated. She accepted the problem as her own, since she was "too terribly afraid to let him come inside me". She was asked the question, "Are you in love with your husband?"
Her hesitancy before answering the question was a sufficient disclosure. "Why did you marry this man then?" she was asked.
"I need to be married. I need to be with a man, and I need to become a woman." She suffered from loneliness and from mental anxiety of approaching the age of thirty still in a virginal state.
"But if you are a sensitive woman, you cannot press yourself into such circumstances and be expected to react like an automaton and be taken by a man you do not love. Isn't it better to be alone in the hope that you will find someone whom you can respond to? This is only fair to yourself and to the man you marry."
Perhaps anticipating the opposite tack from the psychiatrist, and that he would have attempted to rationalize her fears as foolish and encourage her to consummate her marriage with her husband, Gertrude's reaction was startling. She seized the psychiatrist's hand and looked into his face, her eyes dilated with terror. "Doctor, I believe ... I believe I'm losing my mind." It was at that point that she began to relate her problem in depth and detail.
She out-lined the background of her relationship to Carl and his death in Korea and picked up the thread of events from there: "For nearly two years after Carl died, I fell as if I were existing In some kind of a trance, a dream. I would be walking along the street and suddenly I'd think that I had to go and meet Carl after work on his job as I always had. Or I would awaken in the morning and I would begin to plan what we would do that day as I always had. If I were in a store, I would go so far as to make a purchase of a gift for Carl before I remembered. I just could not make myself believe that he would never come back. Often I would dream that he had been lost and had returned and we were married. I lived that wedding in my dreams a thousand times. I would awaken in that empty room and cry my heart out.
"It was my older brother, Daniel, who shocked me out of it. My parents, everybody was very worried about me. He took me in his car to a home for-the-aged near our neighborhood. He walked me into the little park garden where the very old people were seated on benches. He told me to look at them-old men, old ladies, bent and drawn as crows. He told me people grow old before they are aware of it. He told me that one is young for a short time only. He told me to look at the old ladies and to ask myself if I wanted to become like that without having had a husband and a family and a full life. I remembered I burst into sobs, and he held me close to him for a long time, and when I was quieted, I felt different.
"I went out and applied for a job in a bank. I hadn't been working at all. My family lived comfortably, with sufficient income, and there was no pressure on me to go to work. Not for income. There I began to pay attention to my appearance and to use cosmetics, which I hadn't done since Carl's death. I bought myself lovely dresses. Men began to notice me, and I became aware of it. I believe I have always had strong feelings but I denied them in myself.
"I used to have wet dreams often. They stopped coming after Carl died. Now the dreams began to come again, and when I dream, I can see everything so clearly, as though it were real. I would see naked men and women having intercourse and suddenly I would be there, and a man would be having intercourse with me. I could feel myself moving around violently in my sleep, and I would have an orgasm and that would wake me up. I began to become very excited. I felt that I had to know the sensation of a man inside me.
"The feeling was made a lot stronger by one of the women who worked in the bank as a bookkeeper. She was an attractive divorcee. She was continually having affairs with men, and when we would go out to lunch, she would always talk about them and describe them in great detail. She'd tell me if a man was big or small or how long he made love to her and what else he did. I would be excited all afternoon-sometimes so much so that I would go into the ladies' room after lunch and I would have to masturbate.
"She was always trying to get me to go out with her. One night she said she had arranged for a man she was currently going with to bring a friend up to her apartment. She wanted to make it a foursome, and I agreed. I was afraid, and I felt myself being pulled in two different directions at the same time. At the last minute, I felt that I didn't have enough nerve to go and I took two glasses of brandy at home to calm myself. And then I left.
"The men were presentable. Mine, tall and dark, was the better looking of the two. My friend at the bank served several rounds of cocktails. She was very gay and became risque. And while she was dancing, she suddenly pulled away from her partner, reached up under her skirt and pulled off her garter belt and waved it in the air. She dangled it before her partner's face and said, 'How about a little battle action? Don't you want to win my trophy? Then she started for the bedroom and he went after her. I was sitting on the couch with the other man, and he put his arm around me. He tried to kiss me. I had quite a lot to drink. My head wasn't very clear. I was excited, and I kept on hearing all that laughter from the other room. My imagination was working overtime.
"Paula was intoxicated. She started shouting, 'Gather round. Gather round for the big bombardment,' or something like that. The man with me took my arm, walked over to the bedroom and flung open the door. And there they were together. She was under him with her legs wrapped around his waist, and I could see his organ inside her. Then I felt hands under my dress, urging me back on a chaise lounge in the bedroom. I knew he was removing my undergarments, but I didn't care to stop him. Then I felt his penis against my pubic hair. Then something happened to me. I could feel my flesh goose-pimpling, and I sat up with a start, pulling away from him. I had the feeling-only it was more than a feeling-that Carl had entered the room. I began to tremble, and the man stopped pressing me, thinking that I was afraid of him. He brought me a glass of straight whiskey to steady me, and he urged me to lie back on the lounge. The room seemed to be swimming and turning all around me by then. That's when I felt his hands parting my lips, and the next thing I knew his organ was in my mouth. I still had the feeling of Carl's presence. I don't know what made me do it, but I bit down with my teeth. The man screamed in pain, and I felt his hand smash me across, the face. He pulled away from me, staring at me like I was out of my mind. The others leaped off the bed to see what had happened. There was bleeding from his organ. He went to the bathroom, and then he left immediately to see a doctor. I took my coat and ran out of the apartment. I became sick when I reached the street, and I vomited.
"I never went back to the bank again. I was ashamed of facing Paula. I was afraid she might have told some of the others what I had done. I remained out of work for about five months, and I thought that the old feeling was going to settle over me, and I began to fight it and I threw it off. I persuaded myself that there was reason for my feeling as I did. I knew that it was natural for me to feel guilty about being with other men in that way. It was to have been Carl and me, and I had promised to wait for him. But he was dead, and he would never come back. I knew I had to drive him out of my mind.
"I went to work in a real estate office, and I met a man, a widower about forty-five who came in to rent an apartment. He invited me to lunch after I showed him several apartments, We remained together that day. He took me out to dinner, and I saw him every day for about a week after that. We were quite friendly and close. He was a partner in an infants' wear business. His wife had passed away the year previous from cancer. They were childless, and he wanted to marry again. He was serious with me from the start. But whenever we went anywhere, sometime during the day or evening in his company, I would get that chilling feeling once again that Carl was standing close by watching me. Whenever it happened, I would freeze up and become very rigid. My companion would ask me if I was all right, and I would reassure him, but I noticed that on occasion he would begin to question me about my health and my family, wondering if there was something wrong with me. It was that noticable.
"And then one weekend, we decided to go away together to a resort hotel. I wanted to go very much. I felt, in a way, that it was some kind of test of how we would be together. We were both anxious to find out. Marriage was almost a concluded affair between us. But this did seem necessary. I had a wonderful day. We played and danced and at night we shared the same bed. I was undressed and under the covers when he came into bed. I was sexually aroused at that time, and I had my mind on nothing else. When he had me put my hands on his penis, I did so unhesitatingly, and I did enjoy touching him. But as soon as he came close to entering me, it happened again. He felt me grow tense and freeze up. I tried to fight it off, but I couldn't. I felt so certain that Carl was in that room that I half sat up to look around. He noticed the fear in my eyes. He drew away from me. 'Am I so frightening and repelling as all that?' he asked me. He was very hurt. He took his things and found another room in the hotel. We left the next morning. He took me back to the city, and we never saw each other again after that.
"Another year and a half went by. My need to feel was almost unbearable now. My dreams were full of sex images. I was constantly masturbating, but even in my dreams I would feel somebody beginning to enter me, and I would freeze up. Even in my dreams, I felt that Carl was watching me.
"Then I met Arnold, my husband, at a church social. He was a bachelor in his middle thirties. He was kind to me. I had told him about Carl and his death. I explained that as the reason why I hadn't married. I did not tell him anything other than that. He was reserved and very much the gentleman. He kissed me, but that was as far as he went. He never laid a hand on me otherwise. I wanted him to, but I was glad that he didn't. Now I no longer felt that tension and the presence of Carl. I thought that it was gone now. I believed it When Arnold asked me to marry him, I agreed. I thought to myself, now that I was actually married, everything was going to be all right.
"That same night of the day we married, I undressed and went to bed confident and sure of myself. I didn't feel anxious. I fell glad that this moment had come. I was affectionate and encouraged Arnold to hold me and kiss me. When he came close to me and we were lying nude together, our arms around each other, my head was over his shoulder looking into the darkness of the room. That's when I saw Carl-I could see him with my eyes. He was standing there, just exactly as he was when he left me. He was no more than five or six feet from us. His face was pale and sickly. He was staring right into my eyes. I gasped and I cried out.
"Arnold leaped off the bed. 'I won't hurt you. I won't hurt you', he cried, trying to calm me. Even then, I could still see Carl. I kept pointing with my finger, crying out. I buried my face under the pillows. I began weeping. Later on when I sat up, Carl was gone."
Gertrude explained that the same incident had repeated itself on numerous occasions during the four months of her marriage to Arnold, and in no instance were they able to consummate their marriage. In her mentally overwrought state, a condition which had been building up for many years had now pushed her to the point of hallucination, often the onset of serious mental illness.
Since the subject had no true emotional attachment for her husband, it was the recommendation of the psychiatrist that the marriage be annulled. This action was subsequently followed. The subject remained a patient for ten months of continuous treatment, during which time she did not respond. The hallucination repeated itself several times, despite the fact that she had not engaged in any sexual exchange with a man. Since this was an indication of a deteriorative effect, a series of "shock treatments" was recommended. The patient responded satisfactorily, and the hallucinations did not return, though she had not as yet encountered someone to whom she could respond and put to a final test, the efficacy of the treatment.
Psychiatric Commentary:
The prevalent social pattern among young people of "going steady" is a difficult and unnatural one under the prevailing sex codes forbidding premarital sexual relations. It puts too much of a strain upon young people. For example, physiologically, the sexual drives in a young man of seventeen, as a statistical average, are actually at an apex and the curve is downward thereafter. Many young women are biologically mature and ready for marriage and procreation at sixteen. Still, the moral code frowns upon premarital sex relations.
Gertrude and Carl were "steadies" for many years, during five of which they were formally engaged. They managed to refrain from sexual relations. As normal, healthy young people, they undoubtedly had to "weather many a crisis" when momentary sexual intemperance got the better of discretion.
This background casts a clear, interpretive light upon the said consequences which followed: The long period of sexual restraint; her long betrothal to Carl; her marriage-unconsummated-at the time of his departure. Her promise "to wait".
Gertrude belongs to Carl. She was held in reservation for him. Her virginity was owed to him and to no one else.
After the long years of waiting, and the sudden mar riage which "opened up her sight to sex relations", Gertrude's excitement must have mounted every day Carl was in Korea. How excited a woman, how much in need of fulfillment, she must have been.
Then his death. He would never return to claim the virginity which was rightfully his and which she needed, desired so passionately to surrender.
Under the stress of this "sexual crossfire", Gertrude senses Carl's presence at moments when she comes close to defloration. The more she builds up to the moment, the closer she comes, and she realizes its ultimate inevitability, the more omnipresent does Carl loom. Imagining, thinking that marriage will release her from this bond, she discovers that, during this "moment of sexual truth", Carl assumes form before her eyes.
Gertrude was not struggling against her promise to Carl. Hers was a battle to release herself from the imprisonment of a single-minded obsession, that the critical issue in the male-female relationship is the "gift of her vagina". She had the profound knowledge that love is the critical issue, that she had given herself in that sense to Carl, and she would have to experience love or a vital part of her feminine nature would atrophy. The sex act is one facet of an entire, wondrous repertoire of love. Faced in this light the bridging of her virginity would not provide the one all-encompassing, volcanic impasse.
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The Farmer's Daughter
A classic refutation of the slur on the virtue of the farmer's daughter in the constant succession of off-color anecdotes related by traveling salesmen, is the case of Nora L, a quiet, hard-working domestic who had been raised on a farm. Comely and pleasing of countenance, with the light coloring of the Scandanavian peoples, she is brought to an analyst for treatment by her employers of three years, who have a deep and abiding affection for her. In addition to her role as housekeeper, she functions as a governess for the two youngsters in the household, since her employers, both professionals, are away at business during the day.
The first hint of Nora's emotional problem came as a result of an unusual circumstance. The residence of the family is in a large duplex apartment in a major apartment house complex in the city. Since the windows of Nora's room faced the courtyard, she was able to see quite clearly the activities of the people who recently occupied the apartment directly opposite her own room. The distance separating them is no more than fifty feet.
Two prostitutes occupied that apartment, and Nora became aware of the constant succession of male callers and their promiscuous sexual behavior in open observance from the vantage point of her bedroom. She began having weeping spells and then insisted to her employers that she was leaving. She did not explain the reason for her upset; but the older of the children-a ten-year-old girl, who had noticed Nora's response to the activities across the court yard-pointed them out to her father. Although concerned with such flagrant immorality flaunted in close proximity to his family, the man was more relieved than concerned. He said he would contact the police and press for their removal from the apartment opposite, and he complimented Nora on her virtue and her sensitivity. But when she continued her unusual behavior, he brought her to the attention of the analyst.
In the presence of the analyst, Nora was shy and reserved and was ashamed to express herself by referring to sex in any way. Nor could she use any word to describe the male sex organ, not even as "sexual part". She actually responded with a noticeable physical recoil at the mention of the male sex organ by the analyst, so great was her terror of it.
The analyst began to make headway only when he promised that if she would try to co-operate with him, he would rid her of this fear, and she would never be frightened or feel the need to hide or weep at the thought or sight of the male-female sex act. Also, since he was aware that she was a virgin at the age of twenty-seven, he ventured to say that, with successful treatment, he would even herself be able to receive a man in this way. The very mention of it was enough to get Nora to flee the office. Only the kindly ministrations of the analyst's mature female receptionist, together with the reassurances of the analyst, were able to persuade her to remain and face the problem.
She came from a family of four children of which she was the only girl and the youngest child. The boys were big, strapping, boisterous, hard-working farm children. The girl was always diminutive and delicate, and not given to any but the lightest farm chores.
The father was a coarse man, even vulgar; in this atmosphere, it might have been anticipated that Nora would have grown up with little inhibition or restraint or awkwardness in the company of males. But such sensitivity, thrust into the "unshielded face of lust" exposed everywhere in farm animal life, brought from Nora a totally negative response. There was an obvious tremor in her voice as she described her childhood reaction to the fury of horses engaging in the sex act. She was much upset by the powerful sex organ of the bull and the furiousness in his assault on the cow. She witnessed the rooster's domination over the hens. Everywhere to the sensitive child was this act conspicuous; always it started with the extended male organ and was accompanied by furious violent behavior.
Instead of being able to accept this as a natural part of the performance of living creatures, she became increasingly troubled and frightened by it, especially when she made the bridge between farm animal and the human animal in this similarity of behavior. She had once observed one of her brothers "putting his thing" inside the anus of a duck. And another time, she came upon a scene which was etched in her mind for years and was still recounted with obvious pain of recollection.
"I went to the old barn to play one afternoon. We had two barns. The old one was no longer used any more, and I would play games alone there. But when I entered the barn, I saw one of the hired men with his ... his thing stretched out like the bull. He was pulling the housekeeper down on the ground and tossing her skirts up to expose her naked thighs. I wanted to run away, but I was afraid to move. And then he stabbed her with it like it was a knife, cutting inside her."
The child stood by, petrified, and observed the hired man with his sex organ extended, furiously battering the squealing and moaning housekeeper. "For some time after, I became afraid of my father and my brothers and I would run away when they came near me. They only laughed at it, as if it was some kind of silliness and paid me no attention. My mother was a hard-working, quiet woman. She took care of me-fed me, made certain that I wore clean clothes, and that was all. She hardly ever talked to me, nor I to her.
"One time when I was about twelve years old, though I was very small and undeveloped and looked no more than nine or ten, something like that happened again to frighten me. My father had caught Edward, one of my brothers, behind one of the farm buildings, putting his thing into a girl who was a child from the neighboring farm. Her name was Olga, and she was about fourteen years old but grown up like a woman. My father took them both into the house. He then undressed them and began to beat them both with a heavy razor strap. My father was a hard man with a terrible temper and given to old-fashioned ways. He still shaved with the old straight razor. He did not permit any cleaning of the house with a vacuum cleaner but only with brooms and brushes. My father made all of us children watch the beating, letting us know how terrible a thing it was to do and how terrible the punishment must be. I always felt that it was terrible, and now that my father beat them for it and called it so, I felt that I had been right all along and had reason to be frightened.
"I hated the farm. I hated having to be around the animals, and wherever I went, seeing them do that thing. They would always seem like they were going crazy when they did it, snorting or gnashing their teeth, and the females always trembling and looking frightened. And when one of my aunts in the city arranged for me to work as a mother's aid for a family, I was very happy. I was eighteen years old and leaving the farm was the happiest day of my young life.
"I worked for many families after that. One time I worked in a large apartment house, about as large as the one I'm working in now. But it had elevators. One of the janitors around the place was always following me and trying to talk to me, and I would run away when I saw him. But one time I went down to the basement to the room where they had some washing machines because oui washing machine upstairs was broken. It was late in the afternoon, and no one was there, and I saw the janitor come in. He began saying filthy things to me. I was turned around and I wouldn't face him, and I kept on putting the clothes in the machine, hoping that he would go away.
"Then I felt him come up behind me. He grabbed me around the waist. He pressed his body up against me, and I felt his thing against my leg. I tried to push him away, but he turned me around. He pressed his thing in between my thighs. Suddenly I became all wet, and he was making terrible noises and rolling his eyes and moaning just like the bull. I dug my fingernails into his face, and I could see blood just under his eye where I made a gash. He grabbed for his face, and I began running. I ran out of the house and down the street. I was afraid to go upstairs. I was afraid to go back to the apartment house. I had enough money in my pocket, and I went to see my aunt, and I stayed with her until I found another job.
"This is the best job I ever had. I am very happy with this family. I love the children, and my employers respect me. I want to be helped if you can help me."
In simply human, untechnical terms, the analyst began to explain, over a series of many visits, something of the nature of life, of living things. He did not dwell at first upon the sexual aspects. He described and showed how the internal organs of digestion work. He showed the operation of the heart, the liver, the kidneys. He explained how, at first, how ugly and repelling they seemed-like cleaning out the innards of a fowl. But they were only strange and repelling until one began to know and understand their purpose and their function. The act of defecation became, in the light of understanding, a necessary "mechanical" process of expelling waste after digestion. It was necessary to preserve life.
"After a while, he touched upon birth and reproduction as an end process, the wonder of it, the great miracle of the repetition of life. Because of all life's processes, its demands were the strongest-to insure that the race would be continued and new children would be born, the human being was given instincts to bring man and woman together, to bring male and female creatures together, to become one for this purpose. And around this act "was draped the mantle of love itself, in order that man and woman could learn to express such feeling with the most noble and uplifting of all emotions. The fierceness, the violence, the fury was only a symptom of the strong feelings of love waiting to be released.
Within a period of several months, the analyst was able to progress with the subject to the point of exposing her to books on the subject of sexology and the function of the organs and glands. She thus became able to confront illustrations of the male organ without fear or dread. The next step in her treatment was books on art and statuary with reproduced photographs of great works which communicated the aesthetic values in the male physique. It was then recommended, and the subject followed such recommendation, that she visit a major art museum in the city. Her interest in motion pictures was kindled with pictures selected by the analyst, in order that she might begin to relate romantically to some of the more popular and appealing motion picture actors.
The last record of the subject showed that she was dating and apparently relating in a normal way with male companions.
Psychiatric Commentary:
The Farmer's Daughter
The violence in the struggle of nature," when observed from childhood in natural surroundings, as "the pillar in the law of life" is generally accepted and assimilated without event or disfiguration in the character of the child. The best and most natural way to learn is through a direct exposure to nature; the sexual and reproductive processes are everywhere to behold, and they yield up their secret and their meaning in every pollinated flower, every lamb, every little chick.
Nora L's difficulty did not originate with the "gross observances" of the farm animals in the performance of the sex act. This her eyes observed. But her eyes are only instruments of a total organism of which the brain is the interpretative system. On that brain was imprinted the idea of a world without tenderness, without concern for others, only self-interest-in short, a world without love. Her life as a child is separate and lonely. Her family, her brothers, are distant, separated not only by an emotional void but by the difference in sex which they make obvious and frightening.
The sex act without the redeeming virtue of love becomes incomprehensible and undesirable in the mind of the impressionable child. Sexual desire, lust, the sexual organs, the behavior of the creature in the throes of sexual arousal, takes on an ugliness and aspect of cruelty and abuse. Nora saw this in the sexual behavior of the males in her family and the hired man. Nora experienced this as she grew older in the sexual threats to her own person.
For the virtuous woman who has remained withdrawn and inviolate behind "the curtain of Venus", the prospect of sudden violation, the rupturing of her maidenhead becomes wonderously transformed by the emotion of love. What is harsh, cruel, ugly, becomes desirable, impassioned, and a thing of beauty. Sex is an act of feeling, not merely one of performance.
The Phallus Slave
"The old bastard-that sick, vicious old man. He led her to the grave with his dick (male organ) and he knew it. Every time he would come home after boozing and whoring around, all he had to do was just let the dick out of his pants and stroke it until it started getting hard. And he'd look at her, he'd watch her eyes, with that crooked, twisted, idiotic grin on his face. He didn't care if I were there or any of the other kids were there. He'd just pull it out. Then he'd move across the room to her and start shoving her into the bedroom. If I could've used the ax on it, I would've chopped it off him. I would've done it."
This was Betty M speaking, a short, dark, provocative girl of twenty-two, spewing vitriol, pure hatred from deep inside her system. She was recalling her childhood, her father and his sexual domination of her mother. Betty was raised in the South, one of nine children in a family characterized by sociologists as "poor whites". The father was a cruel, uncaring, hard-drinking man without morals or a sense of responsibility to the family he had sired. He subjected her mother to a life of drudgery, since he made little or no attempt to support the household, and she was compelled to take in wash, mending, and any other odd jobs which would bring in some meager income.
"He would disappear for days, sometimes weeks. Honest to God. My mother would just break her back. Nine children. Do you know what it is to raise nine children, and when you don't have any help and you never have enough of anything you need for all of the kids at the same time?
I was the second from the oldest child, and the oldest girl. I knew what was going on in that house. I knew it all by the time I was ten. There were families around us, and there were women who wouldn't take it, kicking some of those no-good bastards out into the street. But not my ma.
"One time he was gone for four months. He went up to Atlanta. He was up to something no good. I thought he would never come back, and I was glad. I kept thinking that some other men would come around. My mother was still a good looking woman. It was evening, and my father just pushed through the screen door. All the kids turned around and looked at him. He didn't even notice the kids. He never did. He just looked at Ma, and there he went through it again, his hand on his pants. I began crying, 'No, Ma. no. Don't, Ma.' But he had that dick out and he was moving across the room to her. She kept backing off just a little. Her face was always so tired. At times like this, it looked different. It was ... there was a kind of softness in it.
"But I didn't want her to get like that. He started leading her into the other room. I grabbed at his back and began pulling at his shirt. He turned around and slammed me with his arm, and I fell on the floor. When he was on top of her in the bed, kids could hear the bed creaking away and Mom moaning and then crying softly to herself. A king of the roost. That dirty old goat was back, eating the food she had to slave to buy, stealing money off her for wine, and playing cards, gambling away pennies on the steps in front of the house with other no-good bums like him. They weren't like human beings. They were like animals.
"We lived like animals," Betty cried out vehemently. "And when those good-looking bitchy neighbor women went by, they'd take out their dickies and start pointing to them and making filthy obscene remarks. And the women, they'd just laugh. I hated them for it. I hated them as much as I did the men who did it to them.
"One time, I walked into the bedroom. It was early in the day, and Ma had got some work doing laundry for someone. She wasn't home. One of those bitchy women was in the bed. She had her ass up in the air, and he was pounding away at her. The door was wide open, and the kids were wandering all over the place. I started screaming at him to get out, get out or I'd kill him. I'd kill them both. He told me to shut up or he'd come and get me. I was afraid but I kept on screaming. I didn't want Ma to see them like that. The thought just cut through me like a knife. I made so much noise that the woman got out. I just stayed out of sight until he forgot about it. His brain was so drowned in booze and wine, he couldn't remember from one minute to the next.
"My ma was thirty-two years old when they laid her in the ground. Thirty-two years old and she looked more than fifty. She had nine kids. She walked around with a big belly as long as I remember. There she was pregnant and lifting, scrubbing, washing. All because of that dick of his. I didn't hate my mother. I loved her. And she wasn't one of those bitches. She was a good woman, and I know why she would go into that bedroom. I could see it in her face, There was nothing else for her in the whole world. Just to feel some love. She needed to feel some love."
Betty buried her face in her hands and wept quietly Then, embarrassed at her emotion, she wiped her face and began to talk once again. Still as she spoke, the tears rolled out of her eyes. "I know how she felt because, God damn it, I feel like that now. I need to feel love. I hate that dick. I hate every man in the world for having one, for using it as he does. But I need it. I need it inside me. I need to open up as a woman. I need to feel love, and I need help because I'm being torn to pieces. There's so much hate in me that I can't let a man take me. I'm afraid that they'll be able to hold that thing over me. I'm afraid that they'll be able to lead me around after it and drag me down until they bury me like Ma in a pine box, without a chance to live."
Betty was a seriously troubled young woman. At the age of twenty-three, having been deprived of feelings of love and belonging for so many years, she was starved for affection. She knew, emotionally as a woman, how strong her demand was. She was a sensual, easily-excitable woman; but she had erected such powerful psychological barriers that the sight of the object, the male organ, the indispensible instrument of female fulfillment, was, to her mind, the most insidious and destructive of all weapons.
She repeated many incidents wherein sexual encounters with a male had resulted in near assault or rape. It appeared as though she was always engaged as an antagonist in a battle against the male sex organ.
"I worked in a diner. Three weeks ago, I was in the kitchen when we were closed and cleaning up. And I was alone there with a fat bastard who had hired me. He came up behind me, feeling me up and down. I heard his zipper. I turned around and got my knee up into his balls. He screamed and grabbed a hold of me. I started yelling for Eddie, one of the countermen who was cleaning up out front. He came running, but do you think he was going to help me? He started helping the old bastard. I was kicking and struggling. They pulled my panties off and started putting me down on one of the meat cutting tables. Lucky I reached for one of the damn cleavers. I started swinging that thing around, and they backed off. I had the cleaver in my hand. That fat bastard had his pants open and I could see that dick of his. The way I held that cleaver in my hand, he could see what I was thinking, and I swear he turned as white as a sheet, and he just kept on muttering, 'Get the hell out of here. Get the hell out of here. Just get out of here. Get out.' "I got out all right."
But to Betty M., not only was the woman placed in a state of defenseless surrender by the male organ, but the male himself was also characterized as being subject to this "organ of lust". Even those men of seemingly better human natures were described in this way: "I got a job as an usherette in one of the movie theaters. Pete, the manager of the theater, took a liking to me. I liked him a lot myself. He'd spring for hamburgers and cokes. He'd talk to me without making passes. So finally I let him kiss me and feel me around in the dressing room. He started using his finger on me, and I got hot. Next thing you know, I was straddling one of the chairs, my legs up in the air, and he was standing in front of me, that dick of his sticking out. I liked him, and I wanted to feel him. But I took one look at that thing, just one look, and I went up out of the chair like a tiger. I shoved my hands up against his chest, and fell over backwards on the floor. He tried to tell me he didn't mean no harm. He even said he was in love with me and maybe we could talk about getting married.
"I liked him. I said that. But all I could get through my head was, once he put that into me, once I began moaning and sobbing like my ma, once he knew how much I needed him, how much I needed to feel, I'd never belong to myself again. So I cut out and I left the movie theater. I quit."
Betty M's case history has an unfortunate conclusion. So deeply entrenched were her attitudes that advice and guidance could not change her state of mind. She continued her visits for a while. Then, after taking a job as a dance hall hostess in a honkey-tonk section of town, she ceased her visits entirely. Several months later, she turned up at the office to pay a bill still owing, and she announced that she had solved her problem. This was her solution : "The way out is not to belong to any one man. Men aren't the only ones who can use women and get away with it. Women can use them, too. I had a roommate who showed me how. She's a hooker, a prostitute, and so am I now. I have five, sometimes ten, men a day. Then I wipe them off with a towel, and they pay me. I don't need any one man. There's always one standing right behind him, and I can take him if I want him. Or I can turn him down."
From virgin to prostitute. This is Betty M's case history. Driven by her fear of becoming a phallus slave to one man, into prostitution, she had become instead a slave to a male social institution as ancient as history.
Psychiatric Commentary:
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The Phallus Slave
When the sex act is used as a coercive weapon against people starved for affection, it takes on a truly degrading character. Betty's mother slaved to maintain her family even on the lowest level of subsistence living. It was a penurious existence, threadbare and void of hope, even of meaning. To feel, to respond to the act of love was, to her, to grasp momentarily for Life itself. Her husband, a callous, brutal man sensed this and used his sex organ to destroy his wife's ego, her pride, and any resistence she might have had against his profligate, irresponsible way of life. Betty M saw him use his sex organ to drive her into the ground and seal shut the cover of her pine casket. This was more than symbolism in Betty's mind. It was as dreadfully real as life.
Ironically, because Betty saw Life in this light, its' pitilessness, its unrewarding harshness, she was as much in need of an emergence of her own womanliness as her mother was. Her dilemma was extreme and her response to it comprehensible in this context. She would be damned if she would permit herself to become enslaved to the phallus. Yet, she knew that she was already damned without it.
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The Hypochondriac virgin
Elena G, a tall, slim, fashion-mannequin type of woman, in her late twenties, developed a medical history dealing with symptomatic venereal disease at the age of thirteen. The surprising feature was that she was a virgin, rigidly and inflexibly so, and remained so up until the age of twenty-six. She was a pronounced hypochondriac, her imagined ills always relating to her sex organs. She read all the literature on venereal disease and knew all of the symptoms and much of the details on the progress of the venereal diseases as well as their deteriorating effects. She knew that, in exceptional instances, it was possible to contact gonorrhea in unsanitary public toilets or that kissing a syphilitic in the lip chancre stage, if the recipient had an open wound on the lip, could result in the transmission of the disease. This is characteristic of the hypochondriac. She had in mind always an endless number of symptoms to which she would attach some importance and which convinced her she had contracted venereal disease.
Elena was a member of a family, which, because of a set of unfortunate circumstances, had suffered from several illnesses and premature deaths. This was the background of her own hypochondria. However, where ordinarily the hypochondriac runs the entire range of possible illnesses and diseases, Elena's "ailments" were exclusively of a sexual nature.
She would turn up at the physician with a rash around the vaginal area. This she managed to bring on by continual nervous touching, manipulating, scratching, and gen eral irritation of these sensitive vaginal tissues. She was continually inserting various instruments inside her-such things as bananas, carrots, of an oblong nature, to determine (she insisted) whether she was suffering from some internal inflammation. This concentration on her sex parts and continual touching stimulated her to a high and continuous state of excitement which demanded constant termination in orgasm. Under questioning, to account for her behavior from the point of having left her house to the office of the physician, she described her actions as follows:
"I examined myself just before I left. (She had managed to acquire a dental mirror on a long stem for this purpose.) This examination excited me, and I had to masturbate. To make certain that on the way over to your office the exertion of walking didn't irritate me internally, I immersed a tampon in Vaseline and put that inside me. But on the way over, my movements with that inside me excited me some more, and I had to stop at a restaurant to go into the bathroom to masturbate again. After that, I stopped at a luncheonette, and sitting on one of those counter stools I had a coke. Then I began thinking, on the way over here, that hundreds of people a day sit on those counter stools and that my skirt was very short, and I straddled it. I might have exposed my vagina to VD contact in this way."
She knew the physician would explain that this was not only un-likely but virtually impossible. She anticipated his comments with, "I do know that's not the way it usually happens, but there are always rare possibilities. Freak things do happen. So I stepped into the hotel next door and went into the ladies lounge and examined myself once again, just to see if there was any kind of inflammation or anything."
When asked whether, in this instance, she had manipulated herself to an orgasm, the subject's response was, "Yes. I practically always do because I get so excited."
Elena was continually subjecting herself to the check against her contraction of syphilis. Even negative results did not remove all of her doubts. She knew that often as the disease progressed beyond the first stage, there was little sign of any illness at all and that, in the final stage, paresis leads to brain deterioration and insanity. She was continually imagining pains in her head and "becoming forgetful and having visions".
Because of her high state of sexual excitement, she was driven to find vicarious ways of appeasing herself. Since she was provided with more than an adequate allowance by an indulgent father, who owned a computer service bureau, she was able to amass a considerable library of pornographic materials. She placed her name on many of the mailing lists for such materials. She had hundreds of still photographs of men and women engaging in all manner of normal and abnormal sex practices, as well as pornographic films, familiar to stags and male club groups. Contacts in this area of interest led her to places where sexual exhibitions of an obscene nature were performed. She described one such instance when she turned up at the physician's office and insisted upon an examination for gonorrhea. She mentioned she had been to a "sex show", in which two male Negro dancers had engaged in sex with a white woman. She met them after the performance and offered them $100 to perform for her privately. They did so that evening in the hotel room of the female member of the group. During the course of this "command performance", the subject had raised her skirts above her hips, exposed her sexual part, and began to masturbate, as she observed the sex performance. "I was very excited, as she took on the two men and when I felt I was going to have a climax, I threw my head back and closed my eyes and I was rubbing violently with my hand. I didn't realize that one of the dancers had come over to me with his exposed sex organ, and he touched me with it-he actually made contact with me at the lips here" (she pointed to the entrance to her vagina) "before I realized it, and I pushed him away. I was very upset. And then I remembered that his organ was wet at the tip. I was sure it was some kind of a discharge, the kind men get when they have gonorrhea. I know, I know absolutely I have gonorrhea."
When the authorities raided just such a performance at another time and found her present, the resultant newspaper publicity infuriated her parent who ordered her either to "marry and settle down" or face the prospect of being driven out of the house and being cut off from any allowance. That would mean she would have to work for a living. Never having had to shift for herself, this latter was an alternative she would not take. Because she was an extremely attractive girl, her father was able to introduce a succession of eligible and personable men who held executive positions in his firm, for her to make a choice.
She settled upon a former collegiate athlete who turned out to be as indulgent to her as her father and willing to cater to her every whim. Her "whims" included a constant round of repeated venereal disease examinations prior to their marriage, all negative. After her marriage and her defloration, her hypochondriacal behavior became more terrible and persistent than before. It involved, however, at this time, not only her own person but her husband's. At the time of her appearance for psychological help, after eighteen months of marriage, she had destroyed the peace of her home and her husband's state of mind, and had led herself to the point of institutionalization.
Psychiatric Commentary:
The Hypochondriac Virgin
"A little knowledge," as in the case of the pyschologist virgin, "can be a bad thing". Elena M, however, was not possessed of the redeeming quality of Julia's exceptional intelligence. Troubled by the specter of death and illness in her family, she felt her person constantly under the threat of destructive and pernicious disease.
The venereal diseases, the most "secretive and shameful" of human maladies, could easily become the most terrible and threatening in the frightened and imaginative mind of a child. Excessive concentration on the sexual parts and their function is common enough among young children. Elena transposed her fear of disease upon her private parts and the hypochondriacal pattern dealing with the venereal disease had begun.
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Virgin For Sale
Melanie O, at the age of sixteen, was already an extremely beautiful, shapely and provocative blonde. She was brought to the attention of the school authorities when, while undressing to participate in gymnasium classes, the teacher discovered that she was wearing a chastity belt. Under questioning, the teener, who was witty and bright, disclosed not only an interest in but an experience with sex far beyond her years. As it turned out, she wore this cumbersome and archaic garment at the insistence of her mother, not because of her own promiscuity; indeed, as an examination proved, Melanie was a virgin. Melanie accepted the chastity belt as a "fact of life", because she had worn one for as long as she could remember.
When it was discovered that Melanie's mother was a prostitute and practiced her prostitution in the same apartment where the child grew up, Melanie was directed to a clinic for purposes of a psychological profile. This bright, wholesome looking, pretty sixteen-year-old was entirely amoral and had absolutely no conception of sex as sinful or evil. When asked whether the only reason for her virginity was the presence of the chastity belt, her response was, "Hell no. I'm not going to get laid the first time until the price is right. Sondra (her mother, whom she addresses by her first name) knows what she's doing. Why 'cherry off cheap" (sacrifice virginity for a low price)? "I'm pretty now, and in a couple of years, I'm going to be beautiful.
"Sondra's very beautiful. She was gorgeous when she was younger. Well, it was always Sondra's idea that she would set me up as a 'shack job' (mistress) for some rich manufacturer or something. Or maybe even get me married off right. Sondra doesn't want me 'bunk bouncing'" (indulging in indiscriminate sexual intercourse for money) "the way she has had to."
Althought the examiner was a male, Melanie felt no awkwardness or embarrassment in discussing any aspect of sex-her own behavior or her mother's. "About this harness (chastity belt), I don't like the goddamn thing, especially in hot weather when I start perspiring-you know, between my legs. But it's necessary. I would hate like hell to find myself in a situation where somebody would rip my pants off and rape me. It'd ruin the whole works in five, maybe ten minutes. And sometimes, I don't mind having it just to be a little more sure of myself. When I get hot, I get plenty hot. Of course, I never get hot with the kids around school. They're just kids. They don't know anything about me or Sondra."
Melanie then went on to describe something of her living condition and her exposure to prostitution "on her own doorstep".
"Don't get the idea because I don't have anything to do with the kids at school that I'm hard up or anything. I get my kicks at home with Sondra and some of the characters that come in to see her. Lots of times we have a ball. The kids at school 'come off in their pants if they kiss a girl or nuzzle her. I've been doing about everything there is to do with men except get laid, since I've been just a kid. I get paid for jerking them off, and I can give a blow job (fellatio) as good as Sondra. And she's a real pro. She works on them until their eyeballs pop." (Laugh)
Subsequent to this interview, Melanie's mother was called in. The entirely amoral attitude of the daughter became understandable immediately during the first five minutes of the interview. She had no conscience, sense of guilt, nor compunctions about subjecting her own daughter to prostitution since childhood.
"Listen. I'm a mother. I know about men and I know about sex. I know what to let her do and what not to let her do. I never did anything to hurt her. Take a look at her. You saw her. Did you ever see a healthier, better-looking sixteen year old kid? So she jerked off and blew a bunch of characters, and she learned what it was all about a couple of years ahead of time. And she learned it while I was around. You think it's better if these kids sneak around down in basements or in garages or get themselves a dose of clap, or get knocked up, because they don't know what they're doing? Is that supposed to be the smart way to do things?
"I know what's healthy and what's sick. And she knows what's healthy and what's sick. She can tell by looking at a guy in five seconds whether she should have anything to do with him. How much do those kids who go to school in her class know? What's more, she may be a sixteen-year-old kid but she knows how to handle men. She knows how they feel, she knows how they think, and she knows how to get along with them without getting toungue-tied and crossing her legs and acting like a moron. She's a smart kid. She may speak or act a little wild, but she knows where to do it. You go ask in school if there's anything wild about her, or if she says any words out of line. She don't. No slobbering moron kid is going to get excited and boff her, (fornicate with her) and louse up her chance at living the way she'd like to live. I mean, mink coats, Palm Beach, fun, kicks, seeing things, doing things.
"What do you want her to do? Tie up with some moron stock clerk, live on seventy-five bucks a week, raise a bunch of kids and work her guts out? She's pretty, and she's going to be beautiful, and the way I want her to live, she's going to stay beautiful. I wish my mother raised me the way I'm raising her. Look at me. Do I look like a dog? I don't live half like my kid is going to. I'm forty years old, and I'll match my face and my body with any of those dumb creeps that run around those PTA meetings and talk about how to raise kids and grow up and have likes like their own. What's more, how many of those mothers of the kids in Melanie's class can say their kids are still cherry (virgin)?
"You tell me what I'm doing so terrible to Melanie. She knows all the dirty words. You think the other kids in the class don't? Maybe you'll say she hasn't got a clean mind. If you had a chance to record the pictures those kids have in their mind when they start jerking off, you'd see what a dirty mind is. Okay, they think about it, but Melanie has a chance to do it. When she grows up, she won't have all kinds of screwy ideas inside of her head about maybe what could happen and didn't happen-or maybe what they'd like to happen and are ashamed to think they'd like it to happen, all those things I read about in those letters to the psychologists in newspapers. I read about kids bozing it up. I read about kids jamming their arms with stuff (narcotics). I read a lot of things like that.
"You find a cleaner-yes, I said cleaner-and more straightforward kid than Melanie in that whole damned school, and I'll bow three times to you and tell you, you're right and that I'm a stupid slut. But if you don't, maybe you've got to consider that all of your ideas of telling me how to live and to raise my kid need some changing. These people ought to mind their own damn business, raise their own kids better, and do some things to straighten out what's twisted in themselves before they come around and tell us how to live."
The authorities made an effort to forcibly remove Melanie from her mother's custody, but before they could, mother and daughter both left the state.
Correspondence directed to the examiner some twenty months later, and tinged with noticeable bitterness, disclosed in part, " ... Maybe you and those high and mighty school authorities have been wondering about what happened to Melanie. Not maybe! I could hear you gossiping your heads off all the way out here. Anyway, I have news for you and them. I have been waiting to write this letter. Boy, have I! Melanie is on a world tour-England, France, Italy, Japan, Israel, the works! She is in the company of a very wealthy businessman. Not old, either. Forty-seven. He made a fortune with retail furniture stores, and he figured it was about time to start enjoying himself. His wife is happy with clubs, dog shows and stuff like that. So Melanie is in! Mama set it up. He liked the idea of a beautiful girl along with him. And one who was lots of fun. Not a hooker, either. Melanie was a virgin, remember!
"They're going to spend a year on the trip. That's a lot of geography Melanie wouldn't pick up in school and a lot of everything else! She'll see more and have more experiences than most of the kids in that school will have in a lifetime. And when they get back, this man plans to have Melanie live in his home in Palm Beach. I know what you will say to that. It's temporary. Nuts! So is anything else in this world. People die in accidents every day. People are separted and divorced every day. The only sure bet is the grave. But most people haven't got the guts to face that idea.
"Even if this doesn't work out, Melanie will end up with a bank account, clothes, jewelry, and experiences that are wofth a lot. If luck is on her side, she will have a lot of wealthy men after her. She's gorgeous and smart, and I'm glad I didn't keep her buried in some stinking small town suburb and let her shrivel up and rot like the kiddies who attacked me. Send them a message for me. Drop dead!
Sincerely nobody's but my own, Sondra."
Psychiatric Commentary:
Much of Sondra's assault of the hypocrisy of contemporary sexual morality is justifiable. Her position is extreme, however, and is defensively used as justification of her existence as a prostitute. Her arguments in this respect are insupportable. She had reduced her identity to that of a "sex service station". She has no love, only sex, in her life, and an illigitimate child without a father. She is projecting the distortions of her own misspent life upon her daughter who is a wonderfully healthy and natural personality, remarkably obedient to her mother.
To encourage Melanie to "marry well"-that is, to seek an emotional relationship with a man of established financial status-is an understandable and defensible stand. Sondra has evidently suffered from the excessive pressures of economic deprivation, to which she ascribes the unfortunate circumstances of her life. But to steep Melanie in an atmosphere of licentiousness, which has totally destroyed her ability to act within the moral framework of our society, was a serious mistake. Melanie's amorality is bound to run headlong into the powerful social forces of condemnation time and again and reduce her to the status of prostitute on one of a number of levels, or, possibly, as is frequently the case, successively on several from her current role as a "kept woman" to party girl, call girl, hooker, brothel inmate.
Melanie already has absolutely no sense of an "appropriate sexual response". She is just as inclined to permit a man to indulge in anal intercourse with her as to kiss or fondle her. It is all a matter of price. Her virginity is simply a device to bring the highest price yet.
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Virgin, Baby
Annette C was a charming, diminutive, astonishingly young-looking woman though her figure was fairly well developed. Her first question, in a childish, coquettish voice was, "Aren't I sweet little baby doll?" In personality and attitude, she was twelve-years-old. Yet, as a result of the analyst's contact with her brother who had arranged the appointment, he knew her age to be twenty-eight.
Her child-like clothing, the type youngsters will often wear to parties, contributed much to her appearance of arrested adolescence. She paced back and forth across the room, turning from side to side, mimicking a model, and asked, "Don't you think I'm a pretty little girl? Do you like my dress and shoes?" She then made a sudden pirouette, spinning about the room with her dress climbing up over her thighs and then exposing her scanty and overly ruffled panties. Entirely calculated in her affected male arousal, she now turned to the analyst saying, "Wouldn't you like to hug and kiss me? Everyone likes to hug and kiss Baby Doll." She moved up to him and put her hands on his shoulders, moving one hand up and down his arm, teasingly.
Annette's older brother, a man of forty-four, arranged for her to undergo analysis because this seemingly-innocent, charming woman was behaving in the most promiscuous fashion, going out with men many years younger and allowing them to have sex with her indiscriminately and without resistance. In one instance, her brother had caught her in the garage at night in her own car with two young men who had brought her home after a date. She was entirely undressed and lying across the back seat with one of the young men lying on top of her having sexual intercourse while the other was astride her face and engaging in fellatio. Yet, when her brother interrupted them and got rid of the two young men, his sister had looked up at him innocently and insisted she was just having fun "on a date", and the boys wanted to see how pretty she was all naked and everything. She would not admit that she had engaged in sexual intercourse. She told her brother that was "silly" but that, "Someday, I will be able to make love to a man when I grow up."
In another incident, while her two elderly parents had been away on a vacation, her brother entered her room to find her under the covers with a young man, both of them completely undressed. She had responded, according to his description, without embarrassment and with the same complete innocence, as though it were not possible for her to do anything "wrong". "The boy just wanted to sleep with a naked little Baby doll," she said, explaining the situation to her brother. "I told him when I grew up, maybe I would marry him and he could treat me like a real woman."
It was these instances that made her brother realize that she was in need of treatment, that she was not functioning normally.
The analyst asked her to sit down alongside his desk. She did so. Not for one instant did she cease making the random little movements, turning her head cutely and coquettishly, blinking her eyes, running her finger up and down the bare skin of her arm, alternately playing with the hem of her skirt, and advertently allowing it to climb up and, with excessive little-girl embarrassment, drawing the hem down to her knees. The analyst asked her questions about whether she wore padding in her brassiere, if she had abundant pubic hair, at what age she experienced her menstrual period.
"Now wait a minute," she answered after several garbled and incomplete replies, "where is the little girls' room?"
She excused herself, and minutes later she returned stark naked. She looked up at the analyst, and, turning right and left and spinning around, just as she had displayed her costume, now exhibited her body. "See, I don't need any padding in my brassiere, do I? But I don't have very much hair. Just a little lovely down. Isn't it soft? Have you ever seen such a pretty baby doll?"
Once again, she came up directly to the analyst. "Would you like to touch me? I'm very soft. I feel real good."
At the strict and abrupt insistence of the analyst that she return at once to the bathroom and get into her clothes, she thrust her lower lip out petulantly and began to sob like a child. He reassured her and told her that she was very, very pretty, that he did want to look at her and touch her, but he just couldn't because his schedule was crowded and he had lots of patients coming in who needed help. Somewhat mollified, she returned to don once again her garments and resumed her place on the chair alongside the desk.
In reference to her menstrual period, she said, "I have that-you know what-just once in a while. It really is just getting started. You know, I'm very young."
According to her older brother, she had commenced her period at the age of fourteen and had apparently had her period with regularity.
Every attempt of the analyst to establish her chronological age (twenty-eight) was evaded by the subject. When asked how old she was when she graduated high school, she would only say, "Oh, very young, much younger than the other children. I was very bright. I was the brightest child in my class."
The analyst knew she graduated from high school at the age of eighteen. As a last resort, the analyst removed from his desk a birth certificate which had been placed in his hands by the older brother to prove her true age, since he had forewarned the doctor of her deceptively youthful appearance. The analyst showed her the birth date and established the number of years as twenty-eight. She only laughed, shook her head, and insisted, "That isn't really mine. Anyone could see that. Just look at me. I'm a little baby doll, not an old lady of twenty-eight. That's 50 old."
Questioned about her sex life, her response was as follows: "Yes, the boys love to be naughty and kiss and hug Baby Doll. I'm so pretty, you know. Baby Doll doesn't want to make them feel bad, and I let them touch me, and they are nice to me."
She defined "petting and touching" as kisses and embraces. Did anyone touch her breasts? She shook her head furiously. Did anyone have sexual intercourse with her? She stared blankly at the analyst who realized that she prefered to pretend the word alien to her vocabulary.
"Do you know what a penis is?" the analyst asked. She shook her head negatively.
"Do you know what a man has between his legs," (pointing to the sexual area on himself) right here?" Her face brightened, and she reached for her purse and began rummaging through it. She removed a small replica of the male sex organ made of hard rubber material of the type identified as a dildo, and in one swift movement, she spread her legs and, moving aside her panties, began slipping the edge of it inside her vagina. The analyst tried to get her to desist, but she said, "Wait, I want to show you.
Sec, I 'm preparing myself. When I get older and ready for lovemaking, no one will hurt Baby Doll."
Exciting herself inordinately, she began moving the instrument rapidly back and forth in practiced masturbatory movements. Only when the analyst insisted such things should never be inserted into the vagina without being scrupulously clean-otherwise, she might get herself ill and get an infection-did the subject stop.
None of the analyst's attempts to get beneath the surface of her pretenses her self deceptions, had any effect. Her two obsessions-her youthful appearance and continuous state of sexual excitement-she carried with an unassailable innocence. Only in the last few minutes of the meeting, when she was ready to leave, did she reveal any other emotion than her pose of gay, childish happiness and beguilement. "Now I must go home," she said. "I hope I don't see any old people." She shuddered, and an expression came over her face of child-like fear.
During the next several sessions, the analyst attempted to turn the conversation to Annette's elderly parents, her father and her mother, respectively seventy-eight and seventy-six years old. In the same way that Annette kept a wall between herself and her acceptance of her own actual age, she related similarly to her parents. Her response to the question of how old her parents were, was "Oh, they are young, very young. They're very active. They get around and do a lot of things. They're very happy and very proud of their baby doll."
Only the profound shock of her mother's death, seven months after Annette's initiation of analytic treatments, had any effect upon the mental attitudes of the subject. So terrible and unconsolable was her bereavment that it was requested that the analyst come to visit Annette at her home two weeks after the funeral. Ushered into her room, the analyst found an altogether incredibly altered subject. Drained and haggard from grief and mourning, her hair undone, her wrap-around garment over her thin huddled body, Annette was a picture of dejection. But most startling were the shadows under and little lines now discernable in the comers of her eyes. She was unmistakably a woman approaching thirty years of age.
The analyst sat beside her quietly for a while, responding with an intuition that comes only from long professional experience, and then said, "Annette, it is not possible to prevent the death of those you love by concealing their age from yourself. You even steal away the joys and pleasures you can share with those you love because you can't relate to them in a way that is a true part of your nature. There's your father and your brother. They both need you as a grown woman, and you're robbing yourself of the rewards of being a grown woman. You are an attractive person. You need a man, not a boy, who would appreciate the things you are-sensitive and loving, not to turn yourself into a promiscuous butterfly pretending you are a virgin."
Annette's voice was deeper and quieter. She spoke more slowly and her tones were measured. She looked directly into the face of the analyst, a pained frown on her brow. "I'm twenty-eight years old. You know that. But you don't know that I've been a virgin for twenty seven of them. Yes, it was only a year ago I allowed those boys to have sexual intercourse with me. Yes, I am a warm, sensitive woman. I need a woman's feelings very badly. I tried to deny them all that time because it seemed to me that as long as I was a virgin, I was still a child, and I had to be a child because, if I weren't, I'd have to see before my eyes every day how old my parents are and face the reality that soon they would have to die.
"I couldn't stand that. It seemed to me the only thing in the whole world that I could not stand. I became afraid of any old people. They made me think of death. I was afraid of it. Not for myself-I don't care what happens to me-but for my father and my...." (The subject pulled herself down, face forward, on the bed and wept.)
Presently, she sat up and thanked the analyst. "Now that Mother is dead, I realize how futile pretending is. I realize a great many things."
Psychiatric Commentary:
Death as a reality is a difficult enough condition for the mature adult to grasp, let alone to experience in relation to a beloved one. For a sensitive child, death is often too incredible, too horrendous even to think about. Annette C. was such a child. But there were other complicating factors involved.
Annette was tiny, diminutive, the center of attention indulged as a "baby doll" by her parents beyond the normal period of childhood. As a result, she was sheltered from the harsh realities of the adult. As the time approached for such an exposure, she clung to her identity as "Baby Doll". Everybody loved a baby doll. A baby doll was pampered and petted and always loved. And as long as she remained young enough to be Baby Doll, then her parents would remain "young" and "safe from the specter of death, from old age".
Her whole world could be same, preserved so long as she remained a little girl. Certainly a little girl did not lose her virtue! Therefore, she had to remain a virgin. Annette's efforts at the masquerade grew more difficult as time, her implacable foe, made its slow but certain mark. And as her womanly responses became too powerful for her to deny, "Baby Doll" surrendered her virtue but retained for "Baby Doll" the myth of virginity.
The fear of growing up, of being thrust into the harsh outside reality of the world, is most commonly found among those young women who have been sheltered in the bosom of the family. Such little-girl attitudes are further accentuated by littleness and a deceptively youthful appearance. Sexual contact with a man becomes, in the minds of such women, a violation, a shocked, wrenching away of the last remnants of a carefree and innocent childhood.
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The Molested virgin
The first time Erica L came to the attention of the authorities was when she was brought to the hospital in a state of shock as a result of an alleged sex attcak by two men in a railroad depot. She showed clear signs of assault with black and blue marks on her arms and thighs and the renting of her garments, exposing her breasts and her thighs. She described her experience as follows.
"These two men saw me standing on the platform alone, and I saw they were talking about attacking me. They were making gestures and pointing at me. The only way I could get away was to get through the exit into the street, but that meant I had to go right past them, and I thought if I did that fast, before they made any move to get me, maybe I would get away from them. I started running past them, and they sort of moved into my path. And I started striking out at them and fighting, and one of them put his arms around me and dragged me down to the ground. The other, standing over me, began to touch me with his hands. He was trying to tear my clothes off, and I struggled to try to stop them. And I could feel this man under me-with his sex part moving up my thighs. Then he started to enter me, and I screamed and I kicked. I guess I scared them because I got up and started running away, and people coming up the staircase caught them."
The story the men told was as follows: "We were standing on the platform waiting for the train. We had a bowling date (this was subsequently checked and found to be accurate). We were just kidding around, and I was making some passes with my arm as if rolling the ball down the alley. We noticed this woman standing further up the platform. She looked real strange, turning one way, then turning another way, looking right at us. And suddenly she started running directly toward us. I turned around and asked her if something was wrong. She ran right into me. She began struggling, and I fell on the ground right under her. I kept on trying to get up, and I yelled to Steve to get her off me. Steve tried to pick her up, but she was acting like some kind of a maniac, ripping her clothes off her body and screaming. Finally, we broke away and started for the staircase. And then we were taken into custody. We didn't bother her, we didn't touch her, we didn't do anything."
Less than ten days later, while the two men were in police custody awaiting trial, Erica L once again came to the attention of the authorities. This time, an incident had occurred in the office where she had been working for three months. She described the incident as follows.
"I had just been typing a letter, and I stood up and came around the desk to get some water from the water cooler. It was up against the wall next to the window. This window cleaner was cleaning the window at that time. He reached over to one side, and I saw his hand go down to his trousers. I could see that he was unzipping his trousers and taking out his sex part. Then suddenly he leaned over and started to raise the window. I knew he was coming for me. I had to stop him from coming in, so I began pushing him off the sill, pushing him."
The window cleaner denied her allegations. He said he had never at any time unzipped his trousers. He simply completed cleaning the window on the outside and was beginning to step back into the office when "this absolutely crazy nut came at me and started pushing me off the god damn window sill. I was sixteen floors off the ground. I definitely would have been pushed off if the other people in the office hadn't come up in time and pulled her away from me."
Fortunately, in this instance, there were witnesses, who attested to the fact that the window cleaner made no obscene movements or advances in any way. Further, he had been cleaning this office for six years and was known to be a sober, decent person.
As a result of this latter instance, the previous two men held in custody on an assault charge were released. The subject was ordered to undergo psychiatric examination.
Investigation showed that Erica L had come to the city from a large town upstate only eight months before. After checking the records in this town, it was learned that at least in four instances, she had been involved in alleged sex attacks and accused men who maintained their innocence. The subject also changed jobs frequently beause of alleged sexual aggression on the part of employers or fellow workers.
The young woman, twenty-three years old, appeared for examination in a highly nervous state. She suffered from extreme insomnia and was addicted to various sedatives for sleep inducing purposes. A well-formed woman, her clothes appeared to have been selected to "camouflage sex appeal", rather than-enhance it, which is the common and normal pattern. Her dress was neck high and closed at the collar. She seemed uncomfortable about her ample, prominent breasts and slouched slightly in the manner of shy teeners beginning to blossom as women.
"This is a disgraceful city," she began as she was urged to talk about herself. "I heard a great many terrible stories about sex maniacs and sex attacks. I could hardly believe it, but I see now that it's all true. A respectable woman can't even safely walk the streets without someone making insulting remarks or indecently exposing themselves or even worse."
Erica L was questioned about her sex life. This was her retort: "Sex life? You realize that I'm an unmarried woman. Do you take me for one of these cheap tarts? No wonder men go around thinking they can pull the dress off any woman they see when there are so many women with lose morals around. I have no sex life. I never expect to have any until I'm married and wish to raise a family."
"Then you are a virgin."
"I told you I was a respectable woman. Yes."
At the psychiatrist's suggestion that she go for a gynecological examination, she became furious and adamant. "No you won't. You won't do it. I know you men. You're all the same. All you want to do is see me naked, and touch my intimate parts. I won't allow it."
It was calmly explained to her that such was not the case, that a nurse would be present, and that, in the final analysis, she did not have much choice because she was in the custody of the authorities for having attempted to take the window cleaner's life. Her reaction to the examination gave clear evidence of abnormal attitudes in regard to sex. Fearful at disrobing, she was given a loose hospital dressing gown to shield her nudity, and she would not separate her legs. This was only accomplished with the assistance of a nurse and an attendant, and she was placed in an examining position.
She struggled in a state of terror and hysteria at the slightest touch of the instrument introduced into her vagina; she severely bit the ear of the attendant and scratched the nurse in the face. At this point, she had to be subdued and immobilized in order for the examination to proceed. Then with the passage of the instrument into her vaginal canal. her violent movements once again commenced, but they were of a different sort. They were now obviously of highly excitatory sexual agitation. She began to undulate her pelvis, violently. She continued undulating her pelvis even when the instrument was removed, thrashing her body from side to side and moaning as if in an ecstatic state.
Organically, she was normal in every way, free from any vaginal infection or venereal disease. She was also a virgin as she had maintained. It was obvious that no penetration at all of the male organ of one of the men accused of assault had been accomplished.
She did not entirely recover from the examination, sustaining a state of high sexual excitement, and it was necessary for the psychiatrist to place her under sedation to quiet her. During her appearance before the psychiatrist, her attitude had changed. She seemed anxious to know about her condition. Was she normal? Was she really a virgin? It was this course of questioning that exposed the underlying problem to the psychiatrist.
"You insisted you were a virgin, and I tell you that you are, and yet you ask me as though you are not absolutely certain. This means that something happened to you some time, a long lime ago, perhaps when you were even a child, an incident that you are not sure about. Now if you tell me about whatever is troubling you, then perhaps we can help you in ways that will be very important to you for the rest of your life. You don't want to have to go through the rest of your life seeing threats against your virtue everywhere so that you can't have normal relationships with men. You can't keep on changing jobs, getting involved with the authorities, not having any friends. Besides, you are a very passionate woman. You know that. You saw that for yourself when I put the instrument inside you."
Erica L began to moan and bite her lips and squeeze her hands together. She was in a terrible state of agitation. Then, gradually she became calm, without further urging by the psychiatrist. She related an incident that went back to the age of six.
"When I was small, my family owned a house. It was a brick house. It had two apartments, one downstairs, one upstairs. We lived in the downstairs apartment. We rented out the other apartment. We had a cellar, not a basement, and when I was small, before we had converted to oil, we had a coal furnace. A truck would come with a load of coal, open the cellar window and run the coal down a gutter from the truck into the cellar. I used to like to watch them do that. The coal man would go down into the cellar and shovel the coal that came through the window into the big bin.
"After the coal was unloaded, I went into the cellar. A man came in with a shovel. He was a very big man, and he was all black from coal. His face was 'smudged, his hands were all black from coal. He kept looking at me as he shoveled the coal. I must have been in there for fifteen minutes, and he was working hard, perspiring. Then he stopped and rested on his shovel, and he gestured with his finger, telling me to come to him. I was little. I didn't even know enough to be frightened. I went to him. He knelt down, and he put his hand under my dress. I didn't know what that meant, but I didn't want him to make me dirty with his coal black hands. And I moved away. He held me. He wouldn't let me move. I started to become scared. When he saw I was going to cry, he put his hand around my mouth. I was little. He was very strong. I couldn't move.
"He tore my clothes. He pulled my legs apart, and he pushed something against me, very hard. He was large. He tried to push it inside me, but I was too small. He kept forcing and it hurt me. It hurt me so much." (Subject re sponds with a terror and anguish that is traumatic, as though reliving the experience.) "He was very angry, and he was hurting my arms. I thought he was tearing me. Then he stopped and he made me stand up. Then he put his sex part between my thighs, and he moved me back and forth on it. Then he put me down on the coal, and he put his sex part in my mouth...."
The psychiatrist was sympathetic, and explained to her that she had good reason for her underlying fears, and while this was a tragic and terrible experience for her, he was relieved to learn about it. She reacted with surprise, and then he explained that if her behavior had no such serious origin, then she would have to be considered a seriously sick woman, without any obvious measures for treatment to restore her emotional balance. But now that the basis for her mental torment was established, they could work from there and help to remove her fears once and for all.
The subject did respond satisfactorily to continued treatment.
Psychiatric Commentary:
The Molested Virgin
Erica, an unfortunate victim of sexual molestation as a child, is suffering from a pronounced case of "the old maid's syndrome". Those women, having dwelled long and hopelessly upon marital (and premarital) sex relations, begin to imagine frequent pursuit by lusting men. The problem begins with their sense of repeated rejection by males.
To be desired and sought after, coveted by men everywhere, becomes a necessary psychological support for a defeated ego. Often, such people become highly delusionary and begin not only to imagine but to "see" threats to their virtue. This was Erica's state of mind, though her problem had a different inception, the painful experience of sexual attack in childhood. True, she felt terrified by the sex act itself, but she suffered equally from another underlying fear-a fear of disclosure. Disclosure of what? That she was unworthy, defiled, even perhaps deflorated by a sex deviate. Should she respond to the deep biological urge compelling her toward men? Or should she run, struggle against the humiliation of possible exposure and rejection? Erica found herself moving in both directions simultaneously.
Young women still to experience sexual intercourse are subject to aspects of this state of mind, though to lesser degrees of course. Experiencing guilt because of a youthful indiscretion, they, too, imagine "unworthiness", a "contamination of their virtue", and feel loath to disclose this to eligible suitors. Many, because of their ignorance of the subject, are doubtful even of their virginal status.
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The Virgin Sexpot
Josephine F, at the age of twenty-five, is one of the most sexy and seductive of women. She has the glamor gal's appearance and wears tight dresses, accentuating her large breasts, hips, shapely legs. She is a dance instructress, and she uses her body in the most sensual and abandoned way, working off the strong sexual energies she possesses. She dates frequently and drives men to near distraction with her teasing ways and her passionate petting which always ends up short of any threat to the loss of her virginity.
Three times she has been severely beaten up (and twice hospitalized) by men who were frustrated for having been "led on" to the point of sexual intercourse and then violently rejected.
It was just such a violent struggle in a hotel room between Josephine and her escort of that evening that put her abnormal sexual attitudes on the record. Here is her recitation of the details.
"We were in the hotel room, and he said I had to go all the way. I. told him I didn't want to. I told him that I was a virgin. He laughed at me and started forcing me back on the bed. I hit him in the face with my closed fist. He began slapping me. Then he put one hand on my chest, holding me down, and he ripped my dress off. I didn't have anything on but a garter belt, and he forced my legs apart. I was struggling, and I was warning him to stop. I told him that I'd get the cops to get him for rape if it was the last thing I ever did. He didn't listen to me. He kept trying to get inside me. I kept bucking and moving each time he got close, and then I came to the end of the bed. My head was against the bed board. Then he started slamming at me. I could feel him just starting to come in, and I reached over to the night table, and I got the heavy glass ashtray, and I smashed it down on him."
The splintering of the heavy glass ashtray had lacerated the man's scalp and opened a gash that required twenty stitches. He confirmed the incident as it had occurred with some additional information that placed the circumstance into a different context.
"She's nothing but a dirty little hooker. Virgin, hell! Some virgin. Trying to feed me that line. I picked her up at the dance studio. She had a dress on that fit like a coat of skin. You don't have to guess what she looks like without it. The way she holds me and the way she's bucking up against me as we dance. She twisted those hips like they were going to come out of joint. I ask her if she wants to go out with me. She says fine. I take her to a bar. She belts down six shots. I ask her if she wants to go a hotel room. She says okay. I get her in the hotel room, and for a lousy hour, I'm feeling her around and she lets me do any damn thing I want to do. Then when I tell her 'let's go', she says to me, no, she's a virgin. So I blow my stack. Then that crazy broad smashed me with that ashtray. That's a great hooker. She can make a big bundle like that, right?"
When Josephine made an appearance, she exhibited a strong and obvious sensuality in her movements, a suggestive slight parting of her lips, the heavy-lidded appraising glance-all of this accentuated by the way she dressed and moved. She did not appear to be wearing any brassiere, and by her own admission, during the time when the incident took place, the only undergarment she had on was a garter belt. She explained her behavior without any persuasion.
"I'm sexy, and I know it. I'm too damned sexy for my own good. I know that too. But I've got to get some of it out of me, or I'll just burn up. So I let go when I dance, and I let men get a good feel. Then I go home, and I jerk off. Is that bad? Just because I have feelings, do I have to be a pushover? Well. I'll tell you that I'm not going to be. I'll tell you why. I have a sister, Francis. She's four years older than I am. She looks about ten years older. She is dirty, dragged out, beat up. There's no mystery why. She has been a hooker since she was sixteen. She'd lay any guy that would touch her for anything he would give her. I grew up with her, lived in the same room with her when she'd have every bum in the neighborhood climbing all over her like a bunch of ants. She couldn't walk down a street without someone calling her names or someone coming up beside her and making slutty remarks.
"That's not for me. That is not going to happen to me. We come from a family with hot blood. It doesn't take much to get us excited. Thank God, at least I know when to stop. I want to have a man inside me so bad, sometimes I think it's just about going to kill me. I have to get rid of that feeling in some way. That's why situations happen like this one (the hotel room incident). But I can't lock myself up in a box and act like a zombie. I want to feel. I want to feel."
Psychiatric Commentary:
The Virgin Sexpot
"Blood is thicker than water" has been an accepted truism for centuries in the comparison of family ties through birth as against those of marriage. "The bond of blood" alludes to the conviction that individuals of the same familial lines are made of the same "common stuff"-that is, they are procreated from the same genetic material. This is the thought behind Josephine F's lingering fear that she might follow her sister into prostitution.
The comparison she makes seem to be obvious enough. She is attractive, sexually appealing; her sister was. She is strongly attracted to the opposite sex; her sister was. She is easily stimulated sexually and has strong and persistent sexual desires.
Often too much importance is attached to "the destinies of biological fate" of children of the same parents. In regard to Josephine's sexual excitation, it would seem to be plain enough that her exposure to and her great awareness of sex relations which occurred in open view of her as a child had early awakened her desires. Her fears of promiscuity served further to focus her whole attention upon sex-as a threat as well as a desire.
Torn between these powerfully conflicting views, her development as a "cat on a hot tin roof" is a logical one. Reacting as she did to men and observing her own behavior, she could only assume that she was like her sister, and if she dared to "cross the barrier" one time, the barrier being her maidenhead, that she would tumble headlong and uncontrollably into prostitution. Thus, Josephine was not a "willing virgin". If she could have been assured that her participation in the consummated sex act would not have led her down the same path as her sister, she would have instantly sacrificed her virginity, which she did not look upon as a prize.
That Josephine's fears were unfounded could be seen from her innate moral antagonism against prostitution and her extraordinary capacities for restraint which permitted her-no matter how advanced her state of sexual arousal in the company of males-to stop short of her defloration.
It is not an uncommon thought among young, inexperienced women that once they admit the entrance of the male organ they are no longer able to control themselves. They have images of becoming "fallen women," depraved, and "slaves to man's lust". It is a fear without foundation. Control, discipline, restraint, are built into the personality and character and may be called upon to respond to all of the sensation and desires to which "the flesh is heir to".
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The Lesbian Virgin
Susan, a petite, pretty student at a major southwestern university, was suffering from an emotional problem which affected her ability to sleep, her intake of food, and her concentration on her studies. Her roommate, Anastasia C, a dark, attractive, Slavic-type young woman, a brilliant scholarship student majoring in biochemistry, had introduced her to homosexual practices which had a devastating effect upon her personal life. Close to the breaking point, Susan had gone to a counselor for advice and described her dilemma to her in this way:
"I don't know what's the matter with me. I think that I'm sick-psychologically, I mean. I think I'm abnormal. All I want to do, all I ever think about doing is to have Anastasia put her hands on me and her mouth. She's turned me into some kind of sex fiend. Maybe I've been a homosexual all along. I mean, a latent homosexual, and I just needed someone like Anastasia to bring it out in me."
In going back to the origin of her problem, she described, "The first time it happened to me was at night. I was asleep, and I could feel hands under my pajamas, feeling me around my hips and my breasts and then manipulating between my legs very gently. At first I thought I was dreaming. It was a pleasant feeling. It felt good. I felt very excited. Then my pajama pants were being removed very slowly. Every time I moved and might have awakened, she stopped, and I dozed off. Then I felt her finger inside me. I opened my eyes. I saw Anastasia. She was nude, leaning over me, touching me. I think I might have stopped her, but I was dazed and very sleepy, and it felt so ... so wonderful. I pretended I was still asleep, and I let her go on doing it.
"After that, it happened every night. She would kiss me all over my body and then the pubic hair, but then she knew I realized what she was doing, and she would undress me completely and press her body to mine and rub against me. I never knew such feelings existed. And I would always have a climax. It always happened at night and in the dark, and during the day we never talked about it. She knew I was embarrassed. But then Steve, the fellow I was engaged to, wrote me, saying he was coming to visit me and would be staying the week in town.
"I told Anastasia I would be staying with him. She seemed very shocked. I told her we stayed together before, that we had had sexual intercourse many times, and she told me that was terrible. She told me that that would destroy any relationship we could have later on in marriage. She said that it was an important obligation of every woman to remain a virgin up to the point of her marriage, that it was not outmoded by a lot of progressive ideas. That it had deep psychological meaning. She said it was possible to satisfy sexual feelings in the way we did without engaging in sex relations with men.
"She just kept on talking and talking about how in many ways the feeling was better, more tender, and everything. Then she started with her fingers on my legs and up onto my thighs, and I was undressed and on the bed before I knew it. She wouldn't let me go, and I didn't want her to. She kept at me continually. She kept me so excited I thought I was going to jump out of my skin. When she did things to me, she would say, 'Can Steve make you feel like that, or like that?'
"I tell you, she could make me do anything. Then she finally got me to write a letter to Steve, telling him not to come. He didn't pay any attention. He came anyway, but I didn't want to see him. I mean, I wanted to see him, but I was in between Anastasia and my feelings for Steve. And every time I thought I was going to get enough courage to see Steve, she would keep touching me again. Steve got so upset that he said if I wouldn't see him, he was going to break our engagement. We had an argument over the phone, and he left town.
"I don't know what was the matter with me, but Anastasia had me believing that I didn't even miss him, that I didn't want him. Every time I had a bad feeling or a letdown mood, I would go to her and she would practically put me in a trance, touching me and feeling me and bringing me to climax so many times that I would sleep and sleep, sometimes twelve, sometimes fourteen hours. I was so exhausted.
"Now it's been two weeks since Anastasia has taken up with another girl at school here. She doesn't come near me. She doesn't pay any attention to me. I began having crying jags. That's when my insomnia started. I just could not do my school work or attend classes. Anyway, I told myself I should be relieved that I was free of Anastasia. I didn't want to be a homosexual. But I just can't get rid of the feeling, and I think that I am, and I think that I must be if I stayed away from Steve and preferred Anastasia and let him break our engagement."
The counselor explained something of the nature of the male-female sexual response and that sexual stimulation between people of the same sex was not an indication of confirmed homosexual pattern. That a tendency to bi-sexual response, response to either sex, was present in all individuals with strong sexual endowments. Although the student understood intellectually, the emotional attachment to her roommate, Anastasia, was too compelling, and she could not make satisfactory adjustment. Therefore, the counselor invited Anastasia C in for a discussion.
The young woman of twenty-five, appearing even taller than her slightly more than average height of 5'6", Anastasia C smoldered with resentment at this intrusion upon her private life. A very intense person, her black eyes glowed with intensity.
"I would have refused to come, but I suppose that you will put information about my personal life in my school dossier." The counselor mentioned that this would likely not be necessary. "Not if I'm co-operative; is that it?" was her comment.
She then launched into a highly animated, forceful discussion in defense of her attitudes regarding sex and her sexual expression. "Let me start this conversation by telling you that I'm a virgin. I have never been manhandled, mauled, sexually molested, or had the male sex organ violate any of my parts. Can this be said about the 'person' who feels it her privilege to disclose personal things about my life and feelings? When I go to my husband, I shall be able to do so with complete knowledge for myself, and him that I have been virtuous, that I had considered love between male and female important enough to keep myself within restraint. Let me tell you, for every one man that these girls date and go to bed with, I could have five at the flick a finger." (So volatile and so overtly sensual in nature was the subject that the counselor did not feel her remark any exaggeration.)
"I do not choose to present my virgin body to these 'boys', as so much hamburger on a platter."
The counselor suspected, rightly, that the young woman was not as certain and unshakable about her position as she pretended. The following questions began to 'expose the chink in her armor'.
"Be frank with me. How many girls have you engaged in homosexual relationships with before Susan?"
"Of course I shall be frank. Enough so that I would have to sit and think a while before I could recall them all."
"How many men have you known during the same period?"
"Do you mean sexually?"
"No, not necessarily. I mean in a social way-going on dates and in other ways that the opposite sexes can relate, unless you feel there is no other way that they can relate, and that would mean you had no reason to consider you weren't remaining a virgin in order that you could meet a man to marry and share a life with."
"Of course I feel that male and female can relate in other ways than sexually. But I just haven't found any men who were interesting enough for me to spend my time with."
"But more women than you could count, and each of them with a sexual relationship. Isn't that so?"
"So what is it that you're inferring from that?"
"I am not inferring anything. I am, however, considering the possibility that yours is a fixed homosexual pattern and that you do not wish to now or ever have sexual contact with a man. If that is true, I'm not accusing or condemning you. But if it is so, then it should be faced now and it is important that you should understand yourself and your motives. It is important not only for yourself but the girls like Susan that you choose because of a forceful personality, superior intellect, and an obviously powerful sex drive, you reduce to a state of confusion and emotional instability. You have no right to destroy other people because of attitudes which are perhaps confusion to yourself."
The young woman became so intense and so inflammatory that she chose not to continue the discussion and left abruptly. She returned of her own accord on the following afternoon. Her appearance was subdued. She seemed less sure of herself and troubled. There were dark shadows under her eyes as though she had not slept.
"I'm afraid I've not been frank with you. I must admit that you were perceptive to see through my defenses. I have had my doubts. I have wondered whether I was a lesbian. Perhaps I am assuming a position to defend my virginity on the basis of waiting for the right man and marriage. I cannot think of the male sex organ with any emotional response. A woman's body seems very beautiful to me, not only aesthetically, but it excites me, induces me to make love. I think of the male sex organ with a kind of abhorrence. I have tried to think why.
"I have grown up in Berlin. The morals, as a result of the wartime conditions, were, as you know, on a low level. Everywhere around me as a child, classmates my own age, there was promiscuous sexual relations. When I was about eight years old, and there was still the presence of the military in the city with soldiers from different countries, many times I would go by an alley way and see women bending over with their skirts thrown up and men fornicating from behind them. When I was still younger, my mother left me in the presence of a baby sitter, a young girl of perhaps thirteen or fourteen. I was present when she let in two young men who engaged in sexual intercourse with her before my eyes. When I watched them mounted, the male organ inside, and the pounding and surging together, I thought they were ugly, like animals.
"I don't know whether I am a homosexual or whether my experiences thus far have taught me unpleasant things about the male-female relationship."
"You must realize that these thoughts cannot be separated-what you are and what you have been taught or associated with. It is these experiences that sometimes shape a homosexual. You must attempt to stop your homosexual relations and try to meet young men and see if you could find a way to learn something of the male-female sex relationship that is not ugly but that is natural."
Troubled and genuinely interested in learning how to better cope with this part of her life, Anastasia made an attempt to separate herself from homosexual contacts. She continued to see the counselor for a period of several months. She confessed that she was not successful in her efforts. She had had several dates with young men but found them unrewarding and her attitude unchanged. And she met and had taken up with another female student.
An incident which, at one level, must be considered unfortunate, occurred to radically change the entire course of Anastasia's life. She had accepted a date with a young male student and accompanied him in his car with another male student, supposedly to drive to the house of another girl. Instead, they drove the car into a deserted woodland area and forceably disrobed Anastasia. With one of the students holding her down, the other raped her. They held her 'captive' for four hours, during which time both students had sexual intercourse with her several times. Strangely enough, the incident did not come to the attention of the authorities because Anastasia did not report it. Instead, she appeared before the counselor and related this incident of a week before.
"It all seemed terrible, and I was frightened. But after the sudden pain of contact with the first student the first time, I found the sensations very pleasurable. Perhaps I would have been more frightened if I thought they were going to make any dangerous threat to my person. But I saw them only as two overly-excited college students who had become sexually excited by my appearance.
"Before the evening was over, I was not only not resisting but I realized that I was co-operating. Therefore, when they left me, I did not feel I had any right to report them or make a cause out of this. Now, looking back on it, I feel as though I want to reward them. I know that I'm not a homosexual. I never felt so much in all my life as I did when I was entered. It is far beyond anything I have ever known with any woman."
Psychiatric Commentary:
More systematic research should be directed toward bi-sexuality in the human female. Homosexuality among the human female differs in several important respects from male homosexualism. The most obvious difference: it appears more "natural" to the female! Homosexual behavior among males, by way of example, is noticably feminine. In manner, attitude, movements, speech, features of the female are emulated. In more pronounced cases, superficial changes of secondary sex characteristics take place. Further, lovemaking among male homosexuals is more feminine in character, less violent, less "staccato", commencing more gently and terminating not so abruptly. Thus, homosexual love in the case of both sexes is feminine in aspect. In this sense, lesbianism is more natural to the female.
It is for this reason that lesbianism appears as less of a social problem. Its existence is not so noticeable. Although accurate statistics are not available, it appears that the expression of affection that borders on and develops into lesbianism is common among females who cannot be classified as "homosexual" or having clearly defined exclusive sexual patterns confined to members of their own sex. They easily make the transition to male-female or heterosexual patterns. Unfortunately, with the miasma of ignorance sur rounding sex knowledge, young women such as Anastasia begin to doubt their sexual normalcy. They relate easily to females and enjoy highly pleasurable sensations which cause them to doubt their capacities for heterosexual love. Anastasia rationalized her lovemaking with women, explaining it as an innocent way of preserving her virginity.
That it was not a true reflection of her feelings was demonstrated by the incident of rape, awakening her to the experience of sexual intercourse and terminating her lesbian interest.
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One Virgin Old Maid
For the first time in seven months, May Y, a woman of thirty-three, admitted to the institution several months before, began to speak. Several techniques were tried by two psychiatrists separately, both males. But then, quite by chance, a female psychotherapist temporarily assigned to the institution, called her in for an interview.
May had been brought into the institution in a state of hysteria by her husband of three nights. After a painful introduction to sex relations, she could not be calmed. Immediately upon separation from her husband, she lapsed into a state of apathy, during which she did not respond until the female psychotherapist appeared. Because of the sexual nature of her problem, the questions applied to this subject. May showed no hesitancy in frank and direct answers put to her by a woman.
Psychotherapist: Do you know why you are here?
May: Yes.
P: Can you tell me why?
M: My husband penetrated me with his sex organ.
P: I see by your records that you are thirty-three years old and that you were a virgin at the time of intercourse with your husband.
M: Yes.
P: Was it the pain that you were unable to withstand? M: No. It was more than that. P: In what sense?
M: I find the male sex organ physically repelling. P: Have you always found it repelling?
M: No.
P: Can you tell me when you felt different about it? M: I was eleven years old. My father forced an Army corporal to do a mortifying thing. P: What was it?
M: He forced him to expose his sex organ to me.
P: Did he want you to have intercourse with him?
M: (Bitter laugh) No. My father would have shot him on the spot. My father was a colonel in the Army, commanding troops. He was a fanatic on the subject of sex. There were many such problems in dealing with service personnel.
P: Compelling the man to expose his sex organ was a form of punishment?
M: Yes. My father fancied himself something of a psychologist, and he had his own methods of handling such problems. His sharpest weapon was mortification.
P: What had the corporal done?
M: He had been assigned to custodial duties at the home of a major on the base. He had watched the major's wife taking a bath and then he had exposed his sex organ to her. He tried to persuade her to make love to him.
P: You were eleven years old and you remember this in detail?
M: My father made it a point to have my brother Philip-he was two years older than I-and myself present during many such incidents. And my mother. She would be very upset, but she would not dare oppose my father. He expressed his opinion about sex at great length. He considered sex desire bestial and degrading. He said that much of the problem was created by the secrecy and mystery surrounding it.
P: Did that exposure end the Corporal's punishment?
M: No. He made him perform custodial, duties in our home for three days. And all during that time, he was to go about with his sex organ exposed. My father would ridicule him. He would call his sex organ a 'pee-nus' and he would ask us if the corporal looked like a brave and appealing figure or like a moron. He would say that a man ruled by the lust of his penis was a moron.
P: Did you find the corporal's sex organ repelling?
M: No. I did something that was shameful to me.
P: What was that?
M: During the first day the corporal was walking about the house like that, I went into my room. I left the door open just enough for me to see the corporal as he went by. I stared at his sex organ. I didn't want to be excited. I felt sorry for the corporal. He looked very young to me, even then. But I was excited just the same. My hand went down between my legs. I rubbed so hard I became irritated but I could not stop. And then I felt ashamed and I flung myself down on the bed and cried.
P: Were there other such incidents?
M: Yes.
P: Can you tell me another when you were older, say fourteen to seventeen?
M: When I was fifteen. There is a great deal of gossip among officers' wives on army posts. This was the peacetime army. And a wife of one of the lieutenants was being promiscuous with other men on the post. My father called the lieutenant and his wife into our house. He insulted the woman and said she was a whore. He made her repeat aloud, 'I have more regard for men's sex organs than for my husband's love and respect and his army career.' He ordered the lieutenant to administer a spanking to his wife right there. My father turned his back on them and waited. The lieutenant and his wife were both miserable and humiliated. His wife laid down across his lap without a word and raised her skirts. The lieutenant struck her. I remember there were tears on his face.
P: Did your father ever get into trouble with military authorities because of these actions?
M: No. Men never complained. There was too much at stake. And that was in the peacetime army before World War II. Times have changed. Now there are congressional investigations and post commanders are under closer scrutiny than they used to be. And it may be that my father's system worked better than wasted time in stockades, court martial and scandal.
P: You approve of your father?
M: I detest him. I realized many years ago that he ruined my life and he destroyed my brother's.
(May's brother had attended West Point, and six months previous to graduation, he committed suicide because his father would not permit the son's marriage to a girl of his choice upon graduation.)
P: How did your father ruin your life?
Af: Here I am. Look at me. I am thirty-three years old. I am in an institution because I could not respond to sex relations like a normal woman. My father succeeded in debasing sex in my mind, making it sordid and disgusting.
P: Through the incidents you described?
M: Please do not insult my intelligence. You asked me to tell you a few incidents that happened when I was different ages. But my father was on the subject all the time. The human being is ruled by his brain, he would say. The human 'animal' by his sex organ. Animal. That's a word. I am very familiar with that word. When I say it, do you know what comes into my mind? A man mounted on a woman like two farm animals.
P: Is that all imagination? Or have you ever seen a man and woman engaged in sexual intercourse?
M: It is not imagination. It is another contribution of my father, rest his sick soul.
P: Would you tell me about that?
M: I was twenty-two years old. My father had retired from the service. My brother Philip had taken his life. My mother had passed away. I stayed at home and attended to my father's needs.
P: Didn't you go out? Did you have no social life at all?
M: I began to go to college at night. Then there were some club groups I attended. My father was very upset by it. He would tell me to avoid them. Young men were wild these days. And didn't I remember all of the terrible things that occurred in the service? It was worse in civilian life, he said.
P: Didn't you suspect that he wished to discourage you from getting married and leaving him to shift for himself?
M: I understood a great many things. But it did not change things. I did feel a certain loyalty to him. And I guess I was truly afraid, after all of the years he had worked on me, to be alone. I was disturbed by any thought of sex. I had not felt any desire in years. It simply disappeared.
P: What is the incident you were going to tell me of?
M: We had a Norwegian handyman to help around the house and a Mexican woman who came in four hours a day to do the housekeeping. On one particular day, when they were working at the same time, my father came over to me. He silently took me by the sleeve and took me toward the back of the house. We came to the utility room next to our den. The door was open just a fraction, and my father suddenly pushed it open. The housekeeper was standing leaning forward, her skirts trussed over her waist, and the handyman was up against her, pushing up against her from behind. His sex organ was inside her. My father began shoulting, 'Animals! Animals!' They drew apart, frightened. I saw the man's sex organ distended and wet from inside the woman, and I vomited. Whatever that feeling was that came over me, it stayed with me for months, every time I recalled the sight of those two people together in that way.
P: Your reaction is what we refer to in psychology as conditioning through aversive consequences. Your every association with the sex act was "bad, punishing, mortifying, debasing".
M: What has happened to me is clear enough in my mind. But it does not effect my feelings.
P: It will, with patience and retraining, associating good feelings, rewards and benefits with sex.
M: I tried that. That's what put me in here.
P: Can you explain that?
M: When my father died, I was alone for five years and then I realized I was thirty-two years old. I was a spinster. I was alone in the world. I stared at the four walls in the house until I thought I would go out of my mind. The prospect of growing old alone was terrifying to me. I took employment with a real estate development organizazation. I worked for them for eight months, and then I was assigned to a field trailer office to interview construction trade workers. One of the men who applied was from Belfast-a big, rough-and-tumble Irishman who was ambitious and came to America full of success stories of the Kennedys and other Irish families that made good. He asked me out, and I refused several times. I was afraid. Then he wrote me a letter, explaining that he knew he was rough and he wanted to learn proper manners to get ahead. He felt I could help him in that way, and he proposed marriage. He could see that I was no youngster and unmarried.
P: Did you accept immediately without giving yourself an opportunity to know the man?
M: I knew that if I did not say 'yes' and push myself into it, I never would agree. And I knew it was now or never. I did not allow myself to think of anything, except that I would no longer be alone.
P: Do you believe that you can talk about the incident that resulted in your institutionalization? Or will you be too upset about it?
M: I can talk about it.
P: It would help if you would describe any of your reactions, your thoughts, your feelings. It may show us how to help you overcome your difficulty.
M: There is not much to tell. We had had a large dinner. John had drunk quite a bit. I had several drinks, hoping to calm myself. As soon as we got into the hotel room, John began to remove his clothes. I went into the bathroom to change. My whole body was trembling. John began tapping softly on the door and calling out what he assumed to be playful obscenities. He asked me if I knew what he was tapping at the door with. He said it was "his organ calling for its grinder". I began to feel ill. I took some cold water. It helped for a few minutes. John was getting impatient, calling to me. Then I began vomiting into the bowl. He could hear my difficulty, and he leaned against the door and forced it open. Perhaps he had come in at first to see if I was all right, I don't know. But I was leaning over the bowl, my back toward him. He was drunk, and he made some joke about the result of my drinking. Then, all at once, he pulled up my gown from behind and began to try to force himself inside me. I cried out to him, but he held me with his strong arms and I could feel him pushing, tearing inside me. I had never known such pain. It was excruciating. He had torn me. I could feel the blood running down my thighs.
I fainted. When I opened my eyes, I was leaning over the bowl. I could barely raise myself. Then I saw him on the floor where he had passed out. The tile floor was red with my bleeding. I didn't know what had happened to me then. I began screaming. I could hear my screams in my own ears, but I could not stop. Someone from the hotel came in. They sent for a doctor. Through it all, I kept on screaming. They gave me an injection, but every time I would wake up, I began screaming again. Then John brought me here. Do you know? All the while I was screaming, I kept on hearing my father's voice.
P: Was it an admonishing voice? Did it sound as if he was condemning you?
M: No. He kept on repeating one word over and over-'Animals'.
Psychiatric Commentary:
In the case of Erica L, mention was made of the "old maid syndrome". It does not apply to May. She suffers no delusions of men following her, wishing to "rob her of her virtue". Her problem is to be attributed solely to a harsh, inflexible male parent with distorted moralistic attitudes toward sex. The culprit in this "passionless play" is the male sex organ, or, as the old army colonel identifies it, the "pee-nus".
To May, under the domination of her father, as are all of the members of the household, the image of the male sex organ is equated with all of evil, of sin, of mortification. Its mysterious power to attract and excite her when younger adds to its fearsomeness. And in time, deprived even of her passion, the excitement is gone and only the fear remains.
Beyond her own consciousness, understanding, the crux of her fear is the representation of the male sex organ as her own father. It was his sex organ that "created" her and her brother, that invaded, conquered and destroyed her mother. In a perverse way, it drove her brother to suicide.
So distorted had May P's sexual attitudes become that she could have lived without this physical part of the male-female relationship. Perhaps, long-suffering as it would have been, she might also have existed without love. But loneliness, the deprivation of all male companionship, she could not endure.
Driven forward into a marriage and a situation she was not prepared psychologically to handle, and with a guileless man who could react only to his own sensibilities, the relationship was doomed and her mental health placed in jeopardy.
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The Impenetrable Virgin
Juanita R, 20 years old, a dark, strikingly beautiful South American girl of Spanish descent, had been called in by the psychiatrist who was treating her husband, Arthur, 24 years of age. The man was in a state of deep anxiety, suffering from digestive difficulties which are more commonly described as nervous stomach. His appearance before the psychiatrist had brought out his conviction that he was impotent and unable to consummate his marriage. In situations such as this, the practice of evaluating the behavior of the sexual partner and deriving the benefit of her observations is a sensible precaution.
The psychiatrist's suspicion that the impotency was psychologic and a mental barrier on the part of the subject came as a result of such information derived from their interviews as the following:
"Can you describe to me the instance of the first attempt you made to have sexual intercourse with your wife? I want you to be able to tell me exactly what your thoughts were and impressions, as best as you can remember them, as well as your performance and what you did. It's very important, and many of the details might tell me things of which you are not aware, and they can account for very much in your treatment. If you come to some material that you feel you would rather not tell me or that you are suppressing because it troubles you, then I want you to tell me that you cannot talk about it. Under no circumstances are you to conceal such information or just skim over it, and pretend that you do not remember. Do you understand?"
"I understand it all right. And you needn't worry about me trying to hide anything. I came to you because I know what I am, or rather what I'm not. I'm just not a man, that's all. I can't have sexual relations with my wife. What would you call that? All I want to know is how to live with it, how to live with it without it torturing me and eating my guts out."
"Well, tell me what you can, and we'll take it from there one step at a time. It isn't always wise to make too many predeterminations about what you are and what you aren't."
"It was that same night we-I mean, after the ceremony and the little reception we had at my folk's house. I had Juanita alone in the bedroom, and I began holding her and all that...."
"Now, don't tell me 'and all that'. Tell me exactly what you did, and tell me how you felt, what your emotional reactions were to what you did."
"We closed the door of the bedroom. I put my arms around her and kissed her. She pressed against me, and I began rubbing up against her. I began to feel her breasts. Then I took the shoulder straps of her dress down and I exposed her breasts. I began touching them with my fingers."
"Were you sexually aroused? I mean, did you feel yourself having an erection?"
"Yes-Yes, I did, when I began rubbing against her. I was excited all right. I put my hands down on her legs and I began raising her dress up and began touching her thighs and...."
"Was your wife responding?"
"She was responding all right. She was very excited. I mean, she seemed to have trouble controlling herself. When I raised her dress, she immediately slipped her panties off. Then she began pressing up against me, breathing very heavily."
"Did you feel that she was too aggressive? Were you a little repulsed by her aggressiveness?"
"No-I-But I guess I was anxious about whether anything would happen."
"Did you have any reason to believe that you would not be able to consummate the marriage? Had there been a previous occasion with your wife or with someone else where you had failed to perform in an adequate way?"
"Yes, when I was in the service. You see, Juanita and I had broken up just before I went into the service, and I don't know-I guess I felt pretty rotten, and I began to see a few girls. And then it would get, you know, to that point and nothing would happen."
"Then you never were successful?"
"Yeah, sometimes I was. I mean, sometimes I'd get drunk, and I didn't know half the time what I was doing, and sometimes it worked out."
"What happened on your wedding night? Continue."
"Well, we began moving back toward the bed. We didn't even get our clothes off. She separated her legs and pulled me toward her onto the bed. I reached down and thrust my sex organ at the entrance to her-her vagina. She began to push up against me hard, real hard, and I was very nervous."
"You mean, you didn't have an erection?"
"Well, I did have an erection but, oh well, what was the use? I couldn't get inside her. What was the use? Does it really do any good to talk about this? I mean, I told you, I just can't...."
"Yes, it's essential. You're giving me valuable information and it begins to tell me what course to follow in treating you. Please go on."
"Well, I-She hung on to me. She kept pressing me and breathing hard and digging her nails into my back and wrapping her legs around me, and I just couldn't do anything. I pulled away from her, and she took all of her clothes off. After a while, I did the same thing and got into bed with her. I lay down beside her and she, you know, she just went at me again. This time, she began trying to make me do it. When nothing would happen, she began beating her fists against my chest. I got angry at her, and I just pushed her away. That's the way that night ended."
"But that wasn't the end of your attempts to have sexual relations with your wife, was it?"
"Geez, no. She was after me all the time. She would unzip my fly, put her hand inside and touch me. She'd practically drag me over to the bed or a chair. Most of the time, she didn't wear anything under her dress. She just put her dress up and she would go at me. It just kept on getting worse."
"What do you mean by 'getting worse'? Is this your relationship you're talking about or your feelings about her sexually, or just explain it to me."
"I guess the whole deal. I used to like to see her hot and everything. And I used to like to see her naked like that. But I began to hate the whole thing. I didn't want it to end up like that. I didn't want it to make me feel the way it does."
"Did you ever manage to get close to penetrating your wife?"
"Yes, I did. Sometimes I-almost made it but just couldn't. She'd press against my stiff thing and I would ... Well, I couldn't do it, that's all. It got so I just couldn't sleep in the same bed with her. I couldn't sleep and I couldn't hold my food in my stomach. I was tied up in knots. What's the use? I look like a man. I walk around like a man, but what's the use? I ought to just be put out of my misery. I can't live like this."
"Don't generalize. Don't begin to make forecasts or try to discuss the whole of the problem. Let's just be specific and take this one step at a time. The puzzle to begin with may seem unsolvable, but if we work on the parts, the whole thing begins to take shape and fall into place. That's what we're going to do here. The point is, your organ was erect. At that particular moment, you were capable of engaging in sexual intercourse with your wife. But for some reason, whether it's fear, uncertainty, anxiety, or something in your relationship with your wife that I don't know about yet, it has affected you adversely and terminated your sexual capability prematurely.
"This is something we don't want to call impotence not yet, at least. This is far from a total picture, and I must say that many of the things you told me indicate that you are not impotent at all. There is a considerable difference between true medical impotency and someone's inability to deal adequately with a particular person or particular set of circumstances. At times like this, we have to look into the circumstance that renders the person impotent."
Other material which followed in subsequent interviews led to the psyhiatrist's appointment with the wife, Juanita.
The young woman was tense, tight-lipped, and obviously nervous at the prospect of the interview. The psychiatrist led her into it gently. He discussed the earlier aspects of her relationship with her husband, and asked her about the incident of the difference of opinion that disrupted their friendship prior to Arthur's entrance into the service. She sat up abruptly and suddenly announced that there was nothing she could do to help him, that it was all terrible, and hadn't she suffered enough. Did she have to go through some kind of interrogation?
She started for the door, and the psychiatrist, sensing an underlying tension that related more to her own character and difficulty which she was unwilling to reveal, snapped at her, "It would appear that you're not much interested in your husband but rather in your own feelings. And, furthermore, let me tell you that I suspect that the difficulty is not your husband's at all-but yours."
The yong woman burst into sobs. She was so affected that she leaned against the wall and could barely stand on her feet. The psychiatrist led her to a chair and brought her a glass of water.
After a few minutes, when she was quieted, she looked at him and said, "Yes, you're right. I was afraid to come here in the first place. I don't know what's wrong with my husband. Maybe he is like that or maybe he isn't. But there is something wrong with me-terribly wrong. And I was afraid to come here because of it. Now I think I want to tell you. I've always wanted to tell someone. Part of it is about Arthur, and the rest of it is about myself."
Juanita then related the material which provided the cles to the treatment of this patient.
"As Arthur has likely told you, we practically grew up together. Our families were neighbors. And then when I was sixteen years old, we made an agreement that we would be married just before he went into the service. He is two years older than I am, and the time really wasn't too far off. Then one evening, I was baby sitting in a house around the neighborhood and there were two girls with me-one, a girl named Helen, who I knew very well, was keeping me company for the evening, and the other girl, Charlotte, who lived next door, who had a pretty wild reputation with the boys. It's really because she was with us that the incident happened.
"Just before midnight, four boys came to the door, and forced their way into the house. They grabbed us and tied our hands behind our backs. Then they took our clothes off and began doing obscene things to us to arouse us. One of the boys-he was taller and he looked older than the rest-took out his sex organ. The other boys looked a little scared, but he got them all out of control. He began to go from one of us to the other, pressing his organ against us. Then he put it inside Charlotte.
"I knew that Charlotte had had sexual relations before because Helen had told me all about her and the things she did with boys. But Helen and I had never done anything like that. One of the boys held my legs apart, another got on top of me and pressed his sex organ against me, hurting me, but he couldn't enter me. The boy who was holding my legs became impatient and pushed him off me and began struggling to get my legs open again. The boy who had just left me got on top of Helen and she was right next to me. I heard her gasp and begin kicking, and I could see by the way he was pressed up against her that he was inside her. I fought very hard, and one of the other boys came to help hold me still. But the second boy could not get inside me either. Then the big boy shoved them aside, and he rubbed something on his sex organ. He put his hand down between my legs and I felt him touching me with his hands and putting his sex organ up against me. Then he pushed very hard. I couldn't move, the way they held me down now, but he couldn't get inside me either. They all tried, and none of them could. All the boys had been unable to enter me but they had all taken Charlotte and three of them had taken Helen.
"I had never been bad or anything like that, but I did become excited very easily all the time, and I had been masturbating ever since ten or eleven. And what happened that evening frightened me-but it had excited me too. I can't deny that. They were boys really, and somehow they didn't scare me because they were young. And feeling their sex organs up against me-I knew that toward the end I wasn't struggling so hard. I think I really wanted to feel it.
"I think I would have kept quiet about the whole thing. I know that Charlotte would never have said anything. But Helen called her folks and there was a terrible scandal. They caught the boys and made us testify in court and everything. After that, Arthur acted strange toward me. He behaved as if I had had something to do with it. I knew in his mind he really felt that they had had sex with me. He'd see me for a while, then he'd stop seeing me, then he'd start again. He used to kiss me and hold me before, but now he was awkward doing it, and he would suddenly draw away.
"Ever since that night, something was bothering me very much. I couldn't help it. I kept thinking that something was definitely wrong with me. Four boys had tried to have sex with me, and none of them could. They had had sex with Charlotte and had had sex with Helen, who had been a virgin too. I tried to forget it, but it was always on my mind.
"After a while, Arthur and I began going steady again. I tried several times to encourage him to get close to me but what happened was still on his mind I suppose, and he never would do anything.
"Then I made a terrible mistake. I met this girl Charlotte again. I realized later on that it wasn't exactly coincidence. I suppose I had been looking for her. I met her in the school library. She began talking about men friends right away, and she told me about a date she was having that evening. She asked me if I wanted to go along. Then before I realized it, I had agreed. Everything after that happened awfully fast. I met Charlotte that evening and we waited on a comer across the street from the post office until they picked us up in a car. I don't know exactly how old they were, but they were men. I mean, both of them were close to thirty or in their thirties. They took us out to some park. They had liquor and we were all drinking. We were necking in the back of the car, and as soon as things began to get a little out of control, they started up the car and drove us to a motel.
"I was frightened then and had much too much to drink. I started crying, while one of them began undressing me. If I could have called it off then, I would have. But at the same time, I know I had that same unanswered question pressing on my mind. Was there something wrong with me? I just had to find out. One of the men began having intercourse with Charlotte, and the other one lay down on top of me, but it was the same as before. Charlotte and the other man began laughing as they watched, and Charlotte said something about the other time that none of the boys could get inside me. She thought by now that I had had sexual relations. But when she realized I hadn't, she came over to me and began to tell me what to do. She even reached her hand down between my legs and separated the lips of my vagina and guided the man's sex part right up against me. But no matter how hard he pushed, he just couldn't enter me. When the other man tried it, it was the same thing. It was something hysterical for them. They were all laughing and making a racket, and that was what was responsible for our being caught there.
"It was the second sex scandal I had been involved in, but in both instances, when it became clear that I was a virgin, people felt more sorry for me than condemning.
"But Arthur, he was just about to go into the service. He had it out with me, and we broke our engagement. We had made it formal by then. When Arthur was in the service, I wrote him, and we began picking up where we left off. When he was discharged, we were married. And I think you know the rest."
Juanita agreed to a physical examination. She was indeed a virgin as she contended. It was further found that her maidenhead, or hymen, was so taut, so tough and unresiliant a sheath, and with such a minute opening, that normal penetration was virtually impossible. It was, however, a problem of superficial and minor significance. The entire matter could be remedied with a local anesthetic and a deft scalpel in the matter of an instant. The fact that it had not been was a matter of ignorance or secrecy on the part of the young lady and the general attitude prevailing, which tends to cast a pall over problems dealing with sex and the sex organs.
Juanita's condition was remedied, but this did not result in an amicable resumption of the marital relations between these two young people. The psychiatrist explained to Arthur that he was not impotent, that his entire problem related to Juanita from the beginning. He had ambiguous feelings in relation to her. He had never entirely forgiven her the first circumstance of the rape and the second situation in the motel. Subconsciously, he felt that she was a promiscuous person. As further evidence of this, he realized that she had attempted to encourage him to experience intercourse previous to their marriage. He had not known about her condition or what she feared.
When he went into the service, his problem with other women in a sexual way was a result of psychological feelings of unfaithfulness in relation to Juanita. This was readily borne out, because when he was under the influence of alcohol, he acknowledged that he had engaged successfully in sexual intercourse. When he was married to Juanita, he wanted to possess her physically, but at the same time, he felt repelled because of his feelings about her promiscuity. Added to this was his own tension and doubt about his ability to consummate the marriage, and his resultant impotency became a natural and explainable consequence.
It appeared to the psychiatrist that the relationship of these two people had been a matter of close proximity and convenience and that there was no great compelling emotional response to one another. As a result, he did not encourage any continuance of the relationship, while he had not suggested a separation either. The separation and subsequent divorce was something arrived at on the part of both partners, when a clear and rational picture of their mutual behavior was presented.
The marriage was annulled, and within a period of a year, both had married other partners. No sexual problem on either side was reported to the psychiatrist.
Psychiatric Commentary:
When the sensuality of Mankind is examined, it is considered as it were, after the fact. Man does so and so, Woman behaves so and so, is the pattern of such sexual description. Why Man and Woman respond as they do, is never asked and seldom thought about. It seems almost too self-evident a subject for inquiry. Because of this, part of the true miracle of human nature is overlooked.
In the same sense that the human constitution suffers hunger pangs as a signal to Man that he requires nourishment, there is a signal for human sexual hungers as well.
Nature has designed Man in such a way that he longs for food; he desires food above all else when his hunger is upon him. Ask him and he will say that he loves food. That is Nature's protective device for the species in order that he will never forego this critical need.
Also, to survive, sexual propagation is necessary. And to assure male and female sexual intercourse, the human nature has been indelibly marked with desire, with lust, the signal for sexual hunger. It is built deep into the human's physiology and chemistry.
But the same wisdom, which has so ingeniously adapted human nature to ensure its continuance, has not devised Man and Woman for indiscriminate intimacies. There are certain fundamental natures which belong together, are thusly attracted and join harmoniously as Man and Wife; others, drawn by superficial attractions, clash. There is something in their entire chemical makeup which appears incompatible. Often the signs for certain irritations, dissatisfactions, even repulsions are present, but the individual attaches little significance to them and passes them off.
Arthur is a clear example of what is often referred to popularly as the subject of a mismatch. A sensitive human being, he could not go about engaging in sexual intercourse with any woman he encountered when he was in the Service. It is not that he was incapable, but he was always fighting a psychological repulsion; only alcohol seemed to grant him the necessary blindfold. Because others had no such difficulty, he began to assume that he was "less of a man". Also, he had no great chemical affinity for Juanita. If he had, his passion for her would have overcome his doubts, suspicions, etc., at least to the point of physical intimacy.
Since all of this was magnified by the chance of circumstance-Juanita's tough, membranous hymen, a not uncommon occurrence-their sexual relationship became complex and fraught with fears, psychological barriers on both sides.
As circumstance eventually proved, there was nothing organically wrong with either one of them, both were able to find compatible partners and enjoy normal sexual relationships.
This case serves as a reminder that we have been designed with a great wisdom. Lesser and greater compatability likely has more of a bearing than we know upon this wisdom. Perhaps the attraction of harmonious natures is a signal of genetic makeups which are complementary and would produce healthy offsprings. And incompatibility, such as Arthur and Juanita's, might be a warning to save the partners from the tragedy of attempting to fuse antagonistic traits. Sexual fulfillment apparently goes far beyond the dependence upon adept sexual techniques.
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The Virgin Mother
Wherever there was a light source, she would face it, like some gentle delicate flower seeking sustenance from the light. For hours, she would station herself near a windown and stare outside, her expression unchanging, not a flicker of recognition or acknowledgment of anyone's presence or any reaction to sudden sounds. This was Annette L, sixteen years of age, a small, blonde young woman who had given birth to a child at the age of twelve. Yet, she was still a virgin; the male organ had never penetrated her vagina nor ruptured her hymen.
Well-formed and quite womanly, with a premature ripening of her sex parts and breasts as a result of the premature motherhood, Annette still retained the face of a child. Because of her normally light complexion and her long institutionalization, her whiteness of skin was extraordinary and her hauntingly ethereal beauty made her a great favorite of the attendants who had administered to her and treated her like a child. She was entirely composed and intractable, with one single particular exception. That was when it was necessary to remove her clothing to prepare her for a bath. At such times, when she had to be exposed to her own nakedness, she would become hysterical and struggle with the attendants who had to forceably restrain her.
Annette did not dare to look upon her own nude figure. Her sex parts, if she were forced to look upon herself, as one of the psychologists had earlier in her institutionalization attempted to have her do, made her physically sick. Her early records showed that shortly after the birth of the child, an event which had affected her mind, she attempted to do harm to her sex parts. Several times she was found with her legs apart bleeding from the vagina as a result of jamming objects inside in an effort to self-mutilate.
Her increasing depression and detachment from the activities about her and long periods of trance-like immobility, led to her institutionalization.
Within two years of her institutionalization, her condition showed the effects of progressive deterioration. Only on rare occasions, and these could not be predicted, would she speak. During such times, she could articulate well, and she was entirely lucid; but such periods would last approximately fifteen minutes to half an hour, and she would then return to her catatonic state. Her records showed that only in one instance-and that was in the aftermath of an unfortunate event at the institution-did Annette respond as a totally rational person with complete recognition of people and events about her. Peculiarly, this incident was in connection with an attempted rape on her person by an inebriated maintenance man.
Probably expecting that a patient of this type would be unable to report such sexual molestation, the man had apparently assaulted her with complete impunity. However, Annette struggled fiercely, her cries attracting others at the institution, and when the man protested that he had not touched her, she gave the following account:
"He grabbed me and turned me around so the back of me was pressed against him. Then he pushed my head forward, all the way forward so it was down between my knees. He took out his sex thing and tried to put it into me. I was kicking and screaming. He lifted me off the ground, but he was drunk and he lost his balance and he fell backwards and I fell on top of him...."
The man made an attempt of denial, calling her "crazy" and "You can't take what goes on in the mind of a crazy girl as evidence against me."
But the patient seemed in complete control of herself and continued in complete lucidity and detail to give evidence of the man's mendacity.
"He forced my face down to his sex thing and tried to get it in between my lips. He kept on saying to me that if I would be quiet, he would help me get out of this place and go home to my parents. He said he could do that if I would be nice to him. Then I dug my nails into his legs and I managed to get out of his hands so I could scream without his putting his hands over my mouth. That is when they came in and found us."
Because of the patient's complete coherence, which had taken aback both the institution personnel as well as the attempted rapist, the man was forced to acknowledge the accuracy of her statements. But several hours after the incident, the patient had lapsed once again into her abstracted state.
Perhaps because of the violence of her actions whenever she was exposed to her own sexual parts, therapy directed at the patient at the institution either avoided or did not deal directly with the sexual history of the patient. Such explorations were not made, out of concern that a concentration upon sexual data in the fact of an obvious hypersensitivity would snap the cord of reality entirely and send the subject into the barren mental environs of catatonia, perhaps forever.
However, a change in personnel brought in a new attending psychiatrist. After his examination of the records, he was convinced that another tack with this patient might produce positive results. To combat her apathy, he administered a psychic energizer. There was a marked improvement in her movements and awareness of activity about her. During the sessions with the psychiatrist, instead of approaching her with the sexual problem tangentally, he went directly to the crux of the problem. The record of her response and her complete lucidity as a result of the attempted rape persuaded him that this would not disorientate things. He was entirely correct in his surmise. The patient related the origin of her sexual difficulty in the following manner:
"Tod is my half-brother. We both have the same mother. He's ten years older than I am. My stepfather worked for the aircraft companies. When he'd get laid off on one job, then he'd go to work for another. We lived in a trailer, and there wasn't very much room, and Tod and I shared a room. Tod never talked much to anyone. He was quiet, kept to himself. But he was as big as a grown man, and he was like a man-you know-in a sexual way.
"In bed, he would always be touching himself. I would pretend that I was asleep, and he would expose his sex thing and be rubbing it until it was all stiff and all that stuff would come out of it (the semen as a result of an orgasm). I didn't know that it was bad or anything. There was something very secret about it, and I was attracted to watching. It was like that for a long time.
"Then, I don't know when it started, but Tod would reach over to my bed and he would throw my covers aside and raise up my nightie so he could see me there, lying naked, and then he would do it to himself. I don't know how many times he did that while I was asleep, but once or twice I started to stir, and I realized what he was doing. At such times, he would pull away and pretend that nothing had happened. But then, he began to do more than that, like I would feel his fingers touching me, and one time I began to come awake when I felt a heaviness across my thighs. When I woke up, it was all wet and sticky between my thighs. He had been rubbing his sex part between my thighs while I was asleep and I didn't know it.
"There was a girl named Edith who was a year older than I was, and she knew a lot about sex, and she began to tell me things, and that's when I realized that it was all bad-what Tod was doing. I became very frightened. And when Tod would touch himself, I would shut my eyes tight so I wouldn't see him. And I would be very careful when I slept. I didn't tell my mother why because I was afraid to, but I told her I wanted pajamas. I felt safer sleeping with pants on.
"But then, one time I woke up in the middle of the night to feel my legs stretched out. Tod had taken my pajama pants off. He had my legs separated and wide open, and he had his sex thing right up against me. When I sat up, he held me close and all that stuff began coming out of it right onto my sex part. I began to squirm, and he got frightened, and he told me if I said anything that we'd both be sent away. He frightened me, and I didn't say anything. He did that to me at least two more times. I don't know how many others because sometimes I would wake up and find that fluid on me or on my pajamas.
"Then I began having my period, and not long after that, my stomach began to get large. I was pregnant. When my mother took me to the doctor, he was puzzled. He could tell that no man had put any sex sex thing inside me. I didn't even know what was happening in the beginning, and then when Tod found out I was pregnant, he ran away from home, and everybody knew that he was responsible. My mother made me tell her everything then, and I explained what Tod had used to do but that he never really got inside me, but somehow his fluid did.
"When my stomach became very big, I was very fright ened. I kept muring dreams that I was being blown up like a balloon and was going to burst; I couldn't go out. I could not play with any girls around the neighborhood. My mother was hiding me all the time. I never wanted to undress or take any baths. I never wanted to look at myself. I was afraid to. My stomach all stretched like that, it had me very frightened. And when the baby started moving, I would grow all pale and trembly and I would sit in a comer trying to hold my breath, trying to stop it from moving inside me. But toward the end, when it began to be time for me to have the baby, I don't remember very much. Something happened to me. I remember someone would have to sit me up and feed me. I would be almost unconscious lots of times. She would have to dress me and bathe me, even take me to the bathroom. That's all ... that's all I can tell."
After a period of prolonged therapy, during which time the patient's behavior was explained to her, the stigma or taint that she felt and attributed to her own person was lessened in severity and then removed. As soon as she believed that she was not evil and that the sex act was not profane and not to be associated with suffering only, Annette showed signs of improvement. Finally, she was released from the institution.
But the marks of such deeply traumatic experiences are not so easily obviated. They are like a sensitive scar tissue far beneath the consciousness, and at the first sign of disruptive experiences, the sensitive annealing splits open to reawaken the slumbering shadows of mental aberration.
The patient was twice more readmitted to the institution as a result of sexual problems. The first came after an encounter with a young truck driver. The patient went to work in a diner and made the acquaintance of Harry, one of the trailer-truck drivers.
"I did it several times without any special fears or problems," said the patient as she subsequently described it. "Even when we'd park somewhere and he'd hold me and kiss me and begin to feel me with his hands, I liked it. I wasn't frightened or anything. I think I was too excited myself to think about being frightened. One time we parked near a lake, and it was at night. It was very hot, and Harry dared me to go for a swim. I took my dress and slip off and had my panties and bra on. He took off all of his clothes off except for his shorts. Then he began holding me, and he put his hand inside my panties. I found myself doing the same thing to him. I wanted to. I wasn't at all afraid. Then we took all of our things off and went into the lake, and while we were in the water, he began rubbing and pressing against me. Then he raised my legs and put them around him and grabbed my back with his hand and pushed me towards him.
"His sex thing went right inside me, part of the way I guess, and I don't know if it was the water that flooded inside me, but I began kicking and screaming, and I dragged us both under water. Harry carried me out. He tried to quiet me, but he couldn't. The minute his thing entered me, I felt as though I was having a baby again. It was agony. I felt all those pains that I had forgotten all about. Harry had to take me to a doctor. He didn't say what he had done, just that I had bad cramps. Harry was very frightened that I was sick or something, and he just left me and never came back. I kept getting those terrible pains. Every once and a while, I would just think of his putting his sex thing inside me, and it would start all over again."
It was as a result of these pains which became periodic and incapacitating that the patient was re-institutionalized.
It was the psychiatrist's conjecture that intercourse in the lake, and the pressure of the water pouring into her vagina forced forward by the male member, had likely brought on the reoccurrence of the traumatic experience of childbirth for the patient. After a period of seven months, when the patient's seizure disappeared, she was released again.
The next incident which was responsible for her return to the institution was even more confused. The patient had become employed by a veterinarian, whose wife also managed dog kennels. They ran their combined businesses from one home, and the patient was hired to help in the office and assist around the kennels and generally perform whatever aid was necessary. The patient enjoyed working around the dogs and admitted subsequently that she was drawn with more than ordinary fascination to the breeding aspects of the kennel business. She would observe the dogs as they copulated and found that she experienced a discomfiture of pains in her vaginal entrance and in her abdomen at the sight of the male animal's sex organ penetrating the bitch's vaginal entrance. The patient later described it.
"I know it made me uncomfortable but nevertheless I would get all excited by the sexual actions of the dogs, and I would return to watch them. Mr. S., the veterinarian, was a young and pleasant man who liked to tease and play. His wife was very serious, and so he used to joke with me. It wasn't anything personal or intimate, not until he saw the way I looked at the dogs while they were having sex. After that, he would come along behind me and sometimes tickle me or run his hand down along the side of me and whistle, the way kids do at a girl with a pretty figure. But it was still pretty much all in play. Then, one afternoon he took one of the prize dogs to mate with a customer's show dog. We had a separate breeding room, and it was necessary that the dogs had attention and surveillance during such times because they could hurt each other. He asked me if I wanted to come along with him, and I went into the room and he locked the door behind him.
"When the male mounted the bitch, Mr. S began to touch me and move his hands around, feeling me. I was very excited. I didn't stop him. I wanted him to make love to me. I wanted to have a man make love to me normally without anything going wrong, and Mr. S saw that he was going to be able to take me. He told me to keep an eye on the dogs and that he would be back. He returned soon after, bringing a chair into the room. He locked the door again. He sat down on the chair, and he unzipped his trousers and took out his sex thing. He had some kind of lubricant, and he rubbed it on my hand and put my hand on his thing and made me work it up and down. It became all stiff and he picked up my skirt and began to play with his fingers between my legs.
"I became so excited I couldn't stop moving. He took my panties down, and then he began to press me down right on top of him. I was facing him, my legs astride his. His organ began to go inside me, and at first it felt very ... very good. Suddenly, I slid all the way down on top of it, and I had the feeling again, as though my whole stomach was bloated, the way it had been when I was pregnant. I cried out. He tried to calm me. I had my arms around him and I was struggling, still on his sex thing. I tried to get" up, and he tried to raise me up, but whatever had happened inside me was so tight I couldn't get separated from him. He tried to get out from under me, and he couldn't. It was so tight inside me, as tight as a fist, but it felt as though he was filling up my whole insides. I started to cry out and sob, saying that I was going to have a baby.
"Somehow he managed to get me off him. He talked to me, saying that I was not going to have a child. He thought my fear was that I would conceive. He explained that he had been wearing a contraceptive, but all I could do was repeat over and over again the same thing. When he quieted me, I went to my room. Then the pains began to get more terrible, and I began moaning and groaning. Mr. S's wife came to see me. She didn't know what he had done to me, and I didn't tell her. She looked at my stomach and it was all bloated, and I was having those pains at regular intervals just the way you do when you have a baby. When it became very bad, she had me sent to a hospital, and they found out that I wasn't pregnant at all. And when they looked into my records, they found out about me. They sent me back here."
No further history exists on this patient. Released once again, her fate was being decided upon the stage of life's experiences. Whether she could ever truly surmount the shock of the disturbing experience of her childhood-a most unusual circumstance which had made her a mother while still a virgin-only time will tell.
In each instance, psychiatric therapy had mended and restored her, but whether her ultimate pattern would be a healing or deteriorative process, is open to question. The human mind is a vast ocean upon which the good ship Psychiatry, possessed of increasing tools of scientific resourcefulness, could plot a course with some predictable accuracy, but there were still many emotional islands that defied rules, reason, or logic. For the human mind and human heart are siblings, and the heart has reasons all its own.
Psychiatric Commentary:
There have been other instances of impregnation with out the entry of the male organ into the vagina. The force of the male ejaculation is able to deliver the sperm into the female sexual part and induce conception. The entire incident of birth, the enormous distension of the vaginal entrance for the expulsion of the infant, for a child ill-acquainted with her own and male sexuality, might be expected to produce trauma and lingering neurosis. Annette was grievously marked by this harsh experience.
Nor can reason eradicate inaccessible psychic scars. It was possible to induce some form of psychiatric healing by persuading Annette to face up to some of the realities of the world about her. With her guilt removed, she was at least able to perform as a functional human being. In all other ways, she was seemingly normal, save one. That one had to do with her sexuality. In both instances, the one with the truck driver and the other with the veterinarian, driven on by her own desire, she actively sought to enter into a sexual relationship in order to, once and for all, obliterate the sexual barrier and restore herself to complete womanhood.
Her attempts were ill-fated because the early motherhood had produced an inseparable association between the sexual performance and the act of giving birth. One response becomes superimposed upon the other, and the incipient pleasure-responses of sex are quickly disrupted by the pseudo labor pangs and/or vaginal contractions. Whereas the discomfiture of the normal birth experience becomes blurred in the memory of Woman, enabling her to accept male vaginal entrance with agreeable excitation, it was not the case of Annette. Only patience, tenderness, the understanding of a deep and abiding love can likely remove the painful stigmata of Annette's mental wound.
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The Virgin Voyeur
Janet A, age 18, could pass for a chorus girl or showgirl at one of the better nightclubs. Indeed, she was an accomplished dancer as a result of having taken lessons since the age of 10. But classes or schooling for her of any kind had been erratic because of her problems with the law.
Janet was what is defined in sexological terras as a voyeur. She received her thrills, her sexual excitement, by seeing males undress or in a state of nudity or sexual engagement with a female. In fact, Janet was a female counterpart of a Peeping Tom. While it is not uncommon among little children, male or female, it is most unusual that a girl of this age should be affected by this sexual deviation a deviation in the genuine sense of the word, because it had become substituted for the sex act itself in Janet's mind. The only pleasure of any kind she could derive sexually was through such a secret observance of the male's sex parts unawares, of male engagement in heterosexual activity. She felt no arousal otherwise, despite the fact that boys had held her and even gone so far as to touch her mons veneris. The only time that Janet ever masturbated was during a situation where she was observing a male in a state of undress or sexual excitement.
Janet was a virgin. However, she was a continual source of concern for the police because her record showed no less than seventeen attempted rapes upon her person. In each instance, it was a result of her having been caught while observing males in states of nudity or other compromising circumstances. Further, since she would masturbate during such an observation, such males could only assume that she was a promiscuous and lascivious person, readily inclined toward sexual pleasures. The fact was, she fully intended to retain her virginity until such time as she would become married, and except for this aberration of hers, she seemed bright, rational, normal, and an attractive person.
The first incident of difficulty with the authorities occurred when she was fourteen. Attending the local public swimming pool, she undressed in the female lockers which were adjacent to those of the male. She confessed that she had many times bored a hole through the boards and observed the boys and young men undressing. But during this one instance, emboldened by her excitement, she had ventured to clamber up atop an overhanging, from which she could look directly with unobscured vision into tbe boys' shower stalls. It was from this position that she was noticed by three young men. Without her knowing it, they had climbed up and seized her while she lay there, her hand between her legs actively engaged in the act of masturbation. They had lowered her into one of the lockers, removed her bathing suit, and were preparing to rape her when an attendant, curious about the noise and struggle, interrupted them. It was Janet's own physical strength which likely saved her that initial time. Although possessed of a stunning figure, she was larger than average, standing 5'9" tall in her stocking feet and had quite an athletic build.
In another instance, because of her physical dimensions, which she had evidently assumed could be easily disguised as that of a young man, she affected boys' clothes and wore a cap to conceal her long hair. In this apparel, she could enter the male side of the public toilets. By her own admission, she managed this many times without incidence, but the entire procedure came to the attention of the authorities because of this episode:
"It was just after 11:00, and there's nobody around at some subway stations during that hour. I went into one of the bathrooms, and just behind the partition separating the urinals from the bowls, I saw two men. They were homosexuals, or one of them was. And I leaned up against the partition and looked around the side. One of the men was leaning up against the wall, his pants down, and the other one had his sex organ in his backside. I never saw anything like that before, and I could hardly stand it, I was so excited. I didn't think of even looking behind me. I just lowered my trousers and separated my legs and began rubbing myself. Usually, I have one climax, and then I lose all my excitement, and wherever I am, I just get away quickly. But this time, I had two orgasms, and I still could not stop rubbing myself. I hadn't realized that someone had come in and was watching from behind me. And I didn't realize it until I felt a man's sex organ actually touching my flesh from behind.
"Suddenly, he grabbed me about the middle and pushed it between my legs, just underneath my private parts. I raised my foot and kicked at him. I can bring my leg way up behind me, and I got him right between the legs, and he fell back. I tried to run past him, but my trousers were lowered, and I tripped and fell. He rolled over and got on top of me. His sex organ was stiff and he tried to pull my pants off. The homosexuals became very frightened, and they just ran out and left us there.
"The man who held me was big and very strong. I kicked and struggled, but he managed to open my legs. I scratched his face, and he let go of me, but he slammed me to the ground and got on top of me again. This time I knew I wasn't going to be able to hold him, but just as he pressed his organ against me, he had an orgasm. He grabbed hold of his organ and began to squeeze his legs together, and I got up and ran out just as a police officer came. The homosexuals had told him that a girl was being raped."
Because Janet came from a good family and was apart from the strange distortion in her personality, an intelligent, amiable, and promising young person, the police, aware that she was undergoing psychiatric treatment, often looked out for her in an attempt to keep her out of trouble. To some of the members of the precinct around the neighborhood, hers was a familiar face. Sometimes, unbeknownst to her, she was kept under surveillance, particularly if she was seen on the streets after dark. Although she was forbidden such exposure by her parents, she did manage to leave the house after they were asleep. On one such occasion, one of the policemen familiar with her, who trailed her, was able to expose a house of prostitution that had begun a covert operation in the town.
Janet, used as a material witness in this instance, described what she had seen:
"I knew this place was open for about a month. I found it when I followed two of the fellows I used to watch at night. They always had girls, and they would have sexual relations with them. This one night, they left the house early and started walking and I just went after them. I thought they were going to pick up some girls in the neighborhood, but they walked to this part of town near Highland Avenue, and they went into this big old gray house. I sneaked around to the back of it and began looking through different windows. There was a porch in back, one of those porches people use in the summertime, and I opened the door and went inside. There was a window from there into the house right into this big room I guess you could call it the living room. Then I could see everything that was going on in there. And, boy, there was always plenty going on.
"This woman; the one that limped a little, she ran everything. The first time I looked through the window it was a Monday night. That was the day I had followed the two fellows. A lot of people were going into the house. There must have been about twenty men who came in. The girls, they were already there. I'm not sure how many there were that night, maybe about six. The men all came in to see the movie, I guess. I never knew that movies like that were made. There wasn't anything that it didn't show. They showed men on top of men, and men and women, and Negroes and whites. They had girls doing things to each other. They even had a woman and a dog.
"When the lights came on after the movie, I saw some of the men absolutely undressed and some of them partly undressed. They were playing with girls', feeling them and everything. One of them was having intercourse with a girl who was sitting right on top of him. Then the girls all began kneeling down between the men's legs and putting their mouths on their sex organs.
"But there were things going on like that every night."
Encouraged to talk about what she had seen, for the record, Janet further stated:
"Another time, they had this woman. She must have been about 40 or 50. She was big, and she had black hair. She looked like one of those opera singers or something. The woman who limped had two of the girls undress her, and then they turned her face to the wall. She wasn't young, and she was large. I'll bet she weighed 180 pounds. She was heavy, but she wasn't fat. She had a very large white behind, and I guess that's why they must have gotten her somewhere. 'Cause this was another one of those things they did to show a lot of the men who came.
"They were sitting in chairs or just watching at first. One of the girls, the one who wears her hair tied in a ponytail down her back, had a-I guess you'd call it a cat-onine tails-it was made of leather and had little knots at the end. She was undressed too, but she had on a leather belt around her waist and leather boots on. She got behind this big woman, and she began lashing her with this whip. The more she hit her, the more the big woman began to squirm and move around. She wasn't screaming or anything. It looked like she was just sexually excited. The more she beat her, the more the big woman just stuck her backside out, just as though she was inviting her to strike her some more.
"I couldn't understand that at all. It must have hurt her something terrible, because I could see the red welts from where I was standing. And she must have beat her like that for-I'll bet it was fifteen minutes without stopping. She got tired. She had to change hands several times. And what happened after that is that a man got up behind the big woman, and he put his sex organ in her behind. Then another man did it after that. There must have been six or seven, maybe more, who did the same thing.
"They didn't have these abnormal things going on each night. But they had sexual intercourse, and I guess what you call prostitution all the time. These abnormal or weird things happened about once a week, I'd say. It seemed like each time, it was something more freakish than the last. They have this girl. I don't thing she was more than about 16 or 17. She was slim, and when she undressed, she looked a little like a boy. But she got on the table against the wall and spread her legs right in front of the seats where all the men were watching. Then she began putting all kinds of strange things inside her vagina.
"She started out with a regular coke bottle. She worked it in until the whole thing was practically inside her. She took it out and took a larger bottle. It was one of the liquor bottles. She put some kind of oil or some slick liquid on it. Then she began working that inside her. I couldn't believe my eyes when she opened large enough to take that in. She wasn't that big. I couldn't understand it. It made me ache just to look at it. That was one night that I didn't like what I saw, but I just couldn't drag myself away from it.
"Then they had one of the girls put something around her waist. It came on a little strap, and it was made like a male sex organ (a dildo-a simulated sex organ). She got on top of this girl, just as though she was a man, and she put it inside her. She moved up and down on her for a while, and then she took that off, and she put another one on which was larger. The belt didn't come off; it was just this attachment at the end that she kept changing. She had five or six of them, and each one was larger than the last one. The last one, I didn't think that was going to be possible at all. And she had a lot of trouble getting it into her, but the thing girl grabbed her and pulled her forward, and someone pushed behind the girl on top of her, and then it did go in. My insides were aching just looking at it, and I didn't go back there for about a week after that. But then I kept thinking of all the other times that I had seen things that had excited me so much, and, well, I just started going again. During that period of time, I never even went anywhere else."
Janet recited many other instances of what had transpired in the house of prostitution, but among them, as subsequent testimony disclosed, was one which she did not even wish to talk about. Later on, when this incident did become public, as the result of the complaining parents of the young girl involved, Janet admitted she had observed this incident as well. It involved the defloration of a girl 17 years old before a similar group of invited, paying guests.
"The defloration was not forceable. The young girl involved had agreed and was to be given the sum of $250. Despite police prodding, Janet resisted description of this incident. She was finally warned that if she did not comply and give the details as she had seen them, then her status would be changed from that of material witness and she would be sent away to the Women's House of Detention, a fate which she had thus far, despite her frequent entanglements with the police, been able to avoid. Janet finally conceded.
"There just isn't much to tell. This girl came in. Everyone was seated. There were a great many people. I think almost twice as many as usual. A lot of them were women and they were very well dressed. Some even had mink stoles. The girl who came in seemed like a nice person. I mean, she didn't look cheap or anything. What's so special about this that I have to go into this kind of detail?"
The interrogater persisted, and Janet, not without resistence, continued.
"I said she wasn't cheap or anything. She had one of those organdy dresses. It was orange. She had white sandals on. She looked scared, sort of. Well, at least very uncomfortable. They brought out a bed. It wasn't very large, and it had a canopy with gold and everything on top of it. It was something they prepare for the stage.
"Two of the girls started to undress her. They stripped her down to her brassiere and panties. Then this woman who limps came over and she made a big thing about taking the girls panties off-sort of slowly, pulling them down, you know, inch by inch, until everyone could see the hair between her legs. Then she had her sit back on the edge of the bed and she spread her legs apart, and this woman took her hand and opened the lips of the girl's sexual part. She pressed her finger into her to show that the opening was too tiny to admit her finger. That's when I realized that the girl had never had sexual relations. She was a virgin.
"She even had some of the men and woman come up and put their finger there so that they could see for themselves. It was disgusting. It was just the most terrible thing, the most immoral thing I think I've ever seen. But you know what happened after that. Why have me go over it? A man had sexual relations with her. That's all there is to it."
Details were demanded, even a description of the persons involved.
"After that, the woman who limps used her hands and began to masturbate the girl on the outside of her vagina. She got her all excited so she couldn't stand it or resist. Or even want to resist. They ought to throw them all in prison and let them stew in their for a hundred years! It was contemptible."
At this point, Janet became so upset that for the first time during any of her testimony she wept.
"They didn't have one man do that to her. They had three. They came into the room all undressed. They all stood there before her, and then one of them began rubbing her breasts with his hands and putting his sex part all over her face. The other one raised her legs, separated them, and then the third man began to take his sex organ and rub it up and down at the entrance to her vagina. The man holding her legs raised one of her legs so everyone could see it. The man rubbing against her didn't try to put it inside her, just kept rubbing against her. Then he left her all excited and one of the others started to do the same thing.
"They had that girl going out of her mind. She didn't know what she was doing. She wasn't responsible for what happened to her. The third man, the one who was leaning over her face and rubbing her breasts, he was the one who-who actually pressed it inside her. She was screaming and they were holding her down, and blood...." (Janet broke down, sobbing uncontrollably. Then after she was quieted, she was permitted to continue.) "She was just bleeding something awful. But that didn't stop them. The other two men went inside her too. Oh God, God...."
All of the material became part of Janet's psychiatric record, and the latter testimony was instrumental in greatly benefitting her condition. It disclosed a strange anomaly. Here was this young lady, capable of acts of boldness which were entirely in contradiction to her virginal condition: Peeping into men's locker rooms; entering men's toilets; observing, with a great state of excitement resulting in masturbation, acts of masochism, the most vulgar pornographic movies and acts in real life, performance of flagellation, and the most terrible and the most "immoral" act was defined by her as the act of defloration.
A virginal girl, taken in normal heterosexual intercourse was a condition so terrible for her to contemplate that she at first refused to discuss it and then could speak of it only under dire emotional duress. To the psychiatrist, it was quite revealing. An examination of her early upbringing revealed the presence of a male parent who carried, to a point of virtual obsession, the thought of his daughter's premature de-virginity. Janet referred to many father-to-daughter talks he had with her, under the guise of educational sex discussions, since the age of 9. He had revealed to her exactly what sexual intercourse was, what had to occur, and its direct and sole objective of the reproduction of the species and motherhood. Every other instance of such male-female engagement in the sex act was sacrilegious, damning, destructive to the morality and the character of the human being.
Over and over again, she had heard that story many, many times. Since she was a girl with strong and healthy sexual instincts, it was necessary for her to find an outlet. The one which she became attached and the one that seemed distracted and harmless was that of the voyeur. This was not something personally engaged in, and this was merely looking on; personally, it did not harm her. To her, harm meant only one thing-to lose her virginity prematurely.
Because of the power of the sex drive, and the manner in which it becomes fixated and assumes definite patterns, soon the only arousal she could experience was that of the voyeur. Seemingly, she could observe anything, and in her own mind, she was clean, pure, healthy and untampered with, in the ultimate sense.
This the psychiatrist explained. He explained that she was suffering from a distortion of values. A preponderence of emphasis had been placed upon the act of sexual intercourse to the unreasonable minimization of the importance of all other forms of sexual morality. He explained how this could contaminate her entire ability to respond sexually. Even habitual clitoral masturbation, if extended and continued long enough, can often not be diverted to the real source of sexual expression in the vagina itself. Such a practice often makes it impossible for females to experience orgasm during vaginal intercourse. Further extension of the sex response and its association with other acts which become substitutive-the masochism of the thin young lady who receives all manner of objects into her vagina; the large woman who requires flagellation to become excited. The psychiatrist even explained pyromania-those arsonists who start fires in order to observe them and experience orgasm.
Janet's voyeurism was described as a similar substitution and one which could have lasting and pernicious affects; it could become more complex and distort her entire personality. Most natural to the human being is direct sexual engagement, heterosexual activity, sexual intercourse brought to the point of orgasm. This is natural.
The taboos that exist in relation to this, premarital or otherwise, are social taboos. But there is a clash, a conflict, in a person with strong sex drives involving these two forces, the subordination of the natural sex urge may auger ominous consequences. The common sense virtues of social morality and premarital chastity are wise indeed in our form of society. However, the disproportionate emphasis placed upon a state of premarital chastity can sometimes serve to accentuate the pressures and heighten desires which normally might not make such strong demands.
Janet's father's cautions had evidently backfired and aroused in her a state of heightened curiosity and premature sexual excitation. The psychiatrist further explained that if she did not make a conscious, deliberate and strong effort to alter her sexual patterns at this time the thing she valued the most-her virginity preciously saved for holy matrimony and motherhood-could be ruined. At such a time, she might likely discover that she was unable to respond normally and that she was still tied to the abnormal demands of voyeurism to which she had grown psycho-sexually accustomed.
Although the effects were not immediately apparent, over the course of the next fourteen months, Janet A was able to satisfactorily alter the pattern of her behavior and the promise of a normal future became realistically predictable.
Psychiatric Commentary:
The Virgin Voyeur
Janet A's case history can serve as a classic example of the development of sexual perversity. The sexual drives are powerful and sustained by an unyielding force which is intended to direct the human being toward his natural end ol reproduction. When the normal sexual act becomes marred with evil connotation-fear, threat of damnation-it is driven inward and buried in the complex labyrinth of the psyche. But the sex drive, like the truth, "will out". It is the most powerful force in human nature and, much as the lidded kettle of steam, will result in an explosive aftermath, unless some of its force is diverted through other outlets. Sexual perversion can be described as just such "other outlets".
Such diversions can assume many weird and bewildering forms. Many of them-flagellation, pyromania, voyeurism-occur in this case. While some of them, such as the Peeping Tom complex of Janet's, would seem harmless on the surface, except for her exposure to incidents of sexual rapacity, there is a quality which makes them quite serious. The quality referred to relates to the manner in which the human being develops and matures. His sexual behavior patterns are formed in childhood and early adolescence. Whatever are the forms which serve as sexual stimulants at this time, they take root in his psychological makeup. They wear deep into his psyche, just as a rivulet wears its way deep into rocky mountain beds. Presently, with maturity, they become a fixed and per manent part of the character and personality of the individual. Thus is the fetishist marked for life. Or the homosexual. It is not simply a bad habit to be undone; the sexual physiology begins to work automatically when kicked off by whatever are the sexual triggers of the individual.
For Janet, peeking, observing, seeing others in sexually compromising states, served as the substitute for the sex act itself. Often, if such behavior is not altered during early adolescence, it assumes the central position in the sexual life of the individual. Voyeurism is, therefore, for many of its victims, the only sex-related act to which they can respond-just as many pyromaniacs can experience sexual excitement and orgasm only while observing a fire. Sexual intercourse, once substituted by such confirmed deviates, elicits no sensual pleasure whatever.
Fortunately, in Janet's instance, she was apparently still young enough to rechannel her desires to their natural outlet of expression.
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The Strongwoman Virgin
Elsa M. raised in the circus world as a member of a performing family of acrobats, grew up to be an extraordinarily powerful woman. Blonde and attractive, she was nevertheless as powerfully muscled as a man, although her muscularity was of a more lithe and less angular kind associated with the male. She performed in circuses and on theater stages as a strongwoman, demonstrating feats of exceptional strength, such as bending horseshoes, tearing of telephone books, and arm wrestling contests with male members of the audience. She closed her act by crouching beneath a circular platform upon which a performer played a piano and she raised herself, both lifting the platform and the piano.
At the age of 22, Elsa was still a virgin. Although she had had many suitors, and three such relationships had proceeded to the point of marriage, they had always been disrupted before the trip to the altar. Elsa's problem was first brought to the attention of the psychiatrist as a result of her conflict with the law. Three young rowdies who had tackled her during a performance had permitted their hazing to reach a point where one reached up and tugged her off the stage as she put stress on a rope. In the ensuing embroilment, Elsa broke the jaw of one of the young men and fractured the wrist of another. So great was her anger, because she narrowly risked being seriously injured by being thrown off balance during a performance, that it required four policemen and the theater manager to subdue her.
Fearful of some maniacal tendencies in the young woman, she was subjected to a routine psychiatric examination. The report was negative. She was entirely normal and rational, and her anger was understandable under the circumstances; her extraordinary strength was what gave the appearance of irrationality. The psychiatrist found her to be courteous, co-operative, and a most candid young woman. He became interested in her because of her unusualness. Despite the fact that she was prodigously strong, she was completely feminine in her attitudes, reaction, and appearance. However, the single fact of her immense physical strength, considered a masculine attribute, and in which category she surpassed the male, placed her in a competitive relationship.
Elsa confessed that she felt herself impelled to test the masculinity of her male companions because of her desire to feel dominated and in the female role. Elsa was possessed of a strong sexuality and she was driven by an uncommonly strong desire to experience sexual relations with a man. As a result, she made herself provocatively available in her actions and behavior. However, the effect of such provocations brought her only frustration and humiliation. Questioning by the psychiatrist produced the following recollections:
"Emil was a handsome, blond man, a student majoring in physics and an athlete on the university track team. My brother Martin introduced him to me, and from the first, I resolved that this would be the man. He was attractive, masculine. He came backstage to see me in the dressing room. I deliberately undressed behind the screen in such a way that he couldn't help but see my exposed figure. I wanted him to see me as a woman and not be awed by the performance on stage and think that I was a mass of unappealing muscles. I caught his glance many times, and I could read the excitement in his eyes.
"We went out to a restaurant and had a lot of beer. After that, we went walking in the city, and it began to rain and we continued walking in the rain, laughing. I was soaking wet; my dress was clinging to me, and he invited me up to his apartment to dry my things, and I vent. I took all my clothes off and hung them up to dry and wrapped myself in two towels. We had more beer to drink in his apartment. He came over to me, and he put his hand under the towel, and he began to touch me and embrace me. He uncovered my breasts, and I could see that he was very impressed. They are very large, but they're well formed, and I don't even require the support of a bra. He put his hand down on my stomach and began to reach down to touch me between my legs. And I turned away and moved back to appear resistent. I didn't wish to seem shameless and cheap, but at the same time, I believe there was something in me that wished to sec how much he would exert himself to persuade me.
"He was, at that moment, very excited, and his sex organ was exposed and rigid. Also, he had had too much to drink, and he began to grab at me and to try to pull me and force me down. I shoved at him with the flat of my hand which struck him in the chest, and he fell off the couch on which we were sitting. He grew so angry at this that he began to manhandle me angrily. I turned him over, put him down beneath me on the couch, and held his hands above his head so he couldn't move. I was lying on top of him, and we were both naked, but instead of sexual excitement, it was a terrible experience. I could not feel that he was a man. I still had desire, but I could see that my own strength had overwhelmed him, and even his state of sexual excitement had passed. His sex organ was no longer prepared for the sexual act."
Elsa was frank to state the terrible concern and emotional instability that such experiences were producing in her. An indication of how far desperation had driven her was this occurrence:
"We were on the same bill in the theater with two dancers. One was a West Indian, very tall and attractive and graceful. He was very impressed with me, and he would watch my every performance, and he would applaud and smile. We dated after the show and went dancing. He was a very sensual man, and I could feel the warmth of his body when he pressed against me. Also, he was apparently a very practiced lover, because of the way he held me his very touch was calculated to excite me. His fingers running up and down my arm or touching my ear or stroking my neck. The way he kissed me, his tongue parting my lips. And there was about him a very natural sensuality which his African dances, a specialty of his, only accentuated.
"One evening, I went to his room. He opened the door, flustered, wearing only a cloth bathrobe. I told him I just wanted to talk to him a little while. He did not seem anxious to let me come in, but seeing him that way, with only his bathrobe and my mind all full of images he had encouraged in me, I was difficult to persuade otherwise. Once I got in the room, he gave me a drink and had one himself. He had apparently been drinking quite a bit. I allowed my skirts to go up my thighs. Yes, I'm ashamed to speak this way, but the truth is the truth. I require the feeling of having a man very much. It is working inside me like a storm which must burst one day soon.
"There was a record player, and I turned it on, and he began to make dance movements, and then, in the sexual teasing way that he had about him, he let his bathrobe slip dawn and began to hold it between his legs and effect those exciting African movements he was so good at. The man was practically naked before me and moving in that sensual manner. I was on the couch, and my legs seemed to move apart with a will of ther own. But then he simply stopped and began to put his bathrobe back on, as if he were going to prepare to leave.
"At that moment the door to the bedroom opened and a young woman came out in a dressing gown, all disheveled. Then I realized that I had interrupted him. I had no right to behave as I did, but I felt offended, insulted. It was as though he was making a mockery of me. He had taken me out and shown in me an interest. Even now, with a young woman in the room, he had excited me in this way, and now was ready to turn me out of the door. I don't know what seized me, but I simply went up to him and tore the bathrobe off his body, and pressed him back on the couch. The young woman came at me and began to beat me with her fists, and I smashed her with the back of my hand and flung her across the room. Then I ... I actually made an attempt to force him to have sexual intercourse with me. I attempted to ... rape him.
"I'm so ashamed to speak of this in this way. It makes me sick with myself. I placed his sex organ between my legs and began to rub and move on it. But I had so upset him that it was not erect. I began to rub it with my hands. The young woman I had thrown backward had gotten back on her feet, and she ran out into the hall making a racket. I was never so humiliated in my life. I straightened my skirt and immediately pushed past her and left the building. I found myself weeping. The tears were coursing down my cheeks. I don't remember when I had wept before that. It must have been when I was a child. If the whole thing had not been so mortifying, I suppose it would have been ludicrous. Imagine, that young woman crying out in the hall. Would anyone believe that a woman had attempted to rape a man?
"As it turned out, I was mistaken in my feelings about the dancer. His partner was much upset with him, and he confessed to me that he had dated men and acted in that way just as a lark, an experience. The idea of dating a professional strongwoman was looked upon by him as an amusement. There was another week to go in the engagement, but he didn't show up at the theater. He was plainly afraid of me. He had reason to be.
"I suppose I certainly don't sound like a rational or normal woman. I've told myself so many times that physical strength had little to do with a relationship between a man and a woman. After all, there are some very fine, sensitive, intelligent men who are not physically very..-..strong. I admire these qualities, but something in me just makes me continue to seek a man who can make me feel the way other women do in relation to most men. Perhaps I am wrong, but I believe my strength would be of great distress to a man who was not physically strong and that it would hurt his ego in the same way that it would not fulfill me.
"I'm not an ignorant, brutish person; please don't assume that. But I do believe that there is something in Woman herself that needs to be dominated by a man. I don't mean men who wish to enslave her; but at least there should always be that feeling that, if circumstances demand it, these inner physical resources of the man would be there and could be used to assert the masculine nature. Doesn't the sex act itself tell something like that? The man mounts the woman. He gives to her, and she receives. And isn't Woman made in such a way that she may be engaged in sex any time? The male, not so. He must be prepared and desiring. The woman, no matter how she feels, she has been so made by Nature that she can be penetrated by a male who can dominate her. Woman may deny this-they're so busy trying to be equal and to compete with men; but I believe there is something that is in a woman's nature that cannot be denied. And I think that something is working on me and working on me more strongly because I am especially physically strong.
"Perhaps the most disturbing of all is the fact that I do not wish to be promiscuous or lead an immoral life. I wish to be married. I wish to have a family as other women do. But my desires are so strong and I am becoming so anxious that I am allowing myself to do things which I detest, such as that incident with the West Indian.
"Perhaps even worse was what I had been involved in recently. The agent who handles and books our act is a big, florid man, Eddie, and he's in his fifties. He drinks a great deal, and when he does, he permits himself liberties that he would not when he's sober. He is a most attractive man. When I was alone with him in his office, he asked me whether I had been fitted for the new costumes. He knew I had made arrangements for it. They were to be more dramatic, with 'sequins and more decollete' with a more accentuated difference between the bust and the waist.
"He came over to me and looked down my blouse deliberately with an admiring smile on his lips. He sees and handles a great many very beautiful women, and I was flattered that he gave me his attention. When I didn't act upset, he began to unbutton my blouse, and since I don't wear a brassiere, my breasts were completely bared to him. He drew in a breath at the sight of them and began to touch them with his fingers. Then he bent down, and with his mouth began to kiss them. I became so easily excited. I'm so hungry, so starved to know a man. I went to the couch with him willingly. He placed his hand underneath my garments and began to feel my hips and my buttocks. I reached over and unzipped his trousers, and I heard the words coming from my own lips. I could hardly believe it. I kept repeating over and over again, "Make love to me, make love to me. Please make love to me."
"We were in this state when Eddie's wife, Eileen, walked in on us. We had been so excited we had failed to lock the door. She clicked it shut. She didn't look upset. She merely smiled. 'It won't do you any good, honey,' she said to me. 'He's completely worthless. A lot of big talk and nothing else."
"Whether it was his age or his drinking or some other reason, I don't know, but I could see that she was right. He got up angered and slammed into the other room. I was so upset. I just sat there, my head buried in my hands. My skirt was still above my waist, and I was completely exposed. And then I felt hands touching me, between my legs. Then when I raised my head, I saw Eileen bending down, putting her mouth on my most intimate part. I wanted to push her away, but the sensation was so piercing, so appeasing to my hunger at that instant, that I just let her continue. I twisted and writhed on that couch in uncontrollable ecstasy. The feeling was beyond description. I felt everything rising up inside me, and I arched upward; so fierce were my movements that I flung her off on the floor while in my convulsive heavings. I experienced a climax with an intensity I had never known before.
"I don't know if this is the nature of a woman's ability to make love to a woman, or whether I was so sensitized, so excited that any hand other than my own or lips would have produced such a sensation. But whatever the reason, I hunger for it. And Eileen doesn't allow my hunger to go unappeased. She loves my body. She says she does. She says it is a wonderful experience. Often, she will stay with me a whole night, and even as I sleep, she will remain between my legs, bringing me these extraordinary feelings.
"I hate the connotation of our relationship. Such people and such things have always repulsed me. And yet, here I find myself drawn to her and permitting her to do whatever she wishes. Worse than that, I'm almost afraid to think what would happen if she stopped, if she didn't desire me any longer. Yet the question keeps asking itself through me, 'Am I walking away from what is normal? Am I giving up my chances for a fulfilled life as a woman?'
"All I can think about, all I can dream about is the image of a man, strong and naked and fierce in his desire for me, to take me forcibly if necessary-but being able to do so, with no power on Heaven or earth able to stop him. Am I wrong? Am I wrong to feel this way?"
Psychiatric Commentary:
The Strongwoman Virgin
Elsa is trapped by her own extraordinary strength. Physical strength of so great a measure has been invariably associated in our society, and in most societies, with the nature and character of Man, not Woman. There is nothing which indicates that such strength was intended by Nature to be masculine, not feminine; there have been incidents in history of powerful warrior women, of amazons, as strong as any men. But the roles assumed by men and women in our civilization, and in the majority of others, have resulted in a stereotyped muscular strength as being masculine. As a result, there is the unconscious identification of the powerful male as "more masculine." The image carries over into lifting and carrying the female over the threshold, shielding and protecting her, and so on. The physically delicate male does not serve as a masculinity symbol. Sexual virility is associated with male strength.
Although Elsa M is an intelligent young woman, and realizes that physical strength need not be the measure of a man, she is a captive of the attitudes of her society. Her images from childhood of the ideal man, the one with whom she could share physical intimacy, have been of the physically strong and virile types. Love, sexual response is not governed by the mind; it is an emotional response and, as a consequence, Elsa's reactions are consistently emotional. Though her desire is great to join with a man, something in her nature desires physical subjugation, conquest. She wishes, literally, to feel that she is being "taken" and not placed in the masculine role of the aggressor who "takes".
There are many satisfactory unions where physically delicate men desire women of greater strength. There are also many women who are physically, though not noticeably, stronger than their partners. But Elsa's condition is one of a most extreme nature; her physical prowess is equal to, and surpassing, many professional strongmen. Her sexual drives are equally intense. Her picture of fulfillment involves, therefore, a man capable of extraordinary strength.
It has been possible for her to respond to a woman is a lesbian relationship because she is not placed in a competitive role. But her acceptance of this relationship is begrudging and unenthusiastic. So great is her desire for a male that it is safe to predict that she will never become truly homosexual. However, her chances for a normal sexual relationship are not likely. She would have to meet that extraordinary man, and physical strength would not be enough, either. She is a woman of a lively mentality. Or, her own attitudes would have to be slowly re-schooled over a long period of time. She would have to come to look upon the male-female union in an altered light.
