The erotic fantasies of the American housewife reflect her needs and desires as well as her sexual strengths and weaknesses. Sexual fantasies are important because they are indications of our own private perceptions about ourselves as well as providers of sexual stimulation. Sex fantasies can determine psychological difficulties and personality problems; they can indicate the emotional position of a particular relationship; they can even help us determine the cultural influences which have shaped our sexual consciousness and behavior. These cultural influences are particularly important when discussing female sex fantasies because the psychological determinants of female sexual behavior frequently have their causes in cultural, noninherent mechanisms.
When discussing psychological problems, fantasies often provide the only real clues for the analyst and the individual to work with. For women, fantasies thus become an invaluable tool through which they can develop their own sexual self-knowledge and preferences. Because of the cultural bias against women in our society, psychological counseling and other forms of professional help for the woman tend to be flavored with masculine influences which, as everybody knows, repress the expression of female sexuality. Fantasies, then, become of paramount importance to the woman as perhaps the only true guide to her unconscious feelings about sex. Through an investigation of her own fantasies, a woman can determine the emotional truths that make up her psychosexual awareness of herself as well as her mate.
Women growing up in this country often find difficulties with marriage and other societal constructs of the sexual relationship. As Maxine Davis points out in her. book, The Sexual Responsibility of Woman, many women fail to notice the cultural elements responsible for their sexual behavior, particularly when it comes to marriage:
The history of marriage is long and fascinating but it is sufficient for a woman to realize that it is a social institution, largely the product of her primitive need for protection and subsistence for her young, and not a natural state. Religion has made it sacred and social custom has complicated it by imposing its own patterns upon it. The latter forces are far from negligible and have conditioned Western men into accepting monogamous marriage by innumerable devices.
Both women and men should be aware of the distinctive sexual patterns that characterize American women. Women are not aroused by as many sources of sexual stimulation as men, and in general their sexual response seems dictated by more emotional determinants than physical. Women have a frequency of sexual response far below that of the male in every stage of the life cycle. According to Alfred Kinsey, in his statistical survey of female sex habits entitled Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, the average male, both single and married, reaches orgasm through one of six outlets regularly in the late teens, almost half of the women have had no such experience before twenty. When married, almost 75 percent of the women are able to reach orgasm during the first year. These statistics indicate a vast difference between the expression of male vs. female sexuality in our culture.
Even the physical reaction of orgasm itself seems to develop differently for men as opposed to women. For men, sexual release is mostly a physical reaction; orgasm is accompanied by the physical process of ejaculation. In women, however, the physical processes involving orgasm are much more complex in nature since they involve emotional reactions. Masters and Johnson, in their classic text Human Sexual Response, portray the female orgasm as a psycho-physiologic experience occurring within, and made meaningful by, a context of psychosocial influence. Physiologically, it is a brief episode of physical release from the vasocongestive and myotonic increment developed in response to sexual stimuli. Psychologically, it is subjective perception of a peak of physical reaction to sexual stimuli. The cycle of sexual response, with orgasm as the ultimate point in progression, generally is believed to develop from a drive of biologic-behavioral origin deeply rooted into the condition of human existence.
Jessie Bernard, writing in his book about communication between the sexes The Sex Game, points out that sexual differences influence the manner in which men and women view the world:
Because of the common species heredity and the common body systems, especially the sensory systems, we can assume that all of us, regardless of sex, experience red when stimulated by the proper wave length, hear high C when the proper note is struck, taste sweetness when we eat sugar, smell fragrance in a rose garden, feel softness when touching silk. The same confidence in assuming similarity in all sensory experience, however, is not warranted, for some differences between the sexes in relevant areas of experience can influence communication and therefore the relations between them. Some of these differences are physiological, some anatomical. Some are culturally induced. And some are bio-socio-cultural.
The key word in Mr. Bernard's account of sexual influence over perception, "bio-socio-cultural," is also the key idea of the Masters-Johnson definition of female orgasm. Almost all sexual experience is culturally defined, but the cultural emphasis is never more important than when female sexuality and female sexual fantasies are discussed. So much of female sexual behavior is defined by socio-cultural conditions that it is almost impossible to separate cultural definitions from female sex fantasies without destroying the meaning and immediacy of the fantasy.
Some cultural elements which regulate female sexual behavior and response include religion, education, and social class and status. Women with strong religious convictions are less-likely, for instance, to experiment with extramarital sex as a solution to marriage sexual difficulties. Women with a background of higher education have been proven by studies to be more satisfied in their early marital sexual relations. Several studies have indicated strong negative feelings about intercourse on the part of lower-class women.
An especially significant cultural determinant over female sexual patterns is the remnant of previous moral standards which still linger in our society. The double standard of behavior, prevalent in the Victorian era, dictated that the pleasures of sex were for men only and that women participated in sex only to give men pleasure. Women who did participate in sex for their own enjoyment, and especially women who participated in premarital sexual intercourse, were considered sinful and they lost their chance to make a decent marriage, unless a particular boy felt obligated to marry her.
This stress against female sexuality in past generations is still felt today. "Good" girls who supposedly have not lost their virginity are usually the ripest candidates for compatibility problems after marriage because so much of their background has been directed against sexual stimulation and pleasure. In the past, a woman who took too much pleasure from intercourse in marriage was suspected of premarital experience; this influence is still felt in our culture-witness the number of divorces caused by a husband's lack of trust in his wife.
Because of this cultural "redefinition" of female sexuality which is still operational in certain groups of our society, marriage counselors have been plagued with thousands of cases of frigidity and impotence, the two psychological states of inadequate sexuality for women and men. Sexual imbalance between man and wife is common. In the past, says Dr. Donald Hastings in his Sexual Expression in Marriage, marriage counselors would tell their clients that there was a natural imbalance one way or the other (according to nature of the complaint) and that since the wife was oversexed, or the husband, they would just have to make adjustments around the problem. Today sexual research by Masters and Johnson and others has found wide dissemination throughout the media and most women know that, scientifically at least, there are very few physical causes for frigidity or for the other problems that bring on sexual imbalance in a relationship. Counselors can no longer ameliorate marriage difficulties with the "oversexed" or "under-sexed" explanation-the public is too aware of the fact that physical factors in sexual inadequacy are usually rare. Instead, says Dr. Hastings, the modern marriage counselor believes the normality or abnormality of a person's sexual drive is related entirely to that person's response toward a specific partner. Every woman, it seems, is capable of being a nymphomaniac with the right man, and-likewise most men are capable of much higher levels of sexual performance than they are willing to admit.
The sexual role women are expected to play in marriage is not always a simple one. There is a tension between the goals of equalitarianism and feminine passivity. Few women want to build their marriages upon nineteenth-century standards, but the new roles demanded by the twentieth century are not always clear. The wife should learn to bring her own sexual feelings and responses to a point where they match their husband's as closely as possible.
Because of the difficulty women face in clearly defining their sex role, neuroses are very common with married women. Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham, M.D., outline the condition of the neurotic housewife in their book Modern Woman: The Lost Sex:
The relatively large number of women who complain of immediate sexual and marital difficulties stands out among the neurotic. Their complaints usually revolve about the sexual act and its insufficiency or unsatisfactory nature. Often, however, the general marital relationship is under attack, the woman not being able directly to place her problem as sexual. The husband is criticized for a thousand reasons as inconsiderate, selfish, harsh or thoughtless, which he may not in fact be. These women range all the way from the frankly and completely frigid to those who complain of neglect and indifference on the part of their husbands and the feelings of loneliness and uselessness that arise from it. Many of them have the prospect of divorce prominently in mind....
Of particular incidence is the neurotic tendency in most American women to be masochistic. This tendency becomes very prevalent in the erotic fantasies of dissatisfied wives. The tendency toward masochism in so many compensatory erotic fantasies has caused debate among psychoanalysts as to the extent of cultural determinants in the behavior of women. Most classical, Freudian psychoanalysts believe that women are inherently "weak" and therefore more prone to masochism. Later analysts, including Karen Homey, author of Feminine Psychology, feel that cultural determinants are responsible almost entirely for this phenomenon. Alex Comfort, author of The Joy of Sex, agrees: "Women aren't 'masochistic' any more than men-if they've knuckled under in the past it's only through social pressures ... the old idea of man as raper and woman as rapee being built-in is contrary to all experience in a world where role swapping is general."
Karen Homey outlines the possible anatomical-physiological features of women that might prepare the ground for masochistic tendencies. She stresses, however, that these "functions have in themselves no masochistic connotation for women, and do not lead to masochistic reactions." But if masochistic needs are present from other causes, these elements of the physical nature of femininity may be involved in masochistic fantasies. From Feminine Psychology: a. Greater average physical strength in men than in women. According to ethnologists this is an acquired sex difference. Nevertheless, it exists nowadays. Though weakness is not identical with masochism, the realization of an inferior physical strength may fertilize an emotional conception of a masochistic female role.
6. The possibility of rape similarly may give rise in women to the fantasy of being attacked, subdued, and injured. c. Menstruation, defloration, and childbirth, insofar as they are bloody or even painful processes, may readily serve as outlets for masochistic strivings. d. The biologic differences in intercourse also serve for masochistic formulation. Sadism and masochism have fundamentally nothing to do whatsoever with intercourse, but the female role in intercourse (being penetrated) lends itself more readily to a personal misinterpretation (when needed) of masochistic performance; and the male role, to one of sadistic activity.
The masochistic female fantasy then is exactly that-fantasy. There is no real basis for a psychological norm of masochism in women-to the extent that these fantasies are still prevalent in our culture attests to the lack of adequate sex and family education in the schools and to the slowness of the culture to adopt to new sexual values.
Almost every sexual problem that women face, and subsequently fantasize about, is correctable, given therapeutic attention by either a counselor or the woman's mate. Fantasies then are signals of problems as well as vehicles for sexual stimulation. When women learn to recognize the societal demands made upon their sexuality, their fantasies will have new meaning for them. Erotic fantasies have always been excellent teaching aids for the learning of one's own sexual response; in the light of recent knowledge, however, they can also be used to diagnose specific sexual characteristics as well as personality traits.
As the therapist uses fantasy and word association to discover hidden subconscious impulses in his patients, women should learn the meaning of their own sexual fantasies. Not only will their fantasies insure a fulfilling sex life, but they can inform the woman as to her own particular awarenesses and problems of her sexual nature.
CHAPTER ONE The Delivery Boy
I was in the kitchen when the doorbell rang and I was still drying my hands when I answered it. Then I stood staring, with the doorknob in one hand. "He's beautiful! Oh, God, he's so beautiful." Something inside me began saying it over and over. In all my mind, there wasn't room for anything else.
He was the new delivery boy. He had to be, because he was standing on the step with his arms full of packages, looking as though he did not know what to do with them. The old boy, a long-haired type with pimples, would have come to the back door. But I didn't mind. The only thing that mattered was that he was there. He could have come in the window and I wouldn't have cared.
He looked at me and then at the name on the slip. "Mrs. Dillingham?" His voice sounded like Clint Walker's, only not as deep. "I brought your groceries," he added when I nodded because I couldn't speak.
I had sense enough left to stand aside, and I caught some of the healthy smell of him as he came in and stood in the middle of the living-room rug. Purposely, I brushed against him, just to be sure that he was real, as I led the way back to the kitchen.
"Just-just put them on the table," I managed to get out and he seemed relieved when he dumped the two sacks and straightened up. "Canned stuff is heavy." He grinned and handed me the slip to sign. "Yes, isn't it?" I nodded again and felt like an idiot and wrote "Cynthia Rogers" instead of the usual "Mrs. J. Dillingham." Rogers was my maiden name and I had written it for the first time in fifteen years. He gave me a closer look as I crossed it out and substituted my customary scrawl so that Mr. Withers, his boss, wouldn't have heart failure.
"There!" I guess it sounded like I had done something quite important as I handed the paper and pencil back. My fingers touched his and my knees got weak and I sat down in a hurry before I made a bigger fool of myself.
I had always given the other boy a dollar for bringing my order. Now I remembered that all I had in cash was a few pennies from the last check I had cashed. "You'll have to wait until next time for your tip." I hated myself for having to get rid of him so crudely but I felt that if he stood there any longer, towering over me with all that manhood of his bulging in his tight jeans, I would have screamed.
He grinned again and put the receipt and the pencil in his shirt pocket. "No problem, ma'am. I make pretty good pay. See you."
He was gone out the back door and I sat there staring at nothing and blaming myself for not having kept him. When I got my wits together, I realized that I had wanted him not in just a friendly way, but physically. I made myself admit that I'd have gone to bed with him if he had even suggested it.
Alex and I have been married for years and years. He was so insistent and I was only seventeen when he proposed and my folks urged me to accept. "He's running for mayor and the next thing you know, he'll be governor," my father said. My mother just smiled when I hesitated. "He's twice my age. By the time I'm thirty, he'll be an old man." But I knew I was going to marry him. Mother knew it, too.
It was a big church wedding, with ushers and flower girls and bridesmaids in high heels and picture hats. A tenor from the Met sang, "Oh, Promise Me," and I forgot that Alex was old enough to be my father as the pastor handed him the ring to put on my finger. Now I was Mrs. Alexander Dillingham, and little Cynthia Rogers, only a few years out of dental braces and blue serge school uniforms, had got lost in the shuffle.
We went to Italy for our honeymoon and the enchantment lasted even when we came back to New York and settled down to being husband and wife instead of two divinely happy people with nothing to do except enjoy life and each other. I say "instead" because it was different. I don't think I ever really loved Alex. I respected him and I was happy in his company, but after Rome, something seemed to be lacking.
For one thing, and I suppose this is very important in any marriage, I found that having sex with my husband was not what it had been at first. I was a virgin when I married, and maybe the idea that he was the first man made intercourse a mutually intimate thing I had never shared with anyone else and added to the physical enjoyment.
Another thing was that Alex was away a lot on campaigning tours and I was left alone in a big house with a lot of time on my hands. I imagine that a lot of young matrons in a similar situation would have tried to make friends of both sexes. Maybe that is where I made a mistake. I even cut down on entertaining because I didn't want Alex to think that I was doing anything behind his back. But when I told him, he just laughed and called me Pollyanna and pointed out that our establishment was not exactly a moated grange.
"Go out. Enjoy yourself, my dear. The fact that I want you to proves that I trust you, doesn't it?" We had intercourse that night and I tried to put both my mind and my back into it but it wasn't right. We both had an orgasm, but I couldn't get rid of the idea that he was making love because he considered it his duty. I lay back and shut my eyes as soon as I felt him enter me. When we were honeymooning, that alone would have been sufficient to bring on a climax. Now I saw the whole thing as automatic, the proper answer to his marital obligation, like making a speech at the right time and shaking hands with the right people. I wanted more than that.
I tried to get used to the idea of being a receptacle for Alex's sense of fitness but it wouldn't work. I went through the motions with him when he was at home, but each time I had to work harder to put on a convincing act. I have no proof that he even looked at another woman, but I don't think I could have found it in my heart to blame him if he did. He must have seen through the faked excitement and the make-believe orgasms. Perhaps he believed that, in spite of my profession of loyalty, I was actually sleeping with some other man during his absence. I didn't know and finally it got so that I didn't care.
I began to make up a dream lover. Carefully and with increasing ecstasy, I put him together in my mind. He must be tall and athletic, I told myself-not just of medium height and inclined to paunchiness like Alex. He must be reserved but not patronizing, enough to make me respect him and strong enough to be gentle. Above all, I wanted him to be beautiful in the way I had always thought of a perfect man, rugged and challenging yet kind and understanding. Sexually, I wanted him to be totally masculine, yet not hung like some sort of stud animal. Alex was so large when aroused that he often hurt me.
After we were first married, the feeling of complete possession I experienced when he entered me fully more than made up for the discomfort of over distension. I tried to convince myself that I was having intercourse with a superman, and for a while the illusion persisted. The euphoria kept me happy as long as he was able to get a complete erection without undue foreplay.
Little by little, his response deteriorated until sometimes we would spend a full hour stimulating each other before he could enter my vagina. Where before he had needed only a few minutes, his reaction time became more and more indefinite, and when he did accomplish penetration, he spent almost at once, leaving me tense and dissatisfied. As if that were not bad enough, there were intervals of near-impotence when he would beg me to let him finish in my hand or between my breasts because his penis was not hard enough to do anything else.
It was somewhere around that time that I lost interest in him sexually, although I tried very hard to rationalize and believe that his physical stamina was being adversely affected by strain and worry in his campaigning. I would be tolerant, I decided, and above all, I would encourage him when he needed it most and otherwise be a loyal and helpful partner.
Wherever it is that such things are decided, someone must have laughed, because I was beaten before I started. If I had really loved him, things might have been different. Maybe then I could have stood the disappointments and the increasing desperation when he failed me. And had I been nearer his age and not so eager for sex, especially when I had worked my excitement up to concert pitch, the letdown could have been less drastic.
As it was, I began to get neurasthenic, and Alex increased his drinking. Neither condition was favorable to marital harmony, and when he was defeated in the gubernatorial race by a landslide victory for his opponent, we had to give up the big house and get rid of the servants.
I think it was then that I actually began to dislike him. Before, there had always been the sustaining thought that things would get better after the election and that we would have more time together and an opportunity to readjust ourselves. Now the chips were down and he had lost. And we were almost out of money.
My dislike did not stem from having to live in a smaller place and do my own housework. My mother had done that all her life and I had helped her until I left home. I think the letdown had a lot to do with my change of feeling. I had married Alex with my eyes open, knowing that I did not love him but hoping for a good life and ready to be a good wife in return. The fact that I could have frequent sex, all open and aboveboard, also attracted me. Having servants was a change for me, but not a necessity. But the sex was a necessity, more and more, in spite of his large penis. I loved it, even wrote him letters about it when he was away.
My desire seemed to increase as his virility waned. I wanted intercourse every night, instead of twice or three times a week, and when he failed me, I think I even hated him a little. Things between us had reached that point when he came home to announce that he had been beaten at the polls. He was drunk. When I tried to console him, he pushed me aside and went to the bar and poured himself a double shot of neat brandy. I begged him to sit and eat dinner with me, but he kept on drinking until he couldn't stand up. I had to help him to the couch, and he passed out at once.
I did the dishes and tidied up and read until bedtime. He was still asleep and when I couldn't rouse him, I Covered him with a blanket and left him there. He was snoring, a habit he had lately acquired, and the sound followed me into the bedroom until I shut the door.
I remember tossing a lot before I dozed off and I was dreaming that I was single again and that the cute blonde boy I had met at choir practice was pestering me for a date. I had gone out with him a couple of times before I became engaged but there had never been any real petting or intimacy between us. But in the dream, he took his penis out and showed it to me, and I got all excited and told him I'd go with him and let him do it if he was careful.
I think it was the noise Alex made undressing that woke me. He was sitting on the end of the bed, trying to get his shoes off, when I switched the light on. He yelled at me to put it out and, when I hesitated, he got up and flipped the switch himself. I remember a sort of hush when the light went off. For some reason, my heart was beating so hard that I could hear it. Whether that was from the dream or because I was a little frightened, I had no time to decide.
He flung himself on top of me and began to tear at my nightie like a wild man. He ripped the bodice open and began to handle my breasts, burying his hot face between them and biting the nipples so hard that I screamed. The sound seemed to spur him further. He hauled the rest of the gown up around my hips and pried my legs apart and entered me so violently that I almost fainted.
I found out then what it must feel like to be raped. For once, his penis was erect, demanding, and, in spite of the pain, I felt the desire rising in me. If he had not been so violent, I might have been able to enjoy it. After all, he had not been able to satisfy me in more than a month.
But he was still too drunk. His hardness began to soften in me and, as though he sensed it, he began to thrust in and out so frantically that the bed shook and most of my breath was cut off. When he finally spent, his sweat was dripping on my face and breasts and he was grinding his teeth and groaning as though he were having a fit.
He rolled off me, limp and exhausted, and when he began snoring again, I was so disgusted that I went back to the living room and spent the rest of the night on the couch.
I thought about divorcing him, but he pleaded with me to forgive him and stay with him while he went back to his law practice. I compared my married life, if it could be called that, with going back where I had started from and trying to pick up the loose ends. In the end, I decided to stay on. That was nearly fourteen years ago. I suppose I have become a sort of glorified servant to Alex. I prepare his meals and keep his house clean and turn into the gracious hostess he expects me to be when we have company, which is seldom except for his business associates. Otherwise, we could be two strangers.
He never tried to touch me after that short-lived raping scene. If I had been cut off from sex abruptly, after having indulged regularly, I might have missed it more. As it was, tapering off as his potency diminished, the change was not so disappointing.
Many wives in a similar situation would probably have looked around for a real lover, not the dream one I had kept by me ever since I had invented him. But my make-believe man satisfied me most of the time. I found I could close my eyes and imagine the feel of his hands on my body and hear him saying how much he loved me. With a little mechanical assistance from my finger, I could reach quick orgasm while I thought about him and believed that we were having intercourse together. It helped but it was not enough. I wanted life in my body, not fantasy.
I inspected every man he brought to the house and, once or twice, I thought I had found a suitable male with whom to carry on some extramarital adventuring. That came to nothing because they were married and in love with their wives, or at least, that is what I was given to understand.
Next, I explored the possibility of doing some deliberate swinging. I even went to one group meeting and witnessed a wall-to-wall sex orgy that sickened me rather than attracted my interest. Gradually, after that, I began to deprecate men as bed partners. There was a time when I considered trying the homo scene and getting another woman for a sex mate. That idea died when I let myself be picked up in a gay bar and got slapped around when I wouldn't settle for the butch doing cunnilingus on me.
After the gay workout that didn't work, I stopped looking at other men and women and started thinking about boys. I began by changing my dream lover from a handsome muscle type to a younger, less sophisticated hero. Alex and I had never been able to have a family, and perhaps it was a secret wish to have a son that influenced the change in my sex fantasy. But I wanted more from my dream lover than filial respect; a whole lot more.
I felt that by now I knew enough about sexual technique to teach him some of the finer points, such as patience and consideration. From what I had heard and read of younger men, I had formed the idea that most of them were purely physical, demanding sex for the material pleasure with small regard for the feelings of the partner.
The thought of creating a young lover, even a dream one, thrilled me almost as much as actual intercourse. I spent hours when Alex was away at his office adding final touches to my creation. He must be strong and good-looking and past the usual distempers of early adolescence. I had no desire to be possessed by a concentration of acne or a hairy-phase juvenile.
His attitude toward sex was very important and I kept changing and substituting until I was satisfied. I finally settled for a seventeen-year-old who had dabbled with girls but was still experimenting. Under my more than willing guidance, he would learn all the little libidinous tricks of studied foreplay and find out how to stimulate himself as well as the woman before coupling. I would take the brashness out of him and replace it with the certainty of pleasing as well as achieving personal ecstasy. Then, when I had built him that close to my heart's desire, I would revel in his embrace and try to give him as much satisfaction as he gave me. We would be perfect lovers and I would recover all the excitement of intercourse that had been denied me in my marriage.
Then the doorbell rang and he was there, just as I had imagined him. If I had followed a blueprint, I could not have made him any better. Because Withers the grocer had fired his old delivery boy and hired a new one, I had a man in my life again, and this time he was the one I most wanted. I remember studying him while he was putting the packages on the kitchen table, finding time in the confusion of my mind to feel quick pride, as though I were really responsible for creating him. It was only after he had gone that I realized I had forgotten to ask his name.
One of the first things I did, after snapping out of my near trance, was to find a pad and pencil and make out a new grocery list. We were better off financially, now that Alex had revived his legal business, but I'd have put that new order in if it meant hocking something to pay for it. Now that I had found my lover in the flesh, I had to see him again.
I had taken the phone off the hook and was about to dial when I had a sudden fit of shyness. What would old man Withers think, I wondered, if I kept calling for another delivery after he had just sent one order? I thought about it and finally hung up and decided to wait until the morning. Whatever happened, I must not appear tp be unduly interested. That could spoil everything.
I passed a restless night. Anxiety that something might happen to rob me of this new excitement kept me wide-eyed almost until it was time to fix Alex's breakfast. The house had two bedrooms, and ever since that night he attacked me, we had not slept together. I felt no qualms when he nodded good-bye and left. We had stopped kissing each other years ago. My only worry was about how I would look when my real man came.
I washed the breakfast dishes and took my shower as soon as Alex was out of the house. On some past birthday, he had given me some expensive perfume which I seldom used because there was nobody whom I wished to impress. I found the bottle and applied the perfume discreetly. Then I slipped into slacks and a housecoat that zipped under my breasts and marched to the telephone.
He came around the house this time and when I opened the back door, he looked more beautiful than ever. If he wondered what made me reorder so soon, he gave no sign of it. " 'Morning, Mrs. Dillingham." He was wearing a knitted cap cocked jauntily over one ear. He took the cap off when he had set the sacks down and smiled at me with his eyes as he held out the delivery slip and the pencil.
I was purposely a little distant this time, following my plan to make him come to me instead of acting like a fool and falling all over him. That, I had decided, would add to the pleasure of getting him to make love to me, as I was determined he would do. Most people ascribe the hunt and the final conquest to the male of the species, but the man has no monopoly. The woman, under certain circumstances, enjoys the chase and the surrender equally as much. As I proved, she can be just as relentless.
"What's your name?" I tried to make the question casual. "If you're going to stay with Mr. Withers, I should know what to call you." I was almost tempted to ask him to call me Cynthia but I stopped in time.
"I'm Jim Barrett." He folded the signed slip and buttoned it in his white uniform shirt pocket.
"Do you live around here or are you new in our town?" It would not do to appear overcurious, but I wanted to find out as much as I could, in case he quit the grocery. If that should happen, I had to know where to find him.
"I live with my folks." He named a street about a mile away and I felt relieved. "I just got out of high school. I'm going to college next year if I can save up enough money."
You darling, I thought, I'll help you. All you have to do is love me. "You sound ambitious." I gave him what I figured was an arch smile. Then I frowned as I remembered that girls went to college, too; girls of his own age, who would undoubtedly make a try for him and steal him away from me. But I had a year. By that time, I planned to have such a hold over him that he would never leave me. Perhaps it was selfish but I wanted him too badly to care.
I had been careful to have some small bills this time. I handed him a couple of ones and when he looked doubtful, I closed his fingers over them and gave him a little push. "For your college fund," I smiled.
Touching him made me nervous and I was actually glad when he thanked me and went away. In another minute, I would have lost what little control I had left.
I suffered agonies of repression for two days which seemed like years before I made up another order. If Mr. Withers suspected anything, I couldn't help it. Any further waiting would have driven me up the wall. As it was, I caught Alex giving me the appraising eye at breakfast the second morning. He didn't say anything, but I knew he was wondering why I was humming tunes and tripping about like a ten-year-old.
Watch it, I kept telling myself. You'll never get a chance like this again, so make the most of it. All the same, I went for the perfume behind my ears and between my breasts, and put on a low-cut blouse to wear while I waited for Jim to come.
He was late and I was certain he had been fired or that he had quit when he showed up, cheerful as ever. "I'm running behind schedule," he apologized while I tried not to devour him with my eyes. "I ran out of gas. I never do that."
It was time to pounce. "Maybe you're in love," I suggested. "Who's the lucky girl?"
I loved him all the more when he blushed. Then he said hesitantly that there was no one. "That is," he corrected himself, "no one I could have."
"How do you know?" Something in his voice excited me. Maybe things between us were progressing faster than I had thought.
"She's married." He cut the announcement short as though it hurt him and looked away. "And she's too old." He met my eyes squarely, then looked down at the floor.
I guess all women have something of the cat in them. I was fairly sure of what he was trying to say, yet I wanted to play with him. Teasing him sharpened my hunger. "Have you told her?"
"No." He sounded miserable.
"Why not?"
"I-well, what would be the point?" He looked up again and shook his head. "At least, if I keep my mouth shut, I can see her now and then."
"But seeing her is not enough. Is that it?"
He nodded and turned toward the door.
"Wait a minute." I had kept him on the hook long enough. "Come back and sit down. You can be frank with me, Jim. You are talking about us, aren't you?"
If he had kept on going, I think I'd have run after him, even if I had to chase him on the street. As soon as he stopped, I knew everything was going to be all right, everything was falling in its place.
Things happened so quickly after that that I have no clear memory of every detail. One minute, he was standing with one hand on the doorknob, looking over his shoulder at me. The next, I had both arms around his neck and couldn't stop kissing him. All the while, I was conscious of his hardness against my thigh and I felt like singing and crying at the same time.
He pulled my blouse further down and put his hot face between my breasts, and we stood for a long time, it seemed, just holding each other without speaking.
I don't remember how we found ourselves in my bedroom but we got on the bed at once and I let him take me, dressed and all, as soon as he pulled my panties down. He was big, but not huge like Alex, and when he pushed his hard penis all the way into me, I almost fainted with the wonder of it.
I recollect him coming twice that first time, something that Alex in his prime had never been able to do without uncoupling and resting for a while. Jim-darling, as I was already calling him, left it in and seemed to come more the second time than in his first orgasm. His semen was hot and exciting on the nubbin of my womb and I seemed to have one long climax that had no beginning or end. When he finally pulled his hardness out of my dripping vagina, I felt utter release. After the months without even masturbating, I was at peace with the world.
After that never-to-be-forgotten morning, I cut down on my grocery ordering. When I needed anything, Jim-darling brought it and we made love before he went back to the store. But I didn't call it that. Instead, I said "fucking," a word I had never used before. It seemed to fit so much better than just saying "intercourse." There are several kinds of intercourse, sexual and otherwise but there is only one kind of fucking which to me meant taking a horny prick in my cunt and coming and feeling the hot semen squirt deep in my tense and anxious body.
Jim-darling visited me in the evenings, too. Alex had taken on a lot of work which kept him late at the office. At first, I thought he might be setting a trap, but J checked him out by phoning under one pretext or another until I was sure he was not lying. Then I'd call my sweet one and give him as much of me as he wanted.
After he had gone, either back to work or home, I reviewed our lovemaking and found it perfect. I sensed that I could not teach him much about the art of making us both happy. He seemed to know it all naturally. Sometimes, when he became a little too impetuous and wanted to enter me before I was ready, I would whisper in his ear to take it easy and he would slow down at once. He never tried to take me by force and there didn't seem to be any selfishness in his makeup.
My hardest job was to conquer his shyness. There was nothing of the prude or the hick about him, yet he hesitated when I asked him to do certain things which gave me pleasure. Without going completely physical, I wanted everything, including oral sex in every way.
Now I can laugh when I think of his reaction the first time I tried to take his penis in my mouth. I was brought up to be a lady, but I was still very much Judy O'Grady where he was concerned. Any expression of the way I loved him seemed perfectly natural, but at first he balked, even to the point of stuffiness. His penis was rising when I kissed the head of it and opened my lips. I had barely touched it when he backed off and said, "I don't think we ought to do that." He actually looked horrified, and it wasn't until later that I found out what was the matter. The poor darling was convinced that letting me suck him off would cheapen him in my eyes and he would lose me.
I finally talked him into it and I managed to make it a tremendous experience for both of us. He ended up by teaching me something, which was to keep perfectly still at the end and let him fuck my mouth the same way he fucked my cunt, then swallow the length of his hard penis so he could come in the back of my throat. I learned to come with him when that happened.
Getting him to go down on me was even more difficult at first. I have always been very careful about intimate hygiene, so I knew that he could have no objection on that score. I decided that it was all in his mind and I had to do a real selling job before he would give in. Our conversation went something like this:
Me: What don't you like about doing that to a woman?
Jim: I wouldn't mind if it was any woman. I just don't want to do it to you. Me: What makes me different, darling? Jim: I love you. That makes all the difference. Me: Why?
Jim: It just does, that's all. You're-well, you're good and sweet and decent. Doing that to you would seem like an insult. Can't you understand that?
I assured him that, instead of taking offense, I would only care for him all the more. He still hesitated, even when I sucked his nipples and tongued his mouth and ears. He was like a little boy who had been told to jump in the water and wasn't sure how deep it was. I had to push his head down at the end and show him where to find my clitoris.
Then it was pure glory. I came almost as soon as I felt his probing tongue. That was one of the few times I jacked him off with my hand. I felt around until I found his cock and rubbed it until he shot off all over the sheet. Afterward, we fucked until it was almost time for Alex to come home.
Once he had got over his misgivings, he was like all converts, more enthusiastic than his teacher. We worked out a routine. First, I'd suck his penis, but only enough to get it good and hard. He'd pat my head if I took too long. Then he'd tongue my clitoris and I made him keep on until I pushed up against him and reached a big climax. Coming like that was always wonderful because I knew I could do it again and again. A woman has it all over a man because she can come all the time, where he is finished, at least for a while, after the first or second orgasm. Once I counted and found I had come seven times while Jim-darling was still going for his first spending.
Sometimes we varied the warm-up, as I began to call it, by doing what the marriage manuals call mutual oralism. The common name is sixty-nine. like everything else, it was a wonderful sensation, especially as Alex had never suggested it and it was new to both of us. All I had to watch out for was not to let Jim-darling shoot the works. There was a special ecstasy attached to his first coming and I wanted it in my vagina, not in my mouth, except when I was menstruating.
As a precaution, because I did not want to get pregnant, I took pills regularly and they worked. I made Jim-darling throw away the silly rubber he had insisted on wearing and after that his hard, naked cock thrusting deep into me was even better. Any normal female who has had a rubber fuck will know what I am talking about. Screwing with a condom is like trying to drink through a handkerchief.
There was not much danger of Alex finding out about us. like I said, we barely communicated anymore. If he still had any feeling for me, he hid it. Perhaps he had women on the side. I could not have cared less. All the same, he was a good provider, once he got back on his financial feet again. He was generous about the housekeeping money and there was always enough left over to put by for a rainy day. The rainy day, although he did not know it yet, was to be Jim-darling's college expenses. The opportunity to help Jim was what kept me married to Alex, more than anything else.
I often wondered why Alex did not ask for a divorce. Maybe the answer lay in the fact that he was getting old and had come to depend on me for his creature comforts. I didn't mind waiting on him. It was the least I could do, and the opportunity to carry on my love affair could not have been much greater, or even as convenient, had I been single. I was almost deliriously happy. I had always had security. Now I had all I could wish for in sex to go with it. For that I would have waited a lot longer.
I got more daring as the months passed. Instead of staying home and contenting myself with my lover in bed, I began to want all the things that had been denied me when I was Jim-darling's age. I wanted to park in lovers' lanes and fuck in the back seat, then hurry to the nearest drive-in for a hamburger and a coke. I wanted to sit in a dark picture show and stroke his cock while I munched popcorn. I was still young enough to enjoy dancing, and after he had taught me some of the new steps I made him take me to discotheques when Alex was out of town on a case.
We did all of these things in a natural way and I know Jim-darling enjoyed everything as much as I did. For me, it was a new freedom, like getting out of some dismal cloister where I had been penned up for the best part of my life. Now I was another woman, with everything to live for, and proud of myself because my man loved me.
There were so many things to admire about Jim-darling. He was so damned handsome in a blonde, healthy way that sometimes I caught my breath when I looked at him. His hair was wavy and he wore it in a medium cut, just long enough to frame his regular features without covering his ears and shoulders. And he was so strong that he could lift me with one arm. "Strong enough to be gentle." I remembered using that to describe my dream man. He was tender and considerate in everything and so utterly perfect that I had spells of anxiety about waking up some morning and finding that he was not real, after all. I think I would have felt better if he had done something wrong, just to prove that he was human.
He was quick to learn the things I liked most. For instance, after an outing, we'd come back to the empty house, feeling satisfied after what we had done and reasonably weary. But he was never too tired to carry me into the bedroom and fuck me gently until I could have wept with the sheer pleasure of it. He always did that, no matter how many times we had screwed on the back seat of his car. It was his way of saying good-night and letting me know that he still loved me.
We had so much sex together that I began to worry about his health. He was young and physically sound, but ten or twelve orgasms a week, and two or three more when I could join him on Sundays, had me wondering how long he could stand the strain. I tried to cut down on the times we fucked, but I always wanted him as much as he wanted me, and we ended up increasing the count instead of slowing it.
Every time, he seemed to come more than before. I had only known one other man sexually, but there was no comparison between Jim-darling and Alex. My husband in his prime could never manage more than three or four jets of semen, whereas Jim came steadily for what seemed like minutes at a time. Having him spend in me, except that it was much more exciting, was a little like taking a douche.
Perhaps one thing that worked in his favor was his appetite. He ate everything I put in front of him, while Alex at best merely picked at his food. He called it charging his battery, which never seemed to run down. When he had finished, he was ready to go again. My clitoris used to get hard from watching him clean his plate, because I knew he would want me almost right away.
We got into the habit of doing sexual experiments and practicing the ones we liked best. I found that having him put his erection into my vagina slowly, in one long stroke, was much more enjoyable than the quick thrust in and out and back again. Fucking too hard always reminded me of the night Alex raped me. Perhaps that was why I favored the slow penetration. For some reason, too, the leisurely approach seemed to make everything last longer. I got so I could stand four or five slow strokes before coming, where before I would usually have the first orgasm as soon as I felt his penis nudging my womb.
I tried to get him to stop coming twice without uncoupling but that did not work, either. like I said, the more we did it the more we wanted. I hated the time we lost while I got over my period. At least, it was proof that I was not pregnant but the four or five days it lasted were lost enjoyment. I had read in somebody's marriage book that many couples had normal sex while the wife was menstruating but I drew the line there. Instead, we invented other ways of stimulating each other.
Oral sex was the answer, we found. I already had learned to come when he spent in my throat and the same thing happened when I handled his hard prick and played with his balls. I did not favor the practice of masturbating him with my hand except when it was necessary. The sight of the semen squirting out of the big eye always sent me into quick ecstasy and coming with him was even easier when I let him spend on my stomach or between my breasts. We called that last titty-fucking and we always included it in our foreplay before coupling up.
Love, according to the headshrinkers, is supposed to be a very complex condition. Perhaps it is to a lot of people, but Jim-darling and I found it as simple as it was good. There were times when we never spoke to each other for half an hour or more. Just knowing that the other was there was enough. We did not need words. Maybe that is true love. I only know how we felt.
Another thing I noticed was that neither of us was age-conscious. From the start, we might have been within a year of each other. That was most evident when we went dancing or driving around town or parking for a quickie before the cops ran us off. That in itself helped to make me feel young again, and I was able to act quite naturally when we mixed with other couples about Jim's age. Personally, I didn't care what people might say, but for his sake, I didn't want them to think I was his mother.
More than once, I thought about divorcing Alex and asking Jim-darling to marry me. Then reason stepped in, and I had to accept the fact that thirty-two does not wed eighteen and get away with it very often. And I had learned a very important thing. Sex is a part of marriage, but marriage does not necessarily have to be a part of sex. And I knew in my heart that when the time came for Jim-darling to go, it would happen whether we were married or not. In the meantime, he was there to enjoy, and I intended to make the most of it.
If anybody had followed us around, they would have thought we were really man and wife. Jim is a six-footer, and I was always slender and have managed to keep that way. Not having had any babies may have left me my figure. We always seemed to be touching each other, holding hands or walking arm in arm even in public. If Alex had been seeking a divorce, he would not have needed a detective to collect sufficient evidence. My whole world centered around him by now.
If anything had happened to break us up then, I don't think I could have stood it.
The year I had given us was almost over. Jim talked more frequently about going to college. He had got a couple of raises and his savings were almost enough for the first couple of semesters. He planned to go on working until he got through. He wanted to be a doctor, and I could feel the enthusiasm growing in him with each new week.
It was time to shake my head and see things in their true light. I knew by now that the wishful thinking that I could make him belong to me was just that, and nothing more. And strangely enough, the knowledge made me happy. I loved him too much to want to stand in his way. It was not my way anymore. Half my life was behind me and his was just starting. By the time he was ready to practice, I would be forty, ready to creep up on the shelf alongside Alex.
Instead of trying to hold Jim back, I would urge him on. And the time to start, I decided, was right away. Both of us knew that our affair had to end. The college he had selected was out of state and, even if I had been free, for economic reasons I would not have been able to follow him. He kept assuring me that he would write and come to see me as often as possible, and I pretended to go along with him. But in our hearts we knew it was only lip service.
I supposed that I should feel noble about letting him go so willingly. Actually, there was no willingness about it and I didn't feel noble at all. Rather, there was a numbness about everything, an unreal sensation, as though I was having a bad dream from which I couldn't wake up. I lost a lot of sleep and I was too disturbed even to cry. The one clear thing I knew was that I was right.
I made the plunge by telling him that there wouldn't be any more sex between us. He looked so dumbfounded that I almost took pity on him and on myself.
But I stuck to ray decision for both our sakes.
"But-I don't understand. I won't be going away for two more weeks and...."
"That's just it. Think about what I am going to say. We have two more weeks during which we could keep on as we have been. Then we'll have as long as it takes to get over the way we feel. To put it simply, don't you think it will be easier on both of us if we try to get over it together? Being sad by yourself is a road I know very well. It isn't a nice one."
He took a long time to answer. I was starting to be afraid he would walk out on me then and there but he just looked at me without saying anything. Outside, the street noises became almost deafening. A car going by sounded like a freight train. I sat down because I found it hard to stand.
At last he nodded and came over and put his hand on my shoulder. "You're strong," he said. "Stronger than I am. You're also very wise. And, of course, you're right."
He pulled up another chair and sat close to me and I had to fight to keep my hands off him. "Where do we begin?"
"Let's work back through all the time we've known each other."
"But that would mean sex, the whole thing." He frowned a little as though I was going too fast for him.
"Not necessarily. Think about the first time we went to that crazy drive-in where all the kids keep going round and round. What did you like about that?"
"You," he answered at once. "Without you, it wouldn't have been anything at all."
"Thank you, sir." I tried to keep it light, but there was a catch in my throat. "Now think again. Didn't you enjoy your hamburger and coke because you knew I was enjoying mine?"
"Yes. Oh, sure. I think I know what you're trying to say. Whatever we did was mutual and it was both of us being happy instead of just one."
"You dig me, as the kids would say. And you like being with me now, don't you?"
"Yes again. You know I do, but I still don't see the point."
"The point is that we can always be together in our minds if we want to be. If we're strong enough, as you say, our physical presence is unimportant. As long as I live, I'll never forget what we have done together. We'll never get tired of it because the material side of it will not happen again. It belongs to conscience. We could never change it if we wanted to. Am I getting through?"
"I think so," he nodded. "Only you're away ahead of me. No wonder I love you."
"Correction. Think it. Think it always, but don't say it. Catch?"
"I read you five and five. Any more orders, ma'am?"
"They're not orders; just suggestions. How would you like me to take you to dinner tonight?"
He cocked his head at me like an inquisitive puppy.
"Alex has gone out of town. So would you be kind enough to take this list over to Mr. Withers? If you're not back in an hour, I'll start dinner without you."
The morning of the day he was due to leave was suitably dull and full of clouds. I was about to call him when he came striding around the side of the house and knocked on the back door. He was wearing his knitted cap over one ear and carrying a bulging sack. He looked at me and then at the name on the delivery slip. "Mrs. Dillingham? I brought your groceries."
My hand was shaking so that I could barely sign my name but I managed to smile as I handed the slip and pencil back. "Don't worry about the tip, ma'am. I make pretty good pay. See you."
He was gone, and I could cry at last ... but it was a good cry. When I snapped out of it, I was smiling. Then I picked up the cap he had left on the table and held it for a long time before putting it away.
Cynthia Dillingham's story is one that is repeated countless thousands of times with the May/December romance. Because of societal determinations, women are often forced to regard marriage as an economic or social boon rather than a sexual one. Rich men, especially the retired types who don't seem as fast as they were before, attract the young girl to whom financial security may mean more than sexual compatibility. Besides, with marriage in the state it's in these days, she could always manage another lover without really endangering her marriage.
Mr. Dillingham, however, may be suffering from nothing more than an over-saturation of myth about oldsters making love. As Alex Comfort, author of the delightful The Joy of Sex, says:
Neither men nor women lose either sexual needs or sexual function with age. In men, the only important changes over the first seven decades are that spontaneous erection occurs less often (accordingly they need more direct penile stimulation from the woman), ejaculation takes longer to happen, which is an advantage, coital frequency tends to fall, but given an attractive and receptive partner, decent general health and an absence of the belief that one ought to run out of steam, active sex lasts as long as life.
Mrs. Dillingham makes it clear, however, that it was neither her own sense of opportunism nor her husband's sense of inferiority which took the enjoyment out of marital sex for her. As with many another case of incompatibility, she was not convinced that he thought of sex with his wife as anything but a duty. The emotional response she needed for a fulfilling sex life was not present in her marriage.
This lack of emotional strength forced the issue of Mr. Dillingham's waning sexuality to the point that he could no longer maintain an erection. Cynthia Dillingham feels great frustration and disappointment when she realizes her husband's impotence, for she is aware of his increasing age and of the chances for a return of either the sexual side of their relationship or the emotional. Finally, she turns to masturbation in order to feel orgasm, maintaining sex with her husband only on the pretend level. Soon, all sexual contact ceases.
The importance of satisfactory orgasm in marriage cannot be underestimated. Whatever your moral beliefs about the sanctity of marriage as an institution, statistics prove that marriages do not survive unless orgasmic response is evident. Even from the beginnings of sexual research, orgasm has been emphasized as necessary to one's health. Theodoor Van de Velde, author of one of the most popular sex manuals of all time, Ideal Marriage, explains how, even in the thirties, orgasm was thought to be an essential for the happy marriage:
It is at the present time impossible to estimate how much unbalance of mind and nerves, and misery in marriage, are due to this check and deprivation of complete relaxation in coitus. But I am profoundly convinced of its frequency and importance as of the under-estimate (or neglect) of this factor by doctors and laymen alike.
Since sexual inadequacies can often be cured by a willing and responsive mate, and since there is no biological reason for Mr. Dillingham's waning po-tence, it must be assumed that other factors inherent in the emotional relationship destroyed the effectiveness of the sexual relationship. Certainly the rape episode might indicate a definite lack of technique on his part, but we must remember that our only view of the episode comes from the testimony of Mrs. Dillingham. Assuming that her rush to fantasize at the merest sign of sexual inadequacy on the part of her husband might indicate neurotic weakness, some of the reason for the lack of emotional strength in the marriage can be seen. Mrs. Dillingham herself indicates some of the reasons for her problem; she married young before acquiring any real knowledge of sexual matters, her marriage was successful only until she realized that she didn't really love her husband.
Her general immaturity becomes increasingly evident as her fantasies crystallize into action. She had already fantasized enough and masturbated enough to complete an image in her mind of the perfect lover when her husband, intoxicated and probably clumsy, made love to her in a violent manner. Her reaction to this episode, so different from anything she could associate with the "totally masculine" image that accompanied her dream lover, was to begin hating her husband. At no time does she attempt reconciliation or even a discussion with her husband about their problems. The only solution she does consider is extramarital sex.
When the casual affair doesn't satisfy her, she tries experimentation, only to find that she's too inhibited to participate in either group sex or lesbianism. Retreating to her fantasies once again, she resolves to find a man who is sexy, but not "over-large" as her husband was. It is at this point that Mrs. Dillingham's previous statements about her husband ' must really be examined with a critical eye. She may be entitled to complain about a husband that doesn't make love to her, but her solution to the problem seems more a passive non-solution than an aggressive solution-a running away rather than a new beginning.
The complaining woman, says D. E. Cameron, author of an article, in the Modern Practice in Psychological Medicine textbook, entitled "Sexuality and Sexual Disorders," is part of a cultural pattern handed down from mother to daughter. According to Cameron, the cultural suppression of women is enacted from generation to generation through the process of sex education, which for most women up until quite recently, came from the mother. Unfortunately, as women have not been given a strong voice over sexual matters in the past, most of this sex education is highly inaccurate and in fact usually only serves as a vehicle for the transference of sexual fears and neuroses to the daughter:
A typical situation is one in which the wife, from early in the marriage, has been unable to gain sexual satisfaction, usually because of anxieties concerning sex instilled during her own childhood.... The wife then raises the age-old cry that the husband does not care for her for her own sake, but simply wants to use her as a means of sexual satisfaction, and then, by illogical but very human extension declares: "All men are brutes; every one of them wants only to make use of women." The marriage becomes a battleground, with the mother turning to the girls as her allies, and at the same time indoctrinating them with this fear of sex and, therefore, of men: "I never want you to go through what I have had to endure." In this way, sex fear, with accompanying hostility, frigidity, and other neurotic mechanisms, may be perpetuated down through several generations.
The pedophiliac prefers younger children because they represent no sexual threat to his own fragile sense of security. In the same manner, the neurotic woman will turn to a young man who is considerably her junior because he represents no sexual threat to her own fragile sense of security. The manipulative power she has over the much younger man is enough to compensate for her own fears and weaknesses, permitting enough of a response from her to convince her of the correctness of the relationship.
CHAPTER TWO Black Fantasy
When I look back at myself as I was when Sam and I first met it still seems real, as real as if it just happened recently instead of over twenty years ago. It's difficult for me to realize at times that twenty years of my life, our life, have passed so quickly. And for the most part so happily.
I was a senior in high school when I first met Sam. I had just moved to Los Angeles with my family from Tennessee and I wasn't looking forward to my last year of school or much of anything else. I couldn't really blame my parents for my unhappiness at the time. Daddy's company had transferred him to manage their Los Angeles office, and it was a big promotion for him. But it was very difficult for me to accept all of those changes, even though a move like that was exciting in ways, because it meant to me the loss of friends I had had since childhood, changing to a new and strange school for the last year of high school.
If it all hadn't happened so fast it probably wouldn't have been such a big adjustment for me to make, but as it turned out, Daddy was only given a month's notice about the move and that came in the middle of summer. So I was suddenly in a new town, enrolled in a new school, without any friends, and pretty miserable about the whole thing.
I had really looked forward to graduating from high school with the friends I had known all my life. That was a big disappointment to suddenly realize that I wouldn't be with my friends on graduation day. It also meant leaving behind the "true love" of my life, Johnny Boyd. like all school kids, we felt that we were madly and deeply in love and were looking forward to marriage, a slew of kids and happiness ever after.
So there I was, the envy of all my girl friends back in Tennessee who were certain that I would wind up a movie star within months, if not weeks, thoroughly bewildered by a new life-style, different people, new surroundings and feeling completely alone in the world. I seriously thought about dropping out of school and finding a job, rather than trying to start over again for one year.
Even though I'm not basically shy, the thought of going to a strange school-where I would know nobody, but where all the other kids would have known each other for years-was terrifying. But, of course, my parents wouldn't hear a word about my quitting high school when I had only one more year to go, and I had always planned to go to college. If I dropped out of high school, that dream would go up in smoke.
When we first moved to California, Los Angeles was a lot different. It was like an old-time boom town, with new buildings seeming to go up overnight, but compared to today it was still a small town. Where the airport is today were still fields of orange groves, the San Fernando Valley was just beginning to be developed, and there were miles and miles of farmland and ranches where today whole towns have sprung up.
We had found a house in Hollywood that was close to my father's new office. In those days he wouldn't have thought of driving a long distance to get to work. The move away from the cities was just beginning then and especially for people like us, new to the wide-open spaces, it was unthinkable to live far from work. But because we lived where we did, I was enrolled at Hollywood High. Even in those days, the kids who went to that school had a reputation for being sophisticated and worldly beyond their years.
Kids weren't smoking pot and taking acid in those days, but since many of my classmates came from families that were connected with the movie industry, they seemed, to me at least, glamorous and smart. Not anything like the kids I had known all my life.
I realized after I began school that kids are pretty much the same everywhere, basically. But because of my fears of being rejected I stayed pretty much to myself at first. It wasn't until I met Sam and started dating him that I began to make friends with some of the kids in school and gradually came to feel more at ease and even a little happy. It was mostly Sam, though, who changed my life for me.
Sam is a native Californian, one of those rare creatures, and was on the school football team, on the student council and one of the most popular boys in school. Naturally I was flattered the first time he asked me for a date. He looked like a Greek god in those days, with his blonde curly hair and his muscular physique. But it was his personality more than his looks that made him so popular. To go out with him was a feather in any girl's cap and when the dates became steady I was envied by a lot of the girls in school.
It was a lot more easy to become accepted once Sam and I started going together. The fears I had harbored before the beginning of the school year were quickly forgotten and I began to think of my life in Tennessee as a half-forgotten dream. I became involved in school activities, managed to keep my grades at a respectable level, and before the year was out Sam and I were in love and engaged to be married.
Of course, we both felt that we should get married right away, but our parents talked us into waiting for at least two years before taking that step. We were still together; Sam had an athletic scholarship to UCLA and I was able to enroll the same year. We kept to our promise and were married at the end of our sophomore year. I did drop out of school then, but Sam continued on until he got his degree.
Our twin girls were born just a week after Sam's graduation, but he was already set up with a good job at the electronics firm he still works for. Our parents had helped us financially all during school and I had an office job between the time I left school and the time I became pregnant with the girls.
It all sounds like an idyllic existence, so far, doesn't it? High-school romance, college marriage, children, and a secure future. And in most respects our life has been like an idyll. After twenty years together, Sam and I are still very much in love, proud of the life we have built together and especially proud of our girls.
Sam has done very well in his career. He is now sales manager of his firm and should make vice president before the year is out. We have a beautiful home with a swimming pool, a satisfying social life, security, all the things most people dream of and think important to their happiness.
The only problem with our life is that Sam has never satisfied me sexually. Or perhaps I should say, physically. Despite the fact that he is a big man and terribly magnetic, his penis is very small. I realize that size isn't supposed to be important, but the fact is that I have an unusually large vagina. When Sam and I made love, I don't get the fulfillment that sex should bring.
At first, when we were just married, I didn't know about things like sexual fulfillment. I knew very little about sex at all.
Sam didn't know much more than I did, although he must have been aware that he was smaller than normal compared to the guys he saw in the locker rooms at high school and college. But the size of his penis isn't the only problem we have. For all his large physique and magnetic personality, in the bedroom he is very inhibited and almost lacking totally in sexual aggressiveness.
Even in the early days of our marriage, when most couples have sex almost every day, we rarely made love more than once a week. And it was usually, up to me to be the aggressor. Even on our wedding night, Sam was hesitant about initiating our first sexual experience together. It's as if the sight of a mattress produces a whole personality change in him.
It wasn't until we had been married for a couple of years that I got up the nerve to discuss our sex life with anyone. I turned to my best girl friend, Eileen. When I told her what was troubling me, she didn't believe it. It would be hard to believe for anyone who knows Sam. Of course, Eileen was very sympathetic and understanding. She had just the opposite problem with her husband, Jack. She told me that Jack wanted to make love every night, and that the size of his penis was so large that it was often uncomfortable for her if they didn't engage in a lot of foreplay beforehand.
The more Eileen talked, the more bewildered I must have looked. She was using words and phrases that I had never heard before. When I started to ask her what all the things she was talking about meant, she loaned me a couple of marriage manuals to read.
I took them straight home and was shortly amazed by the realization that I didn't know anything about sex other than the basic position. Sam and I had never thought of, let alone tried, oral sex. And the various positions the books described left me flabbergasted. I suddenly realized that there was a whole world of sexuality that neither Sam nor I had ever dreamed of, let alone explored.
I couldn't wait for Sam to get home that night so that I could share my discovery with him. But when I told him about my talk with Eileen and the books she had given me to read he blew his stack. He couldn't believe that I would discuss our private life with anyone. I honestly think that he had never considered our sexual life as anything but normal, and he was terribly hurt to think that I was not only dissatisfied, but talking about it outside our home.
It was the first real argument that Sam and I ever had. Even though I could appreciate his feelings about my talking to Eileen about our problems, he refused to accept the idea that a problem existed. The argument ended by his refusing to even look at the books Eileen had loaned me and forbidding me to discuss our sex life with anyone. What he really meant, I found out, was that I wasn't to discuss our sex life with him.
I guess I really didn't handle the situation very well right from the start. I should have realized that Sam would react the way he did, but I honestly didn't expect him to react so violently. I had been so filled with that revelations Eileen's books had given me that in my enthusiasm I just didn't stop to consider how Sam might react.
Even though I felt defeated by Sam's refusal to discuss our sex life, I continued to read the books Eileen loaned me and even found more material on my own. One of the books I found myself was illustrated, and it really opened my eyes to what I had been missing.
But my newfound information didn't do me any good. Sam got over his hurt pretty quickly, although he didn't apologize for his behavior, but, if anything, he was more inhibited than before. I tried to introduce new techniques into our lovemaking, but whenever I did, Sam would just withdraw from me totally. He wouldn't say anything, but he'd just turn over and go to sleep if J. tried anything new 'or different from what we had always done together.
My main problem was that the more I learned, the more curious I became. And the more curious I became, the less satisfied I was. At times I was sorry that I had ever brought up the whole thing. I seemed to be more frustrated than ever. I felt cheated that I wasn't enjoying my sexuality to its full extent, but I could never consider giving up Sam or our life together. Nor could I consider having an affair with another man. My marriage was too important to me to risk everything we had together just because there was one element in our life that wasn't perfect. But it seemed hopeless for me to think that Sam would ever change.
In order to relieve my own frustrations and to satisfy my own sexual needs, I began to masturbate more and more frequently. In the beginning, after my sexual awakening, I would think about Sam while I was masturbating, visualizing the two of us together making love in all the variations my reading had made me aware of. But as Sam withdrew more and more from me sexually, I began to fantasize situations where I was making love with different men.
Eventually I settled on one fantasy that revolved around my making love to a black man. Why the though that making love to a Negro should excite me more than the thought of having sex with a white, man ever even occurred to me I don't know. Although my family was never overtly prejudiced against black people, we never were exactly pro-integration either. It just wasn't a subject that came up, although I realize that because of our background, if nothing else, racial prejudice was present in my outlook.
At first, the black man I would dream about didn't have any special characteristics or special physical attributes, in fact, he was faceless at first. But as I settled on this particular fantasy more and more, he not only began to take shape as a physical being, but I even gave him a name.
I would lie on my bed during the afternoon after taking all my clothes off and inspecting myself critically in the mirror. I've always taken good care of myself by dieting and exercise, so that even today, when I'm getting very close to forty years old, I still have the same figure I had when I was first married. My long dark hair hangs over my shoulders framing my face, my breasts are still firm and don't sag even without a bra, my legs are long and slim with no broken veins, my hips are still softly rounded and my belly flat. I don't even have any stretch marks from carrying the twins because of the exercises I did while I was pregnant.
So, after going through my ritual of undressing and looking at myself in the mirror, I stretch out on the bed and close my eyes while my hands softly caress my breasts until the nipples stand up. Then I run one hand slowly down my body while the other continues to squeeze and tickle my breasts. Just as my hand reaches my pubic hair, the door bursts open in my fantasy and Fred walks in.
He is always stark naked when he comes through the door and he stands at the foot of the bed, looking at me with a sneer on his face. Fred is very handsome. His wide shoulders taper to a muscular chest and sweep down to a slim waist. His legs are long and extremely well-developed. His thighs seem almost as big around as his waist. And his penis is huge and always erect. From the moment I see him walk in the door until he leaves, his erection is always hard and throbbing, ready to give me all the satisfaction a girl could wish for.
So he stands there at the foot of my bed with his white teeth flashing, looking me over from head to foot while I lie there waiting for him to speak. "You want some more of my black loving, white girl? You ready to be satisfied by a real man? You want some hot nigger cock in your loose white pussy?"
While he's saying those words his hands are slowly stroking his erect penis and it seems to grow even larger while he is talking and touching himself. "Well, white girl, if you want it you gonna have to beg for it. Get down on your knees and ask me please to ball you."
In my fantasy I slowly get up on my hands and knees and crawl toward the foot of the bed, until my head is only inches away from his hard, drooling penis. "Please, Fred, I need you. Make love to me."
"I shouldn't have no truck with you, white girl," he replies, "but since you begging and obviously need my services, I guess it'll be all right if you suck on my black cock." Then he puts his hands on his hips and thrusts his pelvis forward until the head of his cock is brushing my lips. "Go on, stick your soft tongue out and lick on that a little. If you do a good job, maybe I'll give you the loving you want."
I open my lips and let my tongue trail over the velvet head of his cock, carefully taking the drops of sticky fluid that always seem to be hovering on the tip. After I bathe the head with my tongue I slowly run my mouth along the length of his prick, making sure I don't miss a fraction of an inch of it.
"Now, lick my big, black balls, like I taught you, woman." I lower my head, letting the weight of his cock rest on my forehead while my tongue reaches out and carefully licks first one ball then the other. When his scrotum is thoroughly moistened, I open my mouth wide and suck first one ball then the other into my soft cavity, savoring the taste and feel of them in my mouth.
"Now, lick your way back up to the head of it and suck on it like I taught you." I reluctantly give up the treasure I hold between my lips and do as he tells me. My tongue traces the heavy veins beneath the satiny skin as I slowly work my way back to the head of his prick. When my mouth is in position I open my jaws as far as I can and Fred grabs me by the back of my head and forces my mouth over the gigantic head until it rests at the entrance to my throat.
Still holding my head in his powerful grip, Fred slowly begins to fuck my mouth, his hips moving back and forth, pushing his cock a little deeper into my mouth with each thrust until the head begins to penetrate my throat with each forward motion. I can't pull back because his hands are holding my head in place. I don't dare to move, anyway, because if I do Fred might leave me. So I continue to kneel there on the bed while Fred fucks my mouth.
Usually, when he is ready to come, he tells me to play with his balls. I take them in my hand and softly rub them together. When they start to rise up so that it looks like they are going to withdraw into his body I know that he is ready. His huge cock seems to swell even more so that his jaws hurt from the pressure of keeping them open so wide.
When he ejaculates, he shoves his cock in even further, forcing me to swallow the head of his cock deep in my throat while gobs of his delicious come bolt down, filling my mouth to overflowing. I'm always careful to swallow every drop though, because Fred will leave me right there, high and dry, if I let one drop escape.
Even after a tremendous discharge like that, his cock never seems to get soft. It just stays as hard as always. I carefully lick it clean while Fred watches me critically.
"Now lay back down on that bed and spread your legs apart wide. That's it. Now, stick your finger up there real far and tell me how it doesn't feel as good as when I slam my big dick up there."
I do as I'm told, slowly pushing one finger inside, then another and another until all four of my fingers are inside. "You see, woman? It takes a whole hand to give you the same feeling I can give you with one big, black dick. Or one long, pink tongue. Get your hand out of there, woman! I'm going to eat you out like you never been eat out before."
I pull my hand away just in time as he throws himself onto the bed between my legs, burying his head immediately in my crotch. His tongue feels so good as he runs it around the outer lips of my pussy. Sometimes he sucks the loose folds of flesh into his mouth and chews on them lightly with his strong teeth. That always makes me go wild. Then he takes his big hands and pushes my legs farther apart before spreading my cunt apart and burrowing in with his nose until it bumps against my clitoris. At the same time his tongue comes out of his mouth like a big, pink snake and starts filling me with sensations.
In and out his tongue will go, stretching incredibly far inside me, licking up the drops of lubricant my inner walls produce. Then he will take the tip of my clitoris between his lips and run the tip of his tongue over it driving me wild. I usually have an orgasm the minute his tongue touches my clitoris, an orgasm that he rides out expertly, heightening the sensation.
When my orgasm subsides, Fred always raises his head up and gives me one of those wicked grins of his. "You like the way I eat that big pussy of yours, don't you, woman ? You love old Fred's tongue slurping around in your wet snatch. Go on, tell me how much you like it."
"Oh, Fred," I answer, "you know that no one can eat my fat pussy the way you can. I love it when your long: tongue reaches way up inside me and fills me up. And when your lips suck on my little clit it always makes me come. You're wonderful."
"I know I'm wonderful, woman: That's what I was put on the face of this earth for. To pleasure weak women like you. And I do it better than any man around, don't I?"
"Oh, yes, Fred. Before I found you I didn't know what the meaning of sex was. You give me all the pleasure I need."
"Well, what you want this black man to do to you now? You want me to suck on your tits a little, or should I fuck your ass or do you want me to stick my big cock in your pussy?"
"You know me, Fred," I giggle. "I want you to do all of those things."
"What things, woman? You better spell it out for a dumb nigger like me. What you want me to do first?"
"First, suck on my tits for a while, then shove your big cock in my wet pussy. Then, if you're not too tired, you can ream my ass out good."
"Too tired? Did you say too tired, woman? You know I never get too tired to give you a better fucking than any man around. I'll show you who's too tired. This ain't your old man you talking to. This is Fred you got here to service you."
He starts to work his way up my body, covering my belly with little kisses and nips of his strong teeth until he reaches my breasts. Then he gets gentle as a lamb when his lips reach my nipples. He sucks on them as if he expected to get milk, nuzzling and kneading my tits while his lips drive me crazy. His head goes back and forth between them, licking the entire surface and the valley between. Sometimes he kneels over me and lets his big cock slide between my breasts, pushing them together and fucking them with the same intensity he uses when he's in my pussy.
Gradually he works his way back down my body, licking and kissing every inch of skin going all the way down to my feet. That always drives me crazy, especially when he sucks on my toes. I almost came once when he did that. Now he just does it to tease me. He knows that what I really want is his cock in my cunt.
Sometimes he licks all the way back up my body until his mouth is nuzzling my throat. Then he slides his big dick into me real gently, just a fraction of an inch at a time, until I think he's never going to get it all the way in. But sometimes he just throws himself on top of me and shoves it all the way in at once. I don't know which way I like it better. Or even if I have a preference. As long as I get it, all of that huge prick filling my pussy with its hardness and long, thick fullness.
Usually he does it slowly so that I can feel every millimeter as it burrows into my cunt like a big snake looking for a warm spot to rest. Only this snake never rests. It fills me like I've never been filled by anything else, stretching and smoothing all the folds and creases in my cunt, until my passage is stretched as tight as the skin that covers his cock.
Sometimes I come before it's all the way in, but usually I don't have an orgasm until it's all the way in and I can feel the head all the way up inside trying to enter my womb. My cunt muscles contract around the incredible girth of his cock and start to milk it, begging for the soothing balm he has stored in his big balls for me.
My legs rise up and wrap themselves around his tight backside, holding him tightly while my cunt contracts again and again. Only then does Fred start the gradual withdrawal that usually triggers another orgasm just by the friction of his cock sliding over my clitoris. Fred will pause when that happens, leaving just the head of his cock lodged safely inside while
I go crazy beneath him, my body writhing with the increasing intensity each climax brings.
It's when he starts the gentle in-and-out movements of his cock, alternately filling me and leaving me feeling empty, that the real joy of our union occurs. Every time he is all the way in, Fred gives a little corkscrew motion with his hips that pushes the head of his cock in deeper than usual.
By then I'm a heaving, panting animal, wanting more and more of the bliss his cock gives me. I start moaning and crying under my breath as he increases his tempo.
The feeling of his body covering mine while his hard cock hammers deep inside me is indescribable. It seems like only then am I truly alive, every nerve ending screaming with joy, the sensations traveling up my spine to my brain coming so quickly that it is like one endless sensation until my whole being is centered in my pussy with Fred's hard, driving shaft pounding into me mercilessly, dominating me as only he can.
Sometimes I come five or six times before Fred loses control and his hard cock swells and splits open, bathing my insides with the slimy product of his balls, filling my pussy with the rich cream until it overflows and runs between my legs, tickling my ass and dripping onto the bed beneath me.
I'm usually exhausted by the force of that last climax, but Fred is like a superman. His cock still is as hard as when he began, and he usually isn't even panting after his pile-driving performance.
"You want to rest some, woman, before I give it to you in the ass, or should I just roll you over and shove it in while it's still good and slimy with come?"
I usually want to wait a moment so that I catch my breath before Fred assaults me from the rear, but if he's impatient it doesn't really matter what I want. There's no stopping that man when he's ready to go.
Then he'll just roll me on my belly and start licking me all over the back like he does to my front before he fucks my cunt.
The feel of his broad, soft tongue as he licks up and down my spine, then over my hips and down the backs of my thighs and calves usually gets me ready much faster than if he waited for me to say when to start again. He always pays particular attention to the hollow behind my knee, because he knows that is a very sensitive spot on me. Even if I've just had multiple orgasms, the touch of his tongue there starts me in all over again.
My cunt starts to itch and contract as if I hadn't had a climax for weeks. Then when he starts back up my legs until he reaches my ass cheeks and starts in licking them, I know it will be only a matter of moments before I'm begging him to sink his big prick in my ass.
Sometimes he'll just tease me and get me all ready, then stop and say, "You gotta beg me now, woman, if you really want me to fuck that tight ass of yours. Do you want it?"
"Please, Fred," I'll say, "please sink your big cock in my brown hole and fuck me back there the way you do in my cunt"
Before the words are out of my mouth I can feel the big, spongy head of his thick cock nudging and worrying at my tight back hole. He usually has it so wet from his mouth that he doesn't need any lubricant. And if he just rolls me over and keeps on fucking me in the ass after just coming in my pussy, he's usually slick enough that he doesn't even need to lick me first. But I always keep some vaseline or some kind of lubricant handy, because I never know what he'll do first. Sometimes he starts out by fucking me in the ass. Then he always uses a lubricant because, for all his rough talk, he doesn't want to hurt me.
But usually we follow more or less the same pattern. After licking me all over my back and legs and then sticking his tongue in my ass, he lowers himself over my body and starts to inch his cock inside at the same rate he does when he's putting it in my cunt. Real slow, so I can feel every fraction of an inch going in. Once he's all the way inside he stops for a minute to let me get used to the feel of his big prick stretching my ass open.
Sometimes I get a climax just from his inserting his cock in my ass, but since he started doing it to me regularly it takes me a little longer, and I have to wait until he really starts to ram his rod home before I start climbing the walls.
Maybe it's because I'm tighter back there than in my pussy that Fred seems to enjoy fucking me that way more than the regular way. I only know that he doesn't take nearly as long to shoot off in my rear as he does when he fucks my pussy. But I'm usually pretty well satisfied by then and I don't mind if he comes faster that way.
We usually reach at least one more climax together that way before I start to come out of my dreamworld and back into the realities of my everyday life.
Of course you realize that my fantasy with Fred has taken years to reach its present point. In the last couple of years I have spent more time every afternoon alone with my dream. Lately I've had to start setting the alarm so that I won't still be in bed when the girls get home from school.
So here I am, after twenty years of marriage living in a dreamworld of sex most of the day. Without realizing what was happening to me until it was almost too late, I had begun to substitute fantasy for real life. I would plan my day around" my need to be alone in my room with Fred.
I'd get up in the morning and get Sam and the girls off to school, then I'd rush back into bed and call for
Fred. Sometimes I'd spend the entire day, but usually I'd have a short session in the morning then get up and get the house taken care of. I'd have a quick lunch and then go back to bed until the girls come home from school.
Sometimes I wake up during the night with my need and I'll sneak into the guest room for a couple of hours, but that's really dangerous. Suppose I had Fred in there with me and Sam woke up and came looking for me ? Or what if Fred should walk into our bedroom by mistake some night and crawl into bed with Sam? I know Fred isn't real, and it couldn't really happen; but there are times when I'm not sure what is real and what isn't.
One thing I've been careful to do is to make sure that my daughters don't wind up in the same sort of mess their mother is in. Even though Sam doesn't approve of sex education for girls", I've seen to it that they get the correct answers whenever they've asked me questions about their bodies or about sex. I don't want them to grow in ignorance like I did.
From the time they were little girls and just exploring their bodies, I've explained to them, in terms that they could understand, everything they'll need to know. Now that they're in their teens and beginning to undergo their sexual awakening like other girls their age I have encouraged them to explore their sexuality. Without Sam knowing it, I got our doctor to prescribe birth control pills for both of them, and they've been taking them for a year now.
I don't know if they need them or not. I've tried not to pry into their personal lives, but they both know that they can come to me at any time and discuss anything with me without fear of being told that what theyare doing is wrong.
Even though they are twins, Linda and Elaine are two very distinct individuals with their own identities and needs. Linda takes more after me, I think. I can see some of my own sexual nature reflected in Tier and I hope that, by telling her the right things, I can avoid letting her get trapped in the same kind of situation that I'm in.
I'm almost certain that she has been having sex with one of her boyfriends, although I'd never ask her if it was true. Maybe it's just a mother's intuition, but there is a look about Linda of a maturity that only comes with sexual experience. She is pretty enough never to have to worry about finding a man when she's ready for marriage. Linda has my figure but her father's blonde hair. If it weren't for the fact that she is blonde, people always tell me, we could pass for sisters.
She is very active in school affairs, like her father was, and is the more popular of the two girls. Of the two, I guess it's Elaine that worries me the most. She is much more introspective than her sister, and takes after her father more physically and emotionally, I think. The only part of me that I see in her is the color of her hair.
I'm almost certain that Elaine is still a virgin, even though she takes her pill every day just like her sister. But she doesn't date as much as her sister and the boys that she does choose to go out with are usually dull, bookworm types that would be afraid to make a pass at a girl if they knew how.
Elaine spends a lot of time alone in her room and once I happened to walk in on her when I was certain she had just finished masturbating. I tried to talk to to her about it, but she blushed and pretended that she didn't understand what I was talking about. I did not push it, of course, but I think I recognize some of her father's tendencies about sex in her.
I'd hate to think that I failed with Elaine after trying so hard to keep her from going into a shell like her father. But the older she gets, the more she seems like him in the ways that I'm sure are unhealthy. She has always been close to Sam, and I'm afraid that he has put some of his strange ideas about sex into her head.
Maybe it would have been best if I hadn't tried to bring them up the way I did. I seem to say "maybe" a lot. Maybe (there I go again) I should have just let them develop in their own way without any influence from me. God knows I haven't turned out to be the healthiest specimen around, but I don't think that's really my fault.
I've always thought that, if I had been able to go to my mother and discuss sex and boys, maybe my life wouldn't have turned out the way it did. Of course, a lot of what happened to me is Sam's fault, and I can't really blame Mother for that.
But she's always approved of Sam, even though she did keep us from marrying when we wanted to. Mom and Dad are both Southern Baptists, and of course I was too until I got away from their influence after my marriage. She still reads her Bible every day and is forever quoting scriptures to prove whatever point she is trying to make. I still don't feel free to cuss in front of her, and if she ever caught me smoking she'd probably have a heart attack on the spot. When she found out that Sam and I have an occasional cocktail before dinner, she told me I would go straight to hell.
It's funny the way children turn out to be the opposite of their parents,, isn't it? Sam's mother and father are both radical liberals, compared to my parents, but Sam is the bluenose in our family. I was brought up in a strict, God-fearing home and turned out to be the liberal in our marriage.
Maybe it only works that way with only one child in the family. I don't know. My two seem to reflect Sam and me in many ways but in others they're the direct opposites of what I've tried to instill in them. Elaine is certainly the worst of the two. I have a feeling that Linda will turn out the way I wanted her to. At least I sure hope so.
You know that, for the last fifteen or twenty minutes while I've been sitting here telling you all this, I've started to feel at ease and even forgot about Fred for a minute. Does that mean I'm making progress? That's the first time I can remember in years that Fred wasn't hovering around in the back of my mind....
The last couple of years have been really like living a nightmare when I was around other people, including my own family. I've been so afraid that I would let something slip about him in front of Sam or the girls that at times I've dreaded having to spend time with them. Last summer it got so bad that I talked Sam into taking a vacation by himself and then I sent the girls back to Tennessee to visit relatives, just so that I could be alone with Fred for a couple of weeks.
It got worse after that. I guess it was a mistake to be alone for all that time. I don't think I set foot out of the house the whole time they were gone except to go to the grocery store. By the time Sam and the girls came back I was so caught up in my fantasy world that I often found myself with some reference to Fred right on the tip of my tongue. I had to really watch and think about everything I was going to say, for fear I'd let the cat out of the bag.
I know that Sam would never believe that Fred was just a figment of my imagination if I ever did slip and say something by mistake. It's been such a strain for so long now that at times I think it might be better if Sam did know everything. But I can't tell him, because I know how he'd react. He'd take weeks to convince that Fred wasn't a real person, then, when he was convinced, he'd decide I was insane and have me committed to some institution and I'd never get out.
I've spent endless nights lying awake in the last few months, because I read somewhere about people talking in their sleep. I can't imagine a worse way for Sam to find out the truth about me than if I should spill the beans in my sleep after all these years of hiding my secret life from him.
When I started worrying about talking in my sleep is when I moved into the guest room at night. Sam didn't like it for a minute, let me tell you. He wouldn't believe that it was his snoring that wasn't letting me rest at night. He said how could that be bothering me now, when he's been snoring as long as we've been married? But I was finally able to convince him that his snoring was getting worse now that he is getting older.
But even after I moved into the guest room I was afraid to sleep. I was certain that I was going to talk or scream and the sound would bring Sam into the room and he would still hear me talking. That's when I went to our doctor for sleeping pills. Those little red capsules gave me the first rest I had had in months, but I still dreamed crazy things about Fred that I would remember the next morning.
I would spend my mornings, before the family left for school, trying to ask innocent questions about how everyone had slept or if anyone had heard any strange noises during the night. The morning Elaine told me she had heard me making strange noises I was sure I was doomed to discovery. The only thing I could think of then was to stay awake at night and try to sleep during the day when I was alone in the house. But that meant that I had to give up Fred completely since I was afraid I'd call for him at night while everyone was sleeping.
I guess it was at that point that I first started thinking about committing suicide. I began to think that the only way I could ever obtain peace of mind and still retain my secret was to kill myself. The next time I had my sleeping pill prescription filled, I decided was the time to get it all over with.
I planned it all carefully so that nothing could go wrong. I decided to take the whole bottle of pills one morning after the girls had left for school and Sam was safely out of the house for the day. I figured that by the time the girls got home from school it would be too late to help.
When the morning I had decided on finally came, I made my preparations carefully. I made sure the house was all clean and immaculate. Dinner was ready to put in the oven. I decided against leaving a note because I still couldn't bring myself to tell Sam the truth and I didn't want my last conscious act on earth to be making up some kind of lie about why I was doing what I did.
I chose my prettiest nightgown and robe, spent an hour in the bathroom fixing my hair and makeup, then filled a water glass and went into the bedroom and started swallowing all thirty of the capsules.
Then I stretched out on the bed, on top of the covers, and began to drift off to sleep. Even then, I couldn't block Fred out of my mind. The last thing I remember before going under was imagining Fred lying on the bed beside me with that insolent sneer on his face.
As you know, I woke up in the emergency ward of the hospital with tubes down my throat and needles in my arms. For once in his life, Sam had broken his routine and decided to come home early, only to find me in bed, unconscious. When he couldn't wake me after a few minutes, he got on the phone to our doctor, and then called an ambulance to take me to the emergency ward.
The doctor told me later that if Sam had been an hour later getting home I would have been dead for sure. Sam was really wonderful about the whole thing. Much better than I would ever have given him credit for. I'm sure it was the doctor's doing, but Sam has never pressed me for any reasons why I tried to take my life. All he insisted on, when I was well enough to be discharged, was that I start to see a psychiatrist so that I could work out my problem, whatever it was.
I had thought of doing that myself several times, but I could never figure out a way that I could conceal the amount of money I would have to take from our bank account to pay for a psychiatrist.
At least I know one thing for sure now. That is that Sam and the girls really love me. They've all done everything they could to make my life free of any complications. The girls even got their school schedules changed so that one of them goes in the morning and one in the afternoon. That way I'm never alone in the house.
At first I thought it was just because they couldn't trust me alone for fear that I would try to kill myself again. But they've convinced me now that even if that was the reason in the beginning, now they're just concerned about my getting well.
This whole' experience has opened my eyes to the love that Sam and the girls have for me, and I realize it was foolish for me to let my mind get so out of control. I'm beginning to think that Sam would have understood about Fred and my sexual frustrations if I had been patient with him and given him a chance.
I'm still not ready to tell him everything, but one of these days, when I'm more myself, I think it would only be the right thing for me to do. There is only one way to repay the love and devotion he has shown me, and that's by being totally honest with him.
It's just that, after all these years of deceiving him-even if it was only in my own mind-telling him about Fred and my fantasies will probably be the most difficult thing I'll ever have to do. While I'm at it I might as well tell the girls too, don't you think?
I'm sure they will profit by their mother's mistakes and maybe they'll realize why I tried to bring them up in an open sexual atmosphere. Or at least as open as I felt was possible.
One thing these sessions have done for me is to open my eyes wide to the kind of weird things people's minds can do to them. There must be a whole lot of crazy people just like me, walking around with the same fears and doubts that I have. And they all probably look just as normal as I always did.
Is Fred a dream or reality? At what point does the fantasy transcend the reality? Sam's wife, the victim of severe delusions, halfway believes that her sexual fantasy is as solid, as flesh-and-blood, as her sexual reality. No doubt Fred symbolizes a powerful, cathartic influence; but can Sam's wife actually internalize her frustration to the point of hallucination? Psychologists and psychiatrists can tell you that the power of the mind should not be underestimated, particularly when it seeks to alter some segment of daily life which is intolerable to the person with prior mental weaknesses and disabilities. Severe stress can produce ready hallucinations in even the most healthy of subjects. Even nitrogen narcosis, a condition which sometimes occurs to jet pilots and deep-sea divers (caused by a sudden infusion into the bloodstream of atmospheric nitrogen, i.e., equipment failure) can produce vivid hallucinations which completely confuse the victim.
Hallucinations are usually the product of severe stress, either mental or physical. Long-term hallucinations are signals of schizophrenia and psychosis, according to Charles Brenner, author of An Elementary Textbook of Psychoanalysis. Thus, suicide attempts and other signs in her behavior indicate that Sam's wife is undergoing extreme stress approaching serious mental illness.
The fantasy of Fred must be examined in light of psychoanalytical definition, for it must be remembered that the fantasy itself is only the conscious manifestation of unconscious material. Just what causes are the source of this troubled existence for Sam's wife can be partially understood by the elements of her physical situation, and, in particular, her relationship with her husband.
According to her descriptions, Sam is almost completely impotent, Capable only of intercourse once a week. She tells of their wedding night, of how on successive sexual sessions she "had to be aggressive" to receive stimulation from him, and of how the sudden realization, in her discussions with her friend Eileen, that her husband was sexually impotent changed her mind about her relationship. After trying to be as constructive as possible with her husband, she must accept the fact that his condition is, for the moment, unchangeable.
After consulting with standard sexual references, she becomes even more convinced of the sexual futility of her marriage. Unconsciously, she blames herself for the failure. She may understand on a conscious level that the problem is a physical one, but on the unconscious level her neurotic sexual foundation cannot adequately cope with the tremendous frustration generated by the knowledge that her marriage is unsuccessful. She can only turn to masturbation for satisfaction, and her masturbatory fantasies become the only outlet for sexual release.
It is only necessary to examine the symbolic content of her masturbatory fantasies to determine the nature of her neurotic condition. The central figure in her fantasies is Fred, a black, "super-masculine menial" type common in certain kinds of erotic fantasies, who eventually becomes so cathartically important to the dynamics of her neurosis that he is accepted as real. At all times, his behavior toward her is sadistic, and, as would be expected, her acceptance of his actions is decidedly masochistic in tone. Together, Fred and Sam's wife enact a series of episodes on the fantasy level wherein her sexual degradation is accomplished by means of forced fellation, anal stimulation, and intercourse. Fred's dialogue during the fantasy is abusive, and at all times her excitement is heightened by the presence of physical pain associated with the fantasy lovemaking.
By means of even a cursory examination of present-day racial relations in our country, it can be seen that those who cross racial barriers to engage in sexual activities have to penetrate cultural and psychological barriers to do so. Because of centuries-old prejudices, black/white sexual relations carry with them psychological overtones which reflect in the behavior of the interracial couple. These psychological overtones are even more pertinent when considering erotic fantasies that contain a predominant interracial theme.
The term cultural racism is used by Alexander Thomas, M.D. and Samuel Sillen, Ph.D. in their book Racism and Psychiatry to describe the inner dynamics of racist consciousness. Of Paramount importance, Thomas and Sillen say, to an understanding of cultural racism is the investigation of psychosexual elements present in both the dominant white milieu and the black minority. From the first historical moment of white awareness of blacks, sexual terms have been used to describe the Negro as an inferior species of humanity. The fears of the white community through the ages have centered on the irrational supposition that all black men were "beasts" who could not resist raping a white woman. Both black men and women were possessed of an unnatural sex drive, many times more animal-like than the drives which governed white sexual behavior.
To the extent that racist philosophies and cultures still exist in our country, these irrational psychosexual fears, based on the fear of impotence, determine a pattern of exploitation on all levels of the interracial sexual relationship. Black women, for instance, will exploit white males because they feel that the white culture controls the society and therefore they hope for advancement by submitting to white male demands.
In their book entitled Black Rage, Drs. William Grier and Price Cobbs provide an understanding of the many possible psychological motivations which may prompt the white female/black male relationship. For the white woman in such a liaison, his forbiddenness increases her abilities to project her oedipal fantasies. She may see him as a degraded type of human being, or even as a member of a different subspecies. If she views him this way unconsciously, she may be able to participate in a kind of sexuality, or sexual fantasy, that she could not participate in before because of her personal conception as a "refined" white woman. Although she may view him as a degraded object, she also sees him as a sexual master. When she merges with him, she abandons her previous identity and is able to isolate the sex act as a unique moment, different from previous sexual experiences.
Fred is an instrument of masochism, a masturbatory fantasy intended to complement the basic need for passive femininity in sexual response. Sam's wife has aggrandized her sexual needs by outside stimulation (sex education books) while at the same time she loses compatibility with her husband. As she turns to fantasy and masturbation for relief, the stress of her marital situation brings her so much insecurity that she loses contact with the real world. Her fantasy becomes more real than her reality.
The fantasy gathers strength with each neurotic need that it manages to satisfy. Each time the masturbation ensues, the accompanying fantasy expresses more and more of the deep frustration and anguish of the woman until she establishes a masochistic need for self-abuse. Only resumption of normal sex relations, in this case the restoration of her husband's potency, can nullify the effect of the submissive fantasy. Therapy would be a good recommendation for both Sam and his wife.
CHAPTER THREE Gang Rape
I suppose I'm just like any other housewife. I mean, I've got the two proverbial kids, and the kind, considerate husband who works in the city. I've got the house in the suburbs, and the crabgrass in the backyard, and even, oh, yes, the dog.
And frankly, I'm just plain bored. That is, I was just plain bored until last week, and since then I'm not really sure if I'm even sane.
It's not many of your garden-variety suburban housewives who set themselves up for a gang rape-and then end up enjoying it!
It all started about a year ago, I suppose. We were living in Denver, then, before my husband got this job. Anyhow, it was the first time that both the kids had gone to school. Heather just went a half-day, but even at that I found I had a lot of time on my hands.
At first, I thought I'd have lots to keep me busy housework and shopping that I'd never had time to since I'd had the girls. Only after three weeks, I had caught up on all those chores, and I couldn't think of much to do except watch soap operas on TV. Well, I don't know how you are on soap operas, but one day I heard just one whiny voice too many. I couldn't take one more misplanned pregnancy, one more crisis in tune with organ music
I ran outside and got in the car and just drove. I must have driven for about an hour, just watching the traffic and not really thinking. Suddenly, a sign caught my eye, and I pulled through the traffic and parked.
ADULT BOOKS
I read the letters again, trying to get up my courage. Finally, deciding that I was indeed an adult (and didn't I have these little lines by my eyes to prove it!), I walked inside.
I'd never seen anything like it before. Everywhere I looked were pictures of nude women. On the covers of books, on the covers of magazines, in every conceivable position. Some of the magazines even had pictures of men!
I tried to look inconspicuous, but the guy behind the counter must have guessed that I was new at it by my puzzled expression, and the way I looked away from everything.
After some quick scoldings to my inner conscience, I walked to the rack with the magazines. I wasn't sure I could try a book, yet-I mean, did good women actually read that stuff?
I just stared at the covers for a while, then, feeling like a schoolgirl about the whole thing, I picked one, took it to the man behind the counter, paid, and hurried out.
To this day, I don't know why I did it. Maybe if I hadn't, none of this would have started.
You see, I never did have much sex with my husband. I got pregnant right after we were married, and we didn't really have much time to experiment before I got big and heavy.
To make matters worse, I got pregnant again as soon as we started making love, and before I knew it, I had two babies.
My husband was so considerate through the whole thing. He didn't ask me to make love if I didn't feel like it, and all the time I was pregnant, I didn't feel like it. I suppose he was counting on some action again when the baby was born, but no soap.
Having two babies less than a year apart wasn't easy, and every night I was so tired that I'd roll away from him in bed. By the time the baby was two, we'd pretty much forgotten about sex.
You have to remember, I never went all the way with anyone before my husband, and I really had no idea what sex could be like. I'd heard, of course, about other people breaking up families over it and stuff, but I really couldn't imagine that it was all that terrific.
Then, when the kids had calmed down some, I decided that it might be a good idea to resume our sexual relations. Only by that time it was too late. The first time I tried to make the overtures, my husband got all upset and asked me what the matter was.
I explained that I loved him, and that the kids weren't tiring me out so much anymore, and I wanted to be close to him again, like it was when we were first married.
He thought it was a good idea, and so we started having sex more often than the once a month we'd been averaging before my suggestion. We even made love twice in one week. The only problem was that he never changed it. He still made love the same way he had for four years.
I knew, I guess instinctively, that something was definitely lacking. I just didn't know what. So it went on that way for two more years, only our average went down again till I was lucky to get it twice a month.
That's where the situation stood the day I went to the book store. I still can't figure out what drove me to do it. Go there, I mean.
It took me nearly a week to get over the embarrassment of going into the store. Finally, one afternoon I got out the magazine from where I'd hidden it behind the dirty clothes in the back of the closet, and I read it.
I can't really say read, because that first day, all I did was look at the pictures. And the pictures! There were full color pictures of penises-some of them a dusky brown, others a beautiful olive, but mostly white, and mostly huge.
I was shocked at first, but then I began to examine them. You remember, I had never seen any such pictures before, and certainly not of any live men. Why, except for my husband, I had never seen one before. Even my kids-two girls.
It's not really that the magazine got me started, you understand. I guess I had to want to get started to even go in that store, if you know what I mean. I just knew that I needed some entertainment, and the magazine turned out to be just the kind of entertainment I was looking for.
So you see, I'm not trying to act like an angel or anything-it was all my own doing-buying the magazine and then memorizing the exciting pictures in it.
Anyhow, forever after that, I started looking at other men. Not at their faces, or maybe their shoulders, like I had before; I started looking at the bulge in their pants. Men in liquor stores, men in grocery stores, men in gas stations, everywhere I started noticing their pants and how they fit.
I don't imagine my husband noticed my change. I tried to act the same around him, not sexier or anything, because I was afraid he'd have to ask me why my attitude had changed. I know he's not the kind to approve of me buying magazines like that. Especially since his organ isn't anything like the ones in the pictures.
At that point, I hadn't actually imagined making love to anyone else. I was just noticing pants.
Well, then my husband got the promotion, and we moved out here. At first I thought it would be better-more fun things to do-but it was worse.
By this time, both kids were in school all day, and after unpacking the furniture, I found nothing to do except watch more TV. There were more channels, but no more variety. I didn't even have any friends.
So one day I drove around till I found another bookstore. This time I bought several books-to last me until I got up the courage to go back.
These were real books, you know, not just magazines. Inside I found descriptions of things that I didn't even know existed-parties with wife-swapping, and things like that.
The strangest thing happened, now that I remember it, when I read one of the books. It was all about how this gang had raped this teen-ager. I started it, kind of slow, but by the time I got halfway into it, I was just tearing through the pages. And masturbating.
Yes, me, a grown-up woman, masturbating. I didn't even know I had started doing it until I wanted to turn a page and found I couldn't take my hands away from where they were nestled in my pubic hair.
I guess I had really melted into a fantasy world. I actually felt like I was that teen-ager, being raped by that gang. Anyhow, I quit reading, and just let my imagination do the work, until I came.
About masturbating-I did it a lot when I was a kid, and I got spanked for it every time I was caught. Then, when I was a little older, I still did it, but I got sneakier, and I wouldn't ever do it when there was a chance I'd get caught.
Of course, when I met my husband, I didn't need to masturbate any more, and so I didn't do it for about-oh-I guess four years.
What got me started on it again was that first magazine. It's not that I masturbated when I was looking at the pictures. It's just that something, at odd moments through the day, I'd feel really sexy, and I'd have to go lie down on my bed and spread my legs. I had to make myself come so my husband wouldn't realize how much more desire I had building up inside and get suspicious.
After I read that book, though, I didn't need to read any more. As a matter-of-fact, it was all I could do to keep my mind away from sex. Every time I'd think about that scene, and those four boys holding that girl, and her feeling all those men inside her, one after the other-well, I'd end up spread-eagled on my bed.
About that time, I started looking at my body, too. I'd never really thought about it much before. I just looked in the mirror to check if my blouse was tucked in or my slip was showing or my lipstick was on straight.
Finally, one day after a shower, I stopped in front of my mirror and took a good look. My hair was beautiful, and I was glad that I'd let it grow so long. It was a hassle washing it, but it was worth it to watch those long strands of red-gold hair falling down my back.
My face-I peered closely into the mirror, but found only a few tiny lines to mar the surface of my skin. My color was still fresh and good, and my mouth still carried those full lips proudly.
Yes, I thought, I'm as good as any teen-ager. I should have realized then that I was trying to step into my fantasy, but I just kept right on looking at my body.
My breasts were still large and firm, despite the kids, and my nipples were, if anything, better. They were long and pointed when they were excited, and they pointed almost skyward.
My waist has always been tiny, and it hadn't grown more than an inch since I'd left high school. I had not a single stretch mark, either.
I checked out my hips and buttocks, and found they were round and high and firm, just as they'd always been. My legs were still good enough for any beauty contest, and between them, my reddish pubic hair marked a womanly mound.
I closed my eyes and looked through my lashes. Yes, definitely, I thought, a regular teen-ager. One hand reached down and I started playing with myself, until I had to lie down right there on the bathroom floor, and finish it.
I should have realized then what I was doing, but I guess I didn't really let myself think about my fantasy.
About a week after that incident, my husband wanted to make love. All the time, I kept thinking about what a pretty body I really had, and how sexy I could be if I just got turned on. I even started thinking how there were probably a lot of men that would envy my husband for having his penis inside me at that minute.
Of course, I didn't admit to myself what men I was thinking about, but I knew it was those four men from the book. It was getting so this fantasy had invaded every realm of my life.
I always imagined that I would be coming home from the supermarket. The one where I went was usually pretty dark at night, so I imagined that I was there.
Then when I'd open the door, these two thugs would be in the back seat, and they'd force me to drive to some junkyard where their pals were waiting. Once we were there, these other two would join us, and then the four of them would proceed to rape me in every way imaginable.
Well, I kept having this fantasy all the time, and it just got worse. Sometimes I'd think about it three or four times in one day. It even gdt to the point where I couldn't make love to my husband unless I was thinking about this crazy scene.
Then, about two months ago, I started actively looking for it. At first, I would just think up excuses to run over to the market in the evenings, after the kids had gone to bed.
After a while, I started parking on the far end of the parking lot, in the darkest part, and then walking across to the market. I don't suppose I really thought about what it would be like if it really did happen. I just knew that it was exciting, and kind of thrilling to come close to my fantasy in real life.
I should have known I was looking for trouble. There was a gang of kids that sometimes hung around at the store. It was a weird group, really, with some Chicanos and some Blacks, and some of the white kids that lived around the neighborhood.
Every time I'd walk past them, I'd hear them whistle and say really filthy things about fucking my cunt off. I figured it was pretty harmless, and it made me feel all young again and sexy.
Besides, it gave me some nice clear faces for my fantasy. It's easier to imagine, when you have a nice clear image; and not quite so impersonal.
Then, I stared dressing differently. All my life I've been pretty conservative, and worn long skirts and concealing blouses. But one night, I rolled up my skirt until it was really short, and went that way.
I'd better add that I didn't roll up my skirt while I was at the house. My husband is very jealous, and he couldn't stand it if he thought I was showing that much of my leg to people.
I rolled it up in the car, and after I walked into the store, I was glad I did. That night, the gang got really lewd, making cracks about hair pie, and talking about ramming themselves into that juicy cunt.
I must admit, it made it pretty exciting. After I got home that night I added words to the fantasy in my mind, and I knew just what kind of dirty words the men would use, and I could see their faces saying them.
Then, last week, I pushed it a little too far. I supposedly ran out of bread, so I told my husband I'd have to get some for breakfast. He just nodded, and kept on watching his TV program.
I'd been wearing an old, dowdy housedress, so I stepped into my room to change. But that night, nothing in my closet looked exciting enough for me. On a crazy impulse, I pulled open my drawer and looked through it. There on the bottom was the sexy black nightgown my husband had gotten me when Heather was born. I'd never worn it.
Feeling really evil about the whole thing, I slipped into it. I loved the soft, slinky feeling of the silk against my bare skin. My nipples hardened under the slight pressure of the fabric, and I suddenly felt very wanton, very excitable, and very exciting.
At that point, I even considered staying home and making love to my husband. Only, I told myself, he would want to know why I'd suddenly changed after all these years, and I wasn't really in the mood to tell him. Besides, it seemed a shame to waste such a wanton feeling on that five-second exercise in the darkness.
I slipped into a short coat-one that was really intended to be half-length-and snuck out the back door. On the way to the car, I could feel the breeze against my bare legs, and I remember thinking that I'd never exposed so much of my legs in my life-even to my husband.
It was well worth it, I must admit. Either I looked really sexy in my face or something, or it was just all that added leg, but the gang was in rare form that night. I could hear them all the way across the lot as
I neared the store, whistling and saying obscene things.
I just walked right past them, focusing for a minute on a couple of the more attractive faces, to further set them in my memory for my fantasy.
When I came out of the store, I didn't take the time to check out their faces. The wind had gotten stronger, and I wanted to hurry back to the car before I froze to death. That's probably why I didn't notice the difference-about half of the gang had disappeared.
I got to my car and opened the trunk for the groceries. That part of the lot was really dark, so I couldn't have seen inside the car if I'd thought of it. Anyway, all I was thinking about at that time was that cold wind on my legs.
I even opened my door and sat down before I heard his voice. It was low, but very forceful, and he told me to drive. The way he said it, I knew I didn't have any choice.
In all the time I'd been having that fantasy, even in all the time I'd been tempting fate at the market, I never dreamed that it would actually happen. It was pretty stupid, I guess, but I'm like that-I never really think about the consequences of anything until it's too late.
When I pulled out of the lot, I heard another voice from the back seat-really rough. I tried to see them in the rear-view mirror, but it was too dark. Even without a glimpse of his face, I recognized one of the voices.
I should have-it had been running through my fantasy ever since the first night he'd told me that he wanted to ram his stiff. ... Well, you know.
I felt like I was in a dream, or one of those deja vu scenes where everything seems like it's happened before.
It didn't happen exactly like my fantasy, of course, but it was very nearly the same. First of all, I didn't drive to a junkyard. I drove to an abandoned supermarket out in one of the suburbs.
I was really confused about where we were-it seemed like he directed me on all circular streets, and in the darkness I couldn't seem to get my bearings.
Once we got there, the other guys were waiting. They got out of an old Chevy, a '57 I think, and hurried over to where my car was stopped. Didn't want to miss any of the action, I guess.
They pulled open my door and dragged me out. They told me I was a teasing bitch, and that I was going to get mine. Then they threw me into the back seat, and one of them ripped my coat off.
There I was, in that flimsy little nightgown, feeling terribly silly, but enjoying it in a way. I'd thought about this part so many times, that it really seemed like this wasn't the first time it had happened.
That made it easier. It almost seemed like it wasn't happening to me. Only afterward, of course, it was me, and my body has the bruises to prove it.
The next part was just like in my fantasy. They all had a turn at me, and then they tried some things that I hadn't thought of-two of them at once, and then three.
I knew that I'd asked for it, but I never really imagined I'd get it like that!
First, the one with the rough voice started swearing at me, telling me how I'd excited them for months, and they were tired of being at the mercy of some white bitch who thought she was something special. Then, when he saw my nipples poking up into the air, he couldn't help but whistle.
You ain't nothin' special, he told me, but you sure do have some knockers!
I really loved hearing the words from him. I don't even remember being afraid. I just remember how exciting it was to actually hear the things I'd daydreamed about for months.
The first guy, I'm pretty sure he was Chicano, had unzipped his pants, and he reached down and tore my filmy little panties off with one little swipe. It was too dark to see much, but he must have remembered my hair from the supermarket, because he said something about my red fire-pot, and how he was going to put out the fire.
Then, he reached down and pulled out his cock and told me he was going to shove it up inside me until I exploded. It was just light enough to see his cock against the dark color of his pants, and then I knew it was all worth it. Because his cock was every bit as big as the one in my fantasy-every bit as big as the ones in the pictures.
I suppose anybody else would have been scared, but frankly I was horny. One of the other guys leaned over the back seat to hold me down, but he really didn't need to. You couldn't have dragged me away from there by the time I saw that cock.
With one hand the man, or I guess he was really a boy, was trying to separate my legs, and his other one was rubbing down the length of his cock. I put up a little struggle-more because I figured they expected it than because I really wanted to.
And when I struggled, that seemed to make it even better for him. I could hear him start panting as he lowered himself on top of me, and pushed his huge dick between my legs. At first, I thought maybe it would hurt me, it was so big. I was really excited, though, and it didn't hurt me at all. I was too wet and ready for that.
His huge cock pushed up against my pussy, and he pushed his lips on mine at the same time. I can't really say that I liked his kiss-he was really rough-but it was certainly exciting. And I must say that I liked his cock pushing into me.
At first the walls of my pussy were too small to let him enter, but as he pushed I kept wanting it more and more, and pretty soon he just slid inside.
I had no idea that it could feel like that. He filled me up completely, and every inch of my pussy was just loving it! My husband had never come close to filling me up like that-not in all those years!
But the best was yet to come! When he started driving it in and out of me, I thought I was going to die. The walls of my pussy were just running with my own juices, and with every stroke, I started waving around more frantically. It must have felt like he was caught inside a cement mixer, the way I was churning and gobbling up his cock.
He was grinning, I think, because I could see the white flash of his teeth in the darkness. He probably thought he was getting even with me-that he was forcing me to enjoy it. He couldn't have known that I was just as thrilled as he was!
That's the last thing I remember seeing, because just about then, I started coming. I was so hot and quivery that I didn't even realize what was happening until my whole body went into spasms, and this intense pleasure flowed through me. It had never happened before, and I had no idea what to expect. Well, let me tell you, it was fantastic!
I guess the heat and motion of my orgasm made him come, too, because as soon as I was conscious enough to see him again, he was lying on top of me, moaning, and his hips were thrusting a final time.
He didn't have any chance to rest, though. The next guy, a skinny little black guy, was pulling him off, and moving into position for himself. He already had his cock in his hand, although it was harder to see it in the dark. Maybe I just remember it because it matched him so well-you know, long and skinny, just like him.
He jammed it right in, and it went in easily because I was so wet from the last time. He had been watching all the time, and it made him pretty horny, I guess, because within a few seconds, I knew he was going to come.
At that point, I think he was afraid of looking bad to his friends, because he pulled out and started playing with my tits. I was just as glad, because I needed some time to recover from my last orgasm, and besides, I discovered something entirely new.
I learned that my beautiful big tits were good for more than just nursing babies. This guy wasn't particularly gentle, but he seemed to know what he was doing when it came to stimulating my tits. He rubbed the nipples between his fingers until the pain turned to pleasure-it even seemed like there was a nerve connecting my tits to my cunt, because when he started playing with my nipples, my cunt just came alive again.
One of the other kids, one who hadn't had a turn yet, got mad. He couldn't see why the skinny one had pulled out, and he wanted him to hurry up and finish so that he could get his turn. He kept yelling at his friend, and then at me, urging us to get it on and get it over with.
I was enjoying it so much that I didn't pay much attention to the other guy. That is, not until he jammed his cock into my mouth!
When we hadn't paid any attention to him, he'd come around the car, opened up the door, pulled back my head, and shoved his cock down my throat.
This was certainly a new experience for me-I'd never even touched my husband's cock, and certainly never put it in my mouth. Now all of a sudden, I had one thrust halfway down my throat.
I choked, of course, but then my nose came up under his balls, and I could smell his musky, sweaty, sexy smell, and then I liked it. As a matter-of-fact, when he started to pull it out, I didn't want to let it go. I sucked as hard as I could, hoping to keep it inside my mouth; and when I did that, the boy just flipped. He moaned, and called me all sorts of names, and then pushed back inside me, begging me to suck his dick.
My long skinny friend had meanwhile tired of my tits, and he shoved his dick back up inside my cunt. It was an incredible sensation, feeling one in my throat and one in my crack.
We got into a sort of rhythm after a while, with one pushing when the other pulled, and soon I was swaying back and forth between them, all three of us nearly crazy with passion.
It wasn't long until we all three came, almost at the same time. It was really more than I'd ever dreamed about, feeling both men shoot their come inside me. I just couldn't help myself, I had to come again. And this time was better than the last one. It was longer and deeper, and I thought I would never recover from the sheer excitement of it.
Now the fourth guy-he hadn't said a word the whole time-decided that it was his turn. Only he said he wasn't about to take anybody's sloppy seconds.
Before I knew what was happening, he rolled me over and spread the cheeks of my ass. I had no idea what he was going to do, because I'd never done anything like that myself. Only I had sort of an idea that he was going to slide into my pussy from the back, because one of the books I'd read had talked about that position.
Only that's not what he meant at all. He just kept spreading the cheeks of my ass, and then he started probing my ass-hole with his finger. It was pretty wet, really, because my own come, and that of the first two guys had rolled down from my crack and settled in the hair in the crack of my ass.
I was pretty sticky all over, by that time, so I didn't realize that his finger was sliding inside until he had it in almost to the hilt.
I was so startled that I must have jumped, because the muscles of my ass really hurt as they closed around his finger.
I screamed in pain, but he didn't seem to care very much. As a matter-of-fact, it didn't stop him at all.
The next thing I knew, he had pulled his finger out, and the head of his cock was pushing against the little hole. I didn't think he would really do it, I suppose, or I would have offered more resistance. As it was, I just kind of wriggled up against him so that we were in perfect alignment.
Suddenly, it was inside. Not just the enormous head, but the whole thing was pressed inside the tight little walls of my ass.
Of course, I was a virgin, there, and it was much tinier than my crack, so I must admit it was painful at first. I even screamed, but when I did that, one of the other boys put his hand over my mouth and tried to shut me up. He threatened to kill me if I screamed again.
I hadn't really thought about violence until then, because I'd been enjoying myself so much. It never occurred to me that there might be things that I wouldn't want to do.
I had no choice, then; I pretty much had to take whatever they wanted to dish out. All I could do was lie there while this huge dick was pushing into me, ripping the skin from my tender little ass-hole.
Only, after a while, I got to like that too. It was a strange sensation, knowing that he was really fucking my ass-hole, because it was so close to my pussy, it felt like he was fucking me there.
As a matter-of-fact, it was even better, because it felt like he was fucking me in both places at once. It was so full, and in a very different way, so exciting. I guess after having a husband that was so passive, it was a thrill just to be dominated by this silent black boy.
Pretty soon, I really got to like it. And then, he came. I've never heard anyone react like that before-he was just moaning and screaming. The funny thing was, the other guy had been warning me not to scream.
It made me feel so feminine, to have all four guys come inside me like that-it was really the thrill that I had always imagined.
Only, they weren't through with me yet. By the time this guy finished, the other three were raring to go again. They pulled me out of the car and laid me on my coat on the sidewalk that ran around this old grocery store, and then they all three proceeded to get me again. I'm pretty sure the silent one just watched me from the car, but by that time I wasn't counting.
The first guy had never been inside my mouth. After he watched the other three, I guess he thought he'd been gypped, so he laid me on my side, and knelt beside me. Then he pushed his huge cock into my mouth and held the back of my head so that I couldn't move away from him.
I could hardly breathe because his cock was so big. I kept trying to pull my head back just a little ways so that I could get some air, but he wouldn't even let me move an inch.
The third guy-the one who'd come in my mouth-said he wanted a taste of my juicy pussy, so he lay down beside me and pushed his cock between my legs.
It was pretty uncomfortable there-the cement reached right up through my coat and hurt my ribs and hip-but all three of them were intent on this final act.
Finally the tall skinny one lay behind me, guiding his long thin cock with his hand until it pressed into my ass.
It took only a minute for them to start moving toward each other, one shoving his cock up my juicy pussy, the other moving into my tight little behind.
I didn't have to move at all. They worked like a machine; one moving in while the other moved out. I could feel their cocks nearly rubbing against each other as they slid up and down inside my pussy and ass-hole. It was almost as if I wasn't there, because they were moving as if they were fucking each other.
But I was definitely there. I had never imagined, even earlier when I had first had a cock up my ass, what it could be like to have two of them inside me. It was incredibly exciting, and my body was climbing again, trying to come.
Meanwhile, the guy who was inside my mouth was going crazy. He was moving around in circles, jabbing and poking and thrusting as deep as he could. It was kind of thrilling tasting his big ridge, and the old taste of his come that was still left near the ridge, but I could hardly breathe.
If anyone had come by, they would have thought we were all four crazy churning away like that. Later, I wished someone would have seen us, but right then, I would have been furious if any one tried to stop us.
I felt really sexy. I felt almost like the girl in the book, the girl in my fantasy. Not as innocent, perhaps, but as beautiful, as desirable, and as sexy as she was.
As a mtter of fact, during the whole scene, there were times when it seemed like I really was that teenager. The housewife part of me had melted away forever.
The pounding continued-all three of them working at me, using me purely for their own pleasure. The cock in my mouth had begun to pulsate, and I figured that he was about to come.
I figured right. All of a sudden, my mouth was filled with sticky warm come juice, and the boy was tearing at my head, pulling my hair, screaming, and driving his stiff cock all the way down my throat.
That was too much for me. All this motion had somehow gotten me turned on again-just like I had some kind of on-and-off switch inside. And the off switch was broken.
I started moaning and sucking at the stiff dick in my mouth, sucking all the come out of him, licking at every drop.
I don't remember much of the next part-only that I came and that it was higher than the other times. I can vaguely remember the warm juice flooding over the cock imbedded in my pussy, and running onto my thigh beneath. But that's all.
The other two took their clue from me and came too, moaning and panting, and spurting hot come high inside my ass and pussy.
I don't know what I thought they would do to me afterward. In my fantasy, of course, there was no afterward. And I hadn't really given enough serious thought to the probability of it happening to imagine the ending.
I said before that I'm not very good at figuring out the consequences, and this time was no exception.
They all pulled out of me, and zipped themselves up. I was too exhausted to do anything but lie there.
Maybe they felt guilty when they saw me there, naked except for my shredded nightie. Maybe they were just mean kids. In my fantasy, they had always been foulmouthed, but not rough. In reality, they were rough.
The one who had just come in my face started talking again, saying that this should have taught me a lesson. He told me that I probably wouldn't be a teaser anymore.
Of course, at that moment, I had actually contemplated doing it again. I would like to tease them again and provoke them to attack, because, frankly, I liked the attack.
So I nodded my head.
Well, of course, they had no way of knowing that I'd liked it, or that they could have had me any time they wanted. I guess the boy figured I was being stubborn. Maybe he even thought that I'd tell the police or something.
All of a sudden, he started treating me like I was dangerous. He told the others that he'd better get rid of me, because I knew too much.
I was protesting, trying to explain that I was no danger to them, and that I would like to see them again. But by that time, nobody was listening.
The first guy kicked at me. I don't know if he actually meant to kick me, but he did. And then the others, watching him, started to do the same.
I tried to curl into a ball, and I put my hands over my head, but I couldn't really protect myself from three boys in boots.
One of them landed a blow between my legs that nearly knocked me out, and the others just kept kicking. As a matter-of-fact, the more I screamed at them, the worse they kicked me.
It wasn't long until I blacked out. I'm not used to much pain, and after about six good kicks I just passed out.
Apparently they kept at it for a while after I passed out, because I found bruises later that I couldn't remember. Bruises! My whole body was black and blue, one gigantic bruise.
They must have left me pretty quick, because when I came to, they'd gone. I'm surprised that they didn't steal my car. It was right there, with the keys in it. Ready to swipe. I guess maybe they were too scared.
Anyhow, luckily they'd left the car. I managed to drag myself over to the car and get inside. After about fifteen minutes, I was able to start it up, and by driving with my left foot, I made it to an all-night restaurant that I recognized, and then, finally, back home.
I didn't know what I was going to tell my husband. After all, I couldn't really tell him about how it happened. How could I explain parking in the dark part of the parking lot, or the fact that I was only wearing that nightie?
When I got home, he was asleep in front of the TV. I snuck into the bathroom and took a long bath, soaking all those bruises. Then I slipped on the flannel pajamas that I usually wear; none of my bruises showed at all.
When my husband finally woke and came back to bed. I was sound asleep. Ironically, that night he decided he wanted to make love.
It's funny, I'd gone to all that trouble to get those boys to rape me, and then I was too sore and tired to let my husband inside me for five minutes. I just turned away from him and pretended to be asleep.
My husband, of course, being the considerate guy that he is, just rolled over to his side of the bed and let me sleep.
All the next day I kept going over it in my mind. First I debated telling the police about it. Then, of course, I thought about the things I would have to tell them, and it was just too embarrassing.
There wasn't really much I could do, except take it. I couldn't explain to anyone about my fantasy, or how innocent I had been when I put on that nightie and parked in the darkness. Who would believe it?
So after I adjusted to the situation, it began to seem like a good thing. After all, the bruises would go away, and then pretty soon I'd have the memory.
After all, it isn't every woman my age who can excite a bunch of boys so much that they have to take her out and rape her. I must still be pretty, if I can do that.
And besides, it was just plain sexy. Every time I'd start remembering, I'd end up back in my bedroom, masturbating again. It was just like the fantasy, only better, because I knew that it had really happened. And not to some teen-aged girl. To me!
Again that night my husband wanted to make love, and again I turned over in my sleep. He is so patient, he just turned away again.
What's funny is, on that second night, I wasn't even too sore or too tired. I guess I was just testing him against my memory to see if he'd assert himself. Of course, he never did.
The next day, when I picked the kids up at school, I thought I saw one of the boys who raped me. Now I know this is ridiculous, but I felt really excited, and I couldn't wait to be alone so I could masturbate.
I don't know what it is about the rape, but the more I think of it, even the kicking part, the more exciting it becomes. Ever since then, I can't seem to think of anything else.
It's not that I really want it to happen again, I don't think. After all, this time I might not get off with just bruises. I've heard of women being killed playing that game.
It's just that it is such an exciting memory-especially the way the boys ordered me around and made me do anything they wanted, and called me all those dirty words. I feel terrible about it, but each time I think of it, I still end up masturbating.
I don't know how I'm going to adjust back to my old life. Maybe I'll just have to pretend that I'm back in that parking lot again when my husband taps me on the shoulder in the night. Maybe I'll spend the rest of my life masturbating with the memory. I don't know.
I do know that I've been tempted to forget something when I go to the store-the way I used to do-so that I'd have an excuse to run over there again at night.
And I do know that every time I see a man that looks vaguely like one of my four boys, I nearly melt.
I'm trying really hard to return to normal. I even sat down one day to watch a soap opera on TV. I had to force myself, but I sat through a half-hour. I thought maybe if I could get involved in somebody else's problems I could forget about my own.
The only problem is that every time I try to push it to the back of my mind, it keeps springing forward again. I just keep thinking of the darkness, and all those men wanting me....
For the American housewife, sexual fantasy and sexual reality can be two entirely different things. Because of the inherent bias of our society against women, they are exploited by factors present in the very fabric of our culture. Women have been denied education about the functioning of their own bodies through a process that began in the roots of male domination. Female orgasm has been denied existence as a necessary adjunct to good health and positive living; only in recent history do we find women concerned about their bodies or interested in establishing equal sexual rights with men. Abortion and birth control, two political movements recently supported by women's groups, are still tensely legislated by male politicians who respond to the natural male bias of the larger society.
Because of her position in American culture, the housewife of today still suffers from problems that have plagued women for years. These problems appear to be transmitted from one generation to the next through a system of sex education, if it could be called that, from mother to daughter. In reality, previous generations taught as much superstition and myth as they did scientific fact about sex. Consequently, women have always suffered from a lack of knowledge about one of their most basic bodily functions.
Our culture still views the female as a "weak" creature who needs protection. Women are supposed to be emotional and limited in taking independent action or thought. Karen Homey, in her book Feminine Psychology, was one of the first psychoanalysts to consider cultural factors in the role formation of women in our society. Since earlier work by Freud and others stressed women's basic inferior position because of the factor of penis envy, Homey showed that not only was there no proof for this theory but that Freud's original' statistics, if there ever were any, had been forever lost to future scrutiny and examination.
Homey further adds that this male slant in the theories of psychoanalysis forever works against the liberation of women. They plant belief in women, for instance, that the only socially acceptable role is the masochistic one, and that all women should strive to be able to measure up to the demands of the society. Additionally, as Homey points out:
The influence that these ideologies exert on women is materially strengthened by the fact that women presenting the specified traits are more frequently chosen by men. This implies that women's erotic possibilities depend on their conformity to the image of that which constitutes their "true nature." It therefore seems no exaggeration to say that in such social organizations, masochistic attitudes (or rather, milder expressions of masochism) are favored in women while they are discouraged in men. Qualities like emotional dependence on the other sex (clinging vine), absorption in "love," inhibition of expansive, autonomous development, etc., are regarded as quite desirable in women but are treated with opprobrium and ridicule when found in men.
These cultural factors exert a powerful influence on women. In our culture it is hard to see how any woman can escape becoming masochistic to some degree. Homey stresses that this can come about without any regard for anatomical-physiological characteristics of women-just living in the culture is enough to instill in women a sense of masochism.
Certain analysts, among them another woman by the name of Helene Deutsch, think that the reason the culture is so slanted is because of the weak nature of the female and not the other way around. Homey disagrees, stating that the anatomical-physiological factors which influence feminine masochism do not do so out of any inherent or reflexive masochistic nature.
That women are confused by the cultural definition of their role is a point beyond argument. Whether they follow the submissive societal imperative or not, they are bound to find themselves constantly aware of doubts as to which side of the "weakness" question they really stand on. Marriage and other male/female relationships are confused by cultural imperatives for female masochism. Of even more importance, women themselves suffer from a greater proportion of neurotic behavior because of the cultural determination of their sexual instincts. If they cannot duly follow the cultural mold, their husbands may not be able to tolerate their "demanding" attitudes or behavior. On the other hand, by too strictly adhering to cultural determinants of their masochistic role, women run the serious risk of neuroses or worse.
However, the basic problem is not one of liberation, or cultural awareness of sex role differentiation, or even of compatible and fulfilling sexual technique. All of these things are helpful, but, as Erich Fromm points out in his The Art of Loving, real love is not possible between two human beings until inhibitions of all kinds are put by the wayside.
The study of the most frequent sexual problems-frigidity in women, and the more or less severe forms of psychic impotence in men-shows that the cause does not lie in a lack of knowledge of the right technique, but in the inhibitions which make it impossible to love. Fear of or hatred for the other sex are at the bottom of those difficulties which prevent a person from giving himself completely, from acting spontaneously, from trusting the sexual partner in the immediacy and directness of physical closeness. If a sexually inhibited person can emerge from fear or hate, and hence become capable of loving, his or her sexual problems are solved. If not, no amount of knowledge about sexual techniques will help.
The process of becoming aware of personal inhibitions is a difficult one, especially for women. Women have to be constantly aware of the difference between their culturally defined role of the "weaker" of the sexes and their actual role in daily life, which may be quite the opposite of "weak." Fantasies can often provide the clues for such determinations, since fantasy often is a true mirror of internal reality. Rape fantasies indicate a masochistic striving, for instance, which would color a woman's relationship with men.
Rather than pursuing fantasies, it would be far better for the fantasies to be analyzed and their importance to individual behavior and attitudes realized. A marriage which is sexually unsatisfactory may be so because of the neurotic compulsions of the female member for masochistic behavior. These strivings will, if not immediately compensated for by analysis and understanding on the part of all involved, dominate the unconscious life of the woman in question until only masochism in its more physical forms will satisfy her sexual desires.
Sexual problems must always be understood in the light of cultural explanations, for much trouble and misunderstanding could be avoided if men and women were aware of the ways in which their culture shapes their sexual decisions and appetites. If problems develop, only an understanding of this kind will alleviate the root condition and allow both partners a chance to look at their own subconscious difficulties for what they really are.
CHAPTER FOUR A Time to Love
Since I was a girl the world's concept of time has become more and more hectic. People now seem to be rushing from where it's unpleasant to be to where it's boring to go. Everything in life now revolves on the smallest possible rather than the largest unit of time. Naturally, as with every social upheaval, there have been many casualties. I too was a casualty to time. Only through a strange twist of circumstances was I brought back to the real world.
Twenty years ago, time seemed infinite. I was young and attractive, and, like any girl, held the sure knowledge that life in all its roseate glory stretched on before me and would offer many years, days and hours of excitement and laughter.
I don't mean to suggest that I abused life as so many of my friends have. Some, of course, have violated the order of nature by equating fun with alcohol. Others thought love was the same as pure sex and still others, apparently more aware of time than I, determined to "live" every moment, with the result that they lost sleep, and eventually health, and finally the life which was so precious to them.
I think I began to live my mature years in an intelligent way, although perhaps I may have accepted responsibility a little earlier than I should. That cannot be changed, but I still don't think it was I who violated time. I know it was Alan who did that for me.
I was married very young by the standards of my day. Some people have, of course, assumed that it was a war marriage-that I, like so many young girl of the time, fell in love with a uniform and because of the disruption of the world and society leapt desperately into matrimony as a hoped for security against the death that seemed to threaten everyone on earth. That just wasn't true. I had known Alan most of my life. We had dated while I was in high school and he had asked me to the dance weekends when he went away to preparatory school. Fortunately, my parents were what many people call liberal and allowed me far more freedom than most people thought wise. But I knew they trusted me and never violated the faith they had in me.
When Alan went to college, I dated some other boys at home, but my thoughts were of Alan. It wasn't love then, I don't think, but the love grew by comparisons. The other boys seemed to be just that-immature and irresponsible. Alan was always the kind of man a young girl dreams of. He was handsome and tall. He had all the social graces but, more than that, he always showed a maturity well beyond his years.
If there was anything negative about his character, I did not see it then. What turned out to be detrimental was then a very positive trait. It involved time.
Alan never had enough time to do the things he really wanted to. The main issue was the war. He wanted to finish his college studies, take his commission and get into the combat before it was too late. It never seemed like it then, but, looking back, I remember he was constantly complaining about the clock moving too fast for him. Naturally, I couldn't see the real problem, because many people felt that way. It was a time of strong nationalistic feelings, and a multitude of evils could be excused under the heading of patriotism.
My feelings were, naturally enough, torn. Part of me wanted him to stay home and remain as far away from the war as possible, yet another part wanted to be proud of him. I didn't want to have my fiance appear a coward or a shirker.
As it turned out, what happened gave us both enough of the dream of time to satisfy false pride, ego, and even a little bit of patriotism as well. Alan did graduate after only three years and he did accept his commission into the Navy. He finally was shipped to New Bedford while I remained glued to my books trying to finish my own college education and constantly worrying that he would be sent out to those horrible islands where so many men were dying in the last bloody days of the war.
But still Alan was in a hurry for I don't know what. He became a casualty of the war not as a result of enemy shellfire but only because of his compulsive desire to be ahead of the clock. Because the accident was somewhat embarrassing, he never talked too much about it. All I ever found out was that he was on some sort of a routine assignment carrying a message and happened to slip going down a ship's ladder. He suffered a very painful, but not serious injury to the back which necessitated placing him in a cast for several months, and by the time he was walking and well again, the war, the glory, and the patriotism were all gone.
I realized how lucky I was and maybe because of the injury I was drawn even closer to him. Immediately after I graduated from college we began to plan the details of our marriage and, as two moderately mature, yet still very young people, we exchanged vows at a little country church in Scotch Plains, New Jersey.
Alan had no real plans for the future, but I trusted and relied upon him. He had saved a fair sum of money from his Naval pay so we were able to take a very nice honeymoon before renting a small apartment in New York and beginning to lay the groundwork for the future.
Alan was in a rush for everything, but I still didn't realize it. I might have been considered very mature and worldly by many of my girl friends, but I was still hopelessly naive. I knew nothing about love or the many little acts and gestures that went with it. Oh, I don't mean to imply that I was pure as the driven snow, but I had been raised with certain standards along with my parents' trust. I had maintained those standards and when Alan and I went on our honeymoon I was a bundle of conflicting emotions.
I was looking forward to the greatest experience of my life, but I was worried and insecure about my lack of knowledge while at the same time proud and happy that I was bringing to my husband the totality of my being. like so many girls before me, my first marital experience was something of a disillusion, but I did not dwell on the matter. There was so much more to think of that seemed far more important at the time.
The first thing, of course, was getting that place to live in New York. With men returning from all over the world to be reunited with their families and to build new families, housing had become a very frightening problem. There simply weren't enough places to live. Whether it was pure luck, a certain amount of manipulation, or merely Alan's almost compulsive desire to be first, I shall never know, but he did manage to get that place on Lexington Avenue and while he began to send his resumes out to potential employers, I began the work of creating at least the semblance of a home out of what had once been nothing more than a tenement house's third floor. It was large and well laid out, but the first job of cleaning was a task I shall never like to perform again. Then there was the painting and trying to furnish it on a budget which by that time had ceased to exist.
Alan was fighting terrible odds in trying to get started at a job. He had little more than his college degree and his interrupted service in the Navy to offer an employer, but to his credit, I must say that he was out every day pounding on doors, making appointments, and then in the evenings would sit on the floor of our empty apartment writing letters to anyone at all he thought might be able to help him.
Again, looking back I can see his terrible fight against the clock. Then I thought only that he wanted to make a living so that we could build a family. But it was more than that. Certainly he wanted a job and a good one in which he could grow. But part of the issue with him involved how fast he could get it and then how fast he could climb the latter of promotion to the top.
By the end of our days we were both exhausted-I with trying to make the apartment a home and he with his search for work. In those first few weeks of our marriage we would crawl into the sleeping bag that served for our bed and more often than not simply fall asleep. Then, I liked to curl in his arms to feel the warmth and security of his body close to mine, but I learned that he could sleep better if he rolled away from me. I felt some sense of rejection, I suppose, but I knew he loved me and I loved him so I refused to let it bother me. There were too many other things to do and one of them was that if he didn't find a position I would have to go out into the jungle of Manhattan and find a job for myself simply to tide us over until his luck changed.
He hated the idea of having me work and I must confess it was somewhat frightening to me as well. We had both come from what most people call "good" families where the mere thought of a woman working was considered somewhat shoddy. I don't mean that we all didn't chip in with our efforts for the Red Cross and the USO while the war had been a part of everyone's life, but that wasn't work for money.
I had gone to high school and then to a girls' college which had been more concerned with how to entertain dinner guests rather than how to look for a job. I knew nothing about typing or nursing or even selling perfume in a shop. I was completely unfit for the real world. I could only be a housewife.
Fortunately, Alan's compulsion with time saved me from working. He had been looking for work for almost a month and a half. The money he had saved was almost gone, and when he talked about it he gave himself one week and one more week only to get the position he wanted. I really think that establishment of a deadline inspired him, for I never had to go to work and I confess that even if I had to seek employment now, I might find a hard world facing me. I don't mean that I'm not a better, more fully rounded person than I was then, for I am. What I mean is that I still know nothing of typing or nursing or the many little skills that help women break through a tight job market
Alan managed to get a job and I was thrilled, although I knew he thought it was somehow beneath him. I must say, though, that he did live up to my dreams of his maturity. He never complained about being what he called the low man on the totem pole. Instead he would talk to me about what he referred to as a pecking order. "There is always a number one and a number two and so forth down the line," he would say to me. "But the order is never fixed. The low man can always climb and number one can always fall."
I don't know that much about Alan's career and I never really wanted to know, but I do know that he had talent and ability and that he began to climb almost immediately.
He succeeded in getting a very low-paying job with a moderately large advertising agency. Whether it had a title or not I do not know, but I do know it involved doing a little bit of everything around the offices. He would pick up and deliver from the printers, and was in a position to overhear initial conversations with clients. He would drive the clients from one place to another and generally perform the menial services of a boy Friday.
He threw himself into the job with more spirit than I think I have ever seen in my life. What he really wanted I shall never know, but whatever it was I knew he wanted it fast, perhaps faster than anyone else in the world.
This desire to be ahead-to be the first-extended not only to the job but to our own life. I remember him telling me that we had to do more with the apartment. He insisted that we get more furniture and even frightened me by going into debt so that the rooms could be furnished to entertain guests. I knew how to entertain, but I also thought I knew a little bit about budgeting the household money; still, when he was ready Alan took over completely. He went out that first time and spent the entire household budget for the week so that we could entertain a man who worked for the same company. I thought it was a delightful evening and I enjoyed meeting the man and his wife, although their name escapes me now. After all, it was almost twenty years ago.
I knew Alan was trying to get ahead and felt sure that man would be important to him. What I didn't know was just how. That evening, I remember Alan pouring the drinks and turning the conversation to nostalgic subjects. We all became very open about ourselves to the point where the man went so far as to mention that he had been able to avoid the draft Alan, as I recall, never mentioned his naval service.
What surprised me is that his reaction to his friend's avoidance of the draft seemed almost positive.
Then the following week, Alan came home on Friday with a smug, very proud expression on his face. He didn't say anything, but I knew he was happy about something and was going to surprise me with it. He had stopped at a delicatessen nearby and bought a bottle of gin which we couldn't afford, but he waved away my protests and made us each a very strong martini.
As he toasted me he introduced himself as the agency's newest copywriter.
I was delighted with his promotion and the additional money that came with it. What I didn't find out until some time later was that somehow Alan had managed to get the ear of the agency's head and had mentioned the fact that our dinner guest had avoided the draft. In those days after the war, the feelings about service to the country were still running high and even though the man had been with the firm for three or four years Alan was somehow able to convince the important man that dodging the draft might not be in the best interests of the company.
At first I thought he had been underhanded. Then I rationalized the situation. We lived in a hard world where success had to be bought and paid for in hard terms. If Alan hadn't acted as he had, perhaps he might never have been promoted. The fact was that he did get the promotion and then managed to advance higher and higher along what he always called the company's totem.
Young, idealistic, and now moving up life's ladder a lot faster than anyone we knew our own age, we began to think of a family. Donald, our son, was born less than a year after that first promotion. I'm sure he was conceived the same night Alan brought the gin home. I'm not bitter, but I still wish the conception of my first baby had involved more romance and less male greed, but you see, I didn't know then. My parents had talked to me about the birds and the bees, but how can a parent explain tenderness and patience and all the many little touches and gestures that a woman loves? How can a girl who has known only one man make any comparisons? Love is an emotion that lies deep in the soul of everyone. When a woman feels it she translates all her own feelings into the acts that express it.
If I became irritable, I blamed it on little annoyances around the apartment or on external things. I never once thought that I was a love-starved woman simply because my husband had to do everything in a lightning-like hurry.
Donald was born in December and all my bottled up emotions went out to the baby. I confess I spoiled him terribly and was very glad that his sister was born the following year so that I could be more mature about the children. I admit that before Elaine's birth I behaved more like a neurotic child playing with her new doll than a grown woman taking care of a real human baby. But Elaine made all the difference in the world.
With the two of them, our life changed radically. We became more careful in the attentions we showed one another. It was a time before the pill and because of all the complicated preparations we seemed always to have to make, our love lost what little flavor it had had.
Then, of course, there was the necessity of moving out of town. I hated leaving that apartment on Lexington Avenue, but I knew it had to be done. I had put my very heart into each stroke of a paintbrush, each stitch in the curtains. It had been my first home that was all mine and I loved it almost as one loves another human being. Still I could not escape the facts. Donald was beginning to walk, and both Alan and I knew that the city was no place to raise a child. We wanted trees and fields and a house of our own.
Alan wasn't so annoyed about leaving the apartment as about facing the problems of commuting to and from Manhattan. He suggested several times that he could not afford to lose more than an hour out of his day. For three months we bundled the children up and scouted the suburbs and outlying areas looking for the right location and the perfect house. We were still full of romantic Stardust, I suppose, but Alan was superbly confident that we could meet any payments and buy whatever house we really liked.
I was frightened. I guess any young woman would be-but I was also elated when we found the old farmhouse in Westfield. It was run-down and needed far more work than the apartment had, but it was perfect for us. It may sound trite, but it really was love at first sight. The rooms were big and airy, there were enough of them for the children to have separate rooms and also for Alan to have a study of his own and for me to have a workroom. Also there was a barn that we could use as a tool shed and a garage as well as a guesthouse if anyone visited us.
It was ideal, but I was literally terrified at what the cost must be. Alan never let me know. He handled the whole thing and again the rush began. Our savings were completely destroyed, but we moved somehow and it all had to be done in two weeks. How I ever managed, I shall never know, but I took care of the two children, packed everything we owned, and somehow handled the trip and the movers on schedule.
It took two weeks, but it seemed more like two days. One day we were in the city on Lexington Avenue; and then, like snapping fingers, we were surrounded by a mountain of boxes and crates in the various rooms of the big old house in New Jersey.
It will never be completely finished the way I have dreamt, but over the years, we have done wonders for that old house. The children grew up there and the ancient timbers hold many fond and pleasant memories. But it also sapped years from us both. That has been our only real house and all my life was bound up in it until just a year ago when purely by accident I found out that one doesn't have to rush and dash and gallop through everything, destroying the very essence of life by gobbling at it like a hungry dog.
The human being can, I suppose, adjust to everything, if it has to, and I adjusted. It was hard at first, but like any change one gets used to it after a little while. The main problems at first involved doing everything at once in an unorganized house on a schedule that because of its very newness became somewhat hideous.
The first problem, of course, was that Alan had to get up an hour and a half earlier than he had in the city. In our search for the right place to live we had at first thought of the maximum ease of commuting, but everyone was doing the same thing. We simply could not have afforded a place closer in, so the price we had to pay was an exact hour of commuting time going into the city in the morning and coming home at night. Coupled with this was Alan's desire always to be the first to arrive at the office. By then he had received two more promotions with the agency and was an account executive. Actually the title was a little bigger than the job and the salary, but he did have two accounts of his own and was also functioning as a copywriter for the firm as a whole. His reputation, from what I gathered in overhearing conversations at little parties we went to or had at the big house, was of a hardworking young man who never gave up. He was the first to arrive in the morning and often the last to leave at night.
There were many times that he even called me from the city to tell me that he would either be extremely late or that he might even stay over in a hotel. I trusted him absolutely, so that the thought of another woman did not nag at me. I won't say that it didn't pop into mind, but I mean also that it popped out as fast as it came in. Despite his rushing and compulsive desire to climb his totem pole, Alan did show his love for me and the children in many ways. Nothing was ever good enough for us. When Christmas time came along, Santa Claus was not only generous but so elaborate that the entire main room of the house was actually covered in gifts. The children went to private schools, and my jewelry box was full of many expensive pieces that he had had specially designed just for me.
Still as always there was a great emptiness in my life which I refused to face. The love inside me that I seemed never able to express was poured out to the children, and then, as they began to grow up and to go their own ways, to the dogs and cats we had. Growing up may be a gradual process, but a parent never seems to see it as that. One day it seems you are in a hospital bed looking for the first time at a round red face, knowing it is your baby and you have gone through the greatest experience a woman can ever have; the next day, it seems, you are sitting in a huge auditorium watching that same infant receive a diploma from preparatory school.
Your figure is not so slender as it once was, and little lines of gray are lacing your hair. You are suddenly old and life is gone. First it was Donald, and then Elaine, and then I faced that final summer when for the last time they were both at home before going to separate colleges. It suddenly hit me that in the fall they would both be gone forever. I wasn't depressed, but still the realization that neither one of them really needed me anymore was heavy in my heart. My two babies were grown and even though I knew we would always be good and close friends, I still realized then that the relationship had changed and would never again be what it once had been.
Alan was spending even more time at work. When Donald was seven, Alan had made his decision to leave the agency he had been with for almost nine years and form his own business. The initial problems must have been terrible, for he took many of his old clients with him and his former employers made the first years of his new effort an agony of lawsuits and legal harassments. Finally, however, he did succeed in getting the new firm off the ground and then seemed absolutely consumed with the idea of building it into the biggest and best agency in Manhattan.
Fortunately he was concerned with his health and exercised every day. We always took our month-long vacation in both summer and winter. Two weeks to the north for skiing at what we called our honeymoon lodge which we rented every year in New Hampshire and then another two weeks in the summer either to Florida or California. I remember one year I suggested reversing it as so many other people did. I wanted to go to New Hampshire to get away from the heat and humidity of New Jersey and to Florida to escape the bitter cold of winter, but Alan was adamant and the pattern remained fixed.
With our love, however, the pattern became less and less regular and by the time I turned forty I knew there was something terribly, terribly wrong with me. That is when I first became consumed with time, as Alan had been consumed with it through all the years of our marriage. Life had simply passed me by. I knew I had a beautiful home and two wonderful children. I was married to a man who was successful by any standards and we had all the material things an opulent society could offer. Yet there was a terrible, terrible hole in the very fabric of my soul, one that it seemed absolutely impossible to mend.
I was a woman without love, a horrible empty creature who knew her youth was gone and that romance would never be part of her very establishmental marriage. By that time Alan and I had separate beds and I had given up even the faintest dream of sleeping in his arms again. When he did come to me, he was casual but demanding. He seemed unconcerned with my feelings, my dreams. He wanted only to satisfy himself and then would kiss me and return to his own bed.
There was no use in trying to discuss the situation with him. He was a successful man in the business world, and would never bring himself to believe that he wasn't successful in every aspect of life.
What would have happened to me if I hadn't met George I shall never know. I think my heart, like my hair, would have become more and more gray until all the meaning of life was gone and I would simply have wanted to die. Thank God it didn't work out that way. Thank God George came into our life and the color has returned to my cheeks and to everything I behold.
George was a writer who purchased one of the houses next door a year and a half ago. Since the time Alan and I had had the big house, the man who originally sold it to us began to divide the rest of the acreage around it. Gradually his farm became a tract and, although we still had the area immediately around the big house and the barn, we were surrounded by more modern and smaller dwellings.
It seemed a bit strange that a bachelor would buy a house designed for a family of four, but apparently George had his reasons. He liked New Jersey because he had been raised there and although he had to spend at least two months out of the year in Los Angeles, he insisted that he could not tolerate the West Coast any longer than absolutely necessary to make a living there. That living involved writing one moving picture a year and spending the rest of his time next door to us working on novels.
He was neither a recluse nor a very gregarious man. He apparently liked his privacy, but also enjoyed being with people as often as he could without pushing his sociability. Alan met him before I did. They were both outside one weekend doing something very suburban in their separate yards and the next thing I knew Alan had invited him in for a cup of coffee and some cookies.
Call it chemistry or charisma or whatever you like, but something happened when George first looked me in the eyes. It hit my very being. I thought Alan would notice my trembling hands and believed that I was blushing like a schoolgirl. I don't think I have ever been so embarrassed in my life. Certainly I had no idea that George felt the same way or that he could find a forty-plus woman attractive. But apparently he did and has made me the happiest, most grateful woman in the world.
That night Alan told me a shocking thing about George which shattered what was only a half-formed dream. George had apparently been a Marine officer during the Korean War and in one engagement had been wounded very badly. From what Alan told me, the poor man's genitals had been completely shot away, leaving him horribly maimed both physically and mentally for the rest of his life.
One can imagine the change in my attitude toward George when the following afternoon, while Alan was in Manhattan, he came over to the kitchen door and simply told me he had enjoyed the coffee the day before and would like some more to go with the cake he had brought me. Because of what Alan had told me, I was no longer trembling and girlish. I invited him in. He had become at least for a moment a man who was not a man-a charming person who could be a good friend as well as a next-door neighbor.
How it happened I shall never really know. We were sitting at the kitchen table talking, enjoying each other, smiling and laughing as I hadn't laughed in years, when suddenly he leaned toward me, placed one hand on my thigh and kissed me gently on the lips.
I forgot about what Alan had told me. I forgot everything except the electric spark that shot through me. I was literally starved for love and my reputation, my marriage, my very life were as nothing to me.
I responded willingly, passionately to his at first tender and then more violent caresses. Then we rose and pressed our bodies close to each other, we walked from the kitchen to the huge living room and flung ourselves down on the couch. His hands, gentle as soft down and yet demanding as fire, were all over my body finding nerves I had never known I possessed. My ears, my neck, my breasts willingly responded to his passionate tenderness and I could feel myself being terribly, frighteningly aroused by him.
As he became more demanding, slipping his hand under the hem of my housedress and up to my thighs and then to the very seat of my desire, I became a helpless bit of protoplasm whose very soul was crying out for the total and complete satisfaction which I had never known. Yet I remembered the horror of his deformity that Alan had mentioned to me.
Summoning the scant willpower still at my feeble command, I managed to wrench myself away from him and sit upright on the couch. "We can't," I remember hearing myself say. "We can't do this!"
"Your husband?" he asked me quietly.
"Oh my God," I began to sob, "oh my God, my God."
He put his arm around me and tenderly placed his lips against my ear. Again the electrified particles of total consuming desire shot through me, but again I was able to tear myself away. Anger and frustration raged through me. Why would a man be so cruel to a woman? I wondered. Here he had walked into my life unannounced, filled me with passion for him and yet sat there completely unable to do anything about quenching the flames he had kindled.
"Why?" I asked him. "Why me? Why have you done this?"
And then I told him the story Alan had related to me.
He leaned back on the couch and looked very seriously at me for some moments before his sensual lips curled into a smile. Before he spoke, he reached into his shirt pocket for a packet of cigarettes, offered me one and then lit his own.
"It's true," he finally confessed, "but nothing has really changed."
And then he went on to explain what had happened to him. He had been badly wounded and his testicles and penis were both taken away along with a large bit of his right leg. But, he went on, he could still function like a normal man because of plastic surgery. The doctors at the Veterans' Hospital in Los Angeles had done wonders, he said. As a result he could maintain his own virility by regular hormone shots and he could also function with a woman with a surgically created member that was truly amazing.
Again we were in each other's arms, and I lost all sense of responsibility. I was not even at first curious about what the doctors had done to him. I only knew that he caressed me and kissed me as I had never in my life been kissed and caressed, and then his demand became more direct. I was with him on the couch. Our clothing was somehow gone and his lips touched mine; he gently knelt between my eager thighs.
What I felt then was the greatest, most thrilling physical sensation of my entire life. He was hot and hard as he entered me, like the brand of an iron that will never burn out. There was nothing artificial about him, and I knew that he could feel me around him.
God how we thrashed together! But gently, savoring each prolonged and delicate instant. I let him rouse me and then I would control my passion, knowing that he could not spend himself before I. He was a superlover, a magnificent human machine who could carry me to the universe of pleasure I had never visited as many times as I wished to soar there.
I was afraid, too. I had never experienced total pleasure. I did not want to release my being entirely to him. I was torn between desire and guilt-trying desperately to think, to be logical and right. I knew I could never pull myself back. He began to send great surges of pleasure that could not be denied through my entire body and I knew the floodgates were going to burst wide and pour forth all the love that had been stored within me for over twenty years. When it happened I felt that it would never stop. Wave after wave of ecstasy so totally exquisite I honestly believed I would die rolled through me. With each one I clung to George, pulling his warm flesh tight to my naked body, crying out that I needed him, that I loved him and yet that he was killing me.
How sanity returned I still do not know, but I awoke to the pressure of his body on mine and the hard pleasure of his member still within me, moving back and forth again, arousing me by soft and sensuous internal caresses.
Three more times that afternoon he brought me to the heights of glory. Each one seemed more exquisite than the last. Time was forgotten. No matter how long it took to arouse me, he would always be there and could never fail me.
Finally it was over and we lay naked in each other's arms. In the soft, roseate afterglow of perfect satisfaction, I became curious about his own desire and what the doctors had done that had been able to thrill me so. He let me touch him and examine him, explaining that his hormone shots maintained his own sexual desire and that the nerves of his artificial member could feel almost as much as the one he had lost. The member was really a silicone tube in a perpetual state of erection. Normally it hung straight down his leg, but because of something like a hinge it could effect a real erection.
He did say that part of his excitation had to be effected in somewhat more erotic ways than with other men, and this, as we lay there caressing each other, made me want to please him in any way I could. God, on that first wonderful day I learned more of love and how to express it sexually than I had learned in all the past twenty years of my marriage. Gently, slowly, George rolled me from the couch so that I knelt over it, my knees on the soft rug and my elbows on the cushions of the sofa. As he caressed my breasts with his hands and the back of my neck with his lips, he pressed his wonderful member against my anus and slowly, gently thrust himself into me until I thought my very soul would split apart. I had never thought pleasure and sensation could be so absolutely exquisite. When he moved one hand under me along my stomach and down to my Venus mound to find the center of my heart, my nervous system, my desire, I again knew that, although spent and exhausted, I would soar again to the very apex of passion and there explode into rolling Shockwaves of total and complete release.
I think I screamed or cried out, but I didn't care. Nothing was more important or had ever been more important than the thrills he was sending through me. When that final total eruption of the day came to me I spasmed violently and think I even fell unconscious over the couch for a few seconds.
I knew when I came to my senses again that I had fallen into a situation with which I could never hope to cope. I confessed to George the horror we faced. I was a married woman, I had the responsibilities of a home and a husband, and yet in a matter of minutes time had been shattered. Alan had always wanted to change days into seconds. Now George had shown me the reality of time. He had stretched seconds into days. He had touched me and caressed me, he had savored my flesh and made it tingle in a passion so exquisite that, like a dope addict, I knew I could never do without him.
He assured me that his own feelings were not temporary. That when he had first seen me the day before he had known that we were meant for each other. He could not, of course, experience a normal man's total ultimate pleasure, but the joy of thrilling me and seeing my total release gave him almost as great a thrill. There was no frustration in him, he assured me, because there was no building of sperm crying for release. All he wanted to do was be with me and express his feelings for me in any way he could.
That day the whole of time shattered and collapsed. I began to care about time as I never had before, but in a way totally different from the way Alan had taught me to care. Instead of rushing through every menial and worldly act so that a hundred things could be accomplished in a day, I began to savor each little second of life's pleasure trying to stretch it out to its elastic maximum.
Alan has never found out about George and me. I don't know what will happen if and when he does, but I do know that I do not fear exposure. Each time George and I meet, I live an eternity. He has shown me more of life than I have ever known and continues with each meeting to show me newness and pleasure.
The following afternoon he came over and suggested that we go to bed instead of lying on the couch. Upstairs we took a shower together and soaped each other's bodies and then it seemed for hours he caressed me, fondling each delicate part, driving me to the sweet agony of terrible desire.
That day he used only his lips, kissing every part of my body, showing me sensations I could never have imagined. His lips touched my ears, my neck, my own lips. They hovered over my breasts and found the nerve endings that seemed to tie my nipples directly to my groin. His slowness was an impossible dream come true as his mouth slid over my stomach, played delicately with my navel and then brushed lower and lower. I drowned in a sea of conflicting emotions as his mouth brushed lightly over my pubic hair, then darted to the inside of my right thigh. Lips brushed flesh and inched higher, then brushed my left thigh. Back and forth his kisses hit me, like the sweet darts of Cupid's arrows, and each time he was nearer to my center of passion yet always away from it-teasing me, building within me a yearning that brought with it terror as well as complete and utter helplessness.
With a delicate yet insistent demand, his fingers spread me wide and his lips, his tongue, and his being shot into me and hit the very center of my heart with a sensation so perfect, so unlike anything I had felt before, that I crumbled under the sweeping ecstasy which was mine. I lay back and closed my eyes, allowing myself nothing but the complete and total thrill of feeling his tongue play symphonies of sweet passion on my clitoris. This, I knew, I could savor for an eternity and George made that knowledge come true. He seemed to know my very soul. He would rouse me almost to the end of my rope of passion and then change his movements and caresses so that I could descend and then be lifted again until I could no longer control myself. I didn't care then as he pulled my clitoris into his mouth and, sucking gently on it, seemed to pull from me the last ounce of my ability to respond. "Oh God!" I cried out. "Oh God, George."
I never wanted to leave him-never could-stand being away from him. He has stretched the time spent with him into an eternity of pleasure, the hours away from him were an eternity of agony and throbbing despair.
I have become a completely carnal woman after so many years of near-virginity with a husband who knew only one position for lovemaking and absolutely nothing about a normal woman's capability to desire fulfillment. All was erased by one passionate embrace on a couch and everything else that has happened in the year since then. I cannot destroy my marriage for the practical aspects-the house, the security, the social position-but I cannot live without George.
He comes to me almost every day, and each day when I look at him I desire him. He has taught me everything and keeps teaching me more. I was even surprised when he told me I would have pleasure by taking his member in my mouth. Again we were in the bedroom, he propped up so that his back was against my headboard and his legs extended. Smiling kindly at me he placed his hand gently behind my head and pushed it slowly to his groin. Although I had never done anything like that before, I of course knew about it. I thought at first he would not receive a great deal of pleasure from my act. I had no idea the thrill that I would feel when I took the shaft of his more real than real organ into my mouth and sucked on it.
His member seemed a security blanket for me. I laid my head on his thigh and looked up to him as I sucked contentedly on him like a baby pulling life's nourishment from its mother's breast. And again time became infinite. I didn't want to stop and I didn't. I sucked on him like that all afternoon as he gently stroked my hair and ears and fondled my breasts. Then I realized the thrill which would be mine, for slowly and gradually I felt the excitation welling up within me until the sweet gentle explosion ripped through me, surging me both high and low, washing me on a somewhere shore in a soft velvet cloud of perfection.
It is always that way now. We can never be apart. He times his trips to California so that at least we can have two weeks together in the summer and when we are apart I live in agony. Alan and I have not changed our pattern. He still rushes madly through every little act, even when he comes to my bed the once or twice a month which is his wont.
Perhaps I am a whore dealing with a husband for the material things of life and the security they bring. But I have given twenty years of my life to that husband. I have borne our children and made our home and offered everything a woman can. I offered my love that first night on our honeymoon and he took me as a dog gobbles a scrap dropped from the table. No, I do not feel like a whore. I feel like a woman fulfilled, for I have been given the most precious thing any human being can have. I have been given a whole new pattern of time, wherein I know a moment with George is all the heaven I can hope for and also that the fleetest second spent in his arms brings with it an eternity of joy and erases twenty years of a dry, passionless marriage.
I no longer feel old and lived out, but I do know that I have lived over half my life and that the moments now must be the most important aspects of my existence. Time has passed. The children are grown, and an empty but hectic life loomed, horrid and spectral, before me until I met George. Now, George has given me all the time anyone could ask for.
Were I to die this very moment, I could pass on happy in the knowledge that in but a year George had let me live a hundred lives. But if I don't, if I live on as I expect to, I also know that he will let me live a hundred more. Each meeting is a rebirth of an impossible passion, each spasming climax in his arms a little death and each departure a heartbreak, but I will go on this way because he has given me the most precious thing in the world-time.
Alan's wife describes her marriage as empty and boring. Sexual contacts with her husband leave her feeling unfulfilled and disturbed. His preoccupation with his career eclipses his concern about his wife's desires and feelings, and yet she finds it hard to condemn him, consoling herself instead with other sources of affection and attachment.
Their relationship, according to Cuber and Harroff, authors of the study of sexual behavior among the affluent called Sex and the Significant Americana, is "devitalized":
The key to the devitalized mode is the clear discrepancy between middle-aged reality and the earlier years. These people usually characterized themselves as having been "deeply in love" during the early years ... having had a close identification with one another. The present picture, with some variation, is in clear contrast-little time is spent together, sexual relationships are far less satisfying qualitatively or quantitatively, and interests and activities are not shared, at least not in the deeper and more meaningful way they once were.
The devitalized marriage is not subject to serious threat, and there is typically no overt tension or conflict, but the communication between both partners has become apathetic and lifeless. The marriage will continue indefinitely, despite its numbness, simply because both partners are too accustomed to the habitual presence of the other. Even though, as in the case of Alan and his wife, sexual difficulties could be easily resolved by an increase in effective communication and response, this added extension of psychological resources will be beyond the capabilities of the emotionally exhausted, devitalized couple.
Instead, the partners in a devitalized marriage will turn their attentions to some phase of their lives other than sex. Alan's aggressive business tendencies are well portrayed by his wife, who understands all too well why he is so satisfied with his work, and she herself admits that the presence of her two children saved her from a totally meaningless life. When they move to their new house in the country, both husband and wife are far more involved in fixing up the house than in fixing up their relationship, even though the move to thecountry has given them both far more intimacy than they could enjoy in an apartment.
The nature of their sex problem is simple. Alan is fully potent and capable and his wife gives no indication that she suffers from frigidity, but each sex act brings her less and less satisfaction. She speaks of his "hurriedness," of how little time he spends on fore-play, and of how he always has sexual intercourse with her in the same man-on-top position. Even though he is obviously, to the outside observer, inexpert at the technical side of sex, she makes no effort to correct the situation on her own. This, according to Maxine Davis, author of The Sexual Responsibility of Woman, is a woman's major mistake on the road to compatibility with her husband:
A husband's inexpertness is unquestionably the cause of many domestic disasters, but sex is no longer the closed book it used to be for women. It is unfair for the wife to expect her husband to bear the full burden. She is the first to realize that their union brings her no pleasure. She ought to let him know what she-likes or dislikes and also proceed herself on the basis of her own sensations and needs.
While she doesn't admit it, Alan's wife will not bring criticism directly to bear on her husband's sexual ego because she is not completely aware of the woman's role in marriage. Even though she doesn't labor under Victorian standards of morality, she still accepts Victorian standards of female behavior. According to the Victorian principles of the "double standard" as it applies to the sexes, women have certain duties and responsibilities to their husbands which cannot be neglected without suffering moral condemnation from society. The wife must, in all ways, be subservient and helpful to the husband.
Many women cannot fully understand the relationship between their understanding of woman's role in society and their own sexual happiness and compatibility. If they still adhere to the Victorian tenets of service above all else, as does Alan's wife, they tend to accept their husbands' sexual advances without regard to their own response. On the other hand, women who regard themselves as equal to men on a physical and mental level, if not political and social, strive to make their sexual experiences with their husbands as beneficial and rewarding to themselves as to their mates.
Alan's wife could be suffering from the Victorian hang-up which declared all sexually responsive women to be immoral. Even though she doesn't admit it, unconscious influences left over from her parental situation may still be exerting their power over her sexual awarenesses and potentials. This kind of explanation for her behavior becomes all the more relevant when we examine the solution she arrived at for her unsatisfactory married sex life. By choosing the extramarital affair, Alan's wife may unconsciously be reacting to the Victorian preachment that only sin is fun.
Of course, infidelity in itself is no proof of sexual neuroses, but certain circumstances surrounding the experience may indicate a neurotic compulsion. Certainly an affair with a prosthetically endowed neighbor gives rise to thoughts of neurotic determinants. In addition, Alan's wife gives further indications of pathological involvement by the overwhelming nature of her physical surrender and orgasm, an act which, by her own admission, had never happened to her before.
Whatever the neurotic compunctions of her behavior, Alan's wife sought an extramarital affair for the basic reason of sexual appreciation and fulfillment. She tells us, in one poignant moment of her narrative, that she knows very little about sex because she has only had one man in her life and therefore there was never anything else for her to compare with. Such a bleak sexual career has been shared by many other women with problems similar to those of Alan's wife. According to Alfred Kinsey and his associates, in their statistical survey of sex habits Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, 10% of the married women who responded to Kinsey's canvassers reported that they had not experienced an orgasm even after twenty years of marriage.
As Norman Sheresky and Marya Mannes, authors of the book Uncoupling, point out about the extramarital affair:
The overriding reason for starting an affair in the first place is the same for men and women-the need for self-assurance as a desired and desiring human being. Good marriages supply this, in countless ways small and large. But when a husband and wife, through insensitivity or neglect, fail to give each other this assurance, they either resign themselves to frustration or tedium, or seek it elsewhere.
CHAPTER FIVE Dream City
like a steadily shifting: pattern of clouds oiling over a blue sky, an entire lifetime can slip away without leaving so much as a scar. I watched my mother die, and the desperation and sadness I felt was as much for myself as for her. She had lived almost seventy years, yet she'd never lived at all, and I, at thirty-three, gave too much evidence of following closely in her drab footsteps.
Later, after the funeral and when things were more or less normal again, I found myself thinking those thoughts once again. My mother had had a perfectly fine life, a normal life. She had been a wife and mother, and I was a wife and mother. Nothing wrong with that. There were satisfactions, and ups and downs, as in any life. If life hadn't panned out to grant those special dreams of childhood, and if every day closely resembled the one before, well, that was just reality, wasn't it? Life wasn't the exotic carnival I thought it would be, but that didn't matter, did it?
That's how it all started. No, let me be as completely honest as I can.
It really started when I was a little girl. I was one of four children, two boys and two girls. My parents were good, hardworking types, with a very basic approach to life and child-rearing. I don't remember anything weird about the way they raised us. I'm sure they loved us in a down-to-earth way, but they didn't worry about us having to be reassured about it all the time, either. We just all did what was expected of us, and I challenge you to find a more normal set of children. On the outside, anyway.
I am next to the youngest, with Karen just a year older. Bob had two years on Karen, and Kenny is nearly two behind me. I'd like to say that the fantasies started after the time I saw Karen and Bob together, but that would be bending the truth to look as if I'd been directed to some early sensuality.
I was no older than nine when I began daydreaming before falling asleep every night. Oh, I'd always been off in my own world, but for no reason I could figure out my daydreams began to change at that time. My skinny, shapeless body felt uncomfortably warm in my flannel pajamas, and running a hand over my flesh was deliriously nice. I can't recall the exact pattern of my fantasies, their progression, or the impetus, if any, for them. The earliest I remember is of floating in a very warm ocean. Only I didn't have my bathing suit on in my daydream. It was nice. The sun was hot, the water was the temperature of blood, and my body was feather-light. Then, at some point, I imagined opening my legs and feeling the water trickle between them, kissing my smooth young sex, lapping at it like a sopping puppy tongue. The imagined sensation was nice and on my own bed I widened my thighs, thinking about it. I fell asleep that way, with a comfortable heat spreading throughout my being.
After that I tried often to recall that exact dream, but it never stayed the same. The next time I was on the sand, and the waves were tickling me as the tide changed. In the beginning there was little obviously or overtly sexual from a child's point of view, but it took me almost no time at all to see that the good feeling came from the imagined manipulation of my body itself. I cut out the middleman of the sea after that, and really got down to business.
I was like a little fire out of control after that. I started out-with the creatures nearest and dearest to me-my kitten Fluffy, at first. I imagined her rough tongue all over my body, night after night. Then I thought of Barry, the good-looking coach who headed Bob's ball club. That was fine. I'd dream that he touched me accidentally, never realizing what he was doing. He'd put a hand on my leg and then I'd move, so that it cupped my crotch, and whenever one of us would move, he'd rub me. Only he knew nothing of what was really going on, right? I was so innocent. I began to fantasize seeing and touching his body. I knew he had to be much bigger down there than my brothers, whom I'd seen, but in my imagination he was a god of fertility, grossly distorted. Sometimes I'd pretend Barry's wife Sherri was with me instead. She was my teacher and I had a crush on her. She had long golden hair and a bunch of curves where I was sure I'd have straight lines all my life. I'd touch her hair in my thoughts, and sometimes it would fall all over my little body. One night, after a difficult day in school, I found myself immersed in a dream that was extremely strange. It was a little play, going on in my mind and body, and I was a captive audience of one. At that time I was particularly free to daydream at night, alone in bed, because my sister, who usually shared the room, had been ill and was sleeping on a cot in my parents' room so that I wouldn't be disturbed during the night.
The day had been difficult mainly because I'd forgotten to do my assignment the night before and so had to cheat for the first time in my life, or flunk, also for the first time. Cheating seemed a better idea. No one would know, provided I didn't get caught, whereas everyone would know if I got an F. It was so easy, because the girl in front of me was. a brain and she sat so that usually I had to turn away to avoid looking at her papers. Sherri would never suspect I'd do such a thing, so I had no problems at all. Only afterward I'd felt like a thief, and couldn't quite meet those trusting eyes. I loved Sherri anyway, and to betray her and get away with it was too much to bear.
That night I thought of touching Sherri, but she wouldn't allow me to get near her. She was furious because of what I had done, and when she wouldn't accept my desperate and sincere apology, I allowed myself to get really upset. All the time I experienced a warm and urgent sensation in my body, and I kept my eyes tightly shut to increase my concentration.
I was acutely anxious to have her punish me at the start of that dream. I hated getting away with it in life, and having her turn from me in dreams. I wanted her to be mean to me, to make up for what I'd done to her. Finally I fantasized her slapping me, hard. The feeling I got off that was singularly exciting. Something clicked in my head. My body buzzed with excitement. I wanted more. I shifted the dream to a dark room somewhere. I was naked, but she was fully dressed. I was the one being punished, and I was being shamed by my nakedness. She began to spank my bare butt. I slithered over the sheets in a haze of hot happiness. Joy. It was wonderful. I kept the spanking going until I finally fell asleep.
Even though I felt weird about the dream afterward, I found myself going back to it night after night. Then I'd imagine her taking a hairbrush to my bottom. One night, in my thoughts, Sherri took the hairbrush handle and stuck it up inside my little slit. That got me so excited I nearly fell off the bed.
It was another couple of years before I got around to playing with myself while I had the fantasies. Oh, not that I had them night after night for years. Sometimes whole months would go by and I wouldn't think about it at all. Then I'd be restless some night and the dreams would come back for a few minutes before sleep. I thought about many plots for them, but the Sherri one was the best of all.
Then, when I was about eleven, I came home from school early one day and got the shock of my life. My mother was helping down at our store, and Bob was home recovering from some phony sore throat that got him out of some class he wanted to cut. I don't know still why or how Karen got to be home, but there they were.
They must have felt pretty safe. No one should have been home for at least another hour. But this big rotten chick at school had promised to beat me up, so I told the sewing teacher a story and slipped out of school early, knowing no one would catch on and I'd be home long before that girl would get out of her class.
It wasn't the first time for them, even I could see that. They were on the couch in the living room, probably because they figured that way they could see and hear whoever came before they could be seen. But I'd slipped into the kitchen by the open window, just for the fun of it, and my sneakers made no noise as I started into the living room. The sounds they were making stopped me in my tracks.
It was a few minutes before I could make out what it was they were up to. Even the dull fact that, for all it mattered, they were virtually naked on the couch, escaped my immediate attention. It looked as if they were fighting. Then I really saw what was going on.
They were side by side, and Bob had one hand over Karen's naked little titties. His other hand was buried up her short skirt, and her panties were dangling off of one skinny ankle. Her sweater was up around her neck, and she was breathing hard. At the same time Karen was playing with Bob's dick. It was pretty hard, too, and bigger than I'd remembered by far, and now it had dark hair curling around the base of it, and the fat stick of his young manhood was so red it looked angry as Karen's hand pumped on it.
I acted instinctively, ducking down out of sight and keeping quiet. I was fascinated. like I said, at first I thought they were fighting. There was so much excitement in the air I thought it was anger at first glance. A flash that Bob had Karen down and was doing things to her left me weak in the belly, and my excitement joined theirs from across the room. I watched unblinkingly, taking care to miss nothing.
Karen had her eyes closed and I could tell from the way his arm was bobbing that my brother was shoving his finger in and out of her cunt. His other hand was feeling her little tits so hard I thought he'd leave marks, but she sure seemed to like it. Her hand moved very fast then on his dick, and just before he doubled over and squirted in her hand, she began to whimper, as if he was hurting her good. Only she was really liking it. I had no idea I knew so much about sex until that afternoon. Because I more or less understood everything that went on. I knew what that white stuff shooting out of Bob was, and I kind of knew what Karen was moaning about.
He pushed on her head. "Go on," he urged.
She shook her head. Her long dark curls dangled and caught the light from the curtained window. "Not unless you do it to me, first."
"Aw, you know I don't like doing it," he protested, but he didn't really sound all that opposed to whatever it was she wanted.
"Bullshit, Bob. You know you like it. Besides, what makes you think I want to do it to you? If you want me to, you have to do it to me, first."
He looked uncertain. "We don't have much time. Tracy'll be home pretty soon."
I nearly giggled, but I held it in. Boy, oh, boy, was old Tracy home!
Karen nodded. "So make up your mind."
"Okay," he agreed right away. "I'll do it for a little while."
She stretched out on the hard couch, and Bob got on his knees at the end of it. Then my sister spread her legs and inched down until her naked pussy was only a few inches from his mouth! She was getting hairy down there, as I could easily see since she had her skirt pushed up to her waist and she didn't have any pants on.
Bob pressed his mouth to her pussy and began to lick it with his hot wet tongue. I could hardly believe it. He just took his tongue and ran it up and down her pussy, and she went wild! She carried on so much I could almost feel it myself. He licked her like a cat going after a bowl of heavy cream, and he didn't even seem to mind when she tightened her legs around his neck to drag him closer to her. I didn't know how he could breathe down there, but his dick just swelled like a cigar while he licked her. It got big all over again, and angry looking once more, and I knew that Karen had been right-he really had wanted to do it all the time.
It fascinated me like crazy, what he was doing to her. It was such a ... well, a nasty thing, in a way. I'd always thought of that part of my body as kind of dirty or evil or something, though I don't remember anyone telling me it was exactly. But to kiss it, to lick it. ... Wow!
If you were going to really punish someone, make them lower themselves before you, then that seemed like an act you might have them do to you. I had no idea of the psychology of humiliation at a sexual level, or masochism, but the fibers of my bones understood it only too well. I found myself watching and thinking of Sherri, and that awful day when I'd cheated, and knew I'd have had her make me do this to her, if I'd only known about it. Not that I'd ever, ever, not in a million years, ever be able to do anything like that to anyone in real life. Not even Sherri. But I already understood that a dream life was a wonderful thing. It asked nothing of you in the real world, and demanded no big change on your part. I could do whatever I wanted in my thoughts, and no one would be the wiser. I got even hotter than I already was as I imagined Sherri forcing me to lick her to prove I was truly sorry for what I'd done....
Karen was squirming and carrying on something awful. She was loving it. It would have awakened a dead man, the way she moaned and groaned. Then Bob pulled away and climbed on top of her. He brought his dick right up to her face, and his wet face was as red as his cock. I guess he was about to stick it in her mouth-he was almost there, when all of us heard the sounds of a car pulling up in front of the house. Man, you never saw anything like the activity then. I just had time to dive into my room and out the window so that I could make a more conventional entrance, and I knew Bob and Karen were scrambling into clothing and disappearing like their tails were on fire. I wondered what Bob would do with that big cock of his, and would have bet anything that he was cursing his head off under his breath that moment.
Needless to say, I had a fine time for nights to come. I relived what had happened until it was almost a fantasy of reality, meaning that with each mental encore every aspect of what had happened took on a heightened significance, and people faded and were replaced by others. It was then I began rubbing my own body as an accompaniment to my images, and the first weak but wonderful orgasms began to shake my thin body.
For another child the exact same thing could have happened and I rather doubt that the fantasies would have had the same fire and color. Even at that age the reality itself needed a certain twist to inflame my senses. The submission side of the oral sex thing did it for me, and over and over I imagined my face pressed to Sherri's demanding cunt. After a while I broadened my fantasy to include Barry, and then it would be his cock being rammed down my throat instead. More than once I imagined that Karen and Bob were with me, making me do those things to them. It was so odd, because, had they tried, I'm sure I would have freaked out and gone screaming to my mother. Even then I knew to separate reality from fantasy, and what went on in my head was a secret which I sometimes refused to acknowledge even to myself.
I became self-conscious about my strange fantasies when I got older. I found out just enough-to figure out that normal girls didn't think that way. And I was, otherwise, normal enough myself. Even when I didn't want to be, when I longed to be a little different from all the other girls, more creative, like Bonnie, who dressed different, or Kathy, who was an artist, I couldn't make it. I was an attractive enough run-of-the-mill girl, a girl much like my mother must have been once.
I don't remember really resenting that, then. I just grew up, and for a long while I put down my fantasy life, ignoring the temptation to masturbate nights. I was ashamed of myself, and very self-conscious.
High school was fun, in a low-key way. It was one of those things where you're caught up in the days and don't evaluate things. I just was, dealing with all the problems of youth. I dated quite a bit, but Rialto, where we lived, was quiet in those days, and there were definitely limits beyond which a nice girl didn't wander. It wasn't all that difficult, even. Life was hardening into a definite pattern for me-looking back it was like being another sheep in a pen, only the pen was so large I didn't see it for what it was, I didn't really feel the restrictions and the limitations and the deadliness of it all. Not then.
In fact life was nice enough generally. Around that time I met Howard, and falling in love with him was as sweet as it was a routine thing to do for me at that time. I was still technically a virgin, which means I did my fair share of making out, but nothing to break my hymen and reduce my "good girl status." So I was free to fall in love and marry in white, and collect the bounty of a legitimate bride in the way of gifts and mass approval. We set up housekeeping while Howard worked his way up the ranks of salesman for his firm until he was bringing home enough money to enable us to buy a nice little house and have a baby.
Three years later we had three children and a much larger, older two-storied house, with lots of shade trees and room for a couple of big dogs and a cat that presented us regularly with a litter of adorable kittens. Howard worked hard but we got along without too much hardship. We were, in every possible way, a normal family.
It took Mother's death to make me see that was dead, too, only I hadn't known it till then. Not that I hadn't vaguely longed for more in that time-of course I had. And wanting more didn't mean I wanted to give up what I had, or that I didn't love those around me. My two boys and little girl were my life, and mattered terribly, and even if Howard wasn't a world-beater or anyone's idea of a knight in shining armor, he was my husband and I loved him dearly. Yet there should have been more....
It was the total lack of excitement and stimulation that had me with the living dead. And don't talk to me about taking up a hobby or spending some time with the disabled. That's fine for some, but for me it was a whole different thing that I wanted. I felt like if I didn't do something, find some way to kick my way out of the paper sack of nothingness, I'd drown in a sea of boredom.
One morning, when the kids were all in school and Howard was at work, I looked disgustedly around the messy house and cursed it softly. Then, on a whim, I put on a pair of jeans, a new mod blouse, grabbed my bag, and left the house. I drove into San Bernardino, over to E Street, and parked in the new Central City Mall. Once inside I was in a different and busy world. I faded in with the other shoppers, but I felt different inside. Without bothering to formulate it, I was just moving my body along, drifting with the tide of bodies, trying to find out who and what I was, and what was lacking in my life.
I tried to make my thoughts as nebulous as possible, retaining no more identity than I absolutely had to carry. I stuck to the vital statistics. My name was Tracy, I was thirty-three, with short dark hair, a very nice body even for a woman without three kids-no, strike that-I wasn't a mother, I was just Tracy, a nice-looking chick of thirty-three. Period. I caught sight of myself in mirrors and plate glass windows, and attempted to see myself as others saw me, not as a wife and mother and member of an overworked P.T.A. It was an interesting thing to do, too. I found myself being fascinated, as if I were meeting an entirely new person. I hadn't noticed how young I looked, when I wasn't screaming at a pack of kids or nagging at a husband who absolutely refused to stop smoking for his, my, or the children's sake, a husband who habitually picked up the wrong brand of milk at the market. All those things faded away and I stared boldly back at just another good-looking chick, one without a history, one who could be almost anything she wanted to be.
I got into play acting then. I imagined conversations with strangers, and when asked to tell them about myself I made up wholly strange backgrounds for myself. I was a student, doing graduate work in biochemistry. My boyfriend wanted to get married, but
I liked just living together. No, no kids. Not in a world like this. ... Or maybe I would be an active woman's libber, with a tough sexual attitude and a very good job in advertising, though I was perpetually angered by the sexism in my field. As I walked I played many roles, and all of them felt wonderful.
A few men gave me the hot yes! look, more than usual, or maybe I just noticed them more. Or maybe they too, were seeing an interesting, sexy chick instead of an overworked mother with a dirty house waiting for her. I played sexually liberated for a while, in the safety of the mall, and returned smiles and swung my hips a little, and felt all breasts and crotch, a sensual feline on the make. I liked it. I liked it a lot.
That was when, out of nowhere, my old sexual fantasies came into my mind. I started to push them aside, embarrassed, but the brief glimpse of them was too much of a turn-on. I began rolling them through my mind, and soon I was really worked up. The store lost its sparkle and I wanted to be alone to think some more.
Driving home, I realized that the sexual side of my life had been the real disappointment. It had turned out to be a big bust. I made it with Howard regularly, about three times a week; he was a tender, gentle mate, taking pains always not to enter me until he was sure I was ready. But where was the excitement? Even the first time was much less than I'd dreamed it would be, and fast too, so that I felt only disappointment where I'd anticipated ecstasy. Not that there weren't times I didn't enjoy the whole thing hugely. I had my share of orgasms, and sex was certainly pleasurable. But beyond that, nothing....
I was happy that the house was empty. I'd agreed to let Lindy go home with a friend after kindergarten, and I had hours to look forward to without another soul. I decided to straighten up, and then have a bath. Once the house was looking good, I still felt wound up, so I turned on some soft music instead of the eternally blaring TV and fixed myself a light lunch. After picking at it, I broke from all routine and made myself a tall drink. I used my best glasses and took my time making it perfect. Then I filled the tub with bubbles and steaming water, and did a slow striptease while I sipped my drink. I felt wonderful and carefree, and not once did I hurry or wonder if Howard had a clean shirt for the sales meeting the next day or if Raymond had enough clean handkerchiefs, or if Danny had hidden his pet mouse in the drawer again. The hell with all of it. Right then I was that girl in the mall, free and easy, and out to enjoy a midday drink and bath.
When the water was perfect I got in the tub, perching the drink on the side. I'd freshened it a little and my cheeks were a little flushed as I looked at myself in the door mirror and stepped gingerly into the steaming bubbles. I had a nice body, with good-sized tits and a small waist. My sex was covered with a mat of wiry brown curls, and I wouldn't be ashamed to stand naked, next to the whole P.T.A., blast them, anyway. I resolutely thrust the thought of a cake I had to bake for them from my mind.
After I got used to the heat, I really relaxed and let the water carry me. I thought of one of the men who had given me a hot look in the mall, and wondered what he'd be like, and began to fantasize that he was waiting in the other room to fuck me....
But habit persists, and I could hardly think that way without feeling guilty and thinking of Howard. But the daydream had felt too nice, so I began to close my eyes and dream that the man was waiting in the other room all right, but to rape me....
I slipped right into it. It was wonderful. He had followed me home. He was waiting now. He was smoking a cigarette in my bedroom, calm and cool, undressing as he puffed away, He had a massive erection. I would come out, hot from my bath, naked. He would grab me. I'd try to scream, but he'd slap me and threaten my life. ... At that point I began playing with my tits. His hands would go all over me roughly. Then they'd force themselves between my legs, digging into my cunt. ... My hand took his role and I stabbed myself deeply, not at all surprised to find I was wet and hot down there.
I played with myself while I dreamed of being raped, of having him slap me around while he forced his enormous dick into me. I imagined him raping me so hard I almost passed out. I wanted it to go on forever. But then, right while I imagined him shooting off in me, I came. ... My finger spun around my clit, and I moaned loudly and tasted the off taste of soap bubbles in my mouth.
It took me fifteen minutes to clean up and get the strength to get out of the tub. It was hard to face the fact that there in the bath, with my fantasies, I had managed to have the best orgasm of my entire life. I was more alive at that moment than I'd been for years. But this time, instead of making me ashamed, it made me furious. How sad a thing was my husband, if my own hand and mind did a better job than he could!
It was a wild day. I didn't even slip on a robe. I just drank a little and thought a lot, and I stayed hot all day long. I went over my childhood fantasies and felt a little horrified at the ones I'd had about Sherri, the homosexual ones, but they, too, got me hot in spite of their perversity. I don't have any idea how many times I played with myself, how many times I made myself explode wonderfully, but it was the best day I'd had in years. In the afternoon, like a child putting away her toys, I got dressed and put away the booze and glass, and snapped off the radio. I was making the cake when the crew arrived, and dinner was in the oven. But everyone commented on how terrific I looked, and on my great mood. It was really funny.
So began the secret life of Tracy. I didn't change as far as the world knew me, but inside I did. Instead of being afraid of the sexy, secret part of myself, I began to revel in it. I dreamed away boring hours and my body began to glow from all the attention I was giving it. Even Howard noticed, poor man, though he had no idea how to take advantage of the new me.
My fantasies became gradually more bizarre, and definitely more masochistic. Nothing bloody or gory, just strong rape and submission themes, and my orgasm always came when I was being forced most definitely against my will. I'd be roughed up a little, then made to do sexual acts. I soon included all kinds of analism in the orgy-I'd be powerless to keep some big brute with a huge cock from shoving it deeply up my tight ass ... some sadist would force a plastic penis of unreasonable size up my anus. ... That sort of thing. It was sure to produce a gigantic orgasm. Then, when I was used to those fantasies, I imagined being forced to use my tongue on some rapist's ass-hole. ... Sometimes there were more than one man, too. It all did the thing, turned on the power plant inside me, and kept it on full blast.
The only super bummer was that through all of this I only had Howard to make real love to. Can you imagine the letdown that was? Oh, I loved him, but ... .
It was a full year of dreaming before it occurred to me that my secret fulfillment could include a real-life partner, and no one had to be any more aware of it than they were about my fantasy world. It took me that long to see the clear light of day! But once I got the idea into my head, it was there to stay.
I planned it elaborately. I arranged to be free for one whole day and evening, under the guise of having to go to Los Angeles for tickets for a TV show, a gift for Howard's parents' anniversary. I dressed in a pair of jeans and a short sweater, nothing particularly suspicious, yet an outfit which made me look very young and showed off my figure to its best advantage without appearing to deliberately do anything of the sort. I was nervous, but calm in a crazy way, as if I'd done this so often in my mind that I had perfect comfort and a minimum of nervousness, all things considered.
I even knew where to go, somehow. I simply headed for Hollywood Boulevard because, in that amazing steel trap I called a mind, I'd absorbed the knowledge that a lot of rough-looking men were always pacing the street whenever I'd been there.
It worked like a dream. I parked and began walking. Once more I was a girl without a background, a sexy, hot woman, ready for a good time. I had a sixth sense about what I wanted, and it took less than an hour to find him.
Lee was tall and young, with cruel boyish features and the body of a truck driver's dream self-image. His jeans were frayed and pulled over taut muscles, and his worn suede jacket showed his bulges there, too. He was dark and glowering, as if frustration motivated him the way life motivated others, and I had a feeling, all things being equal, that I wouldn't have liked Lee at all, if I had to get to know him.
I came on like a bitch in heat, but like a tease, too. I seemed to know exactly what it took. I ordered coffee at an outdoor stand just off Highland, and he strolled over loosely and took the next seat. His eyes were belligerent but aroused, and we ignored each other pointedly for a while. God, I was hot! This had happened in a hundred dreams!
Lee asked for a cigarette and I was a bitch, though I knew exactly what I was doing. I wanted to turn him on, but at the same time I wanted him to feel like he had to make me pay for my bitchiness. If I'd have thought about who I was during this, if I'd allowed myself to think of me as Howard's wife, and all the rest, I'm sure I would have folded up on the stool and sheepishly headed for home at the first possible chance. But I wasn't that woman right then. I was the girl who had done this scene before. In my mind.
It took about fifteen minutes for him to ask me over to his place. I gave him a calculated I-wouldn't-fuck-you-if-you-were-the-last-man-on-earth look, then shrugged. That really pissed him off. I wasn't even responding enough to him to say anything. He began to work for the piece of ass he wanted from me, but behind his urgings I knew that if I dared to go with him I'd have to withstand his efforts to make me eat humble pie. But that was what I wanted, on a mild scale, wasn't it? I did realize that I was taking a fairly large scale. How did I know I wasn't playing games with a maniac? Yet something in Lee made me fairly sure that he was more bluff than blood, and I was always trusting of my hunches. They were rarely wrong.
We went to his place. It was a little rented house just off the main street, and let me tell you, it wasn't much. Faded furniture, a creaking double bed, a few tired landscapes, the sort of thing you see in movies that practically announce: This set is of a rented room! Not that it mattered.
He tried to kiss me, but I wasn't through putting him off. I didn't want him to play great lover. I wanted him forceful! I needed him to play his role!
He had a short fuse. "What the hell are you playin' hard to get for? If you didn't wanna fuck me what the hell did you come for?"
I sent him the heaviest look I knew how to give. It was now or never. "Aren't you man enough to take what you want?"
It was simple but effective. He turned red, grabbed me so hard by the arm that I was afraid I'd wear his fingerprints for life. He didn't kiss me so much as mash my lips with his. Then his hands were all over me, hurting me, roughing me up, forcing himself on me without any hint of technique or tact. I loved it, though I pretended to be cool and indifferent, even then. It worked him up.
He threw off my clothing, mauled my breasts, bit my nipples hard enough to hurt them a little, and hooked a finger into my cunt. I was panting like an animal at that point. He understood my heat by that time and fed on it. If anything, he seemed relieved. My instincts had been right-he was a caveman at heart, and welcomed a chance to be himself with a woman.
There was nothing soft about him. It would have been rape if I'd only made the sounds. But I wanted it that way! God, it was as good as I'd always known it would be! He was hot and he had a big cock. It was massive, really, and impressively thick as well as long. Much bigger than Howard's. But who was Howard? I gloated a little at the thought that this time Howard was the dream, and this experience was the reality!
He barely had me on the bed before he was forcing his cock down my throat. "Eat it, bitch!" he hissed, hurting the nape of my neck. His fingers wound through my hair, hurting me more. "Eat that prick! Come on, you high-actin' cunt! Cocksucker! Give me some fine head or your ass is gonna ache!"
His words excited me as much as what I was doing to him. A few times I'd done this act with Howard-when Howard was being really racy-but it wasn't at all the same. Howard had thanked me a dozen times for putting my pure little mouth down there, while Lee was demanding I do it, and making it as crude as he could. I loved it!
I'd never really sucked a cock before, outside of my fantasy cocks, and this was much better than I'd guessed. I'd had no idea of how a huge cock would distend my cheeks and throat, how it would threaten to strangle me with every thrust, how it would look, all wet and plunging in and out of my mouth, how it would smell, hot and masculine and sweaty. He made me hold his balls, and when I was a little careless and squeezed a little too hard, he pushed me away long enough to slap me across the face. His eyes were wild. "Watch it, cunt!" Then he pushed my mouth back on his dick.
I was so hot I hurt. I actually came when he slapped me, came without touching myself at all! It was a wild sensation! Whimpering with the force of my unexpected explosion, I humbly returned to sucking him off, and I was hot at it when he stopped me again. I cringed for another slap, though I didn't think I'd done anything wrong that time, but instead he was just changing us around, so that he could push that big stick of his up my cunt.
There it was, my rape fantasy to perfection. He didn't ask-he took. He didn't go slowly, probingly, making pains to see that I was ready for it. He just shoved that cock of his into me, all the way, with one mighty thrust. I screamed from the mingled pain-pleasure of it, but I didn't have much chance to think about it. He just got into his work-and I mean into it-and proceeded to fuck the living shit out of me. Not in my wildest of fantasies had it ever been this good! He rode me like he was intending to force his cock into my neck from the bottom up. He was so powerful with me that I didn't even attempt to be a partner to him. I was a limp rag doll, his to maul and fuck at will, a hole for him to pump cream into. And both of us were loving it that way.
He shot into me before long. I came with him, but it was just one more come, since I was coming all the time, I think, from the moment I'd gotten into his room.
Before he'd softened enough to fall out of me, there was the shocking sound of a key rattling uselessly in the lock. Lee pushed me away and sprinted out of the bed. His cock was still dripping come. "Gina? That you, honey?"
"Why the fuck is the door locked?" She got it open and exploded into the room. "So that's why!"
She looked at me with pure evil in her narrowed green eyes. Gina was a knockout. She looked like she belonged in the same comic strip Lee came from. She had long reddish blonde hair, a very sexy cat face, huge breasts which quivered nakedly under a tight silky crop top, a tiny waist, and a generous pair of hips. Her legs were full and long, and she was angry. She looked like a stripper, which is what she turned out to be.
The next five minutes were pure insanity. Gina raved and raged-she and Lee were a more or less permanent thing, and he tried to placate her. I was the target and they talked as if I wasn't there.
"She's nothin', baby! Just some cunt I picked up off the street! For both of us to play with!"
"Both of us! Looks to me like you got a head start!"
"No shit, Gina. Don't be pissed, baby. Come on. Get out of those clothes and hop into the sack with us. Don't be mad. We'll make you feel so good, honey ... . "
Gina looked at me speculatively. "How do you know she'll go for it?"
Lee glanced at me, and his glance was full of a sour and artful arrogance. "She'll do whatever I tell her. Won't you?" He threw me a murderous look.
I nodded dumbly, fascinated and not too swift on what was going on. I hadn't anticipated all this. A thrill ran through me, though, as I speculated on what might happen next.
Lee got up and began kissing Gina. He was actually sweet with her. "Come on, beautiful, get that junk off those gorgeous tits of yours ... I want to get my mouth on them. . ; . "
The three of us filled the bed. He kissed Gina and brought one of my hands to his dick, and the other he forced between Gina's meaty legs. "Play with her pretty cunt," he ordered. I did. It was a weird sensation, but not bad. I kind of liked it, in fact. He went back to kissing her and sucking her nipples. She had a fantastic body. I felt like a boy, next to her.
They whispered together while I played with them. It was fun, holding his horse cock and rubbing it while I was fingering her wet hole. I wasn't paying too much attention to them.
"Tracy, Gina wants you to lick her pretty cunt. I. want to watch you give her some good head. Suck her off, Tracy."
Don't ask me why, at that point, but his request hit me like a kick in the gut. I panicked. "I can't do that! I never did that to a girl before!" I really freaked. This was going too far!
He didn't see it that way, and Gina was just kicking back, grinning away. She was on her back, with her legs open, and my finger was still up her snatch. But touching it was one thing, sucking on it was a whole different thing.
Lee looked like a thundercloud. "I didn't ask you if you wanted to, I told you to eat her cunt! And I mean now, bitch!" To back up his words, he hauled off and cracked his hand across my cheek again. It stung like a sonofabitch, but it also got me hot. Then he slapped my tits, just hard enough to hurt so good you wouldn't believe it. I could feel myself juicing wildly, getting ready for anything. But I didn't know if I could do what he wanted-I might get sick, even. But then he slapped me again, hard, and I sobbed, though it still turned me on through the pain. "Yes!" I groaned. "Yes! I'll do whatever you want! I'll suck her off!" The whole damn thing was such a turn-on I was nearly ill with sudden desire. Renewed desire, really. In a haze of passion I bent my head and pressed my lips to the mound of her sex. But if I thought I'd get off with just a pass at the hairy dimple of her sex, I was wrong. Lee reached down and opened her like ripe fruit, and then I was actually doing it, really licking a woman's cunt! It was such a crazy, obscene, shameful, degrading thing to be doing that I began to come the moment my tongue touched her opened flesh.
I don't know how long I licked her. I just kept on doing it as long as she wanted me to, making her come and come, and then somewhere along the way Lee got behind me and shoved his dick up my soaking cunt. He fucked me like before, like a wild man, and I was so busy coming that I could hardly tell one thrill from the next.
By the time we stopped I was so weak I could hardly move. I drove all the way home in a wonderful, amber daze. The changes I went through, walking into that house, were too insane to talk about. It was late, and I did have the tickets in hand, and I had managed a shower and a makeup job, so that on the outside I was virtually unchanged. But I had lived a hundred exciting, thrilling lifetimes since I'd left, and I'd never be the same.
But everyone was asleep when I got there, and it gave me a chance to familiarize myself with my own house, as if I'd been gone years. First I felt guilty and sad, and then frightened and confused. But then I noticed a toy under the chair and discovered that some finger paint had been spilled-on my new carpet!-and then I discovered the note from Torry, the P.T.A. chairman, about some idea that I'd pushed having been wildly approved, and all of a sudden, I was really home again, and myself, with all the emotions that came with that....
I got into bed quietly, careful not to disturb Howard. He had a big day ahead. I kissed him softly and felt a wave of very real love. Damn it, I was not only home, but I was glad to be home....
Fantasy is a nice land to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there. But then I thought of Gina and Lee, and of their suggestion that I return sometime for more fun. ... Still, I thought, everyone needs a vacation from time to time. Believe me, I slept fine that night!
The problem of feminine masochism is one that still needs investigation on the part of psychiatric and medical researchers, for no one psychological dysfunction is more subject to cultural and social definition, particularly in our own society. Two views have been predominant in the psychoanalytical literature; one, that women come by their masochistic nature because of genetic, biological causes, while the second takes into account social conditionings which may influence the distribution of masochistic traits toward one sector or the other of our sexually integrated society.
Unfortunately, as Karen Horney states in the collection of her essays called Feminine Psychology, most of psychoanalytical theory has, up to now, stressed the innateness or biological component of masochism with female nature. A number of factors are responsible for this one-sided approach, not the least of which has been the suppression of the feminine personality and intellect through the ages. Only during our own century have women come to regard themselves as full political entities, with equal rights to all political and social positions. Freud was what many researchers would call chauvinistic, even though his masculine-slanted theories were only a reflection of his own times that he was unable to foresee changing.
Of central importance to psychoanalytical arguments concerning female masochism is the Freudian theory of penis envy. According to this theory, the discovery by the little girl that she is physically without a penis exerts a lasting negative influence throughout her life. The shock may be caused by one of several factors, according to theory which has not yet clearly delineated which of these factors is primary: the girl may feel that she cannot possibly receive as much satisfaction from masturbation as men, the discovery of a lack of the penis may force an internal confrontation over natural oedipal (Freud's theory of sexual development) desires for the mother, since the lack of a penis forces the girl to abandon oedipal fantasies, or the girl may simply feel an increase in incestuous fantasies for the father.
The main attack against the inherent theory of masochistic tendencies in women in psychoanalysis is led by Karen Homey in her essay "The Problem of Feminine Masochism":
Assuming the girl did react to the discovery of the penis with a severe mental pain; assuming the idea of a possibly greater pleasure destroying her attainable pleasure; assuming she did become sexually excited by the mental pain and found a substitute sexual satisfaction in it; assuming all these debatable considerations for the purpose of argument: Why then should she lastingly be driven to seek satisfaction in suffering? There seems to be a discrepancy between cause and effect here. ... It is one of the great scientific merits of Freud to have vigorously stressed the tenacity of childhood impressions; yet psychoanalytic experience shows also that an emotional reaction which has once occurred in childhood is maintained throughout life only if it continues to be supported by various dynamically important drives.
Masochistic behavior for females includes various symptoms: early sexual fantasies center on a desire to be castrated by the father, menstruation is thought of as an essentially painful experience, intercourse is desired along terms of rape or violation, mental life is tainted by an underlying desire to be humiliated, and the whole process of childbirth is seen as the ultimate masochistic experience since the stress of child rearing is included as part of the masochistic woman's view of motherhood.
According to Wilhelm Reich, famous analyst and discoverer of the orgasm reflex as it applies to psychological health, masochism is the perversion of the desire for gratification due to the regulating factor of an internal stress which causes psychic fear of orgasm. As he states in his general work on psychology and sexuality, The Function of the Orgasm:
Behind the masochistic self-depreciation works impotent ambition and an inhibited wish to be great. The masochist's provoking to punishment became clear as an expression of the deep wish to be brought to gratification against his own will. Women with a masochistic character never have sexual intercourse without the fantasy of being seduced or raped. The man is to force them-against their own will-to the very thing they anxiously long for. They cannot do it themselves because they feel that it is prohibited or charged with intense guilt feelings.
Tracy describes the neurotic components of her sex life along classical masochistic lines. From the first guilt-inducing voyeuristic episode, Tracy inhibits her own sexuality and cannot release it, she discovers through succeeding years, without the masochistic reflex of being forced into the act. The additional guilt force of the unresolved lesbian tendencies, arising from initial sexual feelings for her sister, only confuse the resolution of her sexual difficulties even more. Sexual excitement for Tracy can only occur with acts of submission and humiliation.
Tracy states that, because of her self-perception of being "different" from the other girls, she felt guilty all through her adolescence and refrained from masturbating for fear of resurrecting her earlier, masochistic fantasies. This fear of masturbation is common for the masochist, Reich states. Another peculiarly masochistic trait is the tendency to feel warm sensations on the outside of the skin, particularly when thinking sexually. Reich describes this sensation: "Masochists frequently have the idea that their skin, particularly that of the buttocks, gets 'warm' or 'burning'. "
Reich, in The Function of the Ogasm, tried to illustrate the functioning of the masochist by regarding these skin sensations as significant. Reich saw that the inner sexual tension of the masochist could only be brought to orgasm by behavior which "punished" the individual. Moreover, the form of this punishment had to be physical, usually inflicted upon the skin and especially the buttocks. Reich formulated a model, describing the process of tension and pain for the masochist in terms of contrasting energies, both working on the surface of the individual as "liquid" pressurizing the walls of a "bladder." Tension would increase against the walls of the bladder, causing the desire for release. But since the masochist cannot feel sexual release without the aid of inflicted pain, the tightness of the bladder wall between the separate tensions of internal conflict and release is increased to the "bursting" point.
Using the bladder model to simulate the functioning of the masochistic neurosis, Reich illustrated the strange importance skin sensations acquire for the masochistic personality. As the neurotic conceptualizes internal emotional problems as external reality, the masochist conceptualizes the tension between internal conflict and release in terms of his own body. He can feel the internal sexual conflict in his thinking, but release he knows is an outside, physical sensation. The only middle ground between anxiety and release is the skin which separates the two-hence the heightened skin sensations.
CONCLUSION
Fantasies have always played a dual role in sexual behavior. First, they are useful adjuncts to sexual release, providing material for masturbation or sexual relationships that is not present at the time. Secondly, the nature of sexual fantasies provides the analyst as well as the individual with a ready source book on the unconscious sexual determinants which modify the personality. In particular, neurotic tendencies can be easily discerned by a close examination of the relationships between the participants in the fantasy. A masochistic woman, for example, may fantasize about an above-average-sized man who forces her to commit fellatio.
By examining erotic fantasies, the true variety of the human sexual experience becomes evident. While normal sexual relationships are often not possible because of societal barriers, as in the case of interracial or premarital sex, fantasies can include any number of elements in all sorts of combinations.
Each individual fantasy can indicate even the subtlest of emotions present at the time of the fantasizing. The person who feels confident about his own sexuality, for instance, will envision girls eager to be submissive to his sexual overtures. The masochism and sadism inherent in any sexual relationship will make itself clearly known in the fantasies of the man and woman involved.
For the American housewife, fantasies acquire an additional meaning. American women have lived in a quandary of sexual instincts and responsibilities in our society, told on the one hand to enjoy their sexuality and on the other to restrain their impulses in order to adapt to the societal imperatives. Women's liberation has just begun to inspire the women of America with the self-confidence needed to educate themselves about their body and its functions. Birth control, thanks to technological innovations, is accessible to everyone, and yet there are still segments of the population that wish to keep these materials away from younger girls, who need them the most.
The culture is slowly changing to incorporate the new feminism, but the process will take years to complete, and aftereffects of the double-standard, male-dominated society will linger for years ahead. The total effect on the sexual consciousness of women will decrease in the future, but the results of centuries of domination will continue to influence the sexual education of the American woman for decades ahead.
The cumulative result of sexual ignorance in women is masochism, and in particular the masochistic fantasy. Although analysts have postulated reasons of "penis envy" and other subconscious conditionings as responsible for this particular breed of fantasy, the truth seems to be that the female masochistic fantasy is only a reaction to cultural pressure against female sexual enjoyment. This can be easily seen by examining the number of instances in which masochistic fantasies are associated with problems of frigidity and impotence. The frigid woman feels fear while the woman wedded to an impotent husband feels that she, through the mechanism of societal repression, is to blame.
The challenge facing most marriages is how to maintain the proper level of sexual excitement. The first step toward achieving this goal is to realize that complete sexual harmony between any two people is impossible. Even under the most ideal of conditions, a man and a woman are not going to be capable of the same levels of desire and performance. They will not react to the same sensations, and they will not be able to attain simultaneous orgasm every time they make love. All of these conditions do not necessarily preclude sexual fulfillment, what they do indicate is the complex nature of maintaining sexual excitement in even the best of marriages.
Psychologists believe that consistency is not essential to a successful sexual relationship. It is sexual difference, as in the intrinsic difference between male and female, which excites the most. Consequently, in the long run, the romantic ideal of consistency and uniformity in a sexual relationship can actually create great boredom.
It is boredom more than inconsistency which proves to be the lethalingredient in any sexual relationship, and it is ignorance more than incompatibility which creates most of the sexual tension in marriage, Ignorance can drive one of the marriage partners to attack the other for simple differences and inconsistencies in his or her sexual appetite and performance.
Men are frequently guilty of sexual ignorance as far. as the complex needs of a woman are concerned. There are many men who could call their wives frigid when they could not climax together each and every time they made love together. But the simple fact may be that a woman so accused may climax only if and when she actually wants to make love and not at any time or under any conditions. According to any realistic standard, this woman is not frigid. Her sexual clock merely works on a different schedule and she responds to different stimuli than her husband.
A woman's complex sexual cycle is almost unfathomable for most men. It may take them the better part of a lifetime to even begin to figure it out. The simple fact of how a woman's menstrual cycle affects her sex drive escapes most men simply because they have no comparable sexual cycle with which they can compare a woman's monthly roller coaster ride from gloom to giddiness.
Sexual fantasies can relieve the tension of a frustrating relationship, or they can intensify it-it all depends on how the couple react to the original problem. If the man remains insensitive and uncaring, the fantasy will intensify until it contains every element of subconscious fear and hatred that the relationship instills. Only frank discussions and open participation between husband and wife can relieve the frustration of the inadequate sexual relationship.
Fantasies can be valuable tools for the experienced lover. As an aid in fighting boredom, they can't be equaled. When a couple exchanges fantasies, not only can each partner relive the experience with his mate, but any negative elements present in the fantasy can be discussed and worked upon. In this way, the imaginative couple maintains a sexual relationship on not only the physical level but the emotional and mental as well. Sometimes fantasies can be reenacted and in the process much sexual excitement released. Bondage games are nothing more than reenacted bondage fantasies which, although they don't incorporate the violence of the original fantasy, still enable the couple to engage in the same position and use the same movements which were present in the fantasy.
By using fantasies as an adjunct to a healthy sex life, the quality of sexual communication can be increased. If fantasies can give clues to subconscious drives, they can equally enliven the day-to-day realities of sex in marriage.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bernard, Jessie. The Sex Game: Communication Between the Sexes. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968.
Brenner, Charles. An Elementary Textbook of Psychoanalysis. New York: Doubleday & Co., 1967.
Cameron, D. E. "Sexuality and the Sexual Disorders." In Modern Practice in Psychological Medicine, edited by J. R. Rees. New York: Harper & Row, Hoeber Medical Division, 1949.
Comfort, Alex. The Joy of Sex. New York: Crown Publishers, 1972.
Cuber, John F., and Harroff, Peggy B. Sex and the Significant Americans: A Study of Sexual Behavior Among the Affluent. Baltimore, Md.: Penguin Books, 1965.
Davis, Maxine. Sexual Responsibility of Woman. New
York: Dial Press, 1956. Fromm, Erich. The Art of Loving. New York: Harper
& Row, 1956.
Grier, William, and Cobbs, Price. Black Rage. New York: Basic Books, 1965.
Hastings, Donald. Sexual Expression in Marriage. New York: Bantam Books, 1967.
Homey, Karen. Feminine Psychology. Edited by Harold Kelman. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1967.
Kinsey, Alfred C, et al. Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. Philadelphia, Pa.: W. B. Saunders Co., 1953.
Lundberg, F., and Farnham, M. Modern Woman: The
Lost Sex. New York: Harper & Row, 1947. Masters, William H., and Johnson, Virginia E. Human
Sexual Response. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1966. Reich, Wilhelm. The Function of the Orgasm. New
York: World Publishing Co., 1971. Sheresky, Norman, and Mannes, Marya. Uncoupling:
The Art of Coming Apart. New York: Viking Press, 1972.
Thomas, Alexander, and Sillen, Samuel. Racism and Psychiatry. New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1972.
Van De Velde, Theodoor H. Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique. New York: Random House, 1930.
