Love in the Dark

Along toward the end of '56, the author of the following article, teen-ager Pamela Moore, created a sensation with her book Chocolates for Breakfast, a candid and revelatory portrait of upper crust sex jinks among today's gilded youth. Being younger -- and in some respects bolder -- than Miss Françoise (Bonjour Tristesse, A Certain Smile) Sagan, Miss Moore, undaunted by some shocked reviews, still rushes in where her older sisters fear to tread. Here she sounds off against what she considers the terror with which most American men regard sex, and the harm that ensues for one and all. Some of us will forgive her blanket denunciation of all of us; others will find their hackles rising. And there will be those (we suspect a good many Playboy readers among them) who will suspect her of having what must be a limited acquaintance with Homo Americanus in his more relaxed and carefree manifestations. In any case, we think this candid tongue-lashing by a forthwriting miss deserves an airing among her scattergun targets, who may find it as impudent as it is revealing.

While traveling in Europe this summer, I had a conversation with a young professor of Latin who taught in a southern Italian university. We were sharing a compartment on a train from Venice to Milan, and since he spoke very little English, we soon found ourselves conversing entirely in French. Perhaps that was why he had the courage to question me, without fear of shocking me, on the sexual practices of Americans.

"Is it true, as we hear, that Americans make love in the dark?"

At first I was too startled by the directness of his question to be shocked, and then too interested to be startled.

"Yes," I told him. "Incredible as it seems, it is, nevertheless, true."

"Is it also true," he persisted, with the wonderment of a civilized man questioning an anthropologist about the practices of some remote, barbarian tribe, "that American men actually close their eyes when they kiss?"

Again I had to say, "Yes, that, too, is true."

My neighbor sat back in his seat -- deflated, defeated. He had heard these preposterous rumors and now, to his utter incredulity, an American had confirmed them.

"But why?" he demanded. "Why should two people who are in love with one another -- who may even be," he conceded generously, "married -- why should they make love in the dark, as though they were secretly ashamed of what they were doing?"

"Because," I found myself saying while the hot color rose slowly but steadily to my hairline, "America is -- well -- a pretty puritanical country..."

"Ah-ha," he said triumphantly, "then you are ashamed of it. How extraordinary," he mused, as our train fled through the black night, crossing invisible physical boundaries just as I, sitting there, found myself crossing invisible emotional boundaries. "How absolutely amazing, really. To make love -- anonymously--when the whole meaning of love and loving lies in the fact that this is a person you love, whose eyes you watch, whose body you cherish, whose mouth has meaning because it expresses love -- for you. Yet, you close your eyes, you say. You isolate yourself. You do not dare to say, 'It is you, and it is I, and we are here, together, making love.' Instead, you say, 'I am an island of blackness, receiving anonymous sensations.' You are as personally involved as a radar set."

At that point, I wished heartily that the conversation had never begun. I thought wistfully and nostalgically of America where, when strangers meet on a train, the talk -- if there is any -- is usually confined to the weather, the inefficiency of all railroads and a polite inquiry into the existence of one another's families.

Yet, when I did return to America, four months later, there were many reasons for reflecting on that conversation, held at midnight on an Italian train with a charming stranger. Three things hit me in quick succession that made me think, not without some bitterness, "That young man was right -- and it's awful and more honestly shocking than many an act of immorality -- Americans, American men, especially, are ashamed of sex. Why?"

The first of these incidents was a news story that told of the arrest, in White Plains, New York, of a 12-year-old girl and a 30-year-old married woman, both charged with the crime of appearing on the streets in shorts that were several inches shorter than some presiding judge or magistrate had deemed "decent and proper." Their arrest implied that the average American male, witnessing such a display of feminine anatomy, would go instantly berserk, and that rape was uppermost in men's minds, controlled only by the presence of a vigilant police force and a "moral" insistence that women of all ages, including children, display only that part and that amount of their anatomy as will not drive men to these desperate and violent acts.

It sounds ridiculous, I know, but no more ridiculous, surely, than the arrest of a 12-year-old child. As a 19-year-old girl (barely 19) I am close enough to my childhood to know, vividly, the shock, the terror, the shame which that girl must have felt upon being hauled into court by grown and presumably mature men and charged with what actually amounted to "indecent exposure of person."

The girl's father, a practicing psychiatrist, was justifiably and understandably outraged. He has probably, at one time or another, treated a great many patients who were driven to his couch by parents or people in authority who made them feel ashamed of their bodies and the functions of their bodies. The presiding judge, however, seemed to feel quite proud of the fact that "half-naked women" were not going to be tolerated on the streets of White Plains. Since there was no public demonstration or outcry to the contrary, it is safe to assume that other fathers felt equally virtuous. According to their reasoning, one way to stamp out juvenile delinquency and sex crimes was to stamp the minds of the young with shame about their bodies.

All of those men would have been angrily indignant at the suggestion that what they were really stamping out, or trying to stamp out, was any open reminder of sex. Because the one sphere in which the American male flounders, the one sphere in which he is a dismal failure both as a father responsible for the emotional well-being of his children and as a husband responsible for the emotional well-being of his wife, is the sphere in which he must express his maleness. Unsure of himself here, even ashamed of himself, the American man tries to hide and repress every manifestation of sex. He is shocked the first time he sees his teen-age daughter in a low-cut gown; furious if his wife appears in a too-tight dress -- and as shocked as the young husband of a friend of mine was recently when any female member of his family tries to break down the barrier between the sexes, tries to know the first man in her life -- her father -- without the strange mixture of shame, guilt and desire that most daughters feel toward their fathers, especially when the daughter is very young.

For some reason (perhaps because, although I was younger than the young husband in question by almost 10 years, I had written what is referred to as a "sexy, sensational" novel) he felt he could talk more freely to me than he could to his wife. In fact, he still has not been able to talk to his wife about what I consider to be a heartbreaking and potentially tragic incident.

This young couple has two children -- the girl, who is 11 years old, and a little boy of five. The boy has always been the favorite, the apple of his father's eye. Reading between the lines as Hal told his story over cocktails at The Barberry Room one evening, I thought I could piece together a fairly familiar story of the complete lack of communication between the sexes -- the agonizing awareness of man and woman -- or, rather, man versus woman, even in as tender a relationship as that of father and daughter. Again and again, apparently, the child's attempts to focus her father's attention on her as a girl, as a woman, had been rebuffed by a young father who felt that "there was something wrong" about his daughter's warm, impulsive embraces, her lingering goodnight kiss.

"I don't know why," he told me that evening, "but I just feel funny about it. It doesn't seem normal. It embarrasses me. She knows how I feel, and why, and it's making her miserable, so she takes it out on me by talking back and not doing anything she's told. I suppose," he ended up, "I'll have to consult a psychiatrist. I've got to find out what's wrong with her that would make her do such a thing."

It didn't occur to him that there was anything wrong with him or with his attitude. It didn't occur to him that he simply could not see his daughter's spontaneous act as anything but immoral, and by his reaction of shock and indignation, he had given his daughter the same attitude. The chances are that she will grow up much as he had grown up -- "moral" according to her father's definition of the word, but with a morality that stems not from conviction but from repression. Sufficiently repressed, all her normal instincts would turn to feelings of guilt, exactly as her father's had.

And whether or not her father ever saw a psychiatrist, the chances, I thought, were pretty good that the daughter would see a psychiatrist. She would be another figure in the statistics of broken marriages; another young woman who would associate love-making with evil; the feminine half of another young couple who would make love in the dark "-- as though they were secretly ashamed of what they were doing."

So that was the second event that jolted me into an awareness of the fact that American men were ashamed of sex. The third was coming home to find myself, as I said, billed as the author of "a sexy, sensational" novel.

When, at 18, I wrote Chocolates for Breakfast, it did not occur to me that I was writing anything that might even remotely come under the heading of a "sexy" novel. I was writing about people I knew, about young people with whom I'd gone to school, with whom I grew up. I was writing about places I knew, like Hollywood, and the Stork Club, and "21" and the people who think that as long as they're moving, as long as they're in motion, they're necessarily going someplace.

But my first interview, when I got back to America, made me aware all over again of this incredible, perverted, puritanical attitude toward sex. My interviewer--young, and male--asked, "What about your father? Did he know you were writing a book like that? And if so, didn't he want you to write it under a pseudonym?"

"Why," I said, astonished, "of course not. The book is fiction -- not autobiography. Besides, why would he want me to hide behind the anonymity of a pseudonym? He's proud of me."

The young man shook his head, puzzled and disbelieving. "Brother," he said, "if my old man ever thought I did things like that or knew people who did them well enough to write a book about them, he'd throw me out of the house."

And yet, his father had read the book. He'd read the book, and promptly called the boy's younger sister into the library to read the riot act to her. "I know what your friends are like," he thundered at the honestly bewildered girl who didn't know what he was talking about, but who told me about it months later, when we met socially. 'I know what you do at those fraternity parties. Don't think you fool your mother and me, because you don't -- not for a minute."

But, of course, she did. I have heard a dozen parents say of their sons and daughters, "We're so close. She -- or he -- tells me everything."

It is sad but true that there is little communication between the generations in this vital area of human behavior -- but the saddest part of it is that it is so difficult, usually impossible, for fathers to communicate with their daughters. The first man in a girl's life -- the first love of her life, according to the psychiatrists -- is a forbidding stranger, shocked by any unusual display of emotion on her part. I can remember my own father, when I was no more than four or five years old, unwrapping my arms from about his neck and saying chidingly, "You mustn't hug me so tightly, Pamela ----" I never knew why. I still don't. I only know that I felt he didn't love me, (continued overleaf) love in the dark (continued from page 56) which, of course, wasn't so.

But for men, perhaps one of the most significant things about this generation, my generation, is that women are more frank, more outspoken about sex than ever before -- and much more so than men. We are exploding all kinds of myths behind which men have hidden for generations. We will no longer accept their moralizing or their weak apologies for their own failure to understand their wives and their children.

One of these myths concerns the old wives' tale that men do not like a woman who is the pursuer rather than the pursued. This is somehow tied up with another myth -- that man is the hunter, and enjoys the role. Actually, as far as I have been able to observe among my contemporaries, this is yet another attempt on the part of men to cover up their shame -- and their innate fear -- of sex. The woman who lets a man know that she loves him and desires him sexually is apt to scare the daylights out of him. His immediate reaction is, "Perhaps I'm not such a man after all, and what will she think of me when she finds out?"

So he retreats. He retreats by running away -- not seeing her again, or he retreats as did the husband of a famous young movie star we knew when we lived in Hollywood. At 13, I was too young to understand what the star's agent meant when she said, with a shrug, "Of course she's divorcing him. They were married six weeks and he never sobered up once. With a wife like that, I can't really blame him. He knew that she was all woman, and he was afraid he wouldn't be man enough."

Years and years of repression, of being taught that sex is evil, that it is something carried on in the dark, can, and often does, lead to impotence. Yet, young fathers, such as my friend, continue to pass on this hypocritical attitude from generation to generation.

I remember, for instance, something that happened when I was about eight years old. The idea of progressive education and sex education for the young was still comparatively new. I was visiting the son of friends of my parents -- a little boy about my own age. The thing that happened made no impression on me at the time. It was only years later, looking back, that I realized the importance and the meaning of the small family by-play I had witnessed.

Robert and I had both been raised by these progressive methods that taught children that they were born as a result of the father "planting a seed" in the mother from which a lovely baby was born. We were enchanted by the whole idea, and the thought of married people sharing a room and a bed was accepted as perfectly natural. Then one Sunday, Robert and I were left to play alone in the living room while his mother excused herself to "take a nap." Robert's father had been reading the Sunday papers. In a few minutes, he, too, excused himself and went upstairs. Robert's glance followed them thoughtfully. When they reappeared, the little boy asked his father bluntly:

"What were you and Mommy doing upstairs -- were you having sexual intercourse, and will you have another baby?"

His mother looked as though she would faint dead away and his father looked as though he would pick his son up and take him to the modern equivalent of the woodshed. Instead, he brought his temper under control enough to say, merely, "Son, don't ever let me hear you say anything like that again. If you ever speak of such a thing again, I shall give you a spanking you won't soon forget. And now," his father said coldly, "I think you'd better say good night to Pamela and go to bed."

Twelve years later, Robert was the boy none of the "nice" girls was allowed to go out with. "What the hell," he said to me when we met again at a debutante party in New York, "I'm having a ball while I'm young. One of these days, I'll marry and settle down, and when I do, I'll marry a virgin -- if I can find one. Meanwhile, I want to have all the fun I can, because nobody can sell me on the idea that married love is fun. My parents always acted as though they were committing a sin when they went to bed together. And," he added, "I guess most girls feel the same way about it that my mother did."

Again, it didn't occur to his man's ego that most women felt about it as the men in their lives -- men of whom his father was representative -- taught them to feel.

Another thing about American men that has always fascinated me is the way they collect pin-ups of movie stars and naked women; the way they whistle at a pretty pair of legs. I had accepted all this as part of "what men are like" until my trip abroad. One day, when the sun was brilliant on the canal, I left Venice and the boat I was on headed toward the Adriatic. As soon as I arrived at the beach, I ran across the fine sand into the water, which was cool and welcoming. Since I am a strong swimmer, I swam beyond the area of bathers. There was no one anywhere near me. I swam underwater, and took off my bathing suit, watching it drop lazily to the bottom. Naked under the Italian sun, I dived and returned to the surface. I somersaulted through the water, I swam, luxuriating in the warmth of the sun, the blue of the sky, the joy of being 18 on a beautiful summer's day. Then I dived again into the water, picked up my bathing suit from the bottom, and dressed again at the surface. As I swam toward the beach, I came up to two Italians who had watched me when I thought myself unobserved. Their tanned faces were wreathed in smiles. Not the smiles of Peeping Toms, but the smiles of men warmed, esthetically pleased, at the beauty of an exultant young body in the sparkling waters. The joy which I had felt had been transmitted to them, and they were anxious to tell me they understood the motive behind my unseemly -- to American eyes -- behavior.

"Felicitatione, Signorina! Brava! Bravissima!"

I smiled and thanked them, and swam on to the beach. There were no leers, no whistles. When they returned to the beach they did not seek me out, but rejoined their families, who were lying in the sun. Later, lying half-asleep, half-awake under the Venetian sun, I felt a unity with the world about me, with the young men playing soccer, with the children splashing merrily at the water's edge. I related to this world of sun and water and the world was warm and kind, like the smiles of the two young Italians. I felt no leers. I heard no wolf whistles. No policeman approached to arrest me for "indecent exposure." All about me were people busy with their lives, of which sex was an important, a proud, a necessary, an integral part.

Why, then, can't American men feel this way? Why can't American men, successful in every other sphere of their male life, feel equally at ease in this sphere? Why must they remark, of almost any man who is outstandingly attractive to women, "He's just a damned gigolo." Why do parents, advising their daughters against marrying such men, warn, "It's just a physical attraction, dear -- you'll outgrow it." Like a case of measles or a susceptibility to poison ivy! And why should one outgrow it? I remember a Westchester matron saying to my mother, about the man her daughter was soon to marry, "My dear, he has everything -- as I've told Kathleen, here's a man who's a good earner, who plays a good game of bridge, and who has always taken wonderful care of his mother -- what else can a girl want?"

All my life, as a child growing up in the prosperous community of Westchester County, in New York, I have watched people who were married and supposedly in love carry on bold and blatant flirtations with other men and women. I have asked myself, as a child, and I ask myself again now, as a woman, "Why do people marry if they don't love each other -- and if they love each other, (concluded on page 76) love in the dark (continued from page 58) why would they want to kiss someone else's husband or wife?"

The older I get the closer I believe I come to the answer. The root of the problem seems to me to be the deep-rooted shame which American men feel in the presence of sex--except, of course, in the from of the off-color story, which is a peculiar and peculiarly American institution. It's also another version of the Peeping Tom impulse, what psychiatrists call voyeurism. In my novel, there is a girl named Janet who is the perfect example of what such a father can expect of his daughter. Janet's parents had ceased to have any sexual relations with each other long before Janet was aware of what their bitter quarrels and her father's retreat to the bottle were all about. Her mother escaped in a "nervous breakdown." Her father escaped first in the drive to become a millionaire and then, with that accomplished, into the semi-oblivion of alcoholism. He never had the courage to face the fact that he and not his wife was the cause of the sexual failure of their marriage. Meanwhile, as his daughter grew to maturity, he hated her for finding the fun, the love, that he had missed. He questioned her about her dates with men for the same reason the emotionally frustrated woman questions her daughter about a party she's been to, wanting to know every detail. And no matter how innocent Janet's dates might have been, her father was able to make them seem evil -- until finally they were evil -- and then something that wanted to make her as guilty, as bitterly unhappy as he was himself was finally satisfied. He had destroyed himself and the one thing in life he loved and, for them, the story was over.

But for the little girl whose father can't bear to touch her any more because he's so ashamed of the clumsy way she chose to break down the barrier between them, it's far from over. For young Robert, whose vision of married love is two people stealing upstairs in the afternoon and then looking shamed and guilty afterward, it is also far from over. For all the confused young people who want to be not only aware of their sex, but proud of it, it is also far from over.

Because to all the people who make love in the dark, and who kiss with their eyes closed, someone ought to say, not only "What are you ashamed of?" but also "What are you afraid of?" The guilt-ridden, convention-ridden American male will be a better father when he's no longer ashamed to be his wife's lover.