The Shame-Free Natural History of Making Out

The Rules of the game during my youth were rigidly laid out. You invited a girl out three to five days in advance for a Friday- or Saturday-night date. You took her to a movie or a dance and then for a burger. On the third date, you tried to kiss her good night. If she let you, on successive dates, you necked with her in some semiprivate place, such as your dad's Chevy, before dropping her off at home. You began with French kissing, proceeded to general outside-the-clothes body fondling and, if you could manage to distract her attention long enough while trying to get her hot, on about the 17th date, you went for bare tit. Once you got bare tit (second base or "bare second"), you could try for third. If the girl was not "fast," that might occur around date number 34. From there on into home plate, it was largely a matter of how skillfully you could manage the mechanics of clothing removal and actual entry while coping with a gigantic steering wheel, a gearshift, passing motorists, inquisitive pedestrians, occasional tricky underwear, such as corsets or (God forbid!) panty girdles, without calling attention to the fact that you were actually aware of what you were about to get away with. As long as you could allow the girl to pretend that she was merely being swept along on a tide of passion rather than making a conscious decision to permit sex, the responsibility for what was happening wasn't felt to be on her shoulders. Once you permitted it to shift to her shoulders--and that generally happened long before you got to third base--there was only one thing you could do: attempt to convince her verbally of the logic, the naturalness, the healthiness, the goodness, the rightness and even the beauty of letting you shove your schlong between her legs. I became a master in my time of this type of verbal intercourse. I started using the technique long before it was necessary or advisable in the process of seduction and continued using it long past the point of diminishing returns--often losing the opportunity to score in the process. I began babbling about respecting her afterward when we'd barely kissed and continued chanting the litany of precoital rites well into bed--occasionally into the very act of intercourse itself. If the bodies of all of us overly verbal, ambivalent, guilt-ridden urban middle-class youths had been wired for sound and plugged into a P.A. system, the streets of our cities would have reverberated with thunderous choruses of: "Just let me sleep all night with my arms around you and I promise I won't touch you!" and "Just let me touch you there and I promise I won't go any further unless you want me to!" and "Just let me put the tip in and I promise I won't go in all the way unless you ask me to!" and "Just let me put it in all the way and I swear to you I won't come unless you beg me to!" We were nervous, sweaty and horny. We hungered for sex, yearned for it, had wet dreams about it. We plotted make-out strategy with our buddies, endlessly analyzing everything our intended had said or done after each encounter for evidence that we were succeeding or failing in our quest. When we struck out, we were crushed, beaten and reduced to a bloody pulp. When we succeeded, it was with a whimper of relief, gratitude and outrageous joy and, even if it was with a "fast" girl, we imagined that we were in love. In the late Fifties, we lay on car seats and our dates' living-room floors and made out to records that seemed to typify dating in that period: the Kingston Trio, the Four Freshmen, the Four Aces, Frank Sinatra; Dave Brubeck with Paul Desmond's saxophone doodling lazy curlicues around the melody lines; Jackie Gleason's Music for Lovers Only and Music to Make You Misty, with Bobby Hackett's faraway trumpet blurring all the old standards into sleepy sound-alike versions of Our Love Is Here to Stay. It was a much more innocent time. It was before the advent of herpes, AIDS, ticking biological clocks and the transmutation of premarital assets into the marriage community. What you worried about back then was whether your breath smelled good enough to risk kissing her, what to do when the arm you had around her shoulders in the theater went numb and froze, how to buy a condom without setting off a clanging alarm in the drugstore and whether the breasts you'd been furtively fondling through her cashmere sweater for the past hour might somehow prove to be falsies and reveal you as the schmuck of the century for not having been able to tell the difference. Although I lost my cherry at the advanced age of 23 and got married five minutes before the start of the sexual revolution, I eventually got divorced, and this magazine sent me on a number of assignments to write about orgies and sex clubs. Soon I'd made up for all the time I'd squandered on verbal seductions on the seat of Dad's Chevy. "Isn't it amazing how fast you can get to know someone really well by having sex with her upon meeting her?" I was fond of saying during that period. In time, I tired of orgies and sex clubs. I met a tasty young woman, dated her for a few years, married her and had a child with her. I'm glad I went to orgies and sex clubs, and I'm glad I evolved to other things. And I realize now, contrary to what I said at the time, that having sex with someone upon meeting her, far from causing you to know her well immediately, was false intimacy; it practically ensured that you didn't get to know her at all. For all its frustrations, making out caused you to get to know your partner well. It was also exciting and fun and, at times, achingly beautiful. I miss it.