The New Male Sexuality (16 page)

Am I Normal or What?

Sex is always on my mind. I think about it ten, twenty, or more times almost every day. Is that normal?—
Man, 24

My lover thinks I’m abnormal because I want sex almost every day. I think she’s a little strange because she could do with once a week or less. Is either of us, or both of us, nuts?—
Man, 34

My wife says it’s not natural for me to want anal sex or to experiment with bondage, and I guess I’m not sure myself. Is wanting these things OK?
—Man, 47

I’m concerned because although I love my wife and we have good sex, I often imagine sex with other women, even when I’m making love to her
.
—Man, 55

Because sex is shrouded in secrecy and loaded with anxiety, people often have questions about whether they are okay. The main concern seems to be whether what they are—or are not—thinking, feeling, and doing makes them different, abnormal, or even weird. This apparently is the main reason for the popularity of books like the Kinsey and Hite reports and others that give statistical data about sex. Readers can check to see if they are in the same ballpark, sexually speaking, as others of their gender, age, and so on.

In earlier times, part of this issue was easier to address, at least in terms of official mythology. Medicine, in league with religion, had long lists of thou-shalt-nots, activities said to be sinful, abnormal, and unhealthy, and only a very short list of what was acceptable. Masturbation, perhaps the most common sexual activity, was definitely not on the approved list. In 1758 a prominent Swiss physician, S. A. Tissot, published a book called
Onania, or a Treatise upon the Disorders Produced by Masturbation
. Needless
to say, this was not a celebration of the pleasures of self-love. The idea that masturbation could lead to insanity was promulgated for over two hundred years. The main supporting evidence was the observation that inmates in mental asylums masturbated. Therefore, it was clear that masturbation must have led to their insanity. No one thought of determining the masturbatory practices of those not in mental institutions. The apex of the ideas of masturbatory insanity and sex as disease-producing was reached in 1882 with the publication of
Psychopathia Sexualis
by Richard von Krafft-Ebing, one of the world’s leading psychiatrists at the time. He reached the conclusion that not only masturbation but all nonproductive sexual activity was sick, bad, and abnormal.

Similar nonsense was promoted in America. Benjamin Rush, the father of American psychiatry, proclaimed in the early years of our nation that masturbation (which he called “self-pollution”) caused poor vision, memory loss, dizziness, epilepsy, and a host of other disorders, including psychosis. In the middle 1800s Sylvester Graham led one of the first health-food crusades in this country. He thought that bad health was related to sexual excesses such as intercourse more than once a month, masturbation, and erotic dreams, all of which were caused by eating rich and spicy foods. These foods “increase the concupiscent excitability and sensibility of the genital organs.” The antidote he prescribed was a vegetarian diet of plain and boring foods, one key element of which was coarse, whole-wheat flour. Although you probably never heard of Mr. Graham, you have undoubtedly tasted a processed and sweetened version of his attempt to reduce sexual excess—the graham cracker.

Graham wasn’t the only nut rolling around in nineteenth-century America; many others were also concerned about curbing sexuality. John Harvey Kellogg gained a reputation as both a nutritionist and a sexual adviser. He thought sex the ultimate abomination and remained chaste even in marriage. Masturbation was the worst sin of all, “the vilest, the basest, and the most degrading act that a human being can commit.” In his view, it led not only to the usual stuff like tuberculosis, heart disease, epilepsy, dimness of vision, insanity, idiocy, and death, but also to bashfulness in some people, unnatural boldness in others, a fondness for spicy foods, round shoulders, and “acne, or pimples on the face.” Kellogg introduced a number of foods designed to promote health and decrease interest in sex, one of which he called Corn Flakes. The rest, as they say, is history.

In the Victorian period it was thought that men had an excess of sexual desire, which they needed somehow to control, and no decent woman had any. Men wanted more sex than their wives but wouldn’t get too much
because of their partners’ reluctance. Presumably no one, except for the seriously deranged, was having a lot of sex. Certainly no one would take things in hand and commit the unholy act of self-abuse, and no one would have sex outside marriage. Within marriage, men and women were supposed to have only the kind of sex that might lead to conception; this usually meant missionary-position intercourse. And that was that.

What people actually did during the period from Tissot to Krafft-Ebing and Kellogg did not exactly match official ideology. We know that homosexuality existed, that prostitution and pornography flourished in England and America, that about
one-third of births in colonial America resulted from premarital conception (the Pilgrims weren’t half as puritanical as we make them out to be), and that affairs were not unheard of. Masturbation apparently was widespread, as it always has been in human history. It’s probable that the main effect of the official ideology was not to change behavior but rather to make people feel guilty, anxious, and bad about what they did.

Needless to say, things have loosened up a bit since then, both publicly and privately. Now almost everything goes and is considered acceptable.
A majority of boys and girls have had intercourse before they are out of high school. Although man-on-top intercourse is still the most popular position, every other imaginable position has been tried and many couples regularly use some of them. Anal sex, or sodomy, considered quite depraved in the past, is now an act that about 30 percent of couples have tried and that some do regularly. Another great sin of the past, oral sex, has become quite common; it is a regular part of many couples’ sex play. And that ultimate abomination, self-abuse, is engaged in not only by those without regular partners but also by those with. Surveys in the last twenty years also find that a fair number of couples engage in light bondage. As for how often sex takes place, a lot depends on the age of the participants and the duration of their relationship. Sylvester Graham and John Kellogg would certainly do cartwheels in their graves were they aware that a great many people these days have intercourse more than once a month, many of them even more than once a week.

Most experts now believe that the existence of rigid rules regarding sexual normality is itself a kind of sickness. A large reason for this attitude is our knowledge of the incredible range of sexual thought, feeling, fantasy, and behavior. Some people, for example, think about sex a hundred times a day, every day, and others can’t remember when they last had a sexual thought. The same is true about behavior, although, to be accurate,
I should say I’ve never heard of anyone having sex a hundred times a day. It’s true that there are only so many convex and concave surfaces on the human body, and only a few protrusions and orifices, but people have been very creative with what they have to work with.

There’s actually very little basis for saying that this or that activity, this or that frequency, is bad or abnormal unless it causes harm to a person or a relationship. And it’s clear that most of the harmful effects proclaimed by people from Tissot to Kellogg were nothing but rationalizations for their abhorrence of sex in any form.

Of course, there are still folks who are put off by sex, especially by any kind of sex that does not meet their personal notions of acceptability. Nonetheless, these days sexual tolerance is the rule rather than the exception, both among experts in human relations and sexuality and among the general public.

THE ABNORMALITY OF NORMALITY

Concerns about performance and anxiety about sex aren’t supposed to be normal. But they’re common, perhaps universal, in men. Jim Brown, perhaps the greatest running back in the history of American football, had a reputation as a lover that rivaled his reputation as a ball carrier. In his autobiography,
Out of Bounds
, he complains that even his friends thought he was a superman in bed. But, says Brown, “I was never Superman. I had the same doubts about performing up to expectations that they did.”

After interviewing 125 men of all ages for their book
What Really Happens in Bed
, Steven Carter and Julia Sokol concluded that “all men have sexual anxieties.” More specifically:

Young men are anxious that their inexperience will show; they are also typically anxious about premature ejaculation and whether they know enough about female anatomy. Middle-aged men are worried that their erections are not as firm, or quickly achieved, as they were when they were in their late teens and early twenties. Older men worry that erections are less frequent, less firm, and more temperamental.

In
The Hite Report on Male Sexuality
, Shere Hite reported that a majority of her seven thousand respondents had concerns about getting and
keeping erections and ejaculating too quickly. There is good reason to believe, therefore, that
there’s nothing abnormal or unusual about men’s being anxious about sex
.

Another place where our ideas of normality are way off base concerns sexual problems. Such problems, most of us think, are rare. But is that really the case? A review of community studies by Ilana Spector and Michael Carey found that about 7 percent of men have chronic erection problems, while about 37 percent suffer from chronic rapid ejaculations. The same review found that about 5 percent of men have difficulty ejaculating with their partners and about 16 percent complain of low sex drive. That’s a lot of men with problems, especially since some difficulties—such as a sex drive that’s grossly discrepant from that of one’s partner’s and dissatisfaction with sex even though there aren’t any functional problems—weren’t even considered.

To add to this, we need to recall that most men
occasionally
don’t function as they desire. In Shere Hite’s large sample of men, 65 percent answered yes when asked if they had ever had difficulty having an erection when they wanted one, and 70 percent said they had ejaculated more quickly than they had wanted on at least one occasion. I hope the point is clear:
Sex problems are normal and typical
. I know, I know, all of your buddies are functioning perfectly and never have a problem. If you really believe that, I have a nice piece of oceanfront property in Kansas I’d like to talk to you about.

In case you’re wondering about women, Spector and Carey found that about the same proportion of women as men have chronic or sporadic problems with sex; these include difficulties getting aroused and having orgasm, painful intercourse, and low desire. For both men and women, it seems, sex problems are not unusual. While I grant it doesn’t feel good when you have a problem, it’s just part of the human condition. Welcome to the human race.

WHAT ABOUT MASTURBATION?

Although the dictionary definition of
masturbation
is “stimulation of the genitals by means other than intercourse,” I use the term as most people do, to refer to sexually stimulating oneself. Common synonyms include “playing with yourself,” “self-pleasuring,” and “self-stimulation.”

Playing with oneself is one of the most common sexual acts. Little children do it—at least until their parents shriek at them to stop—and it has
been found in every society studied. In America, the vast majority of boys start masturbating sometime during puberty, and most of them continue to pleasure themselves for the rest of their lives.
Estimates are that about 70 percent of married men sometimes stimulate themselves (as do a similar percentage of married women).

Although there is nothing abnormal or unnatural about self-pleasuring, most of us feel ashamed or guilty about it. It seems selfish and too explicitly sexual (you can’t pretend you’re doing it for anyone else’s benefit or for anything but sexual pleasure, and it’s thought to hint of immaturity). A real man, we think, would be able to find a partner to have sex with rather than being left to his own devices. If he already has a partner, then why on earth would he want to have sex by himself? A married man in his fifties expressed his concern like this:

I’m embarrassed about this, but I’ve masturbated once a week or so all through my marriage. It’s not that Grace leaves anything to be desired. She’s a wonderful sex partner and rarely turns me down. But there are times when it just seems easier to do it myself. This isn’t taking anything away from what we have together, it’s just a separate thing. I think she’d be shocked and hurt if she found out and I wouldn’t know how to explain myself.