From Mickey Spillane to Erica Jong
McMurtry, Larry
From Mickey Spillane to Erica Jong by Larry McMurtry Readers-1 should probably say male readers-who passed through adolescence in the late 40s or early 50s might remember, perhaps with some...
...It is greatly to the credit of Masters and Johnson that they have published a book with the word Bond in the title (The Pleasure Bond, 1975...
...Is realized fantasy the very definition of happiness, or is it as dangerous as answered prayers...
...aged lovers can be just as confused as those fifty years their juniors...
...Or the hopeful “Sticky Fingers” exercise from Intimate Feedback: “This simple exercise is intended to recapture the innocence of childhood...
...Beautiful calves...
...faster than porno cineastes can thread projectors or swingers strip in California or scientists properly graph strawberry spread during the plateau stage...
...and among the many things whch the ladies are super at is, of course, sex...
...Specifically, at the moment, the rather confused belief that sharing is growing is widespread in therapeutic literature...
...What, indeed, are the splendours and miseries of realized fantasy in general...
...Manuel J. Smith, informs us that he offered members of h s “Systematic Assertive Therapy” class $20 each if within 30 seconds they “could command an erection or engorged vaginal tissue...
...seminar rooms, singles bars, whirlpool baths, and copulatoria on the order of the famous Sandstone in Los Angeles...
...Talk about it with one another...
...the spectacle is made all the sadder because in so many cases defeat slipped in the backdoor while everyone was standing in the front yard waiting for victory to come round the turn...
...To say that, read in the aggregate, these therapies are off-putting, is to understate...
...Behavioral engineering, low grade or high grade, may smooth, but it smooths without deepening...
...Whether or not the old tyranny of repression is actually less healthy than the new tyranny of performance is one of the thornier questions contemporary sexual scientists have just begun to ask themselves...
...Of all the experts, they are the sanest and most humane, and they insist again and again upon the value of context and background in sexual life...
...Mike is pointing a .45 automatic at Charlotte, and a few paragraphs later, after she has removed the transparent panties and is walking forward to embrace him, he shoots her right in the stomach...
...What hubris, that the lonely, recalcitrant human will and stubborn human body should team up and refuse to respond, after they have generously been given all the necessary data...
...Confusion endures, and the more one reads in the literature that is attempting to eliminate it, the fonder of it one grows...
...Legs that were all curves and strength and made me see pictures that I shouldn’t see anymore...
...The principal novelty of a book like Fear of Flying is its suggestion that women too think about getting laid...
...James Reston was reported as saying that going to an embassy party was like making love in public...
...Yet its very existence on a mass scale speaks of gnawing lacks and makes mock of liberation...
...some men can, can (maybe), (maybe) can...
...This attack is very general, and hardly confined to sexologists...
...if she existed she would be interviewed for Interview magazine by Andy Warhol and Fred Hughes...
...This strange inconsistency goes against the grain of the anywomancan attitude toward sexual training which, like it or not, cuts across all levels of theorizing today...
...How does this effect the coloration of present-day fantasy...
...Still, when I first met this passage, sometime around 1950, these interesting ambiguities were lost on me, as they were on my friends...
...Most fascinating to me, if tangential to the point I started to make, was a segment called “Number of Intercourse Positions...
...after all, sex is a garden they were not even supposed to want into until fairly recently...
...This is a long way from Simone de Beauvoir’s famous statement (in The Second Sex) that female desire was the soft throbbing of a mollusk-one of the most poetic thmgs ever said about desire, not to mention the sexiest thing ever said about a mollusk...
...Snobbishly, it is generally still assumed that it is women who really need t h s data...
...Masters and Johnson are almost alone in suggesting that familial health and humor can be aphrorather than anaphrodisiac...
...This lady or gentleman now appears across the whole spectrum of our literature, from the Baroness books to Portnoy’s Monkey...
...Small skills can be taught, but there still remains the problem of intelligence, of compassion, of largeness of heart, without which the skills cannot be made to matter...
...The women are doing the shooting now...
...These and all the other questions one might ask about fantasy are questions to which the sexologists have so far offered no answers...
...But all therapies are hardly stuck on this Goo-Goo level...
...However, it must be added that the number of positions used was not consistently correlated with amount of participation, or interest in, athletics...
...indeed, books like More Joy and Bisexual Living imply that now...
...He didn’t say if any could...
...What can he have meant...
...or, to put it differently, that love is somehow historically progressive...
...It scarcely appears at all in the 41 books, or, for that matter, elsewhere: one seldom, nowadays, hears anyone described as “a person of character...
...The sharing industry is already well established, and it will not be long before someone suggests that sexual privacy is neurotic...
...Witness the Spillanesque denouement to Hard-core Murder, in which a naked Baroness confronts an evil little man named (appropriately) Sully, who, after having tried to use her in an obscene movie, is about to shoot her with a .45 caliber dildo until she foils him by tipping over his dune buggy : “She took it (the dildo-gun) away from him almost gently...
...Their book contrasts nicely with the many titles suggestive of no tie, from The Sensuous Woman to Joy and More Joy of Sex, those twin gold mines belonging to Dr...
...I am not so much bothered by the amorality of the fantasy as by its thinness...
...The most obvious thing to be learned from these books and the few others like them is the extent to which sado-masochistic fantasies dominate both the men and the women who can be persuaded to talk about their fantasy life...
...When we face another person we are as much on our own as were the Elizabethans, as were the Greeks...
...Where traditionally it had been either crude and cheap (for the ignorant young) or exquisite and expensive .(for the jaded and presumably wealthy old) it has become merely matter-of-fact, priced to the pocketbook of the middle-class supermarket customer and indistinguishable in its packaging from the million other commodities of our culture...
...Our Lady of the Laboratory Whether the scientists are more intelligent in their goals also remains to be seen...
...They aim at smoother production: less confused and more professional relationshps...
...How many books about football, telling you exactly how you should play it, have been written by people who never saw a game...
...Fisher adds, with open consternation, that sexual responsiveness in marriage cannot be correlated at all with dating history...
...Passionate legs...
...By the time I started home from my tour I had roughly a car full of books (41, to be precise), of all sizes, weights, and degrees of kookiness...
...Relating makes the same requirements of informed concern, and involves the same commitment of spirit and time, all just as essential background...
...All that was left were the transparent panties...
...One suspects that the two Joys have sold like they have because of the delicate line drawings by Charles Raymond and Christopher Foss...
...The zipper and the button...
...Little we dreamed, in those lamb-white days, that within a scant 25 years pubic hair would take its place amid the cultural staples of America, and that pictures of it, on the pubes of both male and female, would be as common in drugstores as Kleenex and aspirin...
...Homes and families scarcely exist in contemporary sexual literature, so clearly are they assumed to be anti-erotic...
...As a novelist, I have often been surprised at the hunger in readers for useful or appealing fantasy material...
...the presence or absence of an erection makes no difference as far as carrying out the exam goes, but an erection might change your partner’s perception of the touching since some areas of the penis might be more sensitive when it is erect...
...It was men who once “scored” on women-a term more than likely derived from contemporary sport...
...Then together, she pushed them away with a toe...
...Some of the tragedy may have been ameliorated, and a great deal of the comedy has certainly been solemnized, but so far most of the sexual therapists have been no clearer about their basic principles than most humans are able to be...
...As he makes his way up and down Charlotte’s legs, this becomes increasingly clear: her thighs belonged more in the imagination than in reality, and her calves were heavier than those you see in the movies...
...A respect for the private is dying out in our culture and an active dislike and covert suspicion of it is growing...
...Curious that a professionally virile hard-boiled dick (the “boiled” in that phrase being not much more than 30s politesse) should be comparing a woman’s calves to those seen in the movies...
...Spillane’s never very agile brain in honest struggle with the fact that he is creating a fantasy, rather than describing an event...
...It was always there, a steady undercurrent in literature, explicit in visual satire, but always halfdenied, not least by women, perhaps in the interest of male peace of mind...
...From Mickey Spillane to Erica Jong by Larry McMurtry Readers-1 should probably say male readers-who passed through adolescence in the late 40s or early 50s might remember, perhaps with some affection, the following snatch of prose: (Her fingers were sliding the zipper of her skirt...
...Why hasn’t our knowledge increased our power or deepened our satisfaction or, at the very least, given us a sense of humor...
...His genitals could be examined visually, using sufficient light...
...The left side...
...The notion that some men or women can’t is nowadays the most heretical of all notions-besides being a problem for the individual, it stands as an affront to scientific progress...
...Comfort and a number of his imitators make clear what an interference children are to those who are really into sex...
...the nature and function of fantasy has received so little intelligent attention...
...And she was a real blonde...
...it wasn’t lis scene...
...talk about what it was like to be explored...
...Lastly, who would have supposed that one could visit a newsstand only two blocks from the White House, in search of I , the Jury, only to be told that none of the 6,000,000 copies were in stock...
...There is a rather capitalistic vigor and brusqueness about all these books...
...The Baroness looks much like Diana Rigg...
...Teaching love is not, as Dr...
...It’s a heavy thought...
...Among its resources, after all, may be deep feeling...
...but emotion, like art, continues to defy professionalization...
...it is even possible that deep feeling is intrinsically confusing...
...So much, indeed, that even the stalwart Mr...
...Far from making one want to run forth and get cured, they encourage one to snuggle deeper into neurosis, for at least neurosis is personal...
...I don’t usually think that the lives my characters lead are particularly enviable, but many of my readers seem to wish that they could be living exactly the lives my characters lead...
...The institutionalizations of Brave New World and 1984 are no longer at all remote...
...Obviously, since variations in intercourse positions involve gross changes in muscular experience, one might expect that a woman who enjoys kinesthetic sensations would be particularly motivated to experiment with such positions...
...In any case, my chagrin at not being able to find I, the Jury led me to another newsstand, and then another, and then to several bookshops...
...The experience consists of eating a normal meal-but only using one’s fingers...
...Among the poets who seem to have partially depiliated themselves at this time were Ginsberg, Ted Berrigan, Frank O’Hara, Aram Saroyan and LeRoi Jones...
...If it can be said to be like anything, it is like teaching writing or music or painting...
...His little pig eyes looked up at her wordlessly...
...Why this constant need for vicarious stimulation...
...Sex By Numbers It is interesting, in view of this, to leap from the inferno of the sexual pulps to the presumed paradise of therapeutics, where one often encounters the same multiorgasmic, endlessly responsive woman...
...If rats can be taught to blush in one ear at a time, what might humans be taught to do...
...Legs of a golden color that started from a flat stomach and rounded themselves into thighs that belonged more in the imagination than in reality...
...The Kronhausens dealt with it rather superficially, before they de-emphasized writing in order to make blue movies and emcee sex fairs...
...Even time and experience do not necessarily make one wise in love...
...It is sex without background, yet this fantasy-the fantasy of the Perfect One Night Stand-animates hundreds of novels, some films, and not a little cool sexology...
...Which areas are most pleasurable when touched...
...In a fascinating book called Sinema, Kenneth Turan and Stephen F. Zit0 interview a number of pornographic filmmakers, stars as well as producers and directors...
...The psychoanalyst Leslie Farber analyzed this ideal brilliantly almost a decade ago...
...Avenging Mike Hammer If one starts at the crudest fantasy level-that of mass market paperbacksthe first thing that is obvious is hard-boiled dicks aren’t shooting women in the stomach much anymore...
...Unhappily, Dr...
...Comfort is not the first Britisher to have his brains baked in Southern California...
...Her ultimate antecedent is Peter O’Donnell’s Modesty Blaise, who carried two novels, a comic strip, and a movie before Mr...
...Since the one embassy party I ever got to was only like being bored in public, I am at a loss to speculate, though I do recall a moment or two of end-of-The-Day-of-The-Locust-like frenzy when the ropes were removed from in front of the caviar...
...This is the scene where you get killed by a naked broad.’ She put both hands around his neck and strangled him...
...The sequence, however, may not matter...
...Comfort suggests, like coaching football...
...Whether one starts with the dildo manufacturers and vibrator merchants and works up to the sexual physiologists, or starts wilh the sexual physiologists and works down to Snapping Pussy may make little difference...
...Larry McMurtry is the author of The Last Picture Show...
...Who would have dreamed that the poet, band-leader, and, more recently, trial reporter Ed Sanders, in the series of landmark catalogues issued in the 1960s from his Peace Eye Bookshop, would catalogue, along with Allen Ginsberg’s cold cream jar and other literary novelties, a bag full of pubic hair gathered from leading poets at a reading in the East Village...
...What follows is an attempt-necessarily sketchy-to describe the sexual climate, or perhaps one should say the ’ sexual culture these books, in the broad, seem to be trying to promote...
...Why, now that repressive pressures have been lifted, have these lacks not diminished...
...Slowly, so I could get the entire exotic effect...
...The woman doing the strip is a murderess named Charlotte...
...Before she stepped out of it she pushed the half slip down...
...In a discussion of body boundaries and muscle awareness, Dr...
...Unless we know our lovers well enough to give and receive some help with it, we’ll end up right back in our tacky fantasy, Charlotte and Mike undressing together, both of them with guns in their hands this time, and, given the terms they have adopted, neither of them likely to survive long enough to find out if the pubic hair is real, or just a merkin...
...In five minutes I was able to acquire books on Vitamin Therapy, Bi 0- feedback Therapy, Exercise Therapy, Massage Therapy, Reality Therapy, Primal Scream Therapy, Feminism as Therapy, Male Liberation as Therapy, Dream Therapy, and, finally, an enchanting book called When I Say No, I Feel Guilty, in which the teacher, Dr...
...That is certainly a modest novelty...
...Comfort’s analogy seems somehow suspect, though it may well be that if lovers could make ready use of instant replay some mishaps and inconveniences could be avoided...
...Why the growing obsession with sexual display (which is not the same as sexual play...
...The behaviorist debate now going on between B.F...
...Any Man Can’t It is obvious from this literature (and from much else) that one of the great, half-suppressed secrets of all time - the rich sexuality of women-is finally out...
...Variants of this somewhat surrealistic scene occur in all the superlady books...
...The gates to the secret garden have been unlocked-those who like to do it in groups can find groups to do it in, and those with more baroque tastes can probably satisfy them...
...Be aware of different textures and temperatures...
...The Baroness far outdistances Modesty, and when she chooses to strip, as Charlotte did, it is the male who had better look to his navel...
...Skinner and his disciples and Neal Miller and hs is highly technical, but Gerald Jonas’ book about Miller (Visceral Learning, 1973) certainly makes it seem that behavioral engineering is some thing future generations will have to cope with...
...The midline on the bottom side...
...both the methods and the pressures that could produce them now exist...
...Frankly, I hadn’t realized what a pass things had reached...
...there will still be feeling to put, and it’s a perennially awkward parcel to handlz...
...Try feeding one another...
...Most of the people who have written about sexuality never saw a couple makmg love-probably not even Sigmund Freud...
...Gorgeous legs...
...The memorable thing about the passage was that it contained a direct reference to pubic hair-such references were seldom to be met with on the newsstands of the day...
...His books are interesting to me here only because he is well in the vanguard of what is a serious if still rather subtle attack on privacy...
...Does responsibility begin in fantasy, or is fantasy our only escape from it...
...The rapidity with which they incorporate the books into their own fantasyconstructs is very interesting...
...My favorite of ths group, however, is the Baroness Penelope St-John Orsini, of the Baroness series...
...only a stupid or frightened society would have supposed that they didn’t...
...what a tacky, third-rate jerkoff...
...Therapy Shopping To walk into any well-stocked bookshop today is to be h t in the face with the realization that our society feels itself in desperate need of therapy...
...The female superspy, whose visual prototype is probably Diana Rigg in her “Avengers” role, is proving deadlier than Mike Hammer ever thought of being...
...Is it a psychic guard against the possibility of failure in involvement...
...he describes a “Lady of the Laboratory” who could just as well be today, a “Gentleman of the Laboratory...
...That last term-character-is, of course, an old-fashioned word and an old-fashioned concept...
...Heavier than those you see in the movies...
...The Baroness could make it coming down in a parachute if she could find a fellow who could handle the altitude...
...orgasms one after the other and one like another, rolling off an efficien t ly functioning psychosexual assembly line...
...With the women’s movement still more or less in its vengeance stage, we may be experiencing a reemergence of the dynamic of medieval allegory, in which the women were queens and the men pigeons...
...Fisher seems to be saying that despite r=.39, p. 01, Sample 2 female jocks might still be reluctant to assume the arduous Indian-Tantrik position...
...I certainly don’t know, but perhaps Masters and Johnson do...
...The same subject has been treated even more crudely in My Secret Garden, compiled by Nancy Friday...
...Shortly thereafter, she dies, real blonde or no...
...In several respects the passage is a curious one...
...It is obvious from even a cursory reading of these books that sex is being asked to bear a weight in our society that it can’t hope to bear, and that it will break down time after time...
...on the whole, a sexual environment not unlike that of A Clockwork Orange with still a thick carpet of sadomasochism as its fantasy base...
...All the therapies seem to me to aim at a professionalization of the emotionswe are a dreadfully professional country...
...It’s the End, Sully,’ she said...
...Who would have imagined that Mary Updike, the mate of the novelist, would say publicly that reading her husband’s novel Couples was like being smothered in pubic hair...
...What few seem to have observed is that, purely in terms of sex, many people in our society are in a position to realize what ten or fifteen years ago would have seemed highly extravagant fantasies...
...One need not doubt the sincerity of the many current-day therapies and therapists to feel that the tragicomedy of sex will still be running when they are all forgotten...
...Instead, right there where 1, the Jury should have been was a vividly illustrated magazine called Snapping Pussy, the very concept of which would have caused Mike Hammer to drop his gun and clutch hs equipment...
...In either sequence one finds oneself travelling through a society that is past the point of panic about its sexuality-a society filled with individuals most of whom no longer have the dimmest conception of how their sexual activity relates to or bears upon character...
...In making this attempt, I followed a Dantean sequence, starting in the inferno of mass market hard and soft porn, the stewpot of fetishism and fantasy, and working rapidly upward through the purgatory of middlebrow advice manuals and counseling books to the empyrean realms of contemporary social science, where it can be seen that the technocrats, having subdued the earth and penetrated the stratosphere, are at last ready to bring their heavy instrumentation to bear upon human emotion and confusion...
...Fear of Flying at least deals with sexual fantasy in a spirited, energetic way, and not many books do even that much.* It is odd that, in a time when so much of human behavior has been investigated...
...Comfort would have to say about it, and at once found ths passage on watching other people make love: “. . . it’s a good way to learn about sexual behaviour...
...The book gives us perhaps the best look yet at the professionalization of sex in America-far more revealing than puff-jobs like The Happy Hooker...
...This psychic and anatomic dramatism-the ideally unlimited female potential, the distinct and limited male-makes for a very great play, perhaps the one great play that gives us comedy and tragedy in equal measure, and of equal quality...
...Secure in our science, with our increasing understanding of physiological and psychological mechanisms, we have nonetheless raised an essentially masturbatory sexual ideal and hung ourselves with it, an ideal centered on accessibility, multiplicity, and variety rather than character, cont i n u i t y , and commitment...
...Long, graceful, tanned legs...
...It reveals, as all these books do, even the most sincerely therapeutic, the extent to which sex has become business in America...
...Seymour Fisher’s 533 page, closely-printed book The Female Orgasm (1973), in a curious chapter called “Diverse and Negative Findings,” reports with surprise that no one can confirm that hostile women are less responsive sexually than nonhostile women...
...Most of these I have now read...
...But love, like art, is not progressive, and for all its information science still can’t write a good sonnet or mate two people...
...It is clear that sex in America is being drained of content faster than the fun-and-frolic merchants can pile books in the newsstands...
...is already in reprint...
...a person who, once plugged into a set of stimuli, goes chugging along to orgasm, whether under lights, in groups, or alone, in total disconnection from societal context or emotive circumstance...
...Alex Comfort...
...What did you learn from the experience...
...and Linda Lovelace, who, in learning to conquer her own gagging reflex, became the most celebrated fallatricp, since Cleopatra, are, verily, the Lady and Gentleman of the Laboratory of whom Leslie Farber wrote...
...With group and public sex so much in the news* I was particularly curious to hear what Dr...
...John C. Holmes, the male porno star who can come within ten seconds when the director yells “Come...
...The Art of Loving The final arrogance of contemporary sexual science is its belief that love can be understood through its processes...
...That sharing can just as easily lead to shrinkage is an undemocratic suggestion...
...What happens in the foreground may always be helter-skelter, but without some fullness of background, some texture and some context, it won’t matter how precise the scientists are able to be about where to put what, and when...
...they are the shop manuals of the psychoindustrial revolution...
...The most provocative, perhaps, is that what used to be called “scoring” is now more commonly called “hitting...
...It is almost as if one can see Mr...
...Before I knew it I had taken a kind of walking of the sexual revolution, or at least of the documents it has spawned...
...Sex only stops in pulp fiction when the wrung-out male is no longer, as it were, up to the grind...
...The right side...
...Now one more and more hears of women “hitting” on men, a term rather suggestive of falconry...
...We have, after all, outdone the Swedes in mass marketing pornography...
...Any woman can, can, can...
...The book, of course, is Mickey Spillane’s, 1, the Jury, first published in 1947 and now in its 63rd printing (6 million copies sold...
...Then the skirt fell in a heap around her legs...
...The giant bra floated over him like a guardian angel...
...Dr...
...How can he know...
...The man watching her is Mike Hammer, the archetypal hard-boiled dick...
...Why, instead, have they increased...
...Notice how revolting it first feels to plunge your hand into your gravy or fried egg, then see how quickly it does not ‘seem to matter anymore...
...What might humans be made to feel through Drug Therapy, which is already a reality...
...Consider this Dick and Jane exercise from For Yourself: “When it is the partner’s turn to be explored the illustrations in Masters and Johnson’s Human Sexual Response could be used as a guide...
...They are the visible embodiments of the fantasy of ecstasy without involvement, and the effects they ‘and their colleagues are having on our culture deserve more attention than they have had...
...In fact, in all of the thousands of cheap paperback sex novelettes published each year it would be hard to find a woman who was less than 100 percent effective, sexually...
...Fisher says: “Since it has also been shown in previous work that amount of awareness of one’s muscles is relatively hgh in those with definite boundaries, it is interesting to note that in the one sample in whch the Life Style Scale (Mackler and Shontz, 1964) (Appendix B) was administered, which measures how much each woman enjoys kinesthetic experiences (that is, those involving muscle sensations), a significant positive correlation was found between number of positions and Kinesthesia (rz.39, p. 01, Sample 2...
...Their book is called Erotic Fantasies...
...O’Donnell petered out...
...The concept goes with an ideal of maturity, discipline, and integration that strongly implies repression: people of character, after all, cannot do just anything, and an ability to do just about anything with just about anyone-in the name, perhaps, of Human Potentialis certainly one of the most moderne abilities...
...The pressures that now center around sexuality have cracked individual after individual...
...A number of the lady spies are flourishing: Cherry Delight is in her 17th adventure, Brandy French has completed eight or ten, and Eve Drum (the Lady from L.U.S.T...
...On the trash level, in books like For Yourself: The Fulfillment of F;’emale Sexuality, Hot and Cool Sex, Bisexual Living, Intimate Feedback, and The Total Woman, this is often laughable...
...instead we have laboratories...
...Hit Parade There have been, recently, some interesting changes in sexual vocabulary...
Vol. 7 • May 1975 • No. 3
