Sentence Auditions

Ideas and Curiosities

Category: Sexuality

April 11, 2013

Touch Me, Feel Me

Women at Adolf Koch’s socialist body culture school, which drew on Reich’s ideas.

Disclaimer: I was surprised by the scattered, incomplete, and sometimes conflicting information I found about Wilhelm Reich online. Take everything here with a grain of salt.

Ted Kaptchuk, the guy studying placebos at Harvard, told his placebo-giving doctors to spend a little extra time with their patients. Give them a rub on the back, the grandfatherly type, while pausing for twenty-seconds of visible introspection, during which the patient may assume that you are pondering how best to proceed with his case. Brushing all of the details aside, those few extra gestures worked; the patients who received them fared better.

That a soft touch might make the patient and practitioner relationship more fruitful has never seemed an odd idea to me. Touch lends itself to trust, for one thing, and it can trigger a subtle wave of pleasure generally lacking from the doctor’s office. The trusting, relaxed patient will be more likely to disclose full information to their doctor, I imagine, and they’d be more responsive to their doctor’s care.

The last time someone touched me therapeutically, I was twenty-three. He was older, let’s say thirty, a reedy guy studying psychoanalysis. His blue eyes matched the blue veins showing through his pale skin, even though it was August and even I, usually pasty to the point of fluorescence, had a tan. We met in a Turkish coffee shop, him reading some book by Wilhelm Reich, who I’d never heard of at the time, and me probably re-reading Gravity’s Rainbow. His eyes caught my attention, then his book, so I started a conversation with him and asked him for a date. “Sure,” he said, suggesting we meet at nine in the morning a few days later at another coffee shop.

It was a tough date to make, but I didn’t have anything else to do. In a week I would be driving out of Boston for a month long camping trip, and from there I’d planned to settle in Baltimore. I hadn’t worked the whole summer, and had spent most of my free time sleeping in, getting stoned, and going out late. It was a dreamy few months for me, one ever content being lazy, but I knew that once it ended I’d probably have to resume waking up early like the rest of the world.

I figured the early date would be a practice run for future early wake-ups, and when the morning came I dragged myself out of bed and to the coffee shop my new friend had suggested. The Turkish place where we’d met was lined with windows on all sides. You sat on soft, tasseled pillows covering wicker seats, and your drinks came in tiny cast iron kettles. It was easy to lose hours sitting there indulging in romantic feelings, imagining intimate meetings with exciting strangers. But we didn’t meet there for our date. Instead, he suggested we go to the kind of place you stay in only because you don’t want your coffee to get cold while you wait for the bus. The shop was annexed to a dingy co-op supermarket, a hold out from Cambridge’s sixties glory days, I guess. There were no windows in the cafe except for a few facing the street, and the walls were a moldy tangerine. Not that anything would feel romantic at such an hour, but this place wasn’t even trying.

The guy came into the coffee place a little after me in a rumpled button up and jeans that hung too loose and short. I gave him the nonchalant, half-attentive smile I was sporting at the time and waited for him to finish the elaborate preparation he favored for his coffee before he sat down. There was a moment of silence at first, but then somehow while finishing our coffee we managed a conversation, one that revolved mostly around him. “I’m studying at the school of psychoanalysis downtown,” he told me. “It’s, um, the only accredited one in the country.” Whatever had been missing in his life—connection to other people, relaxation, pleasure—he found it in psychoanalysis. In particular, he told me, he was interested in physical psychotherapy, sometimes called vegetotherapy. It healed him, helped him get closer to what he couldn’t normally reach inside himself. Psychoanalysis lead him to revelations he would have never had otherwise.

He must have thought I was a monster, because I dismissed his beloved psychoanalysis pretty flippantly. I’ll admit to being an especially unbearable know-it-all that summer. A summer’s worth of acid had cleared up any neuroses I had, and there was no lack of sex in my life. Whatever loop you’re stuck in, acid seems to cut through it and lay it flat for you to examine. It’s easier to toss out your troubles that way. Maybe some people needed ritualistic healing, medicinal touch, or talk therapy to work through that process, but not me, I congratulated myself.  As I sipped my coffee, I looked at him straight through the halo of old mascara rimming my eyes and said that all of his studies and therapy seemed like a waste of time to me. Why sit through all of that talking when the right drug could give you the same revelatory experiences in just minutes?

That’s how we ended up walking back to his bedroom. He promised it wouldn’t be sexual, but strictly professional. Most of all, he promised that I’d begin to see that psychoanalysis works. If I had known more about his hero, Wilhelm Reich, at the time, I might not have believed that. Reich, an outspoken and controversial figure during his life, is best known for his orgone concept. Stemming from the root “org” (impulse, excitement, as in orgasm), orgone describes a universal life force linking libido and orgasms. Reich was obsessed with the libido and the forces that blocked it. Mental illness and neuroses, he theorized, arose from one’s inability to experience full, orgasmic release, and society would benefit if people came more often. These ideas weren’t so popular in the early twenties and thirties, and controversy chased Reich from one European country to another, eventually driving him to the United States.

As it was, my hapless date only explained that, as a new student of Reich-informed psychoanalysis he needed more patients for practicing his favored methods. He explained this to me as we walked up to his bedroom, a closet sized space with just a few feet left over between the bed and his desk. There he rolled a yoga mat onto the floor and told me to lie down. Part of what made Reich so controversial was his insistence that patients strip down during therapy sessions. That made it easy for him to press upon the body armor gathered across their body, until their tension released and allowed emotions pent up in the body to flow. He called this Vegetotherapy.

“When I touch you, relax,” my once-date-now-therapist said. “Relax more. You’re not relaxing enough—put your weight on me.” He was trying to break through my body armor. Though there are different strains of body psychotherapy, of which Vegetotherapy is one, most call for practitioners to press upon the areas where body armor develops. Reich taught that the armor forms when sex-negative teachings run at odds with one’s libido. After this armor breaks, patients should feel more comfortable expressing and pursuing their libidinal urges. Therapy might break through this armor, and so could an orgone accumulator. The latter was invented by Reich in 1940. The original orgone accumulator was a wardrobe-like structure intended to collect orgone from the atmosphere. It was made of layers of organic materials to absorb orgone and metallic ones that concentrated energy at the box’s center. Sitting in this high-orgone environment, Reich claimed, could have beneficial health effects. Orgone did not just have human effects. According to Reich, it could be harvested via his Cloudbuster device and used to control rainfall and clouds. Of course, there is no proof that either of these orgone-harvesting devices do what they claim to do, nor is there proof of the existence of orgone at all. Reich wasn’t very scientific in his study of the force and its potential powers. Even so, he did have enough of a following to catch the FDA’s attention. In 1954, they banned him from touting the medical importance of orgone, and outlawed the sale of orgone devices. Soon after, Reich was imprisoned for continuing to traffic in such contraband. He died in prison of heart failure at age 60.

It was hard to relax with a stranger sitting right above my head, positioned with his fingers pushing hard against the area just outside of my temples. A couple of times he switched positions, moving his fingers behind my shoulders and then to the rounds of my calves. “Relax on to me,” he said over and over, never sounding satisfied with my physical response. The way he explained it to me, if I could feel comfortable laying all my weight upon him in such a way that we were touching as closely as possible, that would open up a deep channel for conversation between us. He never mentioned any of Reich’s terms like body armor or orgone, and without those pseudoscience terms muddying things up, what he was saying made sense. How could a patient relate effectively to a therapist sitting across the room with a notebook in hand? What an artificial, alienating way to heal someone it seems, when you put it that way. But there is still a disconnect with vegetotherapy. His touch had been intellectually stimulating, but hadn’t triggered any emotional or physical release for me. Having always considered myself a little too easily excited, I was surprised to find that this new way of touching left me feeling not remotely aroused. There was nothing akin to an empathetic doctor’s pat upon your shoulder here; it was only a mechanical prodding, a choreographed routine that made one feel more like a test subject than a patient. No one actually intimate with each other would touch like this, and I never felt any rush of liberated orgone coursing from broken body armor.

After a few minutes, he moved away from me and curled up on the bed next to where I continued lying down. “So tell me about yourself. What do you worry about? What stresses you?” But the whole experience had left me so disoriented, I couldn’t think of anything that I felt comfortable telling him. If orgone existed, and if it had ever caused any blockages in me, then my summer had already shaken it loose. “I’m fine,” I said, “Really fine.”

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September 4, 2012

Layers Upon Each Other

Ingmar Bergman's Persona

Persona‘s women fall into each other, like fingers interlaced, so similar that one cannot distinguish herself from the other. The two share fair hair, soft features, light skin, a resemblance emphasized by a veil of black and white film. Liz Ullman’s Elisabet Vogler, emphasis on her plump, expectant features, is silent. Alma, nurse to the now-silent actress Elisabet, chats incessantly while the two stay alone together in a beachfront home. The home belongs to Elisabet’s doctor, a stern chain-smoker, who hopes that her employee Alma will convince Elisabet to speak again. Before long, it is clear that Alma has become more of a patient than Elisabet is. After a career of tending to other’s needs, she is relieved to use Elisabet as her psychoanalytic outlet. In a thick night of never-empty drinks, Alma, who once claimed total fidelity to her fiance, admits to an orgy with strangers, a woman and two young men. Perhaps Alma hopes that her sincere confessions will shake Elisabet into speech. Her inebriation, however, implies another motive. How light it feels to talk, how good, when one’s audience is sure not to judge verbally. As Alma shares her story, curled in an armchair with Elisabet lounging across the room, she fidgets and demurs. She adopts flirtatious mannerisms shared by sheepish girls talking about their first kiss at a slumber party. Recalling the story brings back old arousal for Alma, and her eyes search Elisabet’s for sympathy, understanding, or any of the other emotions for which we wait after telling a story exhibiting us at our most primal. There is no absolution for Alma the confessor, however, not from Elisabet. She grants no validation of Alma’s lust-driven spontaneity. The women lurch toward real intimacy but never achieve it, in spite of their isolation together, and Elisabet only smirks when Alma tacitly begs for some sort of appreciation for her outpouring of honesty. Now Elisabet, having played so many roles on stage and at home, is the audience as Alma expresses the doubt and self-consciousness putting her in tension with the wholesome nurse persona she usually performs.

Elisabet denies Alma a critical element of communication. For all of the talking Alma does, Elisabet never reacts to what her nurse says. While Alma felt relieved to finally burst free with all of her sins, she did not feel any better afterward. She perhaps expected Elisabet to be compelled by such soul-baring to speak, to tell her nurse “You are OK. You are not a bad person. That must have been hard for you.” Instead, mute Elisabet smirks knowingly, as though her nurse’s tawdry but banal story does not surprise her at all.

No one else witnesses their unidirectional communications, save the viewers of Bergman’s’ film. Elisabet’s mute lips and constant smirk create conditions approaching solitary confinement for Alma. Delusions dance across days of living death for the frail-minded nurse. How can you confirm what you experience is true without any communication, tacit or explicit, of it being so? Consider when Alma hears Elisabet say “You ought to go to bed, or you’ll fall asleep at the table.” Elisabet denies speaking, but we viewers and Alma heard her do so. Alma feels a whisper of madness, remembering the physical and mental reality of Elisabet’s brief words but having no way to ascertain whether they occurred. Elisabet has an incredibly amount of control over Alma, in this regard, and it would be easy for her to engineer further breakdowns for her nurse. As the only two characters with whom we viewers are intimate blend together, it becomes even harder to tell what is true and what comes from paranoia and our scrambling toward logical consistency. We become as mad as Alma, as pliable in the hands of Elisabet as the lost nurse is.

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August 2, 2012

Going Bald

When it appears, pubic hair causes a scene. It is so rare in American media, that when seen in advertising or television, reactions flare. An unshaved porn star, whose explicit acts receive no criticism normally, will trigger spasms of disgust and praise across the internet for days.

Last fall, Roger Friedland, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, wrote a demurely titled essay “disappearance” about pubic hair’s absence from American women’s bodies. Friedland writes as one who spent his youth curating women as one would wine. Such men believe they do a courtesy to compare the appreciation of women to the rarefied art of the sommelier. Italian men hold this attitude, he writes, and “[f]or Italian men the smell of a vagina is something earthy. The vagina for them is a prize, a beautiful flower to be admired and won.” One can almost imagine a young Italian man wafting the scent of his lover’s vagina toward his nose, as Friedland describes it. This, it is implied, is the proper attitude toward a lady’s genitalia. In contrast, American men, who expect baldness and find anything else unattractive, are perverted and oppressive. Friedland is well-intentioned when he lets women know that there are men out there who will appreciate their pubic hair in its natural state. However, he fails to recognize that the way he approaches pubic hair trends is informed by an objectified view of women, which is itself the real enemy.

A woman need not be particularly beautiful in order to be objectified. In fact, research in the European Journal of Social Psychology verifies that while each man is viewed as a whole figure, women are perceived as collections of sexual parts. While women do inspect men’s individual sexual attributes, they are more likely to recognize those parts as being part of a complete male body. Women, on the other hand, are assessed in pieces. Thus a woman might become a “nice ass” on a body, whereas a man might be said to “cut a handsome figure”. We are not shy about this behavior. Girls practice it themselves, and begin doing so at a young age. It’s considered nice to tell a friend that she has great legs. A woman might become know for such an asset. Hearing about her singular physical charms frequently enough encourages a girl to identify as “the owner of a great pair of legs,” rather than, for example, a smart student. I once had a man apologize for complimenting my legs. I laughed his apology off at the time, but as I age it makes more sense.

Hand-wringing over the receding tide of pubic hair in America misses the point. It is the wider field of aesthetic norms dictating a woman’s behavior, and the internalization of those norms by women, that are the problem. Some women don’t feel comfortable leaving the house without full makeup, others need to be wearing tottering heels. Pubic hair is not the only feature tailored to the male gaze. To say that it is fine for women to keep their pubic hair long because some men enjoy it does not help, as doing so still keeps women in the male gaze. More women need to adopt an attitude toward their grooming practices that doesn’t originate from their sense of what men will like.

The expectation of a shaved pussy might be new, but it doesn’t signify a troubling new separation of body from function. “Pubelessness is an affirmation of the pure body and a negation of corporeal soul, separating the center of one’s flesh from birth and from knowing,” writes Friedland, in what was for me a true “Oh, brother!” moment. Friedland takes the tone of a weary father explaining the matter to a daughter who hasn’t yet grasped the beauty of maternity. “American women are, in fact, striking a pornographic pose,” he asserts, and they’ve forgotten that their bodies are meant for reproduction rather pleasure. Friedland later argues that while the first feminists were resolutely hairy and natural, later ones embraced shaving as a sign of sexual liberation. To me, this makes sense. Shaving reveals the underlying shape of a woman’s genitalia, clears room for cunnilingus, and decreases the chance of pubic lice transfer. If women want to bare all, they should. If not, they don’t have to do it, and no one should question their decision to not spend the time and money grooming a body party that few see anyway. In fact, experience says most men won’t care; they’ll be satisfied enough with an opportunity to see a nude woman. The ones who do care probably aren’t worth dating for long, anyway.

Photo by Sarah Friedland, included in “disappearance”

Tufts of dark pubic hair grow smaller in the photographs by Sarah Friedland that accompany Roger Friedland’s article. By Sarah’s last photograph, barely a sliver of hair remains. We recognize the tufts as different pubic styles, notice how little one differs from the other in terms of area covered, and contemplate the significance of different pubic hair arrangements. By displaying hair abstracted from a woman’s body, Sarah Friedland’s photos tell just one of many ways a woman’s minute features are divorced from the rest of her figure by her own eye and the gaze of others. That argument runs counter to her writer’s words. Roger Friedland’s argument takes objectification for granted and reduces women into beings starved for male approval and waiting to be filled with offspring. He, like many others, offers women pedantic advice, when in fact he should have addressed his argument to men, the main offenders.

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February 17, 2012

Don Glut Really Likes Dinosaurs

Sometimes the internet still provides.

My boss asked me to look up some examples of toy packaging, so I googled “Playskool”. Nothing too useful came up, so I set the image size to large.

I scrolled down, but had to stop when I found this:

Years of internet what-the-fuckery behind me,  I still paused at this. Don Glut, I learned, is known as a DD movie director and dinosaur fanboy. We should really think of him as a producer and scholar of dinosaur lore. His Dinosaurs: The Encyclopedia (1999) is 1,088 page monolith of dino knowledge. Amazon reviewers approve:

If you are a serious dinosaur lover with some money to spend, this is the book. At the time of publication, every classified species was included, along with pertinent details and from 1-3 pages of write-up. It talks of the holotypes, it has 1-2 photos on every page, it gives it all. It is exhaustive, well written, and just simply outstanding. Put it this way, paleontologists and reconstructionist-artists keep this on their desk like the military folk keep a copy of Jane’s.

It’s a ringing endorsement you’ll need, since the book costs nearly $300.

Or, if you’re a pervert like me, just browse his site. Remain in awe at the bright-eyed and enthusiastic looking girls Glut has wrangled into his geek haven. Though each could have made a quick career out of American Apparel modeling, and I’m sure some have, they’ve chosen to pose for Glut. Now, I know he was a film director, but even he admits that the ones he made from 1953 through 1969 are “unwatchable” now. Sure, maybe some of these girls were promised parts. Perhaps they thought they’d’ become the muse to inspire him to pump out one more movie. To me, however, it seems like they just wanted to be there. In age of dirty and alienated internet porn, there’s something truly refreshing about these eager softcore posers. I  suggest starting with this gallery, where you’ll find quite a few gems.

 You’re still getting an education here. In each set of photos, a young lady poses with a collectible, rare, or simply curious piece of dino culture. In the photo to the left, our female guide poses with a “Mechanical head of a “prehistoric” giant gorilla  made by Messmore & Damon  for their “World a Million Years Ago” attraction at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. This ape, like King Kong, seems to like the ladies.”  Each link takes you to a historical account of the object displayed, and Glut often explains how he obtained it too. It’s a rabbit hole of information, the likes of which I haven’t found since discovering young Wikipedia.

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February 9, 2012

I Wanna Be Adored

“Monogamy is impossible, but anything else is worse.”

No, I haven’t tried everything else…but close.

Puppy love exclusivity, casual one-of-the-bros longterm girlfriend, open relationship with, I thought, the long distance love-of-my-22-year-life.  I’ve been the other woman, the rebound, a girl’s first girl, the youngest one at the orgy, the businessman’s release, and a drug-addled whenever-you-want-it baby.  Not to mention the one who is slowly sleeping with everyone of your friends.

I’m not saying that everything else is, case by case, worse.  If I could spend every night in a group sex pile with intelligent and open people, maybe I would.  But that’s not what it’s like out there.  Not for me, anyway.

Falling in love took my identity and smashed it to pieces. After a few failed longterm relationships, I was looking forward to at least a decade of sleeping around. When I’d been in “love” before, it had turned me to a sniveling pile of fluff who only smiled when her boyfriend called her. The rest of my days I’d spend distant from anyone else around me, trapped in a boyfriend fog that I’m embarrassed to think about now.  Some of that I brought onto myself. Codependency seemed such a disgusting state, so to avoid it I encouraged boyfriends not to call me, coddle me, or love me. We could have sex, we could be companions, but if the word “love” dropped, it would be with a wink and a sense of irony.

This never worked out for me. The slightly younger me took every gap of attention as a sign of disinterest. A lesser problem, that. More importantly, whenever something went wrong, I told myself that it was my fault for being so lax. Sure, it would be nice if I got to see my down-the-street-boo more than once every two weeks, but he was busy. Naturally, I told him I didn’t mind. Maybe I also would have liked if a certain so-and-so didn’t need to ask me to borrow $2 to buy himself a taco once in a while. After all, when he did get money, he’d spend it all on me. Really, all of it!

Then sometimes the wrong love would consume me. Alcohol or other might spin me toward spitting “love” to someone I appreciated, adored, admired, or respected. The word “love” trapped me once. When some say it they mean it. You can’t just utter it in response in a dizzy moment of elation and expect your partner to know what you mean. Maybe I meant “I love you like a friend” when I said it to him on that first blurry night. As the bond between him and I, the wronged love, carried on, I felt a shift toward “I love you like a mother.” Time passed and I loved him more, but not in the way he needed me to do. No one had made him feel loved for a long time. It was dark inside, and it might not have mattered if it was me or anyone who said it. But it was me, and I did take on the burden of loving him, and it broke me. When we broke it was nasty for him, and hard for me to watch.

By that point I was ready to let my heels carry me toward a string of affairs, fucks, and flirtations. There’s a mean streak in me, and I channelled it when marching from bedroom to bedroom, racking up partners and thriving off the heady rush only a nerd on a sexual rampage knows.

As part of my commitment to the single life, I tried to stamp out any signs of a “cute meet” before even pursuing a hook-up.  Being drunk for any chance encounter with the opposite sex helped. Reminding the lucky guy that we met while I spilled my Manhattan on his lap or telling text messaging suitors that I didn’t remember meeting them helped. For P, it was a bit tricky. His brother had been telling me for weeks that P and I would be a perfect match. Love, marriage, the works were in the bag. And I could tell from a few chance meetings that P was someone I hoped to know better. High risk for monogamy there, I thought, especially as all of this was occurring during cold, snuggly December.

When I finally asked P to come home with me, it was closing time at the bar and neither of us was sober. Have a smoke at my place, I offered. Details matter less here. Maybe I’ll share them another time. I’ll only say that after months of trying so desperately not to, I melted.

Love mellows me out. I don’t need the throbbing bass and the elevated BAC that I did to have fun before. In that way it makes me feel much older. I used to worry that my brain chemistry would betray me, that I’d age into a dull adult before I had the chance to really enjoy myself and observe all the life I could. In some sense, love does that, but I’ve never felt bad about that. Instead, I feel more alert than I ever did, and certainly more “myself”. I’ve never been more sincere. No part of me is performing for anyone, and least of all for him. He knows me in my barest state.

In an interview with The Hairpin, Caitlin Moran explained this state best:

You know when you’ve met the right person because there’s nothing really to say. I’ve noticed that time and time again, every time one of my girlfriends goes “I’ve met this guy,” and it just goes on forever in the G+ circles I’m in, and there will be pages and pages filled with like five or six of us debating what he said and what he did, and you’re going “Well he did this, and he did that, what does it mean?” And then suddenly that person will disappear, and they’ve met someone else and they’ll just resurface five weeks later and you go “What’s going on?” and they’re like “I just found a man.” And they just stop talking about it. That is generally the key, the point where you stop talking about it, because there is nothing to say when you’re happy.

She’s right, I’m happy now, and I have nothing more to say about that.

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