The Pious Pornographers Revisited

"'That inverted nipple seems better than it was.' the doctor told Evelyn Ayres after he had concluded his usual examination. 'Have you been pulling it out gently several times, morning and night, the way Mary Ann showed you?'

" 'Yes, Doctor ...'

" 'I believe I told you that there is a difference of medical opinion as to the best method of toughening the nipples ...' "

The phone rang, but I was too engrossed in my reading to answer. Business calls, social engagements and friendly chitchat could wait. After six long years on a bland diet of newspapers, novels and historical studies, I had finally recuperated from the shakes and staggers brought on by the research involved in writing the original Pious Pornographers for this journal of enlightenment, and was once again scanning the bizarre bulletins on glands, guilt, grief, gynecology and intercourse which are the peculiar specialty of some of America's most widely read sex books--the women's magazines:

" '... Your uterus is small and firm....Your breasts show no signs of pregnancy engorgement ...' "

"... This was an atavistic dream of a man and woman alone in a Garden of Eden, perfumed, flecked with butterflies. A red petal fell from the African tulip tree ..."

" 'Oh, Bill,' she whispered, half-choking....Then he kissed her. Her lips were like orchids--crumpled, soft, cool, moist. They clung to his. Her arms were around his neck ..."

"The range of frequency in intercourse for couples of 25 to 35 is great. A few have intercourse as often as 20 to 30 times a month; others only twice a month. For the majority, the average is 2 or 3 times a week ..."

" 'If he had his way, it would be every night. It isn't that I'm a frigid wife, for I am not. Once a week (which is my preference) I respond readily ...' "

"Q. What about the forceful technique of making love? Do you think that women prefer it?

"A. Sometimes. Many couples think that variation in sex simply means a different position. Variation can also mean a different psychological attitude. If a man surprises his wife, spontaneously, on a Sunday afternoon, or in a different room of the house, aggressively taking her, this type of approach can make their relationship enormously more erotic ..."

" 'He said I was cold, and I said he was oversexed. Once he even wanted to make love at lunchtime!' "

" 'Of course it's awfully hard not to. You both want to so much. Sure, Jim used to get fresh with me now and then, but I'd always handle it by saying "Look at the television" or something. But once I thought, Oh, why not? ...' "

" 'The hymen is a thin little membrane, Phyllis, stretched across the lower end of the vagina ...' "

" 'Am I afraid to use mine?' I said.

" 'No,' George said, 'like I say, you're naturally lascivious. You use your pelvis ...'

"I did a little bump.

" 'But I wouldn't go too far,' George said. I could feel from his neck that he was beginning to color."

" 'Why do men want sex to be like a burlesque show? Why can't they realize that it is a solemn thing?' "

" '... And ... well, one night I drank a can of beer in the car with him, and it happened again ... I just couldn't help it. After all, girls want it just as much as boys do, don't they?' "

" 'I hate being pregnant, and I hate sex. Bob has no self-discipline ...' "

" 'Shhh! It's all right.' Harry said to soothe her, and his hand began carefully to explore the eye hooks which closed the band of her brassiere."

"Movies, popular songs and television constantly portray only the passion side of human love, giving our adolescents the false impression that this is love in its entirety ..."

"We went across the bridge to the soft dark grass ... 'I will not ever love anybody else in my life, nobody but you.' I put my arms around his shoulders, and I pulled him down on top of me on the grass."

"Our daughters are the targets of the smut purveyors, the shoddy advertisers and the tasteless entertainment makers of Hollywood and television ..."

" '... What we do, stated in simple terms, is to insert the husband's sperm into the cervix by artificial means, partially or perhaps entirely above the harmful influences in the vagina and cervix ...' "

• • •

But all this was merely prolog.

Since my original safari into the steamy sexual swamps and dismal rain forests which comprise the ladies' literary home jungle, the natives have grown considerably more restless, tasteless, sanctimonious and outspoken. As the above sampler of quotations suggests, the carnal and the clinical are still being served up in large monthly doses of titillation and despair. But, as we shall soon discover, time has bred some rather curious and significant developments. As a result of the much-discussed sexual revolution, and the new trend to verbal frankness, the medicine men and tribal counselors have occasionally made bold to doff their gynecological fright masks and appear in the guise of a modern piece corps, intent upon helping the sexually underprivileged female to hoist herself up by her own bra straps, while introducing the more backward wives and virgins to erotic techniques and handicrafts which have formerly borne the stigma of mass-circulation taboos. In addition to offering thinly veiled sanctions of certain methods of arousal previously relegated to the fear-haunted purlieus of the "deviant" and "abnormal," the pious Pooh-Bahs of the women's field have seen fit to beguile their gentle readers with case histories and dramatic vignettes concerning rape, incest, Lesbianism, homosexuality, prostitution, mate swapping, group intercourse, and interracial copulation between a middle-aged Frenchman and a 13-year-old Negro nymphet.

Almost as interesting as the differences are some of the astonishing similarities--the echoing and reechoing of many of the same peculiar problems and anxieties which were noted the first time around. "I'm in love with my obstetrician!" a young mother had blushingly confessed in an old June issue of Redbook. And, five years later, the Ladies' Home Journal ran a similarly twittery epistle from a flustered "Mrs. Red-Faced," in which the same momentous revelation was made without so much as a change of punctuation: "I'm in love with my obstetrician!" Equally coincidental, one supposes, is the fact that in January 1960, the Journal's long-playing misery-of-the-month feature, "Tell Me Doctor," ran a clinical retread of a story on trichomoniasis, a pesky form of vaginal itch that had cropped up in the same feature during our first set of office hours. "I think (continued overleaf) maybe I've got it, Doctor--that infection you told me might flare up," a young newlywed named Marian Hodges now exclaimed in agitated italics. "Anyway, I've got something! ..."

Though localized in the same vital area, it was an itch of a much more usual sort that troubled Jan, the sex-starved mate of a brilliant but unresponsive young physicist named Kent, whose impassioned account of sexual neglect in the May '63 issue of the Journal bore a remarkable similarity to Redbook's equally impassioned saga of a female named June, the sex-starved mate of an unresponsive accountant named Ken, which had first alerted me to the sexual preoccupations of the women's monthlies, eight years before. "Can this marriage be saved?" the Journal now wondered. And, just beneath, there was the old familiar two-line playlet, suitable for production by little-theater groups who couldn't afford the royalty fee on Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.

"She says: 'Kent isn't one bit like the average man. He's cold--sexually cold, I mean.'

"He says: 'If I feel that any other person is getting too close, I feel hemmed in, panicky.' "

"In many ways he is considerate and gentle," 24-year-old Jan woefully acknowledges, when the article finally settles down to the meat and potatoes of her problem. "He is extra good about opening doors for me, pulling out my chair, remembering holidays. But if we make love three or four times a month, Kent is satisfied. Even then the experience is frequently spoiled by his elaborate birth-control procedures ..."

On the face of it, it seemed to me that Kent might merely be a young man with extremely moderate appetites and an inordinate fondness for life's little rituals and ceremonies--a rather prudent sort, who would not hesitate to wear two or three pairs of socks to bed, if he deemed it wise to do so. But I had no time to mull the matter, because Jan went right on talking:

"Because yesterday was our anniversary, I had high hopes things might be different....I stayed home from the office and rode herd on our cleaning woman, and we got the apartment in super shape....I put romantic records on the hi-fi, candles on the dinner table, I wore a sexy negligee."

But Jan's efforts were all in vain. When Kent came home from the laboratory, he was still deeply absorbed in research problems. "Naturally he didn't notice my negligee. And he didn't kiss me ..." she said, with an almost audible sob. "Dessert was cherries jubilee. As I flamed the brandy, he announced he had an evening date with laboratory colleagues to practice golf shots at a floodlighted driving range. At that moment I lost my temper, and suggested he go back and sleep in the laboratory, since he cared so little about sleeping with me.

"Kent ignored my outburst and went off with his golf clubs, unruffled and serene, still without kissing me. I had hysterics there in the apartment--all dressed up in my sexy black chiffon with nobody to admire it or me ..."

Moved to manly compassion by Jan's scantily clad tizzy, I had to admit that Kent-the-physicist was a much cooler customer than Ken-the-accountant had ever been. As I recalled, Ken-the-accountant had taken up the nocturnal hobby of playing with a jazz band because June's come-hither tactics consisted mainly of harping, nagging, and toying with his ears--activities that should suffice to cause the most ardent husband to lose interest. But what sort of unfeeling cad was Kent to ignore the flaming Freudian suggestion implicit in Jan's anniversary offering of cherries jubilee? How could he serenely go off and spend the evening belting golf balls, when his young and attractive spouse was slinking about their supershaped apartment in her sexy black chiffon, ready and eager for a fast round of conjugal pitch and putt? Was it possible that Kent was physically and emotionally depleted from opening doors and pulling out chairs? Or had he, too, been taking days off to ride herd on the cleaning woman? But no. According to Jan, "The only people Kent enjoys are other physicists. The only sport that interests him is golf ..."

I had just about made up my mind that Kent was the sort of chap who would bear watching in the men's locker room, when the Journal gave him a chance to speak his piece, and I began to see where friend Jan could be something less than totally lovable. "She is argumentative and bossy," Kent flatly declared. "For a small person--she weighs barely a hundred pounds--she's astonishingly noisy. She is heavy-handed, heavy-footed. Jan is an excellent cook. But thumping around our kitchen, banging the pots and pans, she produces the sound effects of an invading army." Before they were married, he recalled, Jan was content to spend a quiet evening at his place, cooking dinner, while he caught up on his reading and paper work. "Now if I open a book, Jan's mouth opens and an aimless stream of chitchat pours forth. The other evening, while I was trying to concentrate on a tricky problem that had arisen at the laboratory, she followed me from room to room, saying again and again: 'Talk to me, honey, talk to me. Listen to me, honey, listen.' Eventually the refrain drove me to the street ..."

According to the Ladies' Home Journal, Kent's and Jan's differences were so great that even the experts at the American Institute of Family Relations could claim only partial success in resolving them. With the aid of a marriage counselor, Jan "devised methods to reduce the pressures she had been putting on her husband....She rejoined a once-a-week bowling club, became active in an intraoffice sewing circle." Kent, on his part, "suggested membership in a Saturday-night dance club." While their sexual relationship remained far from ideal, Kent became more amenable to thumping around in the boudoir as soon as Jan gave up banging pots and pans in the kitchen. "As yet they have no children, but they no longer practice birth control," the Journal reported, with its usual coffee-klatch candor. "And, very soon, Jan hopes she may have exciting news to announce."

On the basis of a long-term acquaintance with the women's magazines, I knew better than to assume that Jan's "exciting news" would necessarily concern the birth of a bouncing baby physicist. If she were at all typical of the general run of Ladies' Home Journal brides, Jan would be just as likely to make a national announcement of the discovery that she had a U-shaped uterus or inverted nipples, or that the new sex-peppy Kent had become so insatiable in his demands that she had been forced to enroll in a Wednesday-night class in defensive judo.

Lest anyone, at this late date, question our masculine right to read and comment upon such wifely woes, let me hasten to point out that in the opinion of one of its male editors, the Ladies' Home Journal is a man's magazine. "As a playwright ... I found myself writing about women a good deal," Journal editor William McCleery wrote in the same issue that had given America the inside story on Marian Hodges' itchy-kitchy case of trichomoniasis. "It finally dawned on me that I didn't really know much about women, and I thought working for the Journal might be an excellent way to learn something. I have--I think. My wife thinks so, too. Actually, I take the view that the Journal is a man's magazine. Who needs to know about women more than men?"

While serving as our own personal passport to a greater knowledge of the troubled sex, Mr. McCleery's statement underscored the women's magazines' new and ever-increasing emphasis upon the male and his sexuality. Reading through the six-year stack of back issues that had piled up under my bed, I found, for instance, that more and more men were turning up in the previously all-female "Tell Me Doctor" feature. As nearly as I have been able to determine, this trend to sexual integration of the doctor's office began in June of '59, when a young bride-to-be named Evelyn visited the Journal's Trusted Physician for a premarital checkup. The visit (continued on page 190)Pornographers Revisited(continued from page 96) started typically enough, with Evelyn bursting in at the top of the page to announce, " 'I am afraid I'm pretty ignorant about sex matters, Doctor. Ought I to read a sex manual, or something like that, before my wedding day?' "

Without commenting one way or the other on the value of book learning, the doctor casually inquired, " '... By the way, have you ever had a thorough physical examination, Evelyn? Including a vaginal one, that is?' "

" 'Not what you would call a thorough physical,' " Evelyn replied. " 'Doctors have just tapped my chest and looked in my throat and ears--things like that. I've always been pretty healthy. My periods are as regular as clockwork ...' "

A rather long and extremely intimate conversation ensued concerning the chronometric accuracy of Evelyn's self-winding menstrual cycle, and the best way to make certain that her wedding day would not occur "bang in the middle" of her period. " 'You can start now taking your temperature every morning,' " the doctor advised. " 'The body temperature rises slightly at the time of ovulation--when the egg leaves the ovary and passes down to the uterus; the only time, as you probably know, when an ovum can become fertilized ...' "

Since I had already learned about the Miracle of Reproduction from sneak-reading E. Haldeman-Julius' Little Blue Books in my sixth-grade geography class, I warily skipped over the eggs and arrived at a two-line break in the next column, just in time to meet Evelyn and the doctor as they came out of his examination room. " 'I hope that wasn't too uncomfortable, Evelyn?' the doctor said. 'The first pelvic examination, I know, can be pretty bothersome.'

" 'It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. There was just one time when it really hurt. What is the verdict?'

" 'Your confidence in your good health is well grounded. I was impressed, too, with your poise and good sense during the examination. Actually, it wasn't quite as simple as I had thought it would be. The reason for the discomfort you experienced was that your vaginal opening is not very large. You probably know something about the hymen, or "maidenhead," as it is called?'

" 'Yes, and Mother told me to ask you about that. I forgot. It's her impression that in the premarital examination, the doctor breaks it or tears it or whatever it is you do. That's what she gathers from her friends whose daughters have had premarital examinations.' "

The doctor, who obviously didn't want to become implicated in the little white fibs being circulated by hymenless hoydens to explain their nonvirginal status, was quick to deny the canard: " 'I don't think that's strictly accurate, Evelyn, any of it. The normal hymen--it's a thinnish membrane or tissue, which partially closes off the lower end of the vagina in a virgin--is rather easily stretched. Doctors do that sometimes, without damaging it, when they feel that a vaginal examination is advisable for a virgin. Or when some slight correction is needed to make a bride's first intercourse easier and less painful....Generally, it doesn't make any trouble, and I don't myself interfere with a perfectly normal hymen. Now and then, however, we find a hymen that is extra tough or fibrous, or that has an unusually small opening. In such cases it may not stretch easily. It can make the first intercourse painful and sometimes may actually prevent normal intercourse.'

" 'And that's the way I am? What can I do?'

" '... First of all, I'm going to give you some graduated dilators. Mary Ann, my nurse, will tell you how to use them. You can start tonight. If the condition isn't corrected by a month before your marriage, we will use surgical dilation....But Alec should know that this is being done. Would he be willing to come in for a little talk?'

" 'I'm sure he would be glad to, Doctor,' " Evelyn assured him--and while the visit ended before the unsuspecting Alec had a chance to drop in for a little chat on hymeneal stretch-sex and a detailed briefing on the sort of thing he might expect to run into on his wedding night, the following April found another man (Sam Jenkins by name) bursting into the doctor's office: " 'My wife got this sudden awful pain. I was so scared that all I could think of was to put her in the car and take her to a doctor quick! Did I do right?' "

As it turned out, Sam had done exactly right--and just in the nick of time. As the doctor explained, after he had removed Mrs. Jenkins' left ovary, Sam's wife had been the victim of an "ectopic" or "ruptured tubal" pregnancy: " 'The baby was growing in the outer part of the left Fallopian tube instead of in the uterus where it belonged.' "

In his gynecological give and take with the Jenkinses (who had been hoping for a little girl), the doctor was obliged to go into considerable detail about how "the ovum is normally met by the sperm at the outer end of the tube," and the fact that sometimes "there are little blind alleys in the tubes"--the whole comprising a small handbook on female plumbing and the etiquette of sperm and egg. " 'Doctor, I just don't know how to thank you,' " Mrs. Jenkins murmured gratefully, when all was said and done.

"The doctor put his hand on Mr. Jenkins' shoulder. 'This fellow here is the one to thank, Mrs. Jenkins. He probably saved your life by his promptness in getting medical attention. I think he really deserves another chance at having that little girl!' "

With these historic words, the door was thrown open for other troubled hubbies to come in and chat with the Journal's Trusted Physician.

" 'It's her mother, Doctor,' " Bob Winston said gloomily, apropos his wife's case of forceps-fear in July '61. " 'Ever since Mrs. Wilkens got here, we've been treated to play-by-play accounts of all the suffering she and her friends and her friends' friends went through when their babies were born ...'

"The doctor shook his head. 'We obstetricians run into quite a lot of that, Bob. There are women who seem to take a ghoulish delight in trotting out all the childbed horrors they can think of when a young wife is approaching her first delivery. They don't seem to realize the effect they may be producing on the expectant mother....' " And, two months later, the doctor was deep in a closed-door consultation with young Edgar Ferris, whose wife Marian was suffering from "placenta previa"--which means, literally, a placenta too far down.

" 'What is so bad about it, Doctor?' Mr. Ferris asked.

"The doctor drew a picture on his note pad. 'Here we have a cross section of the uterus, in late pregnancy, with the placenta well up toward the top, where it ought to be. And here'--making another sketch--'is a uterus where the placenta is so low that it partially covers the cervical opening ...' " But, on the off chance that these pages might fall into the hands of some hopefully expectant young wife, let's spare ourselves the gory description of Marian's "massive hemorrhage" (" 'It's happened, Doctor, and it's dreadful, unbelievable! It's a fountain--a--a torrent! What shall I do?' ") and the grim Caesarean sight of "the big uterine arteries ... temporarily restrained by rubber-covered clamps."

One ingenious device for stepping up the hubby's postcoital involvement in the female sexual cycle is to make him an active participant in "natural childbirth"--a do-it-yourself kind of obstetrics which, by the spring of '63, was getting some pretty heavy promotional play in the form of "home delivery." Apart from catering to the aspirations which some women have to emulate the Great Earth Mother and bring forth the fruit of their teeming wombs with no more frills or antisepsis than might be had in a mud hut on the Amazon, "home delivery" is additionally attractive in that it expands the hubby's household duties to include on-the-job training as a resident midwife and obstetrical handyman--presumably on the theory that if he was in at the conception, it is only fair that he be allowed to share in the joys of welcoming the stork. For an example of this kind of hubby-wife labor union, we need look no further than page 111 of the same issue that contained William McCleery's statement on the Gentlemen's Home Journal, and the story of Marian Hodges' scratch-and-go brush with the galloping trichomonads. The article is called "Our Baby Was Born at Home," and opens with a note written to the editors by 28-year-old Patricia Nissen. "We are planning our baby to be born at home," Mrs. Nissen wrote. "Would you like to share in the experience?"

The question was almost absurdly rhetorical. Would a fish like to swim? Do kids like parades and circuses? Of course the Journal wanted to share in Patty Nissen's accouchement! And so it was that, come July, the Journal's Joan Younger and photographer Joseph Di Pietro were dispatched to the Nissens' Indiana home to provide on-the-spot coverage of the blessed event, using the same dramatic, minute-by-minute technique that had been employed in documenting such great moments in history as the day Lincoln was shot and the sinking of the S. S. Titanic:

"1:31 P.M. 'Wow, here's another one that's a beauty,' Patty says. The contractions are now a regular six to seven minutes apart, but Gene [Patty's husband] is no longer watching Patty worriedly when she has one. He is excitedly occupied by the pans of boiling water and the time sheet. Patty's excitement, on the other hand, is leaving her....Only when a contraction comes does she stiffen and become taut....Patty draws in her breath, startled. 'Oh, that was a funny one.' 'Six minutes on the dot,' Gene says and then looks at her sharply. 'Gee whiz, Patter, we're going to have a baby! ...' "

"Patter," in case you haven't guessed, is Gene's pet name for Patty, and "Noos is her pet name for Gene. It means 'brain' in Greek and she says that is why she chose it, but Gene, laughing, says obviously it is short for Nuisance." The whole family talks cute like that. "Mommy, Mary is fricker-fracker," their little daughter Becky shouts in reporting the bedtime behavior of her younger sister. Fricker-fracker "is a family phrase for being naked." And, when Patty's lady doctor has her bedded down on a pad of newspapers at 1:47 P.M., Patty laughs as she reminisces: "Remember those funny things we used to say in high school? They all had a storal to the mory. Spoonerisms. 'Oh, sometimes your boubles are trig and sometimes your smoubles are trall. But if you trad no houbles at all, how could you blecognize your ressings?' "

"2:23 P.M. The contractions are now coming five minutes apart and are of considerable intensity, but Patty has been dozing through them....The only time she has cried 'Ouch' was when the birth area was washed with soap and germicide. She is stretched out on the bed, the newspapers under her and a sheet over her.

"The doctor has been resting and waiting on a chair beside the bed....When Patty opens her eyes the doctor says, 'You must get up and walk around now. We have only a four-centimeter dilation and we need nine.' "

And so it goes, while Gene rushes around sterilizing cloths, boiling rubber gloves, making tea, and keeping track of Patty's contractions on his time sheet. At 3:50 P.M. Patty's tension relaxes, and she sits to rest. " 'You must walk,' the doctor says. 'Ah, bension is tilding up again,' Patty says, getting up, 'and I am just putzing around.'

"5:10 P.M. The baby has moved downward now and Patty has gone to lie down....5:40 P.M. The water sac broke suddenly and completely a few minutes ago....'Mr. Nissen,' the doctor says, 'put your hands on top of her abdomen and massage very gently, please ... very gently.' There is a long, heaving breath from Patty. 'I see the head!' Gene exclaims. 'Dark curly hair--like yours, Patty, like yours!' 'But I wanted red hair,' Patty says. 'Patter,' Gene cries, 'the baby is coming!' "

As I read, my own bension was tilding up to pever fitch. I was ready to settle for any color hair--auburn, chestnut or peroxide blonde. "6 P.M. But the baby does not come. Its head is pressing, pressing against the cervix, as each powerful contraction of the uterus drives it farther down the birth canal, but it cannot push through....'Relax,' the doctor says. 'Relax. Relax between contractions. Push only with the contractions.' "

Lord knows, I was trying to relax. My grip on the Journal was tense and moist, but I wasn't pushing between contractions. Maybe Mr. McCleery and the other fellows were pushing, but not me!

"6:30 P.M. The baby still has not stretched the cervix sufficiently, nor have the contractions....7:10 P.M. Still the baby has not arrived....7:30 P.M. Delivery is close now, as the baby presses downward, downward, and the contractions come one upon another so closely they are almost continuous. 'Stretch, baby, stretch,' the doctor murmurs. 'Now--now, push with this contraction--push--push--now relax--relax---' "

Crouched down in my armchair, I dug my heels into the rug and pushed--pushed--relaxed--relaxed. The paragraphs were coming one upon another so closely they were almost continuous. "Wow!" I gasped. "Here's another one that's a beauty!"

"7:39 P.M. Then--suddenly--there is the sound of a baby's wail and like an arrow the baby has popped from the uterus into the doctor's deft hands. In skilled rhythm the doctor has caught the child, clamped the cord, and laid the baby on Patty's stomach. 'Oh-h'--Patty's wail is one of pure joy--'see the baby!' Gene is still thunderstruck 'Oh,' he says. 'Oh, oh, oh. What a thrill!' 'What is it?' Patty says. But there is no time to examine the baby now. The afterbirth is coming with the same catapulting speed the baby did ..."

"Oh, no you don't!" I muttered, and slammed the magazine shut just in time to prevent the hamned dafterbirth from lopping into my plap!

Sitting in a dreamy kind of postnatal haze induced by a couple of stiff shots of Old Twilight Sleep, I fancied I could still see the memory book of photos Mr. Di Pietro had taken at the Nissens' obstetrical open house: Noos gently massaging Patter's abdomen at 5:10 P.M....Noos clutching Patter's hand as she winced at a 6:30 contraction....Patter's ecstatic smile at the sight of the newborn little what's-it lying across her fricker-fracker tummy....So vivid and complete were the innumerable clinical details which I have here had the decency to omit, I was certain that I, or any of the Journal's other male readers, could have gone out that very night and delivered quintuplets in a snowbound taxi. The Journal, it seems, was rather hoping that some of us would. "Well, thank goodness!" the letters' editor exclaimed, some months later, when Bettie J. Downing of Yerba Buena Island, California, wrote in to announce that due to the late arrival of the ambulance her husband had delivered their six-pound, nine-ounce daughter. "Thanks to the Journal, we know just what to do!" Mrs. Downing shouted from the far-off Yerba Buena shore.

For a while, I half suspected that the new trend to home deliveries by Journal-trained midhubbies was just a marriage-saving gimmick to prevent pregnant women from developing sneaky crushes on their obstetricians. But if the Trusted Physician was being de-emphasized on the natural-childbirth front, June 1961 found him in there and pitching as a specialist in artificial insemination:

" 'We have a pretty difficult question, Doctor, that we haven't been able to work out for ourselves,' Hal Ward said with a nervous laugh ...

" 'I see you have an infertility problem,' the doctor remarked, referring to the notes his secretary had handed to him. 'Dr. Fairchild has been treating you both for four years ...'

" 'Yes. We had been married three years when Ann went to him about her failure to conceive. He couldn't find anything wrong with her, so he had me come in. He made two separate examinations, said the sperm potential was only fifty to sixty percent of normal. He decided this was due to a very severe case of mumps, with complications, that I had when I was in the Army ...'

" 'Testicular mumps can do it,' the doctor said. 'At that, you are luckier than many men who have had mumps of this type, if your index is still better than fifty percent.'

" 'So Dr. Fairchild said, and he was very optimistic at first that treatment might fix me up. I've had the works, Doctor--diets, thyroid, shots, prostate treatments, male hormones, and some female hormones for good measure.'

" 'He even gave me female thyroid and female hormones, too,' Ann Ward added....'He had me keep temperature charts, and every now and then he blew air through the Fallopian tubes--he called that insufflation--to make sure they were completely open.' "

The Journal didn't explain how Dr. Fairchild went about the business of blowing air through Ann Ward's tubes, but masculine delicacy led me to assume that some sort of hand pump was used. At any rate, the Trusted Physician's particular forte was "homologous insemination"--artificial insemination "using the husband as donor."

" 'We call this homologous insemination because it is all in the family, so to speak.' " the doctor explained. " 'Undoubtedly you know that a terrific number of spermatozoa--millions, in fact--can be released at a single time....They are of course incredibly tiny. And though they appear to move very fast when you look at them under the microscope, it takes from three to four hours for the strongest and liveliest sperm to make the short trip from the cervix up into the Fallopian tubes. Most of them, countless thousands, perish on the way.' "

As in his previous descriptions of the descent of the ovum into the uterus, the doctor's story of the sperms' journey up the tubes had much of the color and drama usually associated with sagas of Westward migration, and how jazz came up the river from New Orleans. " 'Recently,' " however. " 'there have been some very helpful findings concerning the environment--"climate" we doctors call it--in the vagina,' " he went on to reveal, adding that " 'It was not a good one for the sperm....So the sperm are only too happy to make their way out of the vagina into the inviting atmosphere of the cervix.' "

By this time, I would have been only too happy to make my way out of the vagina, too, and would have welcomed a Fallopian-free sojourn in the high, dry climate of the Colorado hills. But the doctor was just hitting his stride: " 'It's even more interesting that in a normal woman there are marked changes in the quality of the secretions in the cervical canal around the time that ovulation is imminent. For example, extra carbohydrates appear on which the sperm appear to flourish....The result is that at this time of the month sperm can travel more quickly and easily, reach the Fallopian tubes in more virile condition, and live as long as three days in a woman's genital tract.' "

To me, three days was beginning to seem like no time at all. " 'That is interesting,' " Hal put in--and that was all the encouragement the doctor needed to launch into a discussion of other secretions and factors that were hostile toward a well-meaning sperm. " 'If you find there is a hostile element of some kind, can anything be done?' " one of the Wards asked.

" 'That is where homologous insemination comes in,' " the doctor replied. " 'What we do, stated in simple terms, is to insert the husband's sperm into the cervix by artificial means, partially or perhaps entirely above the harmful influences in the vagina and cervix ...'

"Mr. and Mrs. Ward exchanged excited glances. 'Won't you please do that for us?' Mrs. Ward implored."

But the doctor hardly needed imploring. If I knew my Trusted Physicians, the Wards couldn't have gotten out of that office with a loaded .45. Happily, however, the tests "revealed no evidence of antagonism between the secretions of husband and wife. The specimen Hal furnished showed only about half the usual sperm concentration, a good many extra cells, much debris and some peculiar sperm forms." But, despite this oddball assortment, the medical consensus was "that Hal could be considered fertile under favorable conditions. The doctor's examination of Ann Ward, however, disclosed one thing which escaped Dr. Fairchild's scrutiny ...

" ' There is a small erosion at the cervical opening, with a very slight infection--we call it endocervicitis,' the doctor told the Wards." " 'Then you won't use homologous insemination after all?' " we all asked in unison. " 'Indeed, we will,' " the dauntless medico retorted, " 'and during this ovulation period. We can give the sperm a lot better chance by depositing them high up in the cervical canal....If we are not successful this time, we will cauterize the erosion....We will insufflate the tubes a few days before the homologous insemination is done....Anything that makes it easier for the sperm to travel up the tubes is all to the good.' "

I agreed. But since there was nothing we male Journal readers could do to assist, I just stood around trying hard not to stare while Hal, Ann and the doctor performed three homologous inseminations with "no results." Disheartened by his failure to come up with a winning sperm count, Hal offered to resign from the team, and suggested calling in an outside donor. But the doctor wasn't ready to give up so easily. " 'That does you credit, Hal,' " he said, in a private pep talk with his number-one seeded player, " 'but let's try at least once more. This time we'll make it easier still for the sperm. We will do a more complete dilatation of the cervix when we rein-sufflate the tubes. We will watch Ann's temperature very closely. If the rise that indicates ovulation does not occur immediately after insemination, we'll inseminate again ...' "

Much as I admired the man's spirit, I began to wonder how Ann was responding to all these attentions. Did she still regard the doctor as a purely scientific middleman? Or was she, perhaps, beginning to welcome his approach with warm, soulful glances and a softly hummed chorus of You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me? Fortunately, such questions must remain forever moot. "The next insemination worked, and nine months later Mrs. Ward gave birth to a fine boy!"

During my first journey into the calamitous world of sex in the women's magazines, I had occasion to remark that there were no limits to how far the ladies' books could go, as long as they approached the subject with a medical license and a little black bag. But I never dreamed the day would come when the male sex glands would be treated with the same clinical familiarity as the female genital tract. For the record, it must be noted, moreover, that the Journal's fertility triangle featuring Hal, Ann and the doctor was but a come-lately instance of a new kind of sexual manhandling that first came to my notice in the July '59 issue of Cosmopolitan--a highly sex-laced number devoted to "Man and His Woman."

The "Case History" of the month was a detailed dossier on "Man's Personal Disease," and had as its troubled protagonist a man named Jim Rogers, who was suffering from an enlargement of the prostate gland: "For over a year Jim Rogers had been aware of decreasing sexual ability....For more than a year there had been a marked change in his urinary habits; he had frequent difficulty, sometimes a little pain. He had been making more and more pilgrimages to the men's room during the day and waking up increasingly during the night ..."

Though the story ended happily, with Jim functioning flawlessly in all departments, this pioneering probe of man's most intimate sex gland was noteworthy for at least two reasons. First, it expanded Cosmopolitan's far-reaching sexual domain to include the bathroom and the office urinal. And, second, it successfully applied the sick, sad sex approach to the problem of getting a man to drop his pants, so that a million-odd women could get a few vicarious kicks from "playing doctor":

"As far as anybody has been able to discover, the prostate gland in the human male has one primary function: to produce fluid in which sperm can live during their long journey to the Fallopian tubes....It lies at the base of the bladder....Thus its secretions--up to two cubic centimeters of fluid daily--have ready access to the urine for elimination. And during coitus, when they increase greatly, they also have a ready exit and can join with the sperm....But as the enlarging prostate begins to dam up the lower urinary passage, the bladder has to work harder to get the same amount of urine through....Massage of the prostate might give him relief for a time. But the advice of the urologist was surgery....An instrument is introduced into the penis, and passed up through the urethra. It is lined with a telescopic lens system and a light, allowing the surgeon to see what he is doing....A Baltimore physician once attributed enlargement to excessive sexual activity. But the condition is observed in Catholic priests in whom there's no question of overindulgence. A famed physician, Dr. Will Mayo, once thought it was due to ... prolonged voluntary retention of urine. But enlargement is as frequent in farmers, who don't have to hold their urine....Other doctors have noted that eunuchs never have prostate trouble ..."

Nonfarming male readers who managed to hold their water long enough to finish the article, found that castration was not being specifically recommended as a cure for prostatitis. But a description of a vasectomy, or male sterilization, on page 58 of the same issue, was as detailed as a recipe for Granny Grimshaw's old-fashioned Nut Surprise: "The two slim tubes through which spermatozoa must travel from the testicles to ejection outside the body are called the vas deferens; each is about one-eighth of an inch thick and twenty inches long, and each, conveniently, lies just below the skin of the scrotum. In a five-minute operation that can be performed under a local anesthesia ... a half-inch incision is made on each side of the scrotum, the two tubes are lifted out, a tiny section is cut off each, the ends are tied off and buried in the neighboring tissue--and the patient forsakes fatherhood for good." Voilà! and Vive le vas deferens! As easy as taking a tuck in a skirt or trussing up a turkey!

Equally simple was the female sterilization, in which the surgeon deftly ties off "and cuts out a portion of each Fallopian tube." The purpose was, of course, "the prevention of parenthood," and the beauty of both operations lay in the fact that "Sex characteristics and sex drive are not affected....Menstruation continues....Seminal fluids, minus sperms, still flow undiminished from each ejaculation ..."

Dedicated to a full, frank discussion of "Our Sterilization Scandal," the article nevertheless turned up some pretty specific information about where a hubby could be sent to have his tubes tied off with a minimum of fuss and financial strain, and treated the male sex organs with the familiarity of a hand thrust in a wide-open fly. But that wasn't all. As anyone acquainted with Cosmopolitan' s, comprehensive coverage must have already surmised, the pace-setting "Man and His Woman" issue did not neglect the techniques of natural insemination and the business of promoting an undiminished flow of conjugal ejaculations and orgasms.

In strictest adherence to the traditional "problem" approach, the month's guide to better sexual relations was presented under the heading of "Man's Greatest Blunder," and was in the classical question-and-answer form of an "exclusive interview" with the "noted authority on marital problems," Dr. Frank S. Caprio. "The American male makes the woman feel that he's overly sex-conscious," Dr. Caprio charged, "and that his love can only be expressed by his physical desire for her. The more talented lover will try to establish some sort of companionship with his woman. He makes a woman feel that he enjoys her conversation. He remarks about her hair, praises her ..."

While the doctor's point might be well taken, most men would agree, I think, that the majority of American wives are inclined to attribute a sexual motive to practically anything a man might say, from "Gee, honey, your hair looks nice tonight," to "Think I'll get the stepladder and replace that bulb in the chandelier." But one sure-fire way for a husband to avoid the appearance of being overly sex-conscious, would be to refrain from discussing the articles in her favorite magazines. Under no circumstances should a talented lover make companionable inquiries concerning the balminess or inclemency of her vaginal "climate," or praise the "quality of the secretions in the cervical canal." Neither should he seek to make chummy small talk of his urinary habits, speak boastfully of the "terrific number of spermatozoa" he can release at a single time, or try to beat up a conversation about his prostate, penis, testicles or scrotum. This may leave him with a mute choice between going out to an all-night golf driving range or having her follow him around from room to room, pleading, "Talk to me, honey, talk to me." But regardless of provocation, he should never commit the blunder of discussing sex with her as exhaustively as did Dr. Caprio.

"American marriage will achieve true happiness when our men develop technique that is midway between being shy and inhibited, and being too bold and brazen," the doctor opined--thus setting up a psychological tightrope of such indefinite height, length and fragility, that even the most sexually sure-footed of men must despair of ever getting across on the very tiptoes of devotion and desire. Helpfully, however, the doctor also advocated a more active participation on the part of American wives--sans tightropes and, presumably, sans tights. "A common complaint among many male patients of mine is that their wives have seldom taken the sexual initiative," he remarked. "... Happily, this trend is changing. Maxine Davis recently wrote a book, The Sexual Responsibility of Women, which makes a valuable contribution because she has tried to show the importance of the wife's occasionally surprising her husband and initiating the advances. This adds to the variety of the physical relationship, and makes the wife coparticipant in sex ..."

After settling the old "frequency" question with a traditional twice-a-week reply, the doctor then broke new ground by addressing himself to a problem that the women's magazines had previously handled with noncommittal kid gloves.

"Q. Could you tell us about what is normal in the sexual relationship between men and women--and what constitutes sexual deviation?

"A. A man and wife who have conventional sex relations and do not indulge in deviations can be normal. By the same token, those couples who do practice variations in technique are also normal. My experience has been that the couples who do indulge in variation are more compatible and have a better adjusted sex life than those who are too inhibited to do so. Whatever two people do, within reason, in the privacy of their bedroom can be considered normal as long as it is done by mutual consent."

Depending upon each reader's sexual sophistication, the Caprio statement could be construed as carte blanche to practice the most outré Oriental deviations, or as a mere medical permit to leave the little bedroom light on. But this, coupled with the doctor's recognition of the need for greater sexual responsibility in women, represented a significant effort to liberalize the American woman's attitudes, and reduce the impossible number of restrictions which years of "authoritative" marital advice had imposed upon the sexual deportment of the American male. Significant, too, was Morton M. Hunt's analysis of "The New Sex Problems" in an article on "Our Manly Men," on page 35 of the same sex-laden issue:

"For the past 30 years, feminists and marriage advisors have sternly forbade the male to enjoy his wife sexually without arousing her and completely fulfilling her," Mr. Hunt observed. "The impact of this campaign has led modern woman to expect a more superior performance than the average man can regularly put on. The requirement that he woo her carefully and long each time assumes the appearance of an onerous duty and a threat to manliness. I once knew a man who, warned by a doctor that he was giving his wife insufficient preparatory wooing, put a luminous clock by the bedside and faithfully tried to provide 20 minutes of arousal before obeying his own impulses. In less than half a year, he had taken up with a beer-joint doxy, with whom he was able to be riotous, selfish and crudely masculine."

Anyone familiar with the findings in the original Pious Pornographers need hardly be told that it was just such prohibitive platitudes that the women's magazines had been propagandizing for years. Curiously, the first indications of a change in editorial attitude toward these man-killing clichés had appeared in Cosmopolitan's special issue on "The American Wife," which hit the newsstands in January of 1958--a few months following Playboy's publication of my first report on the clinical concupiscence and misery-ridden erotica that passed for sex in milady's popular monthlies.

While instances of sexual happiness were still notable for their absence, the month's lead article, by T. F. James, took 19th Century Puritanism to task for insisting that "decent" women were incapable of sexual passion. "Only bad women enjoyed sex," the writer recalled. And the liberating influences of Freud and Havelock Ellis had only led to an increase in sex antagonism. "All shapes and varieties of marital anguish were laid squarely at the door of the clumsy husband. It was the man, the marriage manuals unanimously declared, who was responsible for success in sex, and equally responsible for its failure. For the enlightened readers of the manuals, making love became a kind of challenge ...

"Frequently couples spent so much time worrying about whether their technique was right, whether their climaxes occurred simultaneously as the book said they should, whether the wife really had an orgasm, that they lost all the meaning of marital intercourse, not to mention the pleasure ..."

"Pleasure" was a word that the ladies' books had seldom mentioned in connection with sex, and T. F. James' reference to it came as a welcome surprise. Even more surprising was the writer's announcement that "Doctors now feel the whole concern with orgasm has been overdone. Dr. Clark E. Vincent of the University of California, for instance, declares that the important thing is a spontaneous love relationship in which 'the two people lose themselves without any particular thought as to whether their technique is achieving results.' Psychiatrists point out that orgasm is an extremely difficult phenomenon to measure. In the popular mind it is a sort of physical and emotional explosion at the climax of the sex act. But Dr. Lena Levine says: 'The descriptions women give of an orgasm may be as different as the differences among women themselves, for each has her own sexual responses and in response to a particular man.' "

This recognition of psychosexual variables, and Dr. Vincent's advocacy of "a spontaneous love relationship," added up to a radical change in both doctoral and editorial thinking. In a Cosmopolitan article quoted in my original report, no less an authority than Dr. Frank S. Caprio had deplored the "misconception many young married people have ... that the best sex is spontaneous." "Actually, the most rewarding and consistent sexual happiness is planned," he had declared, and success "comes slowly, in the course of years, as couples learn what caresses achieve the richest response, and how to time these responses so they achieve orgasm together--a necessity for maximum fulfillment."

From advocating that young couples approach sex as though it were a kind of arduous home-study course in erotic engineering, by which the technically gifted might learn to caress their way to success, Cosmopolitan's sex specialists had openly and abruptly switched to promoting the recreational aspects of physical amour. Diligence was no longer placed ahead of desire, planning gave way to spontaneity, and sex was now a spirited folk art in which couples find fulfillment through mutual self-expression.

This new and salutary emphasis upon enthusiasm and delight was to echo in the kitchen-and-cookie-oriented pages of Good Housekeeping in 1962, and amidst the big, splashy color spreads of McCall's, in 1963. The Ladies' Home Journal made an early and valiant attempt to introduce a note of sexual uplift by launching a new series on "Sex and Religion," six months after Cosmopolitan had sounded its come-one-come-all call to sexual joy in "The American Wife." But, while the first article, by the Reverend Doctor Ruel L. Howe, was given prominent billing on the cover, the Journal's reluctance to abandon the weeping womb and go all out for the power of positive intercourse, was evidenced by the equally prominent bill-boarding of an ace-in-the-hole agony item: "I Hate being Pregnant and I Hate Sex."

However, in shifting even a portion of its sexual content from the clinical to the clerical, the Journal moved considerably closer to the side of the angels. The Reverend Doctor Howe didn't hate sex. In the process of expounding his beliefs, he never once suggested that sex was anything less than one of life's greatest blessings. Writing on "The Bible and the World of Dr. Kinsey," in October '59, Dr. William Graham Cole, then Cluett Professor of Religion at Williams College, went even further in freeing sex of some of its puritanical clichés and pious negativism: "For a variety of reasons, the Western world, under Christian influence, has all too often been inclined to view man's sexuality negatively," he wrote. "... Somehow the notion has got around that the original sin of Adam and Eve was the sexual act; and though the church may not have been guilty of positively creating such an impression, it must be confessed that little has been done to counteract or correct it....The insistence of the secular mind upon the essential goodness of sex as a fact of nature must be underlined and strengthened by a Biblically oriented viewpoint rather than attacked or refuted.

"The Bible begins with the story of creation, and creation includes the fact of sexuality. Man's bodily nature is not, according to the Bible, an occasion for regret, a prison house of sensuality from which we must seek to escape. It is perfectly clear that the Old Testament sees man as a psychophysical unity, as a creature made to enjoy the material world, including his own body....The New Testament is somewhat more confining, bringing to an end the era of polygamy, divorce and prostitution, as the Judaism of the First Century had virtually already done. But still, sex is good ..."

It was not necessary to agree with the "Sex and Religion" series on all points in order to recognize the basic health and hopefulness of the clergymen-writers' position, and to appreciate the absence of the sort of militant hypocrisy that often oozes from the pious pronouncements of morally disturbed laymen. But the Journal was apparently unwilling to allow the thoughtful reader's growing respect for clerical collars to distract from the trials and tribulation which had for so long been associated with the marriage counselor's casebook and the physician's clinical coat. While the professor of religion held forth hopefully on page 30, "bright-haired Ava, slender as a newly planted willow tree," was blurting out all the intimate little details of "The Marriage that Could Not Be Saved," on page 82: "In spite of everything, I don't hate Kenneth. In some ways, physical ways, perhaps I still love him. I miss the sexual part of our marriage. Whenever he drops by Mother's place with a basketful of fresh excuses, I telephone a friend to come and sit in on our conversation; I don't entirely trust myself not to be hugged and kissed into a reconciliation....I believe I have been more than fair to Kenneth. I offered him his choice of our furniture and he took the TV and hi-fi....All I took was an orthopedic bed--a wedding present, and the only bed I've ever slept in that is perfect for my back ..."

On page 44, old Mrs. Harrison, the Patient of the Month, burst into the office of her Trusted Physician, and exclaimed: " 'Doctor, I am sixty-eight and I have started to menstruate again! Everyone tells me I look younger, too. What is happening? Is it good or bad?' "

To hear Mrs. Harrison tell it, everything was hunky-dory. After years of aging gracefully, she had suddenly experienced all the thrilling symptoms of a return to youthfulness. " 'The first thing I noticed was a change in my breasts,' she explained. 'They would become engorged and rather painful. I marked these episodes down on my calendar, found it was happening roughly once a month. Presently my breasts began to assume a better shape and substance. Rounding out, firming up again. Getting back to the way they used to be! ...'

" 'This is certainly an interesting story, Mrs. Harrison,' " the doctor murmured for all of us. " 'Any other changes?'

" 'Oh, yes. That was just the beginning! After a while Arthur started looking at me in a puzzled way. He would say, "Ellie, you seem younger." And I did! The natural oils have been returning to my hair and skin, there are fewer wrinkles....My friends started commenting about my youthful appearance. And I feel twenty years younger!'

" 'That must be exhilarating indeed! What made you think there might be something unhealthy about this renewal of youth?'

" 'You will probably find this hard to believe, Doctor. But I started menstruating again! That seemed to be a little too much of a good thing.' "

And indeed it was. "Three days later, Mrs. Harrison was operated upon, the preoperative diagnosis being a tumor of the left ovary ..." Recuperating in a quiet column of copy, next to a coffeepot ad, Mrs. H. knowingly inquired, " 'I suppose you removed my second youth, along with my female organs?' "

" 'I'm afraid I did, Mrs. Harrison. It was a granulosa-cell tumor that caused your second youth. As you suspected, it wasn't normal or healthy ...'

"Mrs. Harrison pushed herself up higher on her pillow and said, 'Doctor, I am not going to let you leave this room until you have told me all the why and how of that weird experience I had! Surely it isn't a common one?'

" 'Well, it isn't rare. And you don't have to urge me to talk about ovarian tumors! To me, there are few things more interesting....But that is because the ovary is such a very special and fascinating organ....Among other things, it contains ...' "

But enough of such bedside pretty talk. Like all male Journal readers, I already knew much more than I needed to know about the contents of ovaries. More interesting, at the moment, was the why and wherefore of the ladies' books' new fascination with female breasts--round, firm references to which had been popping up with increasing regularity. Putting aside my notes on the many lurid matters yet to be discussed--a collection of offbeat erotica that made my notebook read like the big holiday issue of "The Sex Maniac's Newsletter"--I returned to the curious case of Evelyn Ayres and her inverted nipple:

" '... Have you been pulling it out gently several times, morning and night, the way Mary Ann showed you?'

" 'Yes, Doctor. And using the soft brush and rubbing alcohol on both nipples twice a day, just as you said to do.'

" 'I believe I told you that there is a difference of medical opinion as to the best method of toughening the nipples....But none of the approved methods is harmful, and the nipples are such an important factor for success in breast feeding that it's worth while doing what one can. I hope you have been expressing the fluid from your breasts?'

" 'Yes. I've been doing that morning and night, too.'

" 'Good! Expression of breast fluids for several weeks before delivery seems quite definitely to stimulate the milk glands and bring the milk in earlier. It's fine, too, for you to get this practice in the technique of manual expression ...'

" 'Doctor---' Evelyn hesitated, then continued impulsively, 'Please be honest with me. Am I being foolish, after all, to try to breast feed my baby?' "

The doctor looked at Evelyn in surprise, but I didn't.

Familiarity with the format of fear, distress and medical salvation that underlay the doctor's monthly sex operas, had bred in me a sense of foreboding--an uneasy premonition of mammary malfunctions to come. Having served my internship with the Trusted Physician, I knew that all the soft brushes and alcohol in the world could not toughen Evelyn's nipples enough to survive breast feeding her baby without something going catastrophically awry. No matter how practiced she might become at manual expression, the Ladies' Home Journal would still manage to squeeze a few drops of anguish from her breasts, and her boubles would soon be trig.

Before facing up to the fricker-fracker facts of Evelyn's ordeal, I flipped through the pages in search of a spiritual word of hope, a positive clerical assurance that the human body need not be an occasion for regret, and that, all things considered, sex was still good.

Unfortunately, however, the "Sex and Religion" series was missing that month. Possibly it wasn't too popular, I reflected. Perhaps the ladies had found it a bit too upbeat and wholesome to be really interesting. There was so little in it for anxiety to chew on, so little that a woman could personalize in terms of her own ovaries, temperature, heartbeat and Fallopian tubes.

But, patient reader, how wrong I was!

In making my way back to page 46 for the inside low-down on "The Man Princess Margaret Married," I came upon Dr. Clifford R. Adams' "Making Marriage Work" feature, and ran smack into a letter that threw me into an instantaneous and full-scale relapse. "My wife," some anonymously Troubled Hubby wrote from Somewhere, U. S. A., "My wife has a crush on our minister. Isn't this abnormal?"

Looking back on it now, I can see that it wasn't abnormal at all. In light of the Journal's "Sex and Religion" series, it was, in fact, all too predictable that clergymen everywhere would now become the objects of the same twittery female passions which had formerly been directed toward obstetricians!

It shouldn't have rattled me as it did. I should have been prepared for it. But reading that Troubled Hubby's letter caused something within me to buckle and snap. The old shakes and staggers returned. Magazines and notebook were shoved back under the bed, there to gather dust for three whole months ... Each morning I would open my eyes, push myself up higher on my pillow, and resolve to so toughen my inverted psyche with daily applications of alcohol, and morning and evening practice in the techniques of verbal expression, that nothing would ever throw me in the future--that I would live to write another day, and complete the final installment of this full ... frank ... revealing story of my second bout with sex in the women's magazines.

This is Part I of William Iversen's "The Pious Pornographers Revisited." The conclusion will appear next month.