Is sex necessary?

I hesitate to approach the subject of male unresponsiveness. Frigidity in men is a theme sociologists have avoided. Frigidity in women, on the other hand, forms a vast chapter in the sex research of today; the part it plays in marital discord is known to students of sociology as well as to the lay reader, although probably less well. It has occupied the attention of many noted writers, and has taken the lives of such men as Zaner and Tithridge, who carried some of their experiments too far.⁠[20]

Any discussion of frigidity in men calls for an unusual degree of frankness on the part of the writer, since it entails such factors as the “recessive knee,” Fuller’s retort, and the declination of the kiss. Further, before attacking this subject, it will be necessary to reëvaluate some of the more fundamental hypotheses of Man’s erotic nature, and what a nuisance that is going to be!

Let us go back a little way. There are two fundamental urges in nature: the desire to eat and the desire to reproduce one’s kind. Which of these two impulses is the stronger depends somewhat on the individual and somewhat on the circumstances surrounding the individual—that is, it is apt to vary with the quality of the food and of the women. There are, Zaner shows, men who would rather eat than reproduce, and there are isolated cases of men who would rather reproduce than eat. But it is the less simple types that provide the important case histories for the student of masculine frigidity, and no broad conclusions can be drawn about the relative merits of eating and reproducing without a consideration of the contributing factors.

Quite regardless of which urge comes first in Man’s scheme of existence, it is safe to state dogmatically that the second urge (the “sex” urge) has caused more stir in the last few years than the first, or “nourishment,” urge. Sex is less than fifty years old, yet it has upset the whole Western World. The sublimation of sex, called Love, is of course much older—although many purists will question the existence of Love prior to about 1885 on the grounds that there can be no sublimation of a non-existent feeling. What I shall try to show, without carping, will be that there is a very good reason why the erotic side of Man has called forth so much more discussion lately than has his appetite for food. The reason is this: that while the urge to eat is a personal matter which concerns no one but the person hungry (or, as the German has it, der hungrige Mensch), the sex urge involves, for its true expression, another individual. It is this “other individual” that causes all the trouble.

Except in rare instances, all of which have been dealt with by Sumner, the urge involves an individual of the opposite sex; that is, for a man it involves a woman, and for a woman it involves a man. I use the word “involve” advisedly. Just the minute another person is drawn into some one’s life, there begin to arise undreamed-of complexities, and from such a simple beginning as sexual desire we find built up such alarming yet familiar phenomena as fêtes, divertissements, telephone conversations, arrangements, plans, sacrifices, train arrivals, meetings, appointments, tardinesses, delays, marriages, dinners, small pets and animals, calumny, children, music lessons, yellow shades for the windows, evasions, lethargy, cigarettes, candies, repetition of stories and anecdotes, infidelity, ineptitude, incompatibility, bronchial trouble, and many others, all of which are entirely foreign to the original urge and way off the subject, and all of which make the person’s existence so strangely bewildering that if he could have foreseen these developments his choice would have been the “eating” urge, and he would have just gone quietly out somewhere and ordered himself a steak and some French fried potatoes as being the easier way out.

Still, that is just a hypothetical alternative. Life, as we know, is very insistent; almost daily people become involved with other people. And that brings us to our real theme, namely, frigidity in men.

The Recessive Knee. The first symptom of frigidity in men is what I call the recessive knee. To the study of this phenomenon I have given some of my best years. My laboratory has been the laboratory of life itself. Probably I would never have discovered the recessive knee had I not noticed it, some ten years ago, in myself. Questioning my colleagues, I found to my amazement that they too had had similar experiences which they were unable to account for, and this led me to continue my investigations. Since then I have gone into taxicabs, terminal lunch rooms, boat liveries, and all other places where it is possible or usual for a girl to let her knee rest lightly against that of her companion, have gained the confidence of the young men and women whom I was watching, and have accumulated a mass of data showing that frigidity in men, instead of being almost a non-existent characteristic, is one of the commonest attributes of our national sexual life. Inasmuch as the juxtaposing of the knee by the female, which causes the recessive (or “pulled away”) knee in the male, usually occurs fairly soon after dinner, my experiments and observations have had to be made largely in the evening. It has been my custom to sleep late mornings to make up for this.

Simply stated, the knee phenomenon is this: occasions arise sometimes when a girl presses her knee, ever so gently, against the knee of the young man she is out with. The juxtaposing of the knee is brought about by any of a thousand causes. Often the topic of conversation has something to do with it: the young people, talking along pleasantly, will suddenly experience a sensation of compatibility, or of friendliness, or of pity, or of community-of-interests. One of them will make a remark singularly agreeable to the other person—a chance word or phrase that seems to establish a bond between them. Such a remark can cause the knee of the girl to be placed against the knee of the young man. Or, if the two people are in a cab, the turning of a sharp corner will do it. In canoes, the wash from a larger vessel will bring it about. In restaurants and dining-rooms it often takes place under the table, as though by accident. On divans, sofas, settees, couches, davenports, and the like, the slight twist of the young lady’s body incident to receiving a light for her cigarette will cause it. I could go on indefinitely, but there is no need. It is not a hard push, you understand—rather the merest touch of knee to knee, light as the brush of a falling blossom against one’s cheek, and just as lovely.

Now, a normal male in whom there are no traces of frigidity will allow his knee to retain its original position, sometimes even exerting a very slight counter-pressure. A frigid male, however, will move his knee away at the first suggestion of contact, denying himself the electric stimulus of love’s first stirring. Why? That is what my research was conducted to discover. I found that in 93 per cent of all cases, the male was suspicious; in 4 per cent he was ignorant; and in 3 per cent he was tired. I have presented these figures to the American Medical Association and am awaiting a reply.

It is the female’s subtlety in her laying-on of the knee that annoys the male, I found. His recession is for the purpose of reassuring himself of his own integrity and perspicacity. If the female were to juxtapose in a forthright manner, if she were to preface her gesture with the remark: “I am thinking of letting my knee touch yours for the fun of it, Mortimer,” she might gain an entirely different response from the male.

Many men with recessive knees have confided to me that they felt incapable of answering the pressure because of the effect it might have on their minds, with the accompanying loss of self-respect. I have established the fact that no physical detriment is incurred by answered pressure—the only harmful effects are psychological. Some males admitted to an unwillingness to give any woman the satisfaction of believing that she was able to take her companion unaware. Still others told me that they feared the consequences of such an act: they were afraid that if ever they let down the bars and failed to turn away from knee pressure, they would likewise be unable to resist other juxtapositions in life and would continually be responding amiably to other amusing stimuli—sales talks, stock promotion, and the like.

It was a young Paterson, N. J., girl by the name of Lillian Fuller who let drop the remark that has epitomized, for the sociological and anthropological world, the phenomenon of the recessive knee. “Fuller’s retort” is now a common phrase in the realm of psychotherapy.

Miss Fuller was an unusually beautiful woman—young, accurate, sensitive. She was greatly attached to a man several years her senior in the buffing department; wanted to marry him. To this end she had laid her knee against his innumerable times without a single return of pressure. His frigidity, she realized, was gradually becoming prejudicial to his mental health, and so one evening, after experiencing for the hundredth time the withdrawal of his knee, she simply turned to him with a quiet smile playing on her face and said, “Say, what is the matter with you, anyway?”

Her retort somehow summed up the whole question of frigidity in men.

The Declination of the Kiss.⁠[21] Many men have told me that they would not object to sex were it not for its contactual aspect. That is, they said they would be perfectly willing to express their eroticism if it could be done at a reasonable distance—say fifty paces. These men (the frigid-plus type) found kissing intolerable.

When they had an opportunity to kiss a young lady, they declined. They made it plain that they would be willing to blow a kiss across the room from their hand, but not execute it with their lips.

I analyzed scores of these cases, questioning both the women and the men. (The women were mad as hornets.) I found that a small number of the kiss-declining men were suffering from a pathology of the eyes—either astigmatism or farsightedness—so that when they got really close to a girl, she blurred on them.⁠[22] The vast majority of cases, however, were quite different. Their unwillingness I traced to a much subtler feeling than eye-strain. Your true anti-contactual, or kiss-decliner, is a very subtle individual indeed.

In effect, he is a throw-back to another period in history, specifically to the Middle Ages. He is a biological sport. (Note: this is very confusing, calling him a “sport,” because the ordinary “sport” is not a kiss-decliner at all—anything but. Please keep in mind, then, that when I use the term “sport” I want the strict biological interpretation put upon the word. I want it, and I intend to get it. If there are any of you who think you are going to find the use of the word “sport” in this connection so confusing as to make the rest of the chapter unintelligible, I wish you would drop out. Get something else to read, or, better yet, get some exercise.)

No one can quite comprehend the motives and the successes of a kiss-decliner who does not recall his counterpart in mediæval history. In the Middle Ages, when men were lusty and full of red meat, their women expected as much. A baronial fellow, finishing his meal, made no ado about kissing a Middle Age woman. He just got up from the table and kissed her. Bango, and she was kissed. Love had a simple directness which was not disturbed until the arrival, in the land, of the minnesingers. It got so no baronial hall of the Middle Ages was free from these minnesingers. They kept getting in. They would bring their harps with them, and after dinner they would twang a couple of notes and then sing a frail, delicate song to the effect that women should be worshiped from afar, rather than possessed. To a baron who had just drunk a goblet of red wine, this new concept of womanhood was screamingly funny. While he was chuckling away to himself and cutting himself another side of beef, his wife, who had listened attentively to the song, would slip out into the alley behind the castle and there the minnesinger would join her.

“Sing that one again,” she would say.

“Which one?”

“That one about worshiping me from a little distance. I want to hear that one again.”

The minnesinger would oblige. Then he would illustrate the theme by not kissing the woman, but dancing off lightly down the hill, throwing his harp up into the air and catching it again as he went.

“What a nice young man,” the baron’s wife would think, as she slowly turned and went in to bed.

The kiss-decliner of today is a modern minnesinger. He is a sport in that he has varied suddenly from the normal type—which is still baronial. Of course, the amusing thing about his conduct is that oftentimes a woman assumes that she is being worshiped from afar, when as a matter of fact she is merely being ignored from afar. That is part of the trick of an anti-contactual person—he takes a perverse delight in allowing the woman whose kiss he has declined, to think of him as more lyrical than other men. When he leaves her presence, she is apt to think of him as off somewhere by the bank of a stream, lying flat on his back, his shaggy head buried in the tall grasses, dreaming of something or other—probably of her, whereas, if she would take the trouble to go to the nearest Liggett’s drug store she would probably find him there, getting a sundæ.

By the mere gesture of declining a kiss a man can still make quite a lot of ground, even in these depleted days. The woman thinks: “He would not dream of embracing my body; now that’s pretty white of him!” Of course, it would be wrong to ascribe motives of sheer deliberateness to the frigid male. Often he is not a bad sort—merely is a fellow who prefers an imagined kiss to the real kind. An imagined kiss is more easily controlled, more thoroughly enjoyed, and less cluttery than an actual kiss. To kiss in dream is wholly pleasant. First, the woman is the one of your selection, not just anyone who happens to be in your arms at the moment. Second, the deed is garnished with a little sprig of glamour which the mind, in exquisite taste, contributes. Third, the lips, imaginatively, are placed just so, the right hand is placed just so, the concurrent thoughts arrive, just so. Except for the fact that the whole episode is a little bit stuffy, it is a superior experience all round. When a kiss becomes actual, anything is likely to happen. The lips, failing of the mark, may strike lightly against the end of the lady’s nose, causing the whole adventure to crack up; or the right hand may come in contact with the hard, jagged part of the shoulder blade; or, worst of all, the man’s thoughts may not clothe the moment with the proper splendor: he may be worrying about something.

So you see, frigidity in men has many aspects, many angles. To me it is vastly more engrossing than frigidity in women, which is such a simple phenomenon you wonder anybody bothers about it at all.