The Pucci Dress

A typical Pucci Dress

In July of 1964, Esquire Magazine published an article by Robert Benton and David Newman called "The New Sentimentality," which essentially tried to portray the cool, capable, reserved style of the early 1960's as being, not cynical, but of a different type of sentimentality, as a sort of Existential Sentimentality.  This was an almost Absurdist Sentimentality, embracing emotional attachments almost randomly.  It did this in an amusing format, contrasting icons of the Old and New Sentimentalities.  A typical pairing was Arthur Miller ("Inner honor.  Suicides.  Social poetizing.  New Deal.  American tragedies.  Find yourself.") with Robert Lowel ("Beauty of destruction.  The sanitarium as a setting for a poem.  The order of chaos.").  Other pairings were Ben Hogan and Sonny Liston, Jackson Pollock and Roy Lichtenstein, Count Basie with the Modern Jazz Quartet.  This was written just on the cusp of the drastic social changes that were to come in the second half of the decade.  Rock and Roll was new, but not pervasive, Kennedy was dead, but there were still a lot of Cold Warrior Liberals around, Malcolm X was still alive and he was the only one who said "Black" instead of "Negro."  It was a curious moment, because the authors understood  the sentimentality of the previous generation, and sensed that it was slipping away, yet they hadn't any kind of grasp on what was to come.  They understand the Rat Pack, but not the Beatles.

"The Clan — They are Boys' Night Out; the gang; the Buddy System; the romance of booze; practical joking; the Playboy Philosophy; Nouveau Riche; the idea of Organized Fun; millionaires; Show Biz."

"The Beatles — They are the Put-On; the big laugh; a slap in the face; Professionalism; the new idea of the Celebrity; Ringo's looks; "We're not any good, but we're having a good time"; Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!"

And here is where they really miss the mark and yet hit it at the same time: the Pucci Dress —

Women dressing for women are not in the New Sentimentality. The designer Pucci was the first to realize that what men love about women is not their chic, or their correctness, but their bodies. Men are sentimental about bodies. The Pucci dress is all about women's structure. It respects the body and makes it look female. There are cheap dresses that do this, but they can't do it for the woman you love.

Marilyn Monroe wearing a Pucci print dress.

Quite a statement, and quite prescient. The whole ethos of fashion was going to change, and change radically. And it was going to be about bodies and a more sensual way of dressing. What is simply astonishing is that none of what they say applies to the Pucci dress! It makes you realize just how out-of-touch men of that era were with sensuality. Think of the crass, scrubbed, powder-white skin of the typical Playboy "playmate" of the time. Can you imagine the shock that a young man, whose only knowledge of naked women came from Playboy, would have upon actually seeing how hairy women are? how wet and slippery the actual process of coupling is? and how very pungent a woman's arousal can smell? Look at the picture of Marilyn Monroe, certainly a woman know for her womanly form, observe how even she looks utterly de-sexed in a Pucci dress! It makes you realize just how utterly cultural sexual desire is. How Victorian men might actually have desired women in the freakish corsets of the era, how Mandarins might actually have been aroused by stunted and dwarfed feet, or perhaps even how someone might desire Helen Gurley Brown.

Do Communists Have Better Sex?

The other day I found an interesting film on YouTube, “Do Communists Have Better Sex?” It was the title that grabbed me. As an former Godless Communist, I retain a lingering pride in the achievements of Soviet Man. Sputnik, the first man in space, the first woman in space, the Super Booster, the Belomor Canal, the world’s largest bomb, weaving machines, and turbine generators (not to mention beating Hitler and saving the world.), and now we are told better sex as well!


Wow!!!
There are no inhibitions that Bolsheviks cannot conquer!
Freed from bourgeois propriety, Soviet Man achieves per capita rates of bliss to dwarf that of the hodmen of capitalism!
Scientific socialism has given proletarian lovers orgasm after orgasm, while imperialist couples jostle one another like blind puppies in a bathetic dance of frustration.
Fight today, revolutionary, at the barricades of copulation!
Kto kogo!
[Take a minute to calm down.]



DO COMMUNISTS HAVE BETTER SEX ? (2006) from ma.ja.de. on Vimeo.


Now, this was actually a serious documentary, well made, dealing with a documented phenomenon. When the Berlin wall came down in November 1989, sociologists rushed east to study the differences between capitalist and communist societies. They found that, despite the repressive nature of the regime in the DDR, the sex was better. Two key facts stand out:

• While western couples copulated on average two times a week, eastern couples averaged three times.
• Whereas western women reported achieving orgasm in 50% of their sexual encounters, eastern women hit the jack-pot fully 85% of the time.

There were other interesting statistics as well (e.g. eastern penises averaged 6 mm larger than western, 90% of Easterners had participated in nudist activities), but these two, I think, indicate a significant and undeniable phenomenon: sex was better under communism. Furthermore, by the early 2000’s, eastern statistics had fallen to western levels, indicating that this phenomenon was not geographical, but political. Anecdotally, eastern women actually complained that sex had been better under the Soviet government.


Why? Why should a régime so despised by its citizens, one that failed to produce the material abundance of its rival in the west, one that controlled speech and expression so thoroughly, have produced these high levels of sexual satisfaction? Several ideas were proposed.


• The east was secular, while the west was “oppressed” by the church: the sexuality of the west was hobbled by religiosity. Though this difference was pronounced during the 1950’s, by the 1980’s rates of church attendance were comparable, yet rates of sex satisfaction actually declined in the west during this time.


• The east offered comprehensive sex education. While the east did institute “modern” sex education much earlier than the west, by 1970 this to was comparable, so this too is a spurious variable.


• There was less fear of pregnancy in the east, since children were subsidized. This, I think does explain differing patterns of fertility. Women in the east averaged three children, as opposed to two in the west, and they had them in their early twenties while in the west women began having children about five years later. But contraception was equally available in east and west (albeit, subsidized in the east), so after the introduction of the pill in the early 1960’s this would seem to be less of a variable.


• Women in the east were economically autonomous. Due to the post-war man shortage in the east, women were brought into the work-force in the late 1940’s, becoming factory workers, bricklayers. It was ordinary and usual for an eastern woman to have her own income and not be dependent upon a man. Yet by 1980, rates of female employment in east and west were comparable, so this too would seem to be a spurious variable.


• Material affluence make people lethargic in the west. There might be something to this. Material abundance makes one materialistic, whereas privation makes one look to more spiritual satisfactions. Sexuality, reflecting the totality of the person, must inevitably be degraded by a materialist world view, so privation just might enhance sexuality.


• Prostitution and pornography were unavailable in the east. This, I think, is the key factor. Let’s take this a bit further and extrapolate about the kind and number of sexual outlets available to Easterners. Small apartments and lack of pornography made masturbation difficult. Suppression of prostitution closed this outlet. An endemic housing shortage and lack of hotels and private automobiles made trysting spots rare, so illicit affairs were probably difficult and thus fewer in number. Thus sexuality was channeled into expression within monogamous relationships.
When sex becomes a commodity (as capitalism inevitably makes everything), men can find release easily and without effort, so they undervalue their sexual partners. However, when a man can find release only with a woman he is partnered with, he takes care of that woman, makes sure she enjoys sex. The film-makers miss this, stressing in fact that the west was rife with means of sexual satisfaction (e.g. peep-shows, classes to teach women how to find their G-spot, pornography of all sorts, the widespread availability of sex toys), yet are baffled that these failed to produce the sex satisfaction that they promised. They have extensive footage of how, immediately following reunification, Easterners consumed pornography eagerly, yet fail to tie this in with the subsequent decline in sex satisfaction.


Thus, perhaps unwittingly, the communist system fostered sexual exclusivity, the key to lasting sex satisfaction. Eastern man was not troubled by the unrealistic (and fraudulent) example of pornography; having no idealized sex-goddess to compare his mate with, he was satisfied with her. Similarly too, eastern woman, having fewer lifetime sex partners, was likely to end up with one that was as good as, if not better than, her previous lovers. Faced with a paucity of sexual outlets, eastern couples made the best of each other, coming to delight in their familiarity. Variety, far from enhancing long-term sexual satisfaction, pales before the skill that comes only from truly intimate knowledge of ones partner.

What are the markers of a closeted "family values" homosexual?

Lately I've been trying to identify indicators of closet homosexuals, as so many Republicans seem to be just that.  Here's what I've come up with so far:

• Unmarried, married late in life, or (especially) suddenly married.
• Adopted children or stepchildren.
• "Family values" talk, plutocratic voting record.
• Wife is somehow not his equal (less education, from a developing nation, former employee).
• Wife gives off a "sex negative" vibe.

Poor George

When people think they are telling you something about sex they are more usually telling you something about themselves.

"Clinton Lied. A man might forget where he parks or where he lives, but he never forgets oral sex, no matter how bad it is."

— Former First Lady Barbara Bush

 Not true. I have forgotten a lot of oral sex.  Not that it was bad or that I didn't enjoy it, just that between men blow-jobs aren't a big deal.  

Blow-jobs are fast, and they are easy, and nowadays there is the added factor that the risk of infection is low.  There is also the fact that, unlike anal penetration where one party is definitely the Top, swapping blow-jobs can side-step the issue of dominance altogether.  Thus, they are the normal mode of sexual expression between men.

Being bisexual, I got a lot of blow-jobs and it was no big deal.  For a year I lived in a courtyard building on Surf Street that was full of gay men and, if I came home alone at night, the chances were good that one of my neighbors would offer to suck me off.  That happened at least once a week and I'll be damned if I can remember any distinguishing details for more than half-a-dozen of them.  When I was in high school I spent a whole summer pretty much doing nothing but swapping blow-jobs with my buddy Carson and then later, when we both had other lovers, I could still call him up if I was in the mood for a quick suck.  No big deal.

It has also been my experience that most sexually healthy women like sucking cock; they just don't want to be stuck doing only that.  They really like it as foreplay, and sometimes they like the feeling of power that it gives them to be able to give a guy an orgasm, or they like the idea of being able to do something for their lover, just for him, and what they don't want is for that to replace actual love-making.

Of course there are men who obsess about oral sex.   Some because they never get any, some because the passive nature of simply receiving pleasure appeals to them, some because they think it makes them more dominant, and most despicably of all, there are men who feel sucking cock is degrading and they enjoy debasing women.

Naturally, having had my fill of it in my youth, I never obsessed about oral sex.  In fact, because I had so much good oral from men, I usually find oral sex from women to be second-rate.  (The simple fact is, they don't have cocks, they never really know what they are doing.)  Ironically, the fact that I wasn't really interested in oral made women all the more eager to do that with me.  They loved the idea that they could just suck me whenever they wanted, and that I would never pressure them into doing that, nor that this would ever dampen my desire or become a substitute for actual sex.

So what Barbara Bush was really telling us is that she considers oral sex so unusual a thing as to be always memorable.

Draw your own conclusions about how much oral she's ever done.

Thougts On Pornography

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Bisexual Erasure

I should like to deal with two topics that are usually neglected in any discussion of homosexuality, that of Bi-Sexual Erasure and Situational Sexuality.


The simple fact is, bisexuals are rejected equally by straights and queers.


Tell a straight that you are bisexual and the usual reaction is: “What are you really?” Straights either see bisexuals as ravenous wolves who will simply fuck anything, or as being “confused” and “unable to make up their minds.” Many straights who accept homosexuality remain highly intolerant of bisexuality, possibly because while they can imagine gays in monogamous relationships, they cannot imagine someone who likes both sexes being happy with just one. [There is also the phenomenon of straight women who have a healthy fear of contracting a disease from men who sleep with men. This is actually very reasonable and explains the recent uproar about men “on the down-low.”]


To gays, bisexuals are just “in denial” about their true nature. Or perhaps, because bisexuals are able to “sleep with the enemy,” they are simply trying to acquire all the benefits of the dominant culture, even though at heart they are gay. In either case, bisexuals are seen as traitors to homosexuality.


This leads to Bisexual Erasure, wherein bisexuals and bisexuality is marginalized and made to disappear as a separate and distinct category.

Try this simple experiment. Go to Wikipedia and look up someone who is bisexual (but not someone who is famous for being bisexual), like Caesar Romero, Tyrone Power, or Nancy Kulp, and see if they are listed as bisexual. Sometimes they are listed as gay, sometimes there is nothing about their sexuality, and if there is anything about their being bisexual be assured that it will be purged in the next round of edits. While there are plenty of obscure categories in Wikipedia (e.g. “Corporations Based in Illinois,” “Evangelical Women Authors”), there is no category of bisexuals. They are always lumped into LGBT subcategories (i.e. “LGBT African Americans”), yet have no category of their own.


Why is this?

Because gays have an agenda, homophobes have an agenda, and bourgeois liberals have an agenda of acceptance, but there really is no bisexual agenda! That’s because sooner or later most bisexuals end up living one kind of life or another. Eventually, you meet the one that you think you are going to spend the rest of your life with, and that person is usually either male or female, which means you end up as a de facto straight or queer. Think about it. There’s no such thing as a monogamous bisexual marriage, it’s axiomatically nonsensical (or ontologically impossible, take your pick). I really can’t think of a single issue before the public that presents us with a “bisexual position” separate and distinct from that of some other group.


This leads to my second point: most bisexuals end up living lives of “situational sexuality,” where their circumstances, rather than any innate predilections, defines their sexuality.


Let me offer you a few case studies:


Some time ago I had a fuck-buddy, Lorraine, who was bisexual. I first met her when my girl-friend and I did a three way with her, and she was very eager for the attentions of both of us. Later I saw her alone and our couplings were quite hot and exciting. She had, however, a peculiar problem. When she became excited she had an overwhelming woman smell. I liked this but, evidently, most men did not. Many of her previous male lovers would insist that she showered before their couplings and most simply refused to perform cunnilingus because of her truly pungent smell. This caused great embarrassment for her and she was hugely relieved when she found out that I really liked this. I only knew and enjoyed her briefly however, as she soon left to complete her education at U.C. Berkeley where she settled after graduating. Years after this I re-connected with her again on Facebook. She was now a lesbian, telling me in no uncertain terms in an e-mail that this was her true nature, and that she was very happily married to Eileen. At the time I profound doubts about this, since she had simply been way too hot a lover for me to ever believe that she didn’t harbor a profound desire for men. Just a few weeks ago I noticed that not only had Lorraine broken up with Eileen, but she was listing herself yet again as bisexual. So I dropped her a line and it seems that her strident claims of being a lesbian was done at the prompting of Eileen who became jealous at the thought that Lorraine might ever have been attracted to men. She is now divorced, seeing a man, and once again identifying as bisexual.


I think this case illustrates my first point nicely, that bisexuality is unacceptable and has a tendency to disappear, just as it leads to my second point that much of sexuality is transient and situational. I can think of case after case where someones sexual expression changed with the circumstances of their life and I would assert that this does not represent a change from one sexuality to another, but rather yet another manifestation of bisexuality.


Another example might be my business associate, Todd. Despite being bisexual, Todd has lived the gay life since his early twenties. Now in his late forties, he laments that he hasn’t found a girl to marry: “All of my bisexual friends were married by thirty-five: why not me?” As you can see, while Todd regards his sexuality as situational, he simply has failed to change the situations of his life to affect the change he wishes.


A rather stark case would be Patty, a friend of my wife. Patty is about ten years older than us, from a small town, very feminine, retiring, and significantly over-weight. When I first met her she was living a rather free and easy life, dating quite a bit, and not merely straight, but rather old fashioned in what she thought acceptable. Well, she got older, and heavier, and fewer and fewer men asked her out, until finally she hit a dry patch of about five years. Next thing we knew, she had moved in with another woman. Her new friend was a woman much like herself: early fifties, small town background, overweight, thought of herself as straight. And yet they were living together in a lesbian relationship. Plainly, however she thinks of herself, the fact is that she is functionally bisexual.


Of course the opposite story happens again and again. There’s even a word for it, LUG: “Lesbian Until Graduation.” My friend Vida went through high school fending off the sexual demands of her various boyfriends by giving them oral sex so that they wouldn’t push for actual coition. She found this to be degrading and humiliating and, when she went off to college and had her first lesbian affair, she felt absolutely liberated. She plunged in feet first, thought of herself as a lesbian, and planned her life on that basis. The problem was that she kept getting into dysfunctional relationships, had no direction in her life, and (aside from the sex) really wasn’t happy. After graduating she came back to Chicago and took a job she hated. Then she met a bisexual guy that she started to hang out with. Probably because he seemed less threatening, she began to “fool around” with him and discovered that she liked it. But then she paniced, broke up with him and resumed her lesbian affairs, which proved just as disastrous as before. The thought began to haunt her that in order to live a really full and complete life, she would have to be with the father of her children. Later she met a nice Catholic fellow, dated him for a very long time, and then married him. Though she is happily married, with a lovely blond baby boy, she is frank about being bisexual. Although she intends to remain monogamously devoted to her husband for the rest of her life, she acknowledges that she would fully capable of having sex with a woman and liking it.


[As an aside, let me point out that while I have known many people who have straightened up and found religion, they all became straight because they liked the straight sex. People who have a religious conversion and then try to straighten up usually end up as basket-cases. The lesson: straight sex might lead you to religion, but religion can’t straighten you up. My own experience would confirm this. At about the age of twenty one I decided that what I really wanted was a family and that I should begin looking for the mother of my children. At about twenty-three I realized I had to cut-out men altogether if I was serious about that, a year later I became Catholic, the next year I was married.]


The very idea of “bisexual” is actually of rather recent currency. My buddy Bob, who was a young man in the early 1960’s, claims that before Stonewall things were much more fluid. Ostensibly straight young men knew where the gay bars were, knew they could be serviced orally there, and would often go there for sexual release. As Bob explained it, “Plenty of guys just like sucking cock, and every guy likes to have their cock sucked, and no one cares if you pretend it’s a girl doing it.” After Stonewall however, “activists ruined it,” according to Bob, who claims that political elements in the Gay community insisted that people take sides, be straight or gay, and no longer tolerated straight guys availing themselves of gay services. After that, only guys with balls enough to claim to be bisexual were tolerated cruising for easy sex at gay bars.


In the ancient world too, we find that dominant bisexuality was considered the norm, with Near Eastern men availing themselves with temple prostitutes of both sexes (as well as eunuchs) and Mediterranean ephebes (young men) expected to seek sexual release from each other before entering into marriage. Early Christians too, made no distinction between heteroerotic and homoerotic licentiousness, but condemned both equally. It was not merely extra-marital sex that was condemned by the Church, but any form of contragenic sexuality. It is a post-war development that a distinction has been made between married couples indulging in oral and anal sexuality and homoeroticism; previously these activities were thought of as degenerate no matter who indulged in them. [My son likes to joke about this. Q: What is the opposite of bisexual? A: Stunted.]


The bisexual impulse then is a return to a pre-modern view that sees sexuality as something you do, not something you are. Just as I have chosen to live in heterosexual monogamy in order to have a stable family life, so have my friends Bob and Todd chosen homoeroticism as it offers them a fuller and more varied sex life. Vida lives heterosexually so as to integrate her sexuality with her fertility, while Patty lives as a lesbian because that is the only sex life available to her.


To summarize:

• Bisexuals are marginalized by both the straight and gay communities.
• This leads to “Bisexual Erasure,” the effective purging of bisexuality from public view or discussion.
• There is no “bisexual agenda” because eventually most bisexuals develop primary relationships that are either straight or gay.
• The fact that sexuality has become politicized has reduced bisexual behavior.
• Significant numbers of people are “situationally” gay or straight.