Frigid Men

"Well," She Said, and when this particular woman talks, she aims her big blue eyes right at you, "if you're going to publish an article about frigid women, don't you think you probably ought to do one about frigid men? There are plenty of them out there."

And because the man she was throwing cocktail-party mumblety-peg with is the Editorial Director of this magazine, and since he is a mumblety-peg player from way back in the Bronx, where you had to be able to stick those little knives into curbstone, he said, "You're on."

When they asked me if I wanted to take a slash at the story, I had a small knee-jerk moment in which I thought, Why the hell you come around here asking me about a subject like that? But it was a small moment. Truth is, I was a pretty good candidate for the work. Nobody could have fried any eggs on the hood of my libido in the past couple of years. I wouldn't have called myself frigid. The machinery of the whole thing hadn't seized up on me or anything. I'd had that happen once or twice in my life, but there always seemed to be good reasons for it. Like the afternoon that Chicago girl got her pants down just far enough for me to read Property of the outlaws tattooed on her 23-year-old ass. Even the man with no brain recognizes the horrible promise of romping around in territory that's been posted by motorcycle hoodlums, and such failures of the flesh never bothered me much or for long. But the zone I was in wasn't a matter of machine failure. It was more a mood that resembled weather, the kind of weather that keeps you indoors: ground fog, low clouds, muggy chill and drizzle. Something between me and women had cooled sexually, and if you wanted to extend the definition of frigid into those more subtle corners--"Yes," they said, "we do"--then OK.

When I tried to round up the reasons for my cool, they amounted to a hopelessly confused rabble of maybes: my age, 41; the collapse of a second marriage a couple of years ago; alcohol; the threat of entanglement; the specter of herpes; the merciless rain of feminine anger that had been falling over the past ten years or so; the relentless scramble of trying to make a decent living in these greedy times; the notion that when I did get into bed with someone, my performance was going to be rated the way they rate divers and gymnasts and ice skaters.

It was a list that added up to no sum I could deal with, so finally I lumped all of it into a metaphor I liked: the tango, dance of love, dance of sex, where the man seems to lead, the woman seems to follow, but finally the two are so close that lead and follow are one thing, a highly stylized, sensuous agreement of bodies and spirits that is the essence of dance when it works. When it doesn't, when the will or focus is lost for even a second, it's Laurel and Hardy trying to paint out of the same bucket.

Somehow, lately, the juice had gone out of the tango for me; the steps had been lost and it had become a pathetic exercise that finally left me and my would-be partners in separate dressing rooms, bleeding and fuming and throwing our fancy shoes at our reflections in the mirrors.

I didn't seem to be alone in my frustration, either. As I looked around the dance floor, it was pretty empty out there, with the men collected against one wall, talking business and baseball, and the women collected against another, talking business and whatever else they talk about. Frigid men, for one thing.

For the most part, men don't talk with one another about particular sexual experiences. Women think they do, but they don't, except maybe for the worst of the locker-room meatheads, and they're almost always terrible liars. Women do talk about their sex lives. Oh, how they talk. Grisly play-by-play stuff. "Honey," a 29-year-old Manhattan secretary told me, "you make love to me tonight, and tomorrow I guarantee my girlfriends are gonna know every wrinkle on your thing."

That pretty much says it, and it got a nervous laugh out of me, which the lady noticed; and for the next few minutes over our lunch, I could see her trying to decide whether or not to let me in on what she knew. Women may talk with one another, but they almost never talk with men about these things, and they have their reasons. Every woman I interviewed held me in a shadow of mistrust and small talk for at least a while before the real dirt got dished. Women want to trust men, but they can't. They know we are torn up and angry over the abuse we've taken, and they worry about retaliation. Men tend to take this sort of information badly, and this guy who says he's writing about frigid men could be getting ready to jump up and blame ball-busting women for the whole mess, couldn't he? In any case, it was hard for them to believe that men and their much-vaunted egos would ever relax enough to admit their fair part in whatever had put the situation in rags.

Of course, I was telling them to be tough and honest, because nothing else is interesting. And I was promising the usual journalistic false mustaches and beards, new towns, new identities, the way the FBI does with high-level rats, so that nothing I wrote could ever come around to collect from them. Still they hesitated. Men don't want to hear these things, one of them told me. Of course they don't and of course they do, I said.

All of them talked with me finally, most of them with an I'm-gonna-hate-myself-in-the-morning moment in there somewhere. And at least two of them woke up badly hung over with worry. One of them phoned me several weeks after our conversation to say she'd heard through friends of friends that I was busy putting together a nice little hatchet job on women and that she damn well hoped that wasn't true. It's not, I told her. Another wrote me a short note saying that everything she'd said to me was off the record. I didn't answer that one, because I had bad news for her: All writers are monsters.

•

Jan DeLeon and I had a few drinks in the grand lobby bar of the Mark Hopkins in San Francisco. She had on a medium-long pleated skirt and a shiny blouse with a floppy bow at the neck. She was coming from work, a fast-lane, big-money job in which she worked and competed mostly with men. Around 30, beautiful green eyes, a delicate face that needed no makeup and that took its flash from a head of careless light-red hair. There was a practiced sort of girlishness to all of it, but she walked with a stride and talked with a confidence that said girlishness was not at the heart of her game.

The first thing she told me was that she thought Playboy had missed a chance to teach a whole generation of men how to be romantic, which seemed to her pretty much a lost art. It came down to the difference between fucking and making love, she said, and any man who understood how to be romantic could do with a small picklock what others smash windows and splinter doors trying to accomplish. David, the guy she wanted to tell me about, understood that, which was why she got so excited about their affair and also why she missed the signs--such as his Don Juan reputation--that they were headed for an arctic sort of calamity.

They met at a business cocktail party. He was 37, never married and the owner of a rich little operation that kept him on the road to the Far East a lot of the time. That night, they threw a few low sparks at each other, and a week later Jan made the move, in the guise of business entertainment. Dinner, and he had tickets to the symphony, it turned out. A great evening, perfect chemistry, pure Vivaldi, she said. He picked up the tab, then they had the two-taxis-or-one discussion. They shared one to the curb in front of her place. Shook hands. All business. But then he kissed her. "A highly personal kiss," she said. Then, after he'd watched the doorman let her in, he left.

"I was flying," she said; and even when she tells the story, she does a little flying. "He said he'd call the next day, and he did." He was on his way to Japan for three weeks, but he asked if she'd go out with him when he got home. Very romantic to ask that far in advance, she told me. He called her on his way back, from the airport in Hawaii, to confirm. "Flying," she said again.

Business didn't come up at dinner this time. They talked and flirted as if something were in their drinks. And this night, when the taxi stopped at her door, both of them got out. They started their lovemaking on her couch, clothes on, tender, nohurry stuff with lots of kissing. Then he looked at his watch. Tired from the trip, he said. She understood. They made another date, kissed good night and he left.

Jan said that by this point, the anticipation was beautifully excruciating. Everything about this guy was right. He was intelligent, good-looking, romantic, he had money and charm, a ton of charm. In fact, he was straight out of one of those romance novels that Rosemary Rogers and Danielle Steele thump out, which, Jan confessed, she read by the dozens. She called them "class trash."

On the third date, they wandered the city--Coit Tower, North Beach for some drinks, Washington Square--just holding hands, laughing at their own good luck. Finally, a cab to his place, to his couch. Soon enough, his clothes were in a heap on the living-room rug; then, one piece at a time, he put hers in the same place and then led her into his bedroom. Cold sheets, warm flesh. Then.... "Disaster," she told me. "He lost it just like that. I'm still not sure what happened. I think maybe he came early, because when I reached down to fondle him, he pushed my hand away as if he were tender. I tried to talk to him about it. No big deal, I said. He blamed (continued on page 94)Frigid Men the alcohol, but I could feel walls going up. Then he rolled over and went to sleep. I lay there thinking, OK, Jan, how are we going to handle this one? I was annoyed that he wouldn't talk about it, but I told myself to be calm. This guy was otherwise wonderful, and I really wanted it to work for us. There was no lovemaking in the morning, though. He showered and threw me a robe."

David traveled again, so their next date was two weeks later. This night, they started on the couch again, and when Jan went down on him, he came exactly as her lips touched him, and at that moment she delivered on a male fear so ancient and terrible that it isn't hard to imagine the same sound rising up from Delilah's tent and from tents and lean-tos going back before fire. She laughed.

I winced when she told me that, and she winced, too. "I know, I know," she said, shaking her head and gritting her teeth. It had been a nervous laugh, a combination of shock, frustration and disbelief.

"That's a hell of a response," David said.

"You surprised me," she said, but she was thinking, Don Juan my ass. This man has problems.

They went to bed after that, and he played with her. "It was awful," she said. "He was not slow or attentive or gentle. I mean, just zero. I pretended to be satisfied to get it done with. He immediately rolled over and went to sleep."

The next morning, Jan called her doctor. Was there something she was doing or not doing, something she could do differently? She wanted this one. "It's not your problem," the doctor told her. "It's his."

They had one more date, but the evening was doomed from the start. He was petulant and critical, and when he launched into a small sermon about how shabby it was for her to sometimes date married men, which she had admitted to him, she cracked and thought, What the fuck do I care what this guy thinks? Later, at his place, he asked her if she wanted to get undressed. She said no. "He was up like a flash, got some money and his keys, ran me downstairs and put me in a cab."

About a month later, she was having dinner at Ernie's with a client and spotted David across the room with a cover-girl beauty. When he saw Jan, he sent a brandy to her table. "I didn't touch it," she said. He stopped on his way out, sowed out some of the charm that had so attracted her in the first place and then said he hadn't called because he'd been spending all his time on business.

"Why not?" she said. "It's what you're best at."

•

Thinking that story through, I find only one character who was wrong for sure, and that's the doctor. What happened between Jan and David wasn't his problem, it was theirs. And although a lot of sexual behaviorists would tell you that the trouble here was nothing more than premature ejaculation and that it can be fixed as easily as a broken taillight, I don't think so. David was a little old for that syndrome, especially with his reputed experience, and his refusal to talk about it with Jan, or to make a second try, suggests a deeper trouble, a problem beyond the body-and-fender approach.

But what problem?

"The myth of the ever-ready male is just that--a myth," said one sex therapist I talked with, a woman who said she seemed to be seeing more and more lowdesire problems in men recently, even among the young ones who came to her. The legend of Don Juan is a cruel and confused inheritance. In fact, the idea that a man who lays down an endless chain of women is highly sexed may be exactly backward. Lack of interest may be what drives a man to pursue the aphrodisiac of variety. This therapist said also that she suspected there had always been many men out there who weren't that interested in zip-zip sex, and if their numbers are more obvious now, it may be just that men have greater license these days to admit they are not all goatlike creatures who will take a poke at anything, any time--mud if it lies in interesting contours.

In fact, male sexuality is a good deal more complicated and delicate than it's generally been given credit for being. Any number of demons wait to jump in and smother the fire, and their connection to sex isn't always obvious. As with the stockbroker I heard about in New York who was fine on the weekends but couldn't, for love nor points, get it up during the week. Or the lawyer who, when he was taken to his date's apartment after dinner, took one look at the rich furniture and art, excused himself to the bathroom, asked for a magazine on his way in, stayed 20 minutes and then left almost immediately after emerging. "Could be that her apartment made it look like she didn't need anybody," said the therapist from New York when I told her that story.

And there are worse thumpings waiting out there for a man when he actually gets into bed with a woman. We hear a lot about the vulnerability of women in a sexual relationship, the heartbreak of the second date that never comes and such. What gets talked about much less, though, is the power women have to slaughter the male ego in the sexual moment. And if the bargain between men and women is more troubled now than before, nowhere is it clearer or meaner than in the escalating performance demands that hang like spectators around today's bedposts.

May Randall and I talked in New York on her lunch hour. She's a pretty woman, a lab technician about 28 years old who was married when she was a teenager but has been single for the past seven years. She has a good smile and an ironic laugh, and although some of the things she told me that I'm going to quote make her sound like a monster, she's not. It's just that she's been badly used by bad men, and when that anger was tapped in our conversation, she made it plain that she didn't hesitate to use the little pistols and long knives that hang in the armory for all women when they're looking to get even. She talked about men who passed her around like a bottle of wine and convinced her that it was all right, and about others who were hot the first time they made out and from then on just lay back and demanded service. Then one night she went to one of those parties where they peddle sex aids like Tupperware, and she discovered vibrators, an almost religious epiphany as she tells the story. Changed everything for her, she said. Now she could take care of herself sexually if she had to, to the tune of any fantasy she liked, and she says she isn't shy about letting men know they are no longer her only sexual ticket.

"I keep my vibrator in a drawer under my bed," she told me, "and when a man comes over, I get it out and tell him, 'Here's your competition, baby, so be nice.' And if he isn't nice, or if he's been insensitive to me one too many times, I pity his butt, because there are moments when a woman can destroy a man for life. You have that power in your hands. It's not something you'd do just to do it, but I'll tell you there are some men better hope they never have an off night around me, because I'll fuck up their shit real good."

Such threats are not idle, nor do they have to be spoken. The wiring between a man's imagination and his unit is so perfectly direct that the smallest thought of failure is often the failure itself. And there's no man in the world who can compete with a couple of C-size Duracells if it comes down to that. Nor are there many who haven't suffered at least a giggle out of Delilah at some tender instant when their manhood was out there trying its hardest.

(continued on page 170)Frigid Men(continued from page 94)

All of which gives scenes like this one, described to me by the New York therapist, a certain believability. A friend of hers, she said, a man in his mid-30s, was at a cocktail party when a lovely blonde woman with whom he had hooked eyes across the room stepped over to him and said, "You want to fuck?"

"Could we talk first?" he said.

He was running the risk of being called a wimp, of course, an old term that's been dusted off for use on men who don't put on the manners of gangsters and drunken cowboys; because, more often than not, gentleness in men is taken for weakness.

"Macho was the dirty word of the Seventies," said the therapist. "Wimp is the dirty word of the Eighties."

Nor do those sexual snares lurk out there for men in their 30s and 40s only. I was browsing in a Chicago camera store not long ago when I eavesdropped on this conversation between two salesmen behind a counter. Both of them were in their early 20s.

"How's your car?" the shorter of the two asked.

"Right now, it's working intermittently," said the other. "Like my cock."

"What's the matter with your cock?"

"I don't think anything's wrong with it. I think it's booze. You sit around all night with some chick while she decides if she wants to fuck you, and by the time you get home and get her pants off, you're too drunk to do anything about it. At least, I hope it's the booze."

Chet Ford is a film editor in Los Angeles. When I asked him if he dated, he said, "Not really. I mean, I don't go looking for trouble." We both laughed. He goes out from time to time, he said, with women he meets around his job. Ford is a handsome 35, never married, but he's been in and out of several long-term affairs and many short ones in between, a course that's left him cooler sexually than he ever imagined he'd be.

"I've become very picky," he says. "It's to the point where I can tell in the first five minutes whether the lady and I are going to have anything at all for each other. It may sound cold, but there are like ten questions I sort of slide in at the beginning, and one wrong answer and that's it. I've become ruthless in my old age. None of this call-you-Friday stuff. I just tell them, 'Sorry, I don't need it.' I just broke up with a woman I'd been seeing for six months because of her sister, which sounds petty, I know, but her sister was just there all the time. I broke up with another girl because she had a bad dog, and I swear I'll never go out with a woman who has a dog again. I hate to admit it, but I think I'm maturing. I mean, you can get sex pretty much any time you want it, but for me now, it's a question of quality sex with quality women. There's a dilemma there, too, though. When it gets hot and deep, I break it off, because I know I fall hard, and when you end a relationship like that, it takes a year or a year and a half to recover. That's happened to me three times, and I'm just not ready for it again. I can't afford it."

When I asked him if he was seeing the same thing among his friends, he said absolutely yes. "It's the rat in the snake," he said. "Everything that happens to our generation is a trend."

•

A sociologist I talked with said yes, there seemed to be more sexually cool men out there lately, as far as she could tell from her surveys. Among other reasons, she said, she thought it was because men no longer had the dance on their own terms. "It used to be that a man asked for sex when he was ready. Now the initiative is no longer entirely his, and a lot of men have no idea how to deal with that."

Maybe, I thought. It's not very "male" to be out of the mood. Nowhere is it recorded that Don Juan ever pleaded headache. But the bickering over who does the asking is exactly the kind of sexual-political question that undoes the juice of the situation just by the asking. It's never seemed to me that one hot person could jump-start the sleeping passion of another, no matter which direction the spark was trying to fly.

For instance, me and a woman I met a couple of years ago, when I was living in California. She was 29, pretty, brighter than most people I know, and she made more money than I did and lived in a place nicer than mine, much nicer. But we had a lot of things in common, like words and racquetball and having nothing to do with our Saturday nights. We were out together in groups six or seven times; we talked on the phone often--a careful, coy sort of circling. She didn't date much, she said, and complained about all the frigid men out there. In fact, she said she'd rather stay home and read romance novels than go out with the jerks who seemed to be available.

The night we found our way to her couch, we started at opposite ends. Tense stuff. Twenty minutes later, we were still pretty much jammed in our own corners, and I would have given up on the whole thing except there was sex in the air. Thin, taut ribbons, perhaps, but sex nonetheless. So I decided to do the work, take the chances. I got up and made myself a drink and sat down again so that we were touching. Just barely. A little later, I kissed her, lightly, and hugged her a little. She was stiff, skittish. Drum up a little heat here, I thought. It might be catching. So I put a little hunger into the next pass. Still, nothing but that visceral sort of fear was coming back. I let go, sat straight again and looked out the window.

"This is crazy," I said out loud. And I thought, You can't make a tango out of a minuet singlehandedly, buster. Let it go.

"It's just that I like you too much to think of you as a one-night stand," she said. Then she said the irony of it was that she and her girlfriends used that line all the time on men they didn't want but that she meant it this time.

That was it for me. Whatever embers I was trying to provoke in myself went to ash. She was warning me: Sex equals commitment; get out of town while you still have time. We were nice to each other about the whole failed episode, perhaps because it seemed to be mutual--I brought the champagne, she brought the roses--but I left that night promising myself I'd never make a move on a woman again until the spoken or unspoken heat of the situation burst the rug between us into flames. It's a promise I've broken since, and I was always sorry when I did.

•

If the Don Juan myth ever does die, or even wither, it's likely to be a long, slow decline. Men believe in it too strongly, have been watching their heroes ride through that script for so long, that they can't help defining their deepest selves and their relationships with women by it. And maybe the best synopsis of it I've heard for a long time came from a famous commentator on American sexuality, a man who spent ten years researching the subject and then wrote a large book on it.

The first thing he told me was that he didn't have much sympathy for any premise that suggested there might be more frigid men now than a decade ago. "There have been men forever who don't care much about sex--they buy Playboy and read the Interview--but they're exceptions," he told me. Then he said he didn't want to talk about what had changed over the past ten years between men and women, that he could better describe the sexual state of things by summarizing what hadn't changed at all.

"Men want--need--sexual variety," he said. "Women want romance. I'll tell you what happens every night of every year in all the capitals of the world from Washington to Caracas and in all the towns between: Men are home masturbating to pictures. Women are home reading romance novels."

When he said that, it reminded me of a conversation I'd had with a very bright, very successful Chicago woman, a serious and talented athlete and, like Jan DeLeon, a romance-novel junkie. I was trying to find out what attracted her to that whole genre, and when we got around to Gone with the Wind, she said something that convinced me that her love for those books was purely emotional and had absolutely nothing to do with intellect. "I know without a doubt," she told me, "that Rhett Butler came back."

I'd never thought about it, but I wondered at that moment if the difference between men and women could really be reduced to something that simple, that dumb. Does every woman in America believe that Rhett showed up back on Scarlett's porch with his big white hat in his hands to say he was sorry for the strong language and that he'd like another chance?

And does every man believe that what he did was go on downtown and get a hot little delta tart and have him an evening?

"I'll tell you what else hasn't changed," said the writer. "Women are selling; men are buying. Men have to pay for sex every time they get it, maybe with flowers or charm or a job on a picture or whatever. But they are buying."

"Seems to me the price has gone up," I said.

"Well," he said, "inflation affects everything. Still, men will pay anything, risk anything for sex. In fact, there ought to be a Congressional medal of honor for the risks men take to get laid."

•

John Simms and I took a walk out onto one of the docks that overlook the harbor at San Pedro. He has a workshop tucked in among the cargo sheds, where he builds fine wooden boats one at a time. I hadn't come to talk with him about this story in particular; more just to say hello. He's a quiet, decent man in his early 30s, Marlboro handsome, and he's working hard to keep a second marriage together. He asked what I was doing, and when I said frigid men, I didn't have to go on much about what I meant.

I started to, but before I got very far with the explanation, he said, "I'll tell you something. Your dick doesn't lie. Pain, fear, anger, resentment, all of them will suck you right up. Those times before when you maybe weren't up for it psychologically but you went ahead anyway--well, now you just figure, Why the hell bother to perform? I think it's just part of figuring out what you want out of your relationships. What's important. And if your dick doesn't want to, you have to trust it. It's not good or bad. It's just the way it is."

"'I pity his butt, because there are moments when a woman can destroy a man for life.'"

"It's never seemed to me that one hot person could jump-start the sleeping passion of another."