Now That You've Got Me Here, What Are We Going to Do?

FOREWORD

If you read the title page of this opus, you will note that it was originally published in 1972. The actual writing process took place in 1970-71, primarily on an idyllic Greek Isle while cohabiting with an idyllic Greek god, which might explain some of the more lyrical passages. On the whole, however, what you will see hereinafter is pretty straightforward information which holds as true today as it did forty years ago.

As long as the basic equipment doesn't change, sexual activity is going to remain fairly consistent. Some of the vocabulary, attitudes and practices may undergo an upgrade, but the primary elements of mutually satisfactory intimacy remain fairly consistent; the classics never go out of style.

Possibly some of you are wondering what happened to the aforementioned Greek god affair. So am I. Actually, due to a family emergency, I was forced to leave Greece and return to the States, hastily leaving my lovelife without a satisfying conclusion. However, that's probably just as well; think how dull the play would have been if Romeo had married Juliet in the end. Besides, I think it's far better to leave the memory of my young Adonis intact than to have watched him age into a paunchy, balding replica of his father.

Yes, of course there were others after him...many others, some more memorable than others, each with his own story, all with varying strengths, weaknesses and proclivities, but as seen now through my rearview mirror, appear smaller than they probably were. No matter. Sex was then, is now and will always be a fun-filled driving force of life, from beginning to end. And yes, it does live as long as you do. Take it from a well-aged lady whose first priority is fresh batteries in her bedside toys. (Well, you surely don't think I want anything to do with those saggy old dudes of my generation, do you?)

Enough about me. This book is for you...to read, to absorb and to share. Preferably in bed. Enjoy!

Ruth Dickson

Fall, 2011.

CHAPTER ONE

Why This Book Is Necessary

If you read the title page of this book, you'll note that it is specifically called a non-marriage manual. Aside from the fact that there are already scores of books on the market designed for married couples, there are also whole platoons of marriage counselors, family planners and other moral busybodies dedicating their lives to the futile task of trying to salvage the wreckage of the connubial system. [See: Marriage Is a Bad Habit] In other words, the marrieds have all the help they can use in solving their sexual adjustment problems, as well as the dozens of other daily traumas with which they are faced.

But we single types have an entirely different set of puzzles to solve in regard to our sex lives. Although we've finally gone beyond the phase of having to pretend we don't have any, it's an unfortunate fact that education has lagged far behind liberation. The starting gun in the big race to bed went off several years ago**, but nobody seems to know the rules, or even where the finish line is. Single people are hopping in and out of bed with each other in an orgiastic frenzy, but the quantity of their sexual activity has outdistanced the quality to an appalling degree.

So this is, in effect, a self-defense manual. Personally, I've had it up to here with the deplorable bed manners I've encountered since my own liberation from marriage. Too much highly unsatisfactory experience has shown me that not one man in fifty has the slightest grasp of Good-Lovership; what's even worse, few of those inadequate lovers seem aware of their own ignorance.

Not that men are the only ones at fault, naturally. Both parties need to know what they're about, if sex is to be the happy experience it deserves to be, so I've included a section of helpful hints to the ladies, too. But I believe that sex education has to start with men, simply because they are still the ones who take the initiative most of the time. Besides, men need to know more than women, since the female is, sexually speaking, so much more complicated than the male.

Fifty years ago, despite the fact that there was widespread sexual repression and ignorance, a book like this was far less necessary than it is today. In those days, a woman usually had only one man in her life, and she was married to him. If she were very lucky, she would be able to make a satisfactory adjustment to his sexual habits and maybe even have a little sneaky fun herself—if she could be very, very quiet about her orgasms. But even if she never experienced one it was no great loss. Nobody talked about sexual pleasure for the female, except in horrified whispers, so she didn't know what she was missing arid therefore didn't miss it. At least not consciously. (Lord only knows what kind of dreams those Victorian ladies had!).

But the picture has changed in our present era of so-called sexual freedom. There's hardly a virgin left over the age of sixteen. Youngsters are experimenting with each other at younger and younger ages every year, which I think is fine and healthy. The trouble is, none of them know what they're supposed to be doing once they lie down with each other, so they grow up just as ignorant of decent technique as their grandparents. The only fact most boys seem to have grasped is that a girl is supposed to experience a sexual climax, but how to get her there is still a matter of hit and miss. And it's the lucky miss indeed who hits with any frequency.

It seems to me that in the old days, when it was a big deal for a man to bed an unmarried woman, his follow through was a lot better. He mastered the entire art of seduction, from the first tentative touch to the final knockout, making it at least worthwhile for the woman to succumb. Nowadays, however, since it's become a simple matter of your place or mine?, the art of seduction as well as the basic skills of lovemaking itself have become non-existent. And that's a crying shame. I mean, what's the use of having all that potential fun available if the end result is nothing but a crashing bore?

It's not that I object to the casual approach to sex, or even that you might not know a man's last name before your clothes come off. What does bother me is what happens, or more accurately, what doesn't happen once you've been bedded. Men today seem to think that all they have to know about lovemaking is how to assume a reclining position. What's more, if they do have the sense to realize they might need a little technical instruction, whom do they ask? Each other. The one place a man never seems to go for information on how to please a woman is to a woman. They persist in fumbling around, behaving as though they know everything there is to know about sex, just as they think they know about everything else. I know that sounds a little bitter, but I just got through trying to put together a meal for a man in a kitchen designed by a man. The kitchen probably looked great on the drawing board, but who cooks on a drawing board? And that's exactly the way too many men approach sexual knowledge. They've tried to design woman to their own specifications, using their own subjective conjectures, then blame her when she doesn't get off the ground.

As the most blatant case in point, look at the irreparable damage Freud did with his maniacal vaginal orgasm theory. Because he was a man, and therefore owned a penis, he decided that since it felt good to him to surround said penis with a vagina, it must necessarily follow that it felt equally good to a female to have a penis stuck into her vagina. Furthermore, he made the unequivocal statement that if it didn't feel good to her, she was immature, neurotic, and sick sick sick. Have you any idea how many poor women spent years searching for an elusive ecstasy that never existed in the first place, when all the time they could have been having perfectly delightful clitoral climaxes?

The simple fact is that no man has ever lived inside a female body and, therefore, no matter how much theoretical knowledge he may possess, he can't possibly know what a woman really wants and needs. Especially today's single woman, who has an entirely different set of problems from the married. Although marriage in the main leaves much to be desired, it does have one sexual advantage: a husband and wife, after spending a long time with each other, can eventually figure out ways and means to satisfy each other. But the single woman, who frequently has to make do with short-term affairs, generally hasn't the time to break in a man to her personal satisfaction.

And that, in a nutshell, is the reason for this book. Now that you have us in bed, it's time you learned what to do next.

What are my qualifications for being so presumptuous as to tell you how to make love? Well, I am, after a human being, first and foremost a woman. I am also a single woman, and have been to bed with far more than enough men to know that most of them have trouble differentiating one end of a female from the other. I have also had long, intimate discussions and interviews with hundreds of other unmarried women and found that poor lovers are in such abundance as to constitute a veritable plague. In fact, good lovers are so rare that when a woman does latch onto one, she just smiles a lot and keeps her mouth shut. Since most of my friends are talking, and very few are smiling, there's obviously something wrong, and I'd like to help fix it. As for my other qualifications, I not only know how to make love, I enjoy it—at least as often as possible considering the dearth of knowledgeable partners. My academic background is unimportant, although solid and creditable. As for the rest of it—trust me.

Before I go any further, I must make it clear that I'm talking primarily about American men. Since this is being written in Europe, my personal research is continuing, and, hopefully, before it's finished I will be able to report in some depth the differences I've only just begun to explore.

There are a number of reasons why American men are not more famous as lovers. That old bugaboo Puritan Ethic is at the bottom of it, of course, but there are other sociological reasons, as well. There's even a semantic indication of our state of mind. The English language is dreadfully lacking in words concerning sex. There are only two kinds—clinical and scatological—and neither variety is either warm or descriptive, which should tell us something about our standard of values. We have created a vast technical vocabulary, but I haven't heard a new sex word since I saw my first four-letter shockers scrawled on fences. Now the Arabs, on the other hand, have a tremendous number of words, totally untranslatable, which concern the physical relationship between men and women.

But back to the Americans. As any school child can tell you, our sexual hangups were handed down to us by the Puritans, who said they were running away from repression. Then, after they got through, along came Queen Victoria, and we were worse off than ever. Whatever the cause, and it was probably some kind of widespread socio-sexual maladjustment plague, somebody decided that everything that felt good was bad. And, since everyone knows that sex is the most fun you can have without laughing, it came first on the forbidden list. Not only was it bad … it was dirty. Furthermore, cleanliness being next to godliness (think that one over, as a perfect example of psychic perversion!), labeling sex dirty as well as fun made it a double sin. Now, I ask you—how can a man be really uninhibited in bed if he thinks what he's doing is dirty?

It's become part of our culture to equate sex and dirt. We describe a sexually-oriented joke, a pornographic film or book, our Anglo-Saxon four-letter vocabulary as dirty jokes, dirty books, dirty words. And, as any student of psycho-cybernetics can tell you, saying it is feeling it. With this one word, we've managed to create an entire civilization of guilt-ridden sex criminals (and believe me, some of the techniques I've been exposed to were nothing short of criminal!). It isn't that American men aren't nice. They make good husbands. They're usually considerate, and seldom think of women as property any more. But their approach to sex is generally less than joyful.

This basically negative attitude toward sex covers the whole range of men, from the faithful-to-the-end type husband to the belt-notching Don Juan. Each of them, in his own way, thinks sex is dirty: they just take different routes to get to the same place. The TV-family stereotype of the American husband thinks of his wife as a precious jewel, not to be sullied with anything as nasty as his secret erotic fantasies. To him, sex is a marital duty every bit as important as taking out the trash, and accomplished with the same regularity, efficiency and lack of imagination. He never forgets to wash his hands thoroughly after both jobs. He would be shocked by the notion of making love during the day or with the lights on at night. Sex is to be done in darkness, in silence, in secrecy—and never, under any circumstances, is it discussed in the polite company of his wife.The only time he ever talks about it is with the boys, meaning the other good providers who live in his neighborhood. Wives are clean, you see, and any woman who arouses lustful thoughts is obviously not fit to be a mother.

On the other side of the American male coin, we find the so-called swinger. He's generally on a somewhat higher socioeconomic level than the aforementioned good husband variety. He also hits a higher level of hypocrisy when it comes to women. This is the He-Man who professes to love women, who spends a large percentage of his time and energy on the prowl for them, who beds them with as much frequency as his physical limitations will allow, and who speaks of them with the authority of a professional horse trainer. He is frequently a sexual hobbiest; that is, instead of collecting stamps or coins, he collects erotica. His library is full of pornography as well as the works of Kinsey, Krafft-Ebbing, and Johnson and Masters. He's also very big on mechanical devices like vibrators of various shapes and sizes and monstrous dildos, his medicine chest is loaded with oils and unguents, and quite often his bedside table has secreted therein a lifetime supply of Amyl Nitrate. He gets terribly turned on by talking about every last little detail of a woman's sexual encounters, and if she's ever done anything even slightly kinky, he thinks she's super sexy.

This one also goes in for group activities, although he'd throw up at the idea of the mildest sexual contact with another man. Because, you see, despite all his liberality, he has even worse sexual guilt than the stereotypical husband. His hangups are so bad that he has to lean over backward to combat them, which is the reason for all his games. For him, women have no individual identities at all: they are simply animated vaginas, to be used, experimented with, and discarded. His friends are men, exclusively. That's why he comes totally unglued at the thought of sex with another man. Men are clean. Women are not. He's a He-Man, honey, and his deep-seated contempt for women, probably based on fear, is expressed by his never-ending search for bigger and better sex thrills. He'll show that old subconscious it isn't going to push him around! No sir! He'll do every weird thing he can imagine but he can't wait to get finished so he can run and tell his friends about it—thus reinforcing his manliness one more time.

I don't mean to imply that these two types are the only ones to be found. They are just the two extremes in contemporary American life, insofar as normal lovers are concerned. A woman who gets involved, either in marriage in the first case, or an affair in the second, will never have the kind of sex life every human being is entitled to. Because, despite the fact that the stereotypical good husband will keep his woman reasonably satisfied, if bored, and the stallion will keep his girls sexually exhausted (he counts female orgasms like other men count their money), neither has the mental attitude which is essential if a man is to be a sincerely good lover. Without it, all the technique in the world isn't going to satisfy any experienced woman. Oh sure, you can cause a physical climax in almost any female with the correct approach, but to bring her to an orgasm of the soul takes something far deeper than being able to locate her erogenous zones. Not that we aren't going to discuss, in depth, the E.Z.'s. But it's necessary to get into your head before we can progress with the technical aspects of lovemaking.

I know hundreds of men who swear they have a healthy attitude toward sex. Nothing two people do together is bad, they piously intone, thinking that proves, once and for all, that they have a liberal attitude. But their thinking that there's nothing wrong in changing positions once in a while doesn't make them Casanovas. And there's still that basic doubt, deep in their subconscious, about what they're doing. Few men ever approach a woman with the two attitudes I consider essential for Good-Lovership. The first of these is joy. It's a rare American who encounters sex with a feeling of simple delight. More often, he either feels sneaky, a sensation from which he derives most of his kicks, or he works on his girl with serious skill, like a mechanic adjusting a carburetor. Maybe twice in my life have I been taken to bed by a man who displayed free, open, sheer exultation in the act of love.

I don't mean that I want a man to come to bed laughing and chuckling. What I do mean is that he ought to feel that what he's doing is a freely expressed celebration of something so natural that the idea of guilt is incomprehensible to him. To feel a clear elation in all his senses, to relish every part of the act, from the first kiss of anticipation to the last kiss of exhaustion. It's the difference between dining leisurely and well, with crystal, silver, candlelight, and exquisite food, and gulping a hamburger at the corner drive-in. Sadly enough, the majority of American men are let's-get-it-over-with guilty gulpers.

The other attitude which is equally—if not more—important, is that which a man has toward women is general. One of the most distressing facts of life is that very few men really like women. In fact, the only males I've ever known who do have a sincere respect and admiration for women are homosexuals. Their frame of reference is such that they are able to empathize with women, and recognize them for their non-sexual qualities, something which the average heterosexual seems incapable of doing.

Let me describe the two most common attitudes extant today. The first, although still prevalent in many parts of the world, has become rarer in the West. This is the idea that a woman is not quite human, that her place lies somewhere between the family dog and her husband. She is looked upon with tolerant amusement, is pampered because of her assumed lack of brains, is thought to have exotic emotions, so different from those of the male as to be totally incomprehensible. Her physical appeal is a cause celebre: the more beautiful she is, the more valuable she is. She either produces awe and is worshiped as a rare jewel, or she's accepted as a simple sex object and is tended and cared for as such. As a thinking, creative, productive human being, I naturally resent this attitude. But I must say