FOREWORD (27 page)

(A turn-on is taking a shower in panty hose and remembering all the legs I have seen that day, which makes me come.) Men In Love

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Time for a shower.

In some of the above fantasies, the man imagines himself wearing the fetishistic bit of feminine apparel. This raises the vexed question of transvestism and homosexuality. Please note that one does not necessarily mean the other – a confusion often found among even sophisticated people. The great majority of homosexuals never wear women’s clothes. On the other hand, there are men who love to put on women’s clothes, but who have never had a homosexual experience in their lives.

In their sex play, lovers try out all sorts of positions, but rarely does a man suspect himself of being “secretly” homosexual because he enjoys having the woman on top. Jack (above) is so in love with his fetish that he, too, endlessly dreams up variations of erotic play that center on the high-heeled shoes, including putting them on himself. But then, instead of taking this as a simple instance of the erotic imagination looking for new paths of excitement, he decides he must be homosexual. He likes to put on women’s clothes, doesn’t he?

I find something courageous in the way he follows this naive confusion to the end, inventing homosexual fantasies for himself. But they “arouse no excitement in me,” and judging from the internal evidence of his letter, he never had a homosexual affair in his life. Why do so many people rush to label themself as exactly what they fear most?

Jack’s lack of genuine interest in his homosexual fantasies illustrates a way of exploring several important ideas. First, fantasies are a way of playing out private whimsies and speculations about yourself. Second, fantasies can be an end in themselves. They are not necessarily desires that you secretly wish you could act out if you were braver.

Incidentally, not all fetishists act out transvestite ideas. If it is not the woman’s high-heeled shoe but her foot that beNancy Friday

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comes eroticized, the idea is hopeless. You can wear a shoe, but can you take off a woman’s foot and put it on?

Another fascinating aspect of fetishistic thinking is the extraordinary amount of detail connected to the object. The fetish is lovingly described, lingeringly examined. The exact height of the heel, the brand name of the panty bole, the color, the shapes, the feel, and the smell. Nobody is exactly clear why fetish objects become so particularized, but we can make a beginning if we remember that the fetish stands for something important as life itself.

If a man says he is in love with his wife, are we surprised that he pays enormous attention to how she looks? He prefers her hair swept back because he likes to see her forehead; he likes Arpege and is unhappy when she experiments with Chanel No. 5. “Why do you wear black,” he laments, “when blue makes you look like an angel?” If you love someone, there is no detail about her that is unimportant. Why should we be surprised if the fetishist brings the same attention to his beloved object?

Finally, I’d like to speculate on an idea mentioned by Tucker (above) who wonders if women are aware of the seductive powers of their shoes. His own reply is ambivalent, but he has put his finger on something that has always mystified me: Both sexes are much more turned on by women’s shoes than men’s.

Think of the disproportionate amount of money women pay for their shoes; the huge amount of space given shoes in their closets and suitcases; the pain they will endure to wear a size too small, a heel too high. A woman comes home with a new dress. “You must imagine it with these shoes,” she says, holding them out. “You must be crazy,” her husband replies.

“A hundred dollars for those shoes? It’s a floor-length dress and nobody will ever see them!” The woman smiles to herself.
She
knows the importance of shoes.

If, strictly speaking, women aren’t fetishists, why are they so crazy about shoes? Are they intuitively aware that men are more turned on by shoes than they admit? Can it be that Men In Love

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Winnicott is right after all – that long before daddy’s cordo-vans entered her adolescent life, the little girl, crawling on the kitchen floor, became entranced just like her brother with the glamour and safety of a nearby woman’s (mother’s) foot?

9

Water Sports

One of the great principles of nature is economy of design

– illustrated, for instance, by the human hand with its startling evolutionary triumph, the apposed thumb. Here is the ultimate in multifunction adaptability – one tool enabling us to pick up food, arouse a lover, soothe a baby, hold a weapon, or type a book – or indeed, make a more specialized tool for a more specialized use. But in designing our genitalia so that they, too, can serve more than one function, perhaps Nature overreached herself: one piece of machinery used both in sex and urination. What’s more, both penis and vagina in such close proximity to the anus that you can’t blame a kid for getting mixed up.

Many people never get the confusion entirely straightened out. Of course they know the difference in grown-up, cold blood; but in the dark, roiling hotbed of untamed and infantile emotions we call the unconscious, the glamour and mystery of one rubs off and gives erotic meaning to the other.

None of the above is to be understood as saying the men in this chapter are children. Their psychology is more complex.

They have mature physiological drives, but their erotic signals are somehow channeled through avenues developed in their first years of life.

One of the ever-popular themes in porn-palace movie machines is what devotees call “water sports” or “golden showers.” You put a coin in the slot, pull the curtain, and nobody knows that you are getting your charge from someone wetting her pants, someone else being urinated on, or even drinking it.

We might easily dismiss this as just a marginal attraction, of interest only to the dirty raincoat crowd; but a few years ago, the climactic scene of a national best-seller struck a similar note: a famous film producer lying in a bathtub with Men In Love

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several young women sitting on the edge. They peed on him while he masturbated. What gave this book its enormous appeal was the whisper that it was based on real people in Hollywood and was an accurate picture of life in those plush precincts.

“Nothing human is alien to me.” “The proper study of man is man.” I nod assent to these tag ends of philosophy right along with the best of you. But the eroticization of pissing and shitting? How can that be? Is it as hard for you as it is for me to understand why loss of sphincter control can get people horny? The men in these fantasies are as difficult for most of us to identify with as if they were Martians. Our distance from their ideas, our alienation from these people, even the tolerance with which we may smile at them, are functions of how well we have repressed – “forgotten” – that at one time in our lives, every one of us went through the humiliating toilet training experiences that these fantasies symbolically re-enact. In this chapter, I ask you to remember again. Tough work.

BERNARD

I hope you include fantasies from urinology devotees, especially diaper fetishists. I suspect interest in wearing diapers is very common; many fetishists probably think they are alone, as I did at one time. This fetish seems more shrouded in shame than others; and despite your assurance of anonymity, I cannot bring myself to sign this letter.

The feel of a thick mass of diaper, held tight by waterproof pants, is
wonderful
. I use bath towels for diapers, under plastic incontinence pants mail ordered (to preserve anonymity). I suspect a large number of the incontinence pants sold by Sears and Ward’s are used by diaper fetishists.

I fantasize being a child, most commonly a four- or five-year-old little girl who still wets at night. After drinking liquids profusely, I lie in bed and wet myself. Often I wear the Nancy Friday

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wet diaper all evening, wetting it again and again. I collect accounts of the toilet training of children as published in child care books and magazine articles.

More recently, realizing that I am not the only diaper fetishist, I fantasize meeting a female who enjoys diapers. I imagine a slender, neat, small-breasted woman, naked except for her taut plastic pants over a bulging diaper. She would come to me, pretending to be a child, whimpering about her wet diaper. It would be interesting if she had continued to be a bed wetter since childhood and really needed to sleep in diapers and waterproof pants. I suspect may diaper fetishists were bed welters in their childhoods.

DENNIS

There are two or maybe three main desires of mine. I say desires even though I use them as fantasies while I masturbate. I am working on making them come true.

I dream of meeting a bisexual divorcee who is horny, and will try anything as long as she doesn’t get caught, and her having a very horny daughter. I talk the mother into letting me have sex with her young willing daughter with the idea of talking the daughter into having sex with her mom. So she leaves me alone with her daughter and as we have sex, I ask her if she ever thought of having sex with a grown woman.

She says that she thinks it might be nice to try. I tell her that her mom might be game.

I tell each one separately that when we are all together, and if everyone is hot for what I have suggested, they would know when I would take out my peter in front of both of them and start masturbating. Of course, you can see where my dream goes from there.

My second fantasy is a very raunchy one, as it concerns defecation. I dream of a woman who is also into golden showers and defecation. I will write it as I dream it when I beat the meat, because it is easier for me. You can clean it up Men In Love

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if you so desire. But maybe you can feel in my words how strong I desire this.

I have a woman squat over my mouth and let go with a very hot strong-smelling stream of piss into my mouth. (I have had this done! It is very delightful!) Then hold a mouthful and make motions to indicate a question. “Do you want me to spit some of your piss into your mouth?” To have her grin and put her mouth over mine and suck her own piss from my mouth and to swallow it. Then to have her stand up and straddle my chest and stay standing and then to proceed to shit upon me! To watch the turds ooze out of her asshole and fall from her while she is standing and to hear and feel her shit go splat on my chest! To smell it. Then to lick her asshole clean, and ask her if she wants another kiss, and to hear her say, “My, your kisses taste and smell good!” Then to have her lay on top of me with her shit still on my chest squeezing between us while we fuck with her on top!

I told you this would be raunchy. Please forgive me. I don’t believe that there is a woman that digs shit as much as I do. It is very frustrating)

I am a white single male, aged thirty-three. I have lost fifty-five pounds and am now 168 pounds.

My folks divorced when I was thirteen. My mom was an alcoholic. I remember one night when I was awake late at night, she came home with her girl friend and her girl friend’s boyfriend and all three of them got in bed with each other. I felt hurt and guilty and turned on all at the same time.

I also remember one time she was lying in bed and I was talking to her. I was about seventeen then. I thought of making it with her then, but didn’t. But had a strong feeling that I could have.

Remember one thing, all of the desires I have said are true.

Too damned true. And I dig using dirty language with a woman while I get turned on telling her about myself.

Nancy Friday

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HANK

My first and foremost fantasy is to be a baby again. I am twenty-eight years old and have been wearing diapers and rubber pants all of my life. I have never used them for their intended purpose, except of course when I really was a baby, but I just love the feeling of wearing them. While masturbating in them, I imagine myself being diapered by a beautiful woman. She takes off all my clothes and lays me down on the diaper that she has laid out on the bed, and brings it up between my legs, and pins it at the sides. Then she pulls my rubber pants up around my diaper. She then prepares a baby bottle of milk and feeds it to me, all the while she’s talking baby talk to me.

My second fantasy is to lay down naked in a bathtub and have three girls take turns each stripping in front of me and then wrapping their panties around my cock, then squatting down over me and peeing all over me. Then they take their panties from around my cock and wipe their pussies clean, then stuff them in my mouth.

Any mother knows that an infant will often pick up its feces and hold it out to her as a love offering – a piece of himself, something he has produced. Why isn’t she as proud of it as he? Left to his own devices, a baby feels no repugnance in putting anything in his mouth. Only when we leave the animal state – or if you prefer, the state of innocence – do we become more fastidious.

But it was a struggle – “the Battle of the Chamber Pot” in psychoanalytic parlance. We all lost, but the men in this chapter never completely surrendered: They are going to get their own back when mother is not looking.

Children often get into trouble as a way of holding mother’s attention. A similar element may enter to explain why processes of elimination can sometimes be invested with erotic glamour. In the day-after-day struggle to teach her son Men In Love

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continence, mother focused totally on him, neglecting sister, interrupting conversations with dad, watching and waiting beside her son for the first sign he had to go. And more specifically, what area of his body got her most intense attention? His penis and anus.

Breaking mother’s rules about cleanliness renders the unconscious at least three pleasures: (1) It is revenge on mother for forcing the boy to learn clean habits against his will. (2) It establishes his independence; he is not “listening” to her, but to his own desires. (3) It focuses life back on that part of the body which she had once made the center of the universe.