Customs: Love & Marriage: By the Book

Time was when some of the gamiest reading this side of Paris was to be found in the instructive pages of the marriage manuals. “In this little book,” says the preface to the 1939 edition of Married Love, “Dr. Marie Slopes deals with subjects which are generally regarded as too sacred for an entirely frank treatment.” Many a young heart thrilled with pleasant astonishment at Dr. Slope’s revelation that “most women … do at times feel a physical yearning indescribable, but as profound as hunger for food.” Generations of schoolboys have plowed eagerly through the verbal thickets of Ideal Marriage, whose author, Dutch Gynecologist Theodoor H. Van de Velde, could write: “As the grade and locality of stimulation are different, according to the relative position of the two partners to one another, so therefore the sensations arising from such stimulation vary also.”

The Blessing. Such stuff was liberating in the old days of oblique advertising and plain wrappers, when books on sex were mostly designed to disclose the elementary mysteries of human reproduction. Most novels these days have far more explicit sex than this. Today’s mating manuals are advertised in top-drawer magazines in full-page advertisements that would bring a blush to a Victorian bartender. New manuals are published constantly, and most of their readers are not nubile neophytes but experienced men and women, interested in the nuances and fine points of the game, apparently anxious to be more like the sexually superior heroes and heroines of the bestsellers (all fictional heroes have to be sexually superior these days, or they are not heroes).

Even the titles are different. The modern manual eschews Slope’s love and Van de Velde’s ideal and bears down hard on guilt. WHO is TO BLAME FOR SEXUAL UNHAPPINESS IN MARRIAGE? probes the headline of a full-page ad for a book called The Sexually Happy Wife. Duty rather than pleasure keynotes a volume by Writer Maxine Davis: Sexual Responsibility in Marriage.

Some of the new books are solid, sober summations of the latest thoughts and theories on everything from anal eroticism to zygotes; others are hardly more than collections of sleazy case histories. The writing ranges from racy colloquialism to surgical asepsis. But either way, sex is being written about more—and more specifically—in the U.S. today than in any other part of the world.

Not only are the same old things dealt with far more directly, but the modern attitude toward various forms of sexual activity would jolt some of the most advanced thinkers of Stopesville. Masturbation, for instance, is no longer just a relatively harmless pastime —it is a blessing. Maxine Davis calls it “a benign measure for relief of tension under special circumstances.” Clinical Psychologist Albert Ellis, in his widely read Sex Without Guilt, finds it “beneficial.”

The Coat on the Chair. Sexpert Ellis* also sees some virtues in adultery (“Some of us are able to benefit from adultery and some of us are not”), and Maxine Davis advises readers to be permissive about any touches of fetishism in their spouses (“If he likes to have his wife’s beaver coat slung across a chair where he can see or touch it while making love, why not leave it there?”).

The old image of the uninstructed man as a brute intent on his own heedless pleasure has long vanished. Keeping pace with latter-day psychology and sociology, man is seen now as a fellow who needs help himself. Writer Davis has a section titled “Calming the Groom’s Fears.” And Medical Columnist Dr. Walter Alvarez writes: “On the honeymoon, the bride may have to be the one who is kind and patient and understanding.”

A major preoccupation is what Author Mary McCarthy has called “the tyranny of the orgasm.” In contrast to the attitude of the 19th century lady who said, “I lie still and think of a new way to trim a hat,” the unblushing bride of today, in the words of one case history, expects every night to be “like a Cape Canaveral countdown.” Author Davis finds many modern husbands and wives harassed and unsettled by the notion that anything other than a mutual orgasm amounts to sexual failure. Writes she: “We have substituted new fears for old ones, new guilt for inherited anxiety.”

Rather than mutual orgasm, most modern guides describe and counsel other methods as sometimes leading to “greater fulfillment” for the woman. In The Frigid Wife, Gynecologist-Psychiatrist Lena Levine cites numerous case histories of women whose sexual happiness was blocked by the belief that there was only one “right” form of sexual intercourse. “In this confusion,” she says, “sexual coldness may develop.” She advises numerous forms of stimulation.

A Single Standard. On balance, the sexual picture seems to be brightening —especially in the U.S. Dr. Levine thinks that “frigidity as a major problem for American women will disappear in the foreseeable future.” Divorced people contemplating remarriage tend more and more to consult experts in order to avoid possible repetition of a neurotic pattern in the choice of a mate, and single women are breaking away from rationalizations of their spinster-hood—obligation to parents, waiting for “Mr. Right”—to obtain psychiatric help while still young enough for prospects of marriage.

“Side by side with this development,” writes Dr. Levine, “goes a steady, if slow, trend toward the adoption of a single standard of sexual behavior for men and women. A key provision of that standard is pleasure for both, equal and mutual sharing of sexual satisfaction . . . However, there is much more to the single standard than this. The single standard means that infidelity will be condoned for one sex no more and no less than for the other. Premarital sexual experience will be judged on the same basis for both: if it is winked at when boys get it, it must be winked at when girls do the same. In short, both sexes will have the same information and set of rules.”

* No kin to Pioneer Sexologist Havelock Ellis.