Chapter 10
The first sexual experience is met differently by male and female. A young man, once deflowered of his virginity, is concerned with it no longer. In fact, he will probably brag about it.
But a young girl - often it is a traumatic experience with her and can even possibly ruin her life. Let a young girl "stray from the path of virtue," and let there be even one breath of suspicion about her, and she will find no forgiveness in many quarters. A man may emerge from a mire of dissipation without a spot or blemish on his character. It may even be considered a sign of his manhood. And most people will excuse it saying that "he is sowing his wild oats."
But let a woman stray, and there is no return.
A girl may face more dire consequences from the sex act than a boy. She may become pregnant and thus publish her folly to the world. Many such cases are found in maternity hospitals where young girls, some of them yet children, between the ages of twelve and fifteen, are pregnant without even knowing that the results of copulation can lead to childbirth because no one has ever told them.
There is proof, however, that total abstinence brings on bad results. Long continued, it can bring on impotence and various nervous disorders. There are cases on record where complete breakdowns have occurred.
Most human beings feel the craving for a mate, and this craving demands gratification. It may be a permanent impulse, or it may be occasional and lead to satisfaction by promiscuity. If it is not gratified, it produces cranky old bachelors and hysterical old maids and may lead to severe attacks of neurasthenia. It can also produce migraine headaches.
The only cure for these total abstainers is sex!
Some women, reared in a mid-Victorian atmosphere, try to give the impression that they are really non-sexual, and that they serve their husbands only because they feel they have to. One woman said, "My husband is like a smelly old goat! I lie there and let him have at me, and I don't feel a thing but disgust!"
These women are either lying, or they are abnormal. No normal woman is as passive as some of them would like to make men think. In fact, women experience an ecstasy of feeling during orgasm that is as much as seven times greater than that of men, involving the whole system in an ecstatic nervous erethism. Few men could bear up under that! Imagine an ejaculation seven times greater than what the average man has. The poor fellow would nearly die, or at least, pass out!
Among our younger people, the attitude toward marriage has changed. Our forefathers considered marriage necessary for the survival of the human race. Over-population has changed that, and the big problem now is not to produce. Modern medicine has greatly reduced the infant mortality rate. And manifold facilities are provided now for the unfit. A social contra-selection has now set in, and all of our sentimental activities in the interest of charity, praiseworthy as they are, have backfired on us.
Perverted sentimentality shows itself particularly in the stand we still take toward marriage. Marriage and child-bearing are preached in and out of season. Almost anybody, from the criminal in prison to the insane in our asylums, are allowed to reproduce. Methods to prevent conception are known and used chiefly among our better educated men and women, so that the greater part of our present population is produced by the lower classes. The danger lies in the climbing birthrate of weak and inferior children. The moral law and human sympathy dictate that a child once born should be preserved by all known means. In the interest of society, the mentally or physically defective child should be prevented from being born.
But how?
There is no need for the overthrowing of all human institutions and the use of the methods of a stud farm. The freedom to contract an unsuitable marriage is preferable to the tyranny of the state directing the personal affairs of its citizens, such as happened in Nazi Germany. The answer lies in more knowledge of methods of birth control and of the conception process, in laws to allow abortions (which are already legal in some states) and in a freer moral code which admits, as all psychologists know, that sex is not entirely for the purpose of propagation. It is time to admit that there is a genuine element of pleasure in the sex act, and that sex is needed to keep the body in proper tone.
The pregnancy rate among "swingers" is very low. They know the precautions - many of them learned from each other - and take advantage of them. They fuck safe.
Very seldom does the young girl in a swap party situation get pregnant. She has learned from her friends how to avoid having a baby. Swappers know, too, that in the evolution of man from savagery, he has evolved from a state of promiscuity to monogamy, and that in the three periods of human history, the man-woman relationship was largely a result of his surroundings. When man's livelihood consisted of fruits, which were always plentiful, a man could afford to have many wives. As food became harder to find, the relationships of the sexes changed. In the savage stage, when man lived in hordes, all males of a clan protected the women and also claimed all the women for their own.
Adultery was, as yet, unknown.
At the beginning of barbarism, the communal family was replaced by the "paring family." It was founded upon the marriage between single pairs, but without exclusive cohabitation. The marriage continued during the pleasure of both parties. Marriage between close relatives was prohibited and considered immoral (though the definition of incest differed greatly from culture to culture.)
This type of marriage still exists among the Navajo Indians of the Southwest. The woman is the undisputed mistress of the house and clan. The male provides food and protects the clan. If and when the woman gets tired of her man, she simply sets his personal belongings outside the hogan, and the man knows it is time for him to move on.
He usually goes back to his parents' home until such a time comes when he woos and wins another squaw, and he moves into her abode.
In our society, it is the woman who leaves her clan (home) and joins that of her husband. Our Judeo-Christian Bible says, "Therefore, shall a man leave his father and mother and shall cleave to his wife." And the wife, "forsaking all others," joins her husband.
It is interesting to note at this point that in the entire range of higher mammals, even among those considered polygamous, the female is usually monogamous, at least, for the period of her impregnations. She will admit no other male until her next period.
But there was no reward for chastity. The gratification of the sexual instinct was simply a natural process that contained in it neither good nor evil, and the jewel of chastity had no more value than a grain of sand. For ages, the sentiment of chastity had no existence. Fornication, adultery, and what we could call incest were the common order of things, accepted by public opinion, and often even consecrated by religion.
Later on, with the coming of private ownership of property, chastity became, not only a virtue, but a necessity, as a means of passing on a man's worldly goods. The wife who transgressed was severely punished, and in the Middle Ages, during the absence of her husband, she was sometimes required to wear a chastity belt.
Chastity also created her twin sister, modesty. To increase the obstacles to men's advantage, women imposed upon themselves great restraint when in men's company. Feminine coyness prolonged the period of courtship, and by keeping her lover in doubt and suspense, the imagination and the sentimental side of love were developed.
Feminine modesty and coyness have become sentiments by which women dominate men.
Honor and virtue in women did not originally take their rise from any innate moral sense, but from the nature of her position and in accordance with the condition of her relationship with men. Her morality is founded rather on the rule of reason. Woman's modesty and coyness are nothing more than reason applied to human actions, and they regulate men's desires, appetites, and affections for the good of the family, community, nation, and human race.
Thus, the fascinating details of the evolution of the marriage relations among men teach the lesson that the strongest sentiment of chastity, this powerful moral law which controls human actions as the law of gravitation rules the world, has grown slowly from microscopic beginnings until it has assumed virtually a racial consciousness which underlies that of the individual. Throughout the three periods of mankind - savagery, barbarism and civilization - the human heart has felt that man had to sacrifice personal comfort and freedom of action in the interests of posterity, and that it was better to suffer the pain of repressed passion in the interest of general morality which conscience said was a fundamental value.
Perhaps we are moving into a fourth state.
At an Indian school in New Mexico, the girls rule the boys! They make the dates. They are the aggressors.
The boys are the more passive ones, and they do not compete with each other for girl friends. If their particular girl friend decides to take up with another boy, they simply laugh, sit back, and wait. Finally, another girl comes along. They are not jealous, and there is no such thing as a "love triangle" among them.
The homes of these pupils are ruled over by the women, who build protecting walls around their children, as was done to them in their childhoods. The mother strives to give her child security and an inner peace. One Indian mother said, "A culture must not turn out wounded and defeated individuals. There are values one must hold to, but they are not those of a competitive society."
Often, a Navajo woman, for instance, will have several children by different men. All goes well unless a white man moves in.
Bird-throat was a tribal singer and a weaver of rugs. She had six children by three different men and was living with her fourth "husband" when a white man came on the scene. In true Indian fashion, she set her fourth husband's belongings outside her hogan, and the white man moved in. Her first gift to him was a silver and turquoise necklace containing the bluest turquoise she could find. She placed it about his neck, and he kissed her.
After that, he led her to a cot in the hogan, and they had sex.
He told her, 'Take off your satin blouse." He helped her out of her red velvet skirt and then let her hair down.
When she stood naked before him, she said, "I like the good sun on my naked body." She smiled while she watched the white man get out of his clothes.
The man, whose name was Ben Everley, pushed her down on the cot. She kissed his hairy chest and listened to his heartbeat.
His long, hard, white cock became a magnet for her eyes. She touched it, encircled it with her fingers, and began to pump it.
Ben closed his eyes as she lowered her head over his cock and took it into her mouth. He moved his hips and it slid in deeper. She felt of his glans with her moving tongue.
For a long moment, she lay there with his cock in her mouth, hearing the soft sounds of the desert outside. Then she pulled away, and he got on top of her and came down into her wet pussy with one hard thrust. He shifted lightly to get at her tits, and she spread her legs wide to permit him to probe better, to find her hard clitoris with the head of his cock.
He fucked enthusiastically, pushing more of his hard meat into her as she moaned and gasped and said she was getting close to a climax.
Her obvious pleasure was the man's reward. She felt a tiny spasm begin in her womb. It reached a point beyond control as he plunged faster, then went tense and shuddered as he cried out and jetted semen thick and fast into her juicy hole.
He was gasping when it was all over, and she was making urgent sounds. Her hips jerked as she reached her own climax. And then he fell away from her.
They both lay panting, gloriously content.
Then Bird-throat said, "Want to fuck my sister?"
The sentence was less of a question than it was a command.
Bird-throat dressed and left the hogan. Soon, she came back, leading Wahilla by the hand. "Feed her some of your cock," Bird-throat said.
Wahilla got naked and lay on the cot. Ben placed himself over her and said in a deep voice, "Here it comes!"
He pressed his great, thick glans against her partly opened cunt lips. She opened her legs wider and he slid into the hilt. Wahilla bit her lips and moaned in pain. Ben had stretched her pussy and got her cherry. He felt her warm blood ooze up around his cock, and he hadn't known until then that she was a virgin.
He pushed a folded blanket under her head. "Lie still, honey," he told her. 'The worst is over. Now, I'm going to fuck you!"
She put her hands under him, on his naked buttocks, and dug her nails into his flesh, pulling him deeper into her. In stoic fashion, she took all the cock he had.
Ben knew that Bird-throat was watching. He felt his glans press against the young girl's womb. He became mindless as he fucked her, battering the clitoris that pulsed with a fluttering sensation against his cock.
His prick-thrusts became almost brutal. They were powerful, violent as he grunted, "Oh, holy Shit! Oh, Jesus Christ!"
He felt his thick spurts of semen flood her pussy. His cock was swollen inside her, and his semen overflowed her snatch and ran down her leg.
He was dazed, but she kept urging him on as her hands pressed his buttocks. Finally, there was no more semen in him, and he pulled his softening cock from her, gritting his teeth.
She kept working her pulsing pussy against him. Now, her hands clawed his head. Then she whimpered and convulsed.
When it was all over, they lay there together in a pool of sun which came through the opened door. They lay like two-dead people.
Then someone began washing Ben's face. He opened his eyes and looked up. It was Bird-throat, and she was smiling down at him.
He smiled back at her. He was gloriously content.
The next day, they had sex again. This time, Nemi, Wahilla's young lover, joined them. Bird-throat was the aggressor. She coaxed Nemi to fuck her, while Ben played with Wahilla. Then they changed partners.
One evening, Bird-throat's fourth husband came back. She met him at the door of the hogan and chased him off.
Ben pondered over her way of divorcing her husband. When he tried to translate it in terms of his own civilized life, it made no sense.
Bird-throat told him, "The mother's home is like a nest for her children. Sometimes, a man will leave, but - "
"I left my mother's house," Ben said. "Did she tell you to go?"
"Not exactly. But she knew it was time for me to go out on my own."
"That was good," the Indian woman said, smiling. 'The old know. And they give good advice."
During the time Ben Everley lived with the Indians, he never knew them to have mass sex. But the swapping of partners was rather common among them, though it was done under some kind of a code which was accepted by all. A woman, of course, could remarry any man she divorced, and often her going to bed with another man was only temporary.
Sometimes Ben Everley wondered if the Indians' rustic way wasn't superior to the superficially cultivated ones in the white society he had escaped.