Is sex necessary?

[Note: These questions have been selected from among the many thousand inquiries that were received by Dr. Karl Zaner during the past year. They come from people who are sexually inquisitive—people from every walk of life. The authors wish to thank Dr. Zaner for allowing them to have access to his sex files. It is with a sense of high adventure that we face the task of answering, to the best of our ability, these perplexing questions that deal so intimately with human lives.—The Authors.]

Q. My youngest boy, age 28, turned against love because in a book he was reading, where the writer meant to say, “A woman in love is sacred” there was a misprint and it came out, “A woman in love is scared.” How would you go about this?

A. We do not regard the case as typical. Presumably your boy is badly frightened himself, or he wouldn’t be reading books; he would be out somewhere. The way to overcome this is to build up his general health.

Q. Should a woman live with her husband if they are separated?

A. Yes. There is nothing that brings two people so close together as separation. In situations of the sort, the woman’s presence gradually becomes necessary on account of the condition of the man’s shirts. On first being separated from his wife, the husband commonly will be found to neglect his dirty clothes, from spite and from self-indulgence. Instead of gathering them into a pile and sending them to a laundry, he will put on yesterday’s shirt in the morning, and stop in a gentleman’s furnishing store to pick up a clean one on the way to the office. This procedure has a threefold allure for the man. First, it gets him to the office half an hour late; second, it takes him into a furnishing store; and third, when he looks into his shirt drawer in the morning and finds no shirts it assures him of the disorganized state of his life. To feel disorganized is to be perfectly happy.

Things might go on this way indefinitely were it not for the economic side of the question. At three dollars a shirt (which is a conservative figure for a man separated from his wife) the shirt bill runs into eighteen dollars a week, plus another six dollars for underwear and socks. Furthermore, there is now a congested condition in the husband’s office, caused by the accumulation of dirty shirts which he has tucked into bottom drawers and filing cabinets. This shows up in his work.

The impracticability of two people living apart becomes apparent, too, in the matter of the old 1916 Cadillac touring car which they own. On separating, the husband will generously give the car to his wife to use, but that doesn’t alter the fact that he, and he alone, knows what you have to do when the car “does that funny thing.” Thus, the husband is apt any time during the day to pick up the phone and hear his wife’s voice:

“Dear, I’m on the Merrick Road between Bellport and Patchogue, and the car is doing that funny thing again.” This means dropping whatever work he is doing, taking a cab to the Penn station and a Long Island train to the scene of the breakdown. This also shows up in his work. It never could happen if husband and wife were living together, because in that case they would never be on cordial enough terms for him to let her use the car.

There is another phase of separation that is perhaps more alarming than those we have mentioned, namely, the possible effect the news of it might have on the health of the wife’s parents or the health of the husband’s parents. I recall the case of a couple who over a period of years tried to live apart without telling the wife’s mother—who had a frail heart and who liked to see young people together, not apart. (Note: old ladies don’t know why they like to see young people together—they can give no reason; yet just the thought of two young people separating excites them unduly, and, when their heart is unreliable, is apt to carry them off.) So this young pair, out of consideration, although separated, sent community Christmas presents to the parents and wrote letters describing joint experiences, until, after two years and eight months of struggling along and scheming, they finally gave up the battle and decided it would be simpler to take an apartment together somewhere. Sheer fatigue united them. They are residing, to this day, in North Pelham, and the wife’s mother is still alive and well. Getting better every day, doctors say.

So our advice to any couple is just this: separate if you must, but by all means live together—no matter how your friends and neighbors talk.

Q. I have an aquarium and I got a snail for it because they told me it would keep the water clean, and the snail unexpectedly bore young, although it was in there all alone. I mean there weren’t any other snails in there, only fish. How could it have young, very well?

A. The snail in your aquarium is a mollusc. It is quite likely an hermaphrodite, even though it came from a reputable department store. For being hermaphroditic, nobody can blame a snail. We cannot tell you everything we know about the gastropods because we know, possibly, more than is good for us. In the absence of specific information to the contrary, we would say that the snail in your aquarium had been going around a good deal with other snails before you got him (her). Some molluscs (not many) can have children merely by sitting around and thinking about it. Others can have children by living in a state of reciprocity with other hermaphrodites. Still others are like us, diœcious, possessed of only one sexual nature but thankful for small favors.

The shellfish and the snails are a great group, though it is a pose with many people to consider them dull. Usually the people who find molluscs dull are dull themselves. We have met molluscs in many parts of the world: in gardens in France, on the rocks at low tide on Long Island Sound, in household aquaria, on the sidewalks of suburban towns in the early mornings, in restaurants, and in forests. Everywhere we found them to be sensitive creatures, imaginative and possessed of a lively sense of earth’s pleasant rhythm. Snails have a kind of nobility. Zoölogists will tell you that they occupy, in the animal kingdom, a position of enviable isolation. They go their own way.

We can understand your curiosity about sex in snails. Molluscs are infinitely varied in their loves, their hates, and their predilections. They have a way of carrying out ideas they get in their head. They are far from cold, as many people suppose them; indeed, one of the most fascinating love stories we ever read was in the Cambridge Natural History, in which was described the tryst kept by a pair of snails on a garden wall. We have never forgotten the first sentence of that romantic and idyllic tale, nor have we forgotten the name of the snail, L. Maximus. The story started: “L. Maximus has been observed at midnight to ascend a wall or some perpendicular surface.” It then went on to relate how, after some moments spent greeting each other, crawling round and round, the snails let themselves down on a little ladder of their own devising, and there, suspended in the air ten inches or so from the top of the wall, they found love.

Often very fecund, molluscs are rarely too busy to give attention to their children after birth, or to prepare for their coming. There is, in Algeria, a kind of mollusc whose young return for shelter to the body of their mother, somewhat in the manner of little kangaroos. There is, in the Philippines, a snail who is so solicitous for her expected babies that she goes to the trouble of climbing, with infinite pains and no little discomfort, to the top of a tall tree, and there deposits her eggs in a leaf, folding the leaf adroitly for protection. Another kind of mollusc, having laid her eggs upon a stone, amuses herself by arranging them like the petals of a rose, and hatches them by holding her foot on them. Molluscs tend to business.

Sometimes different species intermarry, but this is rare. The interesting point about it is that such unions generally take place when the air is heavily charged with electricity, as before a storm, or when great rains have made the earth wet. The Luxembourg Garden in Paris is a place snails go to for clandestine matches of this sort. H. Variabilis goes there, and Pisana. The moisture, the electricity, the fragrant loveliness of a Paris night, stir them strangely.

Probably, if you know so little of the eroticism of snails, you have not heard of the darts some of them carry—tiny daggers, hard and sharp, with which they prick each other for the excitement it affords. These darts are made of carbonate of lime. The Germans call them Liebespfeil, “love shaft.” Many British molluscs are without them, but that’s the way it goes.

We could tell much more. We could tell about molluscs that possess the curious property of laying their eggs on the outside of their own shell, and of the strange phenomenon of the Cephalopod, who, when he takes leave of his lady, leaves one of his arms with her, so that she may never lack for an embrace. But we feel we have answered your question.