Don't envy that guy whose picture you
always see with a different glamour girl. Chances are good you get more
fun out of life than he does.
"The Truth About Wolves"
from
Exposed
Vol. 1, No. 1, 1955
The doctor
looked across the polished surface of his desk. "To know only the sexual
side of a woman," he told me, "is like a doctor believing that knowledge
of the genital organs brings an understanding of all anatomy."
I'd asked him, Who gets the
most out of sex? Is it the animal type of man who flexes mighty muscles,
gets chased by hordes of women for his wondrous physique and insatiable
animal appetites? Who goes from one to the other, loving them and leaving
them without a qualm.
Or is it the guy who tirelessly
chases girls, the office wolf who parks his thigh on a corner of your desk
every morning, to recount in vivid detail his amatory triumph of the night
before. At the end he gives your shoulder a condescending pat and says,
"Boy, if you don't make a new dame every night, you just ain't livin'."
Or is it a third type, the
married man who goes home to familiar wife and family every night? Who
when he passes a pretty girl on the street bestows on her only the most
perfunctory glance, and presses on.
Which gets the most out of
sex--and out of life?
It would be nice to say the
answer is a baffling mystery, on which research is creeping as slowly as
that on the common cold. Or that the answer is hidden among the philosophic
intangibles, like the true definition of love. Even Freud was baffled by
that one. "We really know very little about the subject." he admitted,
when asked.
Sex is different. Ask, and
yon get definite answers. For instance I was told that after adolescence,
men begin to separate on a basis of sex habits. One fellow needs the emotional
comfort of a woman he marries fast, settles down. Another, largely unresponsive
to women, feeds his ego on success, perhaps on other forms of love. Another
is the schemer, an intellectually selfish type who uses women for his own
purposes, with sex a tool rather than an objective.
Still another is the fellow
who tries to seduce every woman he meets. Popularly, he's called the Wolf
and there's one in every office, every social group, every club. In fact,
every guy's wife seems to know one. Resenting his free-wheeling freedom,
she's always trying to marry him off to sisters, cousins, or just plain
girl friends.
She never succeeds The guy
makes a few passes at the girl. If she responds he may see her again. If
she doesnt he's through with her. In either case, he soon is being seen
around with other dates, which makes his friends shake heads in exasperation.
"All the world loves a lover," says Dr. Theodore Reik, "but not all the
world loves a man because he wants to go to bed with a woman."
Of the Wolf-type writer Alfred
Polgar states: "One girl always too many; many are always too few.'' A
novelist named Alfred Constant gives another insight into the guy...One
Constant character has just found himself a new, lovely mistress. After
work, he just can't get to her fast enough:
In the early days of the liaison he
did not see the other women as he rushed to her through
the streets. Then once more he became aware
of their existence...
Married men--women, too--traditionally
envy the Wolf his freedom, his exciting life, his variety of conquests,
his power over the opposite sex. Indeed, two Wolf-types are among the great
figures in world literature.
One is Casanova, the dashing
Italian who climbed into more 18th century beds than anyone of his time,
then told about it in his celebrated memoirs. A tall, meaty, football-player
type, Casanova piled up experience so fast that soon he was left cold by
love's routine obstacles. He became interested only in the challenge of
taking the other man's wife or mistress away front him. When that became
easy, he started scaling the walls of convents, to pursue nuns. But according
to his books, his biggest nights came when he stole into a bride's bedchamber
the night before her wedding. No matter how long such a marriage lasted,
the girl was never happy with her husband, he assures us solemnly.
His partner in seduction,
Don Juan, never actually existed. He was dreamed up by a Spanish playwright
of the 17th century as a symbol of what all men would like to be.
Today's Wolf is also trying
to act the part of contemporary Don Juan-Casanova, and finding it hard.
For our ideal lover is the handsome hunk of guy, the male animal who yields
to all women, happily and prodigiously. But, doctors say, he seldom exists.
''I've met him in the pages of Mickey Spillane, but nowhere else," one
told me.
When the type does exist,
he is probably mentally retarded. For all his sexual virility, his make-up
totally lacks all important personality ingredient that comes with manhood.
Call it conscience, morality, social awareness, decency, anything you like.
The fact remains that few men reach maturity without acquiring enough of
these controls to take the edge off their manly powers as an irresistible
stud.
Probing in sex, you find another
thing. That Nature has a keen sense of humor. For in every man's life there
is a period when he is capable of being the animal lover. Trouble is, it
comes between the ages 16-19.
Only at that emotionally tender
age there is something else that holds a guy back. It's confidence--a man's
emotion usually lacking in growing boys. In the rare cases when it does
exist, things happen--usually headlines. A few years back a precocious
California youth departed from a party with a married woman of 25. They
were supposed to buy hamburgers for the others, bring them back. They didn't.
Later, from a motel where they were tracked down, the woman issued a statement
to delighted reporters At last she had found the perfect, prodigious lover,
she said.
Maybe she had. Yet at 16,
Sonny Wisecarver--for that was the lad's name--was sexually no different
from other boys of his age. What he had was the confidence allowing him
to make passes at a married woman, or receive them without fleeing. Nothing
has been heard of Sonny lately, and presumably adulthood has caught tip
with him. Now, faced with a willing married woman, he'd give thought to
the consequences, to him and to her. Most likely, he'd drive her back to
time party--with the hamburgers.
Today the psychiatrists believe
that behind the predatory exterior of every Wolf there beats the heart
of a frightened, all-too-human man. They say he suffers from a Don Juan
Complex. One cause of it--though not the only one--is that the Wolf in
question is really homosexual and by tireless conquests of women is trying
to show the world and himself he isn't. Another is that by callously loving
and leaving women he is trying to right wrongs done his father by his mother.
Or perhaps he is trying to find in a succession of women the one who resembles
a mother he idolized.
Yet because he is so deeply
dissatisfied with himself the Wolf won't even let this final moment of
triumph, toward which he has driven so hard, inflate his ego or bring him
confidence. Immediately he starts belittling it. Once he has possessed
a girl, he becomes dissatisfied with her.
Since he's a mixed-up guy,
it's not surprising to find that the Wolf is using the wrong approach to
sex--that he gets far less out of sex than he puts in. "To be capable of
love, one must have approached a point of development," says Dr. Reik.
With the Wolf, something has prevented him from reaching--and passing--this
point.
What is it? No one can say
for sure, since it varies in nearly every case. Like Don Juan, he may be
in terror of giving in to homosexual feelings. Like Casanova, who was brought
up cruelly, in bread-crust poverty, he may find in the pleasures of the
couch a blessed escape from hideous reality. Says one doctor, ''Unusual
promiscuity expresses inner confusions every bit as much as--and sometimes
more than--sexual abstinence or inhibition.''
But no matter what the cause,
experts agree that the fellow who uses sex to inflate his ego, and thus
attempt to escape basic insecurities, gets far less out of it than the
man who takes time to know his sexual partner--or to love her. For sex
is merely passionate interest in another body, while love is passionate
interest in another personality. Sex revolves on a fragment of a man, is
basically limited, restrictive, brief. Love is a matter of psyche--whole
personality to whole personality. Love involves choice; sex merely wants
a woman.
The Wolf is widely believed
to understand women. Yet the experts say he cannot. It's as the doctor
told me--to know only the sexual weakness of women is like taking knowledge
of the human genitals for an understanding of all anatomy. ''A man who
understands one woman comes closer to understanding them all,'' I was told.
Instead of understanding them,
the Wolf is really a slave of women. For more than the married man, he
is dependent on the female sex, for without women to chase he can conceive
of little to do. "Promiscuity in men and women is a symbol of essential
inability to find satisfaction anywhere," say's Dr. Reik. This is bad enough
in the fellow who makes the pursuit of women an after-hour occupation,
but it is downright awful in the type to whom sex is a full-time obsession.
He's the Super Wolf--medically
the Satyr, a man suffering from a disease called Satyriasis. He's the fellow
who has sex always on his mind, who talks it constantly and manages to
make it sound disgusting He calls his apartment a seduction chamber, lures
girls there with only a three-letter purpose in mind. He feeds them martinis,
never food, and when his own charms fail to measure up to task he hauls
out his collection of dirty pictures.
This man is really sick, often
a menace to society. Satyriasis is male nymphomania, and despite all the
jokes about it, nymphomania is no joke, either. Men would like to put the
accent on the first syllable in the word, but it belongs on time second.
''Make no mistake, nymphomania is mania," a doctor told me.
So is Satyriasis. The Satyr's
mind reduces everything in life to dirty-joke level. Says Krafft-Ebbinig,
"He is a toy in the grip of a morbid imagination which revolves solely
around sexual thoughts."
In some cases, along with
this morbid sexuality goes what medical books call "excessive erective
potency." The guy is supposedly capable of 10 to 20 bouts of intercourse
a night. But again Nature play's the joker, for the Satyr gets almost no
satisfaction from orgasm. Often his excessive potency remains undiminished,
he hardly knows anything has happened. ''His is a sexual deviation in which
the libido is never satisfied," the book says.
For this and other reasons,
the Satyr becomes increasingly cruel in sex relations. He is often in serious
trouble. One New York playboy had worked out a technique of leaving a book
of erotic pictures behind every time he dated a new girl. From her reaction
when she returned it, he could judge how far to press his advances. But
he got impatient with one girl and beat her up, landing in jail.
Ideally love amid sex should
mix like steel and concrete to make a fully satisfying relationship between
man and woman, preferably a marriage.
Yet today this is harder than
ever to achieve, for males are time subject of a sex--barrage unprecedented
in history. Nearly every billboard thrusts seductive bosoms at the average
man, every magazine he picks up contains almost--naked women. Where 50
years ago a man could go through life without ever seeing a naked woman,
even his wife, it is now almost impossible for him to go a day or an hour
without seeing an example of suggestive nudity, idealized to stir his senses.
There is far more freedom
too. Formerly the man who made a pass at a girl on a buggy ride found himself
on well greased skids leaching to matrimony. Today's male faces no such
consequences. Indeed, he often finds himself more attractive to women if
he plays hard to get. Girls admire him much more than the stodgy type lover.
All of which, in a way, makes
life harder for the married man. For make no mistake about it, the human
male is not monogamous. ''If there were no social restrictions," Dr. Kinsey
maintains, "the human male would be quite promiscuous. He is interested
in variety of experiences and seeks a variety of sexual outlets in and
out of marriage."
Holding him back are society's
carefully erected fences. They make him realize that by playing around
when married, he can hurt his wife, his children, his standing in the community,
his job. Some men give in to this completely, others still play. Dr. Kinsey
feels that at least half of American married men have had sexual
relations outside marriage.
Yet even so, the guy who is
married stands a better chance of getting the most from sex. If nothing
else, he is going along with Nature, for it is Nature's purpose to lure
men and women into behavior which will perpetuate time race.
At the same time, a major
reason for sexual dissatisfaction between married couples is backwardness
in understanding time nature of sex.
According to Dr. David R.
Mace, men and women evaluate love differently. For a man, love is what
he gives in order to obtain sexual satisfaction. For the woman, sex satisfaction
is what she gives in order to gain love.
Time results of this fundamental
mix-up in viewpoints are only too apparent in divorce statistics. Yet sexologists
told me that the widespread discussions of the Kinsey Reports, and other
expositions of sex, are having an effect. While understanding and recognizing
their own capabilities more, women are also coming to realize the male's
fundamental need for sexual exploration and experimentation. Which, after
all, is nothing new. Some centuries ago John Donne called variety "Love's
sweetest part."
But what of the Wolf? What
happens to him as the years pass by? Oddly enough, he usually settles down.
''Practice in sex makes perfect only up to a point,'' says neuropsychiatrist
Dr. Harold L. Ellis. As the Wolf whirls into middle age, his mind may seem
to need sex as much as ever, but his body loses fire. One might, he makes
the old, familiar advances to a girl, finds his body slow to respond.
''This is the worst shock
a man of the type can get,'' Dr. Ellis goes on. ''It's then he comes tearing
into my office, claiming he is impotent, that his life is ruined. It's
also then, for the first time in his life, he has to think hard about his
life--and grow."
So when life gets rough, the
Wolf who has tried to posses all women usually has sense enough to hook
on to one. The more, the sadder, he finally realizes. Then, as a Johnny-come-lately
husband, he may or may not be a success. Often he succeeds too well, causing
his wife to say ''All he ever wants to do at night is sit home watching
TV. When I want to go to a nightclub club, he say's he's been in enough
for one lifetime. Well, maybe he has, but I haven't."
Whereupon she may start casting
around for--you guessed it--a Wolf.
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