Introduction
Let's get one thing clear right from the beginning. I've always tried to be tolerant towards the various foibles of my fellowman and to live a policy of "live and let live." What another person does, as long as it doesn't injure me or my society, is none of my business. Another person's beliefs, whether they agree or disagree with mine, are his beliefs, and are not mine to judge. If he doesn't try to impose his beliefs on me, I won't try to impress mine on him.
A large part of the work done by a free-lance writer such as myself is tracking down the loose ends of a lot of odd rumors that crop up from time to time, tracing them to their roots, and finding out if there is really a story there, or if somebody has simply had his imagination working overtime again. The latter is usually the case.
At least 99 percent of the story leads that come across a writer's desk are bull, pure and unadulterated. It's the hope of tracking down that elusive one percent that can lead to a money-making book or article that keeps us working on those leads.
I keep good files, one of the most valuable tools for a free-lance writer, and I review them as often as I can, just to keep up with what's happening in the world while I'm busy writing. The last time I made a quick pass through them I didn't catch anything that looked like the makings of an earthshaking story, but I did notice one thing that didn't seem to fit. One of the subject files had been growing a lot faster than usual. The one labeled Cults: Offbeat.
Curiosity reared its hungry head. The curiosity that marks the inveterate free-lance writer-especially when the diet has dropped to beans and hamburger again. This curiosity is the one big factor that leads to money-making stories, and when it began nibbling at the corners of my mind I simply had to dig into the file to find out what was going on.
The folder was packed with clippings, and they were a bizarre lot. There were weird cults from all over the world represented, some by quite a bit of publicity flack. I'm sure you know the kind of cults I mean. The California's-Slip-ping-into-the-Sea-by-Earthquake-Next-Tuesday group and the Christ-Came, Didn't-Dig-It, and-Left gatherings. Even the Flat Earth Society was there, along with those who believed that the only true path to salvation was to live in caves and eat purple cabbage leaves and the doomsday-tomorrow-afternoon types. There were, however, some pretty well established groups as well. Those with religious or pseudo-religious dogmas which separated them from the mainstream of religious or scientific thought, but not by a great deal. A slight crack, rather than a gap.
Gathered together in one large group were a bunch of selected clippings, mostly from West Coast papers, about a new group, sort of an offshoot of the wife-swapping scene, that was making a big thing about anal sexual activity, claiming that it was the answer to both sexual hang-ups and the population explosion.
A few weeks later I had a small newspaper assignment that took me out to San Francisco, and while I was there I took a side trip down to Los Angeles to see if I could pick up any more information on this new cult. There's an old saying that since Los Angeles is at the lower left corner of the United States, all the loose nuts in the country roll to it. I don't know whether this is true or not, but I do know that Los Angeles seems to be the home of more offbeat happenings and cults than any other city, so I wasn't really surprised to find that it was the home of this new anal cult.
I got things started by calling and setting up a luncheon with a couple of old friends, a former free-lancer who is now the news director of a Los Angeles television station, and a psychologist I had met some years previously while doing research for an article on the hippie revolution.
My newsman friend wasn't able to give me a whole lot of information or help, but what he did give me proved to be invaluable in the preparation of this book. He started off by giving me a bit of background on the whole sex-cult thing.
"To start with," he told me, "you've got to realize that there's a whole lot of difference between the 'official' and 'unofficial' attitudes towards sex and sexual behavior in this country.
"In the past ten or fifteen years there has been more sex education going on than in the previous two hundred, and because of this the entire field of sexual superstition has almost died out. The love potions, sexual taboos, and what-have-you of the 'primitive' societies seem to have disappeared from this country, but those same superstitions seem to have been replaced by a more toned-down form of sex rites, rites which you, and everyone else, comes into contact with each day, probably without realizing their significance.
"What, other than superstition, can you call the dependence on horoscopes for sexual information?-likewise, the 'mental' disciplines of the Eastern religions such as Zen and the Ma-harishi stuff the Beatles brought back a few years ago, dianetics, and all the rest-these are nothing more than adaptations of the old superstitions."
When I thought about it, I had to agree with him, and I began to understand why some of these cults, the swapping cult, and now the anal cult, were gaining such popularity.
He wasn't, unfortunately, able to give me much information on the cult itself, but he was able to give me the name and address of a person involved in the cult, as well as a letter of introduction to him.
The psychologist, on the other hand, was able to give me a little of the background on why these people became involved in something like an anal cult, and what the long-term results of their involvement might be.
It seems, according to his ideas of sexual behavior, that whenever a specific sex act, other than one involving force or children, is banned either by social pressure or by force of law, it often tends, simply because it is banned, to become particularly pleasurable or inviting to many people.
Prohibited kinds of sexual behavior, such as anal ism, often take on the aspects of novelty and adventure which they probably would not have were they not banned. In other words, quite often a man or woman may develop a desire for anal sexual activity not because they no longer enjoy the normal sex act, but because there is an element of danger, thrill, and novelty in the illicit anal act, which adds to the pleasure of the act.
The problem this causes is that, when society bans a sex act for which some people feel a strong desire, these people have the choice of either consciously favoring the anal act, and unconsciously feeling guilty and shameful about it, or consciously being against the act, and feeling unconsciously compelled to resort to it nevertheless. In either event, the banned anal act is usually, in one degree or another, at one time or another, actually performed when the desire becomes too strong to resist, and is later regretted. In either case, the end result is a feeling of guilt caused by the original repression of the forbidden desire, which is then combined with psychopathologically obsessional behavior and frustration.
According to Sigmund Freud, repression is the core symptom for almost every form of sexual deviation, including anal sexual activities. He described the development of frustration, and its release, by saying that a traumatic experience or experiences, usually in childhood and of a sexual or pseudosexual nature, such as difficulty in "potty-training" or a period of prolonged constipation, are "forgotten," or, more properly, repressed. However, the excitement associated with the event has not been extinguished, and its traces persist in the unconscious in the form of repressed memories. These memories remain without outward effect until some contemporary event, such as a disturbing love affair or an unhappy or unsatisfactory sexual adjustment in marriage, revives them. At this point there is a breakdown of the successful repression, and what Freud termed "the return of the repressed," which signals the onset of the aberration or deviation, in this case, the involvement in anal sexual activities. In Freud's words, quoting from The Essays on the Theory of Sexuality:
The original sexual excitement is revived and is now forced to find a new path or outlet. The clinical manifestation or symptom results from a compromise between the repressed desire and what I call the "dominant mass of ideas constituting the ego."
Dr. Karen Homey saw acts such as methodical analism as being an essentially self-effacing solution to guilt and repressed desires. She stated that, in the self-effacing solution, sexual activity has the greatest appeal for solving such problems. The subject individual is, in fact, compelled to engage in various sexual activities, especially "deviant" actions, as well as exhibit overemphasized traits such as self-sacrifice, compliancy, sympathy, and dependency, seeing these acts as having a high moral and emotional value and offsetting the repressed desires.
The self-effacing subject needs to be loved, to give in rather than argue, to please, to be approved of. She is over-sensitive to and fears criticism, rejection, abandonment, and to the degree that she may anticipate these reactions she is usually completely without justification in her fears. Dr. Jack Rubins, explaining Dr. Horney's theories, in his On the Early Development of the Self, stated:
In its extreme form, this solution (self-effacement) may be manifested as morbid dependency and is often characterized by neglect of self so severe as to result in self-elimination. Helplessness has great appeal; consequently, unconscious acting-out through sexual perversion may occur.
In other words, where a deviant personality, in this case a woman, enters into anal sexual activities because of a desire for self-effacement, there is a very real danger that the eventual result may be suicide.
Dr. Wilhelm Reich, who gained prominence as the director of the Vienna Seminar for Psychoanalytic Therapy, postulated explanations for the abnormal and/or deviant behavioral patterns of both men and women involved in psychopathological sexual activities, which would include analism.
He believed that the female was of a compulsive character, orderly and thrifty, and with a tendency to ruminate. Outwardly, she is extremely controlled. Inwardly, she is distrustful and indecisive. Her affective reactions are diminished almost to the point where effective assertive actions are completely blocked. Dr. Reich explained this, in his Character Analysis, by stating:
These characteristics are the result of fixation at the anal-sadistic level, due to overly strict or premature toilet training. The strong inhibitions which are created at this stage interfere with the progression to the genital phase, and, instead, bring about a regression to the earlier stage of anal interests and aggression.
In contrast to the female, Dr. Reich saw the type of male who would become involved in anal sexual activities as being of a phallic-narcissistic character. With this type of personality development the individual does not regress to the passivity of the anal-sadistic phase, although he is confident and arrogant. Moreover, these traits plus aggression and sadism are manifested overtly since reaction to formation is absent. He is attractive as a sexual object, although he may often be orgastically impotent, an important datum to keep in mind as we examine the case histories of several men involved in anal sexual activities.
Dr. Reich, in his previously cited work, described the male phallic-narcissistic character in the following manner:
The male always has contempt for the female and has great phallic pride, but the phallus is in the service of aggression, not of love. The formation of this character type is usually attributed to frustration of the child's attempts to win the love object through display of the phallus at an early stage of development, and his consequent identification with the rejecting person.
For such a man, it is clear that the anal sexual act has become primarily a demonstration of sexual potency, as well as a means of degrading or destroying the woman, whom he identifies as the person who rejected him as a child.
It is this desire to degrade women, to prove masculinity and superiority, which is the prime reason for a development of anal sexual desires in an otherwise "normal" man.
To some the idea that anal sexual activity in women, or the desire for such activity, is caused by the toilet training received by the girl while still a child is pure nonsense. Nevertheless, psychological researchers, from Freud's time to the present, put the blame for virtually all abnormal or deviant sexual behavior on events which took place during childhood, and which were then repressed until they were brought out by some traumatic experience in adulthood.