The Pious Pornographers

For Years I have been bumbling along in the naïve belief that the women's magazines were devoted solely to such matters as how to chintz up the living room and get a cake to rise. But it seems I was wrong--the most worrisome problem facing milady's monthly gazettes is how to muss up the marriage bed and keep one's mate aroused.

This belated discovery was as accidental as it was painful, and resulted from my having bitten down on a stray piece of shell in the lobster Newburg, cracking the filling out of my favorite molar. My face throbbed (continued on page 330)Pious Pornographers(continued from page 102) like an empty oil drum in a West Indian steel band, and I sat up all night drawing what comfort I could from a beaker of lukewarm bourbon.

Sometime between midnight and dawn, I went out to the kitchen to renew the prescription and found a pile of ladies' magazines stashed away in a bottom cabinet--things that my cleaning woman had apparently salvaged from the dumb-waiter to help while away the siesta hours she spends at my apartment each week.

In my lonely agony, I leafed through an old Redbook on the off chance that I might find a recipe for newburg that didn't call for little pieces of sea shell, but there wasn't a recipe in the book. There was a piece on Jackie Gleason and a picture essay on The Doctors Who Fell in Love, but the one that made me lean against the Kelvinator and start reading was My Husband Avoids Making Love to Me, a Young Wife's Story, as told to Michael Drury.

"The problem in my marriage is that my husband doesn't make love to me as often as I would like," the Young Wife began, and went on to explain that she had been married for four years to an accountant named Ken, who was always bringing work home from the office: "I've cried out my need on his shoulder," she moaned, "but he only listens and pats me and does nothing. It's humiliating. Once I got so angry that I threw a hairbrush across the room at him."

I felt like throwing a hairbrush at him, too. How Ken could sit fiddling with his debits and credits while June was pawing the nap off the broadloom, I'll never know. She was only asking for a few minutes of his time--no longer than it takes the average accountant to make a simple cross entry.

"One night I said quite early in the evening that I thought I'd go to bed," she confided. "The truth was that I was exceptionally tired, but he must have taken this as a seductive hint on my part, because about nine o'clock he went down in the basement and began painting the summer furniture."

Picking up a Ladies' Home Journal, I found that it devoted a regular feature to matrimonial rescue work, with a special disaster squad headed by Paul Popenoe, Sc.D. "My Husband Wanted Me and the Other Woman, Too. He Needed Us Both," the cover announced in a coast-to-coast whisper. "Can This Marriage Be Saved?" And on page 69 there was an action photo of hubby and the Other Woman locked in a stand-up embrace, while wifey peeked in at the door. "On Thanksgiving I walked into the kitchen unexpectedly. Paul and Florence were in each other's arms," the caption said in horrified italics.

I began to realize that sex wasn't exactly taboo in the ladies' magazines. In fact, they almost seemed to welcome it. To fill the reader in on a marriage headed for in-law trouble, for instance, another young wife felt obliged to lay bare the secrets of her wedding day to the whole April Journal audience: "My bridal gown was ordered from New York ... we had a caterer, and so on. My mother and I planned every detail--and I mean every detail--with infinite care. But just before we left for the church, I suddenly began to menstruate. Sheer nervousness was responsible." And, when his turn came, the lucky groom grumbled: "Susan probably told you about our honeymoon, but maybe she didn't mention that I spent a good part of our first year sleeping on the living-room sofa. Susan was terrified by the physical side of love. Whenever I would approach her, she was likely to become upset or to be so terribly tense that often the result was a nervous illness of some kind. For at least six months, outbreaks of hives kept her miserable."

Looking into the May Journal, I soon discovered that Susan wasn't the only woman who could take sex or leave it alone. In his monthly Making Marriage Work feature, Clifford R. Adams, Ph.D., quoted a couple of wives who would just as soon paint the porch chairs. "I couldn't ask for a better husband, but I don't like him when we have sex," one confessed. "Occasionally, I can tolerate it, and a few times I've almost enjoyed it, but usually it sickens me. I don't know how I can take it when he's home all the time."

Perhaps in the interest of restoring editorial balance, a money-problem case on page 91 was illustrated by a shot of a bathrobed brunette leaning over a bed, tugging at her husband's shoulder. "Long ago I lost any physical appeal I ever had for Ted," she explained in the caption. "It has been months since he has shared my bed. Once, although I hated myself for being so unfeminine, I stopped beside his bed. He pretended to be asleep."

To help stem this rising tide of incompatability, which threatened to swamp the entire issue, the Journal called in Dr. Abraham Stone, of marriage-manual fame, to tell Joan Younger What Wives Don't Know About Sex.

After establishing the need for sex education, and the necessity for modern woman to shed her acquired inhibitions if she ever hoped to know the "joy of sex union," Dr. Stone and Miss Younger began to close in on the subject with a series of questions that read like an entrance exam at Honeymoon Tech.

"Q. What are the chief differences between a woman's and a man's sexual reactions?"

Humming a snatch of Hello, Young Lovers. I skipped to the next.

"Q. There is so much talk about the 'cold woman' today. Is frigidity in women really so common?

"A. Well, there are different categories of frigidity. There are some women who have no sex desire at all. They have no sexual appetite and no pleasure from the sex relation. They are entirely indifferent to sex and submit to their husbands merely as a duty. Such instances of complete frigidity are comparatively rare. Lesser degrees of sexual coldness are, however, more frequent. These women may become sexually aroused now and then, but the intensity of their desire is on a minor scale. Their coldness may be due to the psychological inhibitions we have already spoken about, to physiological deficiencies, or, more often, to Continued on Page 126."

I leafed through to page 126 and continued reading: "They sat down on a love seat that had been pushed into a corner. They began to talk. Sally forgot where she was. She was vaguely conscious of dim figures moving thickly in the background, and...."

I was vaguely conscious that I had somehow wandered into the wrong column of print. Sure enough, it was a short story called You Must Meet Noel. But even here love came in for a clinical treatment. Besides having a mobile nose and being "vaguely conscious of dim figures moving thickly in the background," Sally found that Noel's voice "gave her a queerly soft, clogged feeling in her chest."

As the story rode on to its inevitable clinch ending, with the sweet threat of nuptials in the offing, I wondered how Sally and Noel would make out in their marital relations. Would she break out in hives every time Noel approached her with "the touch, the caress, the kiss" and other "preliminary loveplay," or would she want "to continue the affectionate intimacies and caresses" to the point where Noel would end up forming a small combo to play engagements at Birdland?

Personally, I'd had all the sex I wanted for one night--but not quite enough to fill out an issue of the Ladies' Home Journal. There was still Tell Me Doctor, a monthly mail-order dispensary conducted by Dr. Henry B. Safford under a shingle that featured a snapshot of a Troubled Woman facing a Trusted Physician in his office. Her head was lowered as she pinched the bridge of her nose in distress. His brow was furrowed, and his right hand half extended, as though he were either trying to make a difficult point or collect an old bill. "Every month I have a good deal of pain," the Troubled Woman was quoted as saying. "Could that possibly have anything to do with my being unable to have a baby?"

" 'I wonder if you know,' the doctor began, 'that the uterus, or womb, is an organ about three inches long, composed of smooth muscle fibers and suspended by several sets of ligaments within the cavity of the pelvis. It is shaped like a small, inverted pear, the lower third being called the cervix, or neck, and the more prominent part the body.'

" 'I learned that in freshman hygiene,' remarked the young woman.

" 'Excellent! What may not have been emphasized is the fact that this "pear" is not perfectly symmetrical. Even in the normal state it always has a slight forward bend.'

" 'Why is this, Doctor?'

" 'I can't answer that. It is simply an anatomical fact and it seems to work out pretty well in the scheme of reproduction....' "

The upshot of it all was that "in a normally placed uterus, the cervix lies in contact with the seminal pool after a normal intercourse," whereas in this young lady's case it didn't. "Your uterus is acutely bent forward--so that it lies practically in the shape of a letter U on its side," the doctor told her. "In scientific terms, you have what is called acute uterine anteflexion."

As the rosy dawn came to kiss the kitchen window, I found myself wondering how long this sort of thing had been going on. Certainly no one could quarrel with the idea of trying to improve the nation's sexual relations, but with so much emphasis on malfunction and misery, the general effect struck me as being a trifle morbid. In not one of the back issues could I find a single case of sexual contentment or a cervix with a smile. Could it have been because there weren't any to be found? Or was it because testimonials to sexual happiness were considered indecent--possibly even lewd?

By approaching the subject with a medical license and a little black bag, there were clearly no limits to how far the ladies' books could go, and there seemed to be a strange double standard by which such "frankness" was judged. Consider, for example, what the reaction might be if a popular men's magazine were to publish the following dialog:

"I wonder if you know that the penis, or male member, is an elastic, extensible organ of variable length composed almost entirely of cavernous tissue capable of becoming turgid and hardening into a state of bonelike erection. In repose, it is shaped somewhat like a pendulant banana, the fore part of which is called the glans."

"I learned that in freshman hygiene," remarked the young man.

"Excellent! What may not have been emphasized is the fact that this 'banana' does not hang perfectly straight. Even in the normal state it always has a tendency to dangle a little to the left or to the right."

"Why is this, Doctor?"

"I can't answer that. It is simply an anatomical fact and it seems to work out pretty well in the scheme of reproduction. Your member, however, is not only off plumb but has an acute right hook--so that it hangs in the shape of an inverted question mark," the doctor explained, drawing a large, limp ? in the air. "In scientific terms, you have what is called acute interrogatory anteflexion."

Woozy, by this time, from the high-octane combination of anteflexion and bourbon, I bundled the whole stack back on the dumb-waiter and toddled off to bed, making certain to set the alarm so as not to miss my dental appointment on the morrow.

•

The dentist's waiting room was crowded the following morning. I squeezed in on the sofa between a teenaged girl and a white-haired grandmother type, both of whom were engrossed in magazines selected from the smorgasbord on the office table. The old girl was up to her pearl earrings in What Kinsey Is Doing Now, in the May Redbook, and the girl to my right was browsing through the Special Beautiful Women Issue of Cosmopolitan. Having flipped through Have a New Figure by Summer, which was illustrated with four-color shots of a nude with, apparently, no nipples, drying her face and knees, she turned back to the front of the book and settled down to read Sexual Problems of Beautiful Women--possibly against the day when the dentist would remove the braces from her teeth.

Now that I was hip to the sick, sad sex kick of the ladies' magazines, I bypassed National Geographic and reached for the current Ladies' Home Journal. A young June bride gazed hopefully from the pink-and-blue cover. Her veil and gown were as chaste and white as the bouquet she clutched to her fragile bosom. A touching and uplifting sight, one calculated to soften the heart of the sourest cynic and fill him with a warm glow of optimism and Positive Thinking. Imagine the letdown I experienced, then, upon opening the issue at random to page 109 and being bluntly asked, Can This Marriage Be Saved?

" 'Now my second marriage is on the rocks,' 31-year-old Ivy said in a flat, dulled voice. A handsome, big-boned woman, she sat hunched in an attitude of weary despair."

And in the lower right-hand corner was a fast-lens photo of Ivy hurling a cup of coffee in her husband's face. "Kip suspected Ivy's carelessness with the hot coffee might not have been entirely accidental," the caption said. "The night before, Ivy had put her arms around him and he had rebuffed her. He had become unable to respond to her sexually."

And there we were, back on that again. The dentist's nurse beckoned for me to come climb up into the high chair, and I put the magazine aside, resolving to continue my studies if I managed to come out alive.

Riding home on the Novocain, I picked, up a copy of the June Redbook, understandably attracted by the question on the cover: "Can you Trust your Dentist?" But before I knew it, I was over my clavicle in a description of The Man No Woman Can Resist, by Laura Stewart.

"I'm happily married. I'm expecting a baby. Yet I have fallen in love with a man who is not my husband.

"I'm in love with my obstetrician!"

That just about did it, as far as I was concerned. But when the July Redbook came out with The Tragedy of a Young Girl, I wished I was back in June with Mrs. Stewart.

Here again love and pregnancy had a bizarre medical twist. Only Jackie Smith wasn't married and never got to see an obstetrician. She died as the result of a bungled abortion performed by a hospital orderly in her lover's apartment, and her dissected body was disposed of piece by piece in Manhattan's trash baskets.

•

It was in April that I came across an ad for the Ladies' Home Journal on the back page of the morning paper.

"Where in the world is your wife this morning?" the heading inquired. "You probably think you are 'getting out into the world' this morning. Your wife, on the other hand, is home in a walled-in world completely bounded by the kitchen range and the sink ... but is she?

"If she is like the millions of women who will buy and read the April Ladies' Home Journal, you might be surprised to find her with Dorothy Thompson in Iran ... in Long Beach, California, with a How America Lives family ... trying on a flowered hat with fashion editor Wilhela Cushman ... in Fort Worth, Texas, with a gaggle of multimultimillionaires ... mentally sampling some recipes from China ... or in Samoa with Margaret Mead."

Since I had already read the April Journal, it was with a "queerly soft, clogged feeling" in my chest that I realized she could also be mentally sampling the emotions of a young wife named Carolyn, as she "gave in" after being "terrifically stimulated" by a home wrecker named Jay, on page 54; or she could be off on the trail of a gaggle of perverts and child molesters in a story on sex offenders by Margaret Hickey.

"Maybe your own world seems a little cloistered by comparison," the ad cooed impishly.

To which I could only reply, "It sure as hell does, sister. The biggest, baddest influence in my world is a pinup picture in a certain men's magazine. They call it the Playmate of the Month!"

"I began to realize that sex wasn't exactly taboo in the ladies' magazines. In fact, they welcomed it."