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The Big Oh

The following article is reprinted from Nova Jan. 69.

A hundred years ago we all wanted to be good. A hundred years before that we wanted to be creatures of reason, further back still we've aimed at being courageous or learned, holy or wise. Today we express our spiritual goal differently. We want to be mature. Not just physiologically mature—almost anyone can be that—but mature in the psychological sense. How do we gauge our success? By analogy with physical maturity, which is recognised by the individual's capacity to reproduce his own kind, and it is in the pattern of his sexual activities that he can demonstrate maturity of the mind. Achieve the simultaneous orgasm, and bang, bang, you're mature!

It isn't difficult to see how they arose: both the concept of maturity as the highest good, and the criterion by which we judge it. We live in an age which has been taught to question everything The nuclear physicists, the microbiologists and the psycho-analysts have taught us to accept nothing at face value, neither the corporeal nor the spiritual. We can't then, admire the simple qualities of charity, generousity, wisdom, kindness because we now know too well the compensatory devices which have made these virtues the necessary counterweights for inner doubts and inhibitions.

We have some respect for learning, but the teaching of Freud and his followers has persuaded us to distrust the burnished intellect almost as much as the shining sole. We're concerned with more than an admirable exterior, we want assurance that it is supported by a harmonious working of the whole man The people we dislike, we find infantile, neurotic, they haven't realised their full potentialities. We approve of those who seem to have allowed their personalities to develope freely, they are "Intergrated", they are mature.

And since in this age we also measure everything, to reduce our needs, our aspirations and what satisfies them, to a series of formulae, we are not satisfied with the old-fashioned method of simple recognition Perhaps it is something to do with the great distances over which our present-day communications have to travel Once it might have been sufficient to say to your hearers 'this is a good man", because you were speaking with conviction direct to them, and the good man was also present.

If you say the same thing to listeners or readers thousands of miles distant, who have no personal experience of your judgment or veracity, or of the good man's goodness, you must back your opinion with some facts. To convince, we need a measure of emotional maturity as unequivocal as the events which mark the physical counterpart, and in this search we again owe a debt of gratitude to Freud. He traced the infant's development through the oral and anal stages of sexual experience to an adult and genital expression of sex. This linking of "adult" and "genital", together with Freud's insistance that the nineteenth century's repressive attitude must be broken down, has led to today's belief that an uninhibited enjoyment of normal, hetero-sexual intercourse indicates an advanced degree of psychological maturity; for obvious reasons this is a gratifying theory.

It's one which has drawbacks. Enjoyment isn't an exact enough definition for minds with a "scientific" approach, and "normal" can be interpreted too widely for the purists. No one willingly admits to being abnormal and no one wants to find himself stilted in his sexual activities. The line that divides sexual perversity from sexual freedom is a very thin and straggling one, and can be drawn almost anywhere. There has to be something more, something absolute; some phenomenom which will tell us, apart from our own subjective feelings, whether we—he, she, I—are mature or not.

This time it's the fiction writers who have provided the solution; Lawence, and Hemmingway introduced the English-speaking peoples to the joys of the simultaneous orgasm, and once it has been suggested you see that it's the perfect solution. It is unambiguous; you can't be in any doubt about whether it has taken place or not; it's quantitative, not qualitative. It implies sexual proficiency, an understanding and solicitous regard for one's partner, physical and psychological control, confidence, relaxation, possibly even love. The sexual climax for each of us—splendid; the timed climax—even better. The answer to a maiden's prayer.

Of course this is nonsense. Maturity doesn't rely on one stupendous feat of sexual technique. I want to challenge and destroy this concept that the simultaneous orgasm is more than either a happy coincidence or a piece of careful organisation superimposed on an activity which can lose its point if one precise goal is constantly and obstinately held in view.

We have only just emerged from a dark age in which the convention was that the woman was incapable of sexual pleasure. It's natural that we should have reacted against this, and perhaps over-emphasised the importance of the sexual climax for woman. It probably also reflects the move towards recognising the equality of the sexes; If the man feels frustrated unless intercourse culminates in orgasm and ejaculation, then it is assumed that every woman should have her orgasm too. But though the sexes may be equal—whatever that means—they are not identical. That they can both enjoy sex has been recognised by many cultures other than ours, and by our own before the prudery of the 19th Century chose to deny the fact. But they differ not only anatomically, but also in their physiological sexual responses; some women are capable of having several orgasms one after the other in quick succession, whereas for the man an orgasm imposes a definite, though it may be short, resting period. It may have been this peculiarity which gave rise to the idea, as mythical if universally applied as the notion that all women were frigid, that once aroused, women were apt to become insatiable.

The truth lies between these two extremes; some women are frigid and some are insatiable, some men are impotent and some are compulsive performers in the sexual arena. But although the extremes might be classified as neurotic, or immature, the converse isn't true; not everyone who can put up a competent performance in bed is without any neurosis; sexual prowness is not the touchstone by which development of the human psyche can accurately be measured, nor can the delicate balance of human relations be hung on the ability to delay or to accelerate the moment of sexual release. This mechanical view of what happens between people who love each other is limited and misleading. I believe in something far larger and more flexible than this meagre measure of success.

As long as the goal is widely acclaimed, people will continue to make for it, and worry when they don't achieve it. Simple quantity, the number of performances per night, has always been the test by which men measured their virility But this is crude stuff, and as new fashions in sexual activity arise, some will believe that there is some superior state of bliss which others experience and they don't and this will nag and add to the anxiety and dissatisfaction which all of us experience at some time or other. There are always occasions when you begin to wonder whether you are getting as much as you might out of your marriage, or other sexual relationships, whether you are doing as well, proving an add, as the next chap.

Both sexes read the Khama Sutra and (much more amusing) The Perfumed Garden; men speculate on practices described in kinky magazines, on triangular bedding down, on rubber, leather and fantastic positions which—the books warn—can be undertaken only be very supple women. And women brood on that fetish, the vaginal orgasm, which for the last thirty years has been supposed to signify the height of feminine sexual sophistication; I hate to think how many women, since the days of Freud, and insufficiently reassured by Kinsey, have felt that they have missed some great experience which they ought to have had. They may blame themselves and/or their men, while these same men are wistfully wondering what they, too, have missed.

Probably these are some of the considerations that crowd into the middle years of life, when you review what has happened in the past, and try to see where you have got to now, where you are going next, how much time there is still left. And if you have been convinced that there are more rewarding sexual paths which you haven't explored, and which might prove your own aptitude for maturity, it's difficult to resist pursuing them even at the expense of existing ties.

Super Sex, the simultaneous O—a technique, which has nothing to do with love and which could probably be brought off by any reasonably accomplished and sufficiently determined couple—by being equated with psychological maturity, has become a sort of magically endowed carrot dangled apparently within reach. In For Whom The Bell Tolls, Hemingway describes synchronised sex marvellously pithily. "The earth moved," Maria said, not looking at the woman. "Truly. It was a thing I cannot tell thee." "Como que no. hi ja?" Pilar said. "Why not, daughter? When I was young the earth moved so that you could feel it all shift in space and were afraid it would go out from under you. It happened every night."

"You lie," Maria said.

"Yes," Pilar said. "I lie. It never moves more than three times in a lifetime. Did it really move?"

You see? The magic formula. It's clear that magic has entered the scene from the dictum that it can never happen more than three times in a lifetime. It's this that I object to, these absolute arbitrary terms, guaranteed to increase if not to manufacture anxiety. It encourages people to ask, "Am I doing this correctly? Is this going according to the book?" Instead of what would surely be more appropriate, "What am I feeling? Is this what I want? What am I getting, and how much am I giving to the other?"

It's all part of a modern neurosis; the idea that you can learn how to live by being taught. That enough words expended on any subject will tell you all you need to know. That the head, if it's clever enough, can govern every other organ. And perhaps particularly that there is no subject which can't be made into a science of exact knowledge, measurable and susceptible to tests, with right or wrong answers; you check them by turning to page one thousand and three. I don't mean to denigrate Kinsey, who did a much needed job in demonstrating how much unproved mythology there is and always has been about sex, especially the sexual habits of others, the orgies going on in the other room. Nor do I want to detract from the value of Masters and Johnson, whose studies of the physiology of sexual intercourse are interesting and new.

But let's get it clear, that this is a collection of hitherto unascertained facts, and not a way of life. Just as the statistical figure of 2.5 as the average number of children in middle-class families in some specified area of the world does not mean that you will find two and a half children in any one home, so what we know rationally, or statistically or from laboratory tests, about sex won't necessarily make us more or less sexy, more or less adept, more grown up or more infantile. I'd like someone to write a novel—perhaps it would be an anti-novel—about a couple who had everything on the sexual plane, whose love-making caused the whole globe to shoot off into outer space, but who, after savoring this for the appropriate number of months or years, discovered that it was only remotely connected with what they really wanted, and who eventually settled for that dirty word, "love". Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, it hasn't yet been possible to measure love.

We seem to assume that it isn't only maturity, but love as well, demonstrated by the achievement of text-book sex; which raises an interesting question which we tend, today, to ignore. We'd probably all agree that a sexual relationship doesn't necessarily imply love; you can have a successful affair with someone whom you like or are moderately fond of. But we do also assume that where love exists there must also be sex, and as a corollary, that the success of the sex is in more or less exact proportion to the love. Isn't this a very naive belief? The question I want to ask is, what part does sex play in love?

Of course, it is important. Not only because the physical pleasure of sex for each individual is something which that individual will prize and want to repeat, so that the person who is the "other", and who has provided that pleasure becomes of value for this, if for nothing else. But where there is also liking or love, there is the pleasure of giving pleasure in kind; perhaps the only comparable relationship is that between a mother and her breast-fed baby. Even that isn't quite a parallel, because although the baby wants to receive what it eases the mother to give, the baby's role is an unconscious one, and so the tenderness which arises from the knowledge of having pleased another is missing on his part.

Between the adult lovers—and I'm using the word advisedly here, to cover both physiological and psychological senses, the give and take is equal and it can be an extra dimension to love, just as other shared pleasures may be We have progressed this far, at least, along the road to maturity, that we look for more than the appeasement of our own desire, we do care that our sexual partner should also receive pleasure. And there's another thing. Sex has the immense advantage of being both a shorthand of communication, like the "little" language which families and lovers develop, and also of being without words. To be able to communicate without the complications of language is an incomparable benefit. Of course, this isn't peculiar to sex, and if we were less physically inhibited with each other we should use more frequently the touch which means "I'm sorry, I was unreasonable and cross, forgive me", and the embrace which says non-verbally, "I feel for your misery, I'll do what 1 can" or just "I do understand.'"

If the convention of the shared bedroom for married couples didn't exist marriage would be even more difficult to sustain than it already is. D.H. Lawrence knew the importance of the sharing of unconsciousness. "Paul loved to sleep with his mother. Sleep is still most perfect, in spite of hygienists, when it is shared with a beloved. The warmth, the security, and peace of soul, the utter comfort from the touch of the other, knits the sleep, so that it takes the body and soul completely in its healing". Sex is a refinement of this skin language, but it's not the only way of proving your confidence in another by allowing yourself to lose control in their presence. It's interesting that both sleep, and the pause of satisfied exhaustion after the orgasm have been named, 'the little death". In each case consciousness is abandoned, you lay down your defences before the person you trust.

So, Sex is a means of communication, it's a wonderful interchange of pleasure. But it isn't synonymous with love. There can even be, though it is heresy in this age to say so, great and lasting love which is never fully expressed in a sexual form. We must all have known couples for whom sex was something less than the best, who continued to love each other. Admittedly this is more unusual now, when so much emphasis is placed on compatibility in bed, and when the break up of a marriage is so often, retrospectively, attributed to sexual dissatisfaction, "I left him because he couldn't satisfy me"; "I can't stay with you, you don't make me feel like a man".

The odd thing is that if the speakers were asked whether they married more for the deep deep peace of the double bed than for other reasons they would probably say no, the ex-partner had many excellent qualities which they still value very highly. Why, then, are they remarrying? For another set of admirable qualities, plus the renewed confidence which is given by the acquisition of a new sexual partner. If the quest for maturity is admirable, there's nothing wrong in dissolving a partnership which couldn't supply the current token of that goal.