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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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