Photo Credit: "Orgasm" by D.L. on Photobucket
Credited with naming The Sexual Revolution, changing the way psychotherapy is done (in his earlier works), and leading the Boomers to believe that the personal is political and the political is personal—Wilhelm Reich, a controversial figure to say the least, was also mentally ill, suffering from manic- depressive disorder. Don’t you have to be a little crazy to dream of saving society by any single means, like, for example, sex culminating in spectacular orgasm?
Reich believed that sex would transform all our lives in every area from the political through the personal. The late iconic author Norman Mailer admired the “force and daring” of Reich’s work, but stopped short of endorsing his theories. How could anyone, even the ultimate viral animal of his day, believe that sexual freedom could be the engine driving social transformation to an idyllic society?
That’s a lot to hang on sex.
A new biography of Reich, Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How The Sexual Revolution Came to America (FSG) by Christopher Turner captures Reich and his impossible quest better than anything I’ve ever read about him. As a champion of female sexual empowerment, I hope that women will learn how to have orgasms more easily and often and, secure in their own pleasure, become less judgmental and more supportive of other women’s sex lives. Given the nature of women, that is a lot to ask of sex.
Like most sex educators, therapists and coaches, authors, bloggers and columnists—I believe that we have a mission, providing good sex information in a society that doesn’t value human sexuality highly enough to fund sex ed programs in schools AND to offer support to women especially but also men in defining and embracing their own sexual choices. Collectively, we can do some good. These are modest goals in the light of what Reich hoped to accomplish—but even that eludes most of us on a daily basis here in America, home of the sexually repressed.
Frankly, my dears, the women (and men) who form the regular readership of SexyPrime are enlightened people—and the rest of the country (and some of the world) is not necessarily. You don’t see much emotional support/sexual generosity in average women who cannot look past their own moment to another woman’s, much less reach out to sisters who are not of the same gender persuasion.
Yesterday I received a barrage of emails from someone who could have been—and maybe she was—writing from the psyc ward at Bellevue. She was adamant that older women (over 50) are sexually finished and that I, in particular, as a sex columnist must find my life empty and “pathetic” now that men no longer want me—while she, “gorgeous, really smart” and “desired by many men” had what I surely envied, youth. Only 21 year olds write such drek and rarely at great length and in her emotionally retarded voice. She admits to being 37.
Honey, you are in middle age as medicine defines it, on the conveyor belt to getting “old”—fast. Girls in their twenties think you are pathetic and over it. By the time most women are forty, they are looking to sexperts over fifty hoping to hear “It’s not over.” Dropped periodically on head in infancy?
I don’t feel the need to defend the desirability (to many men, especially our peers who, surprise!, are aging too) of women over fifty—or my desirability in particular. Personally, I don’t care what idiots say, write or think outside the context of noting it in sex behavior/attitude research. Parts of her emails were, according to a therapist friend who read them for “threat level”—“very frightening. She’s sent out these tirades before and maybe has acted on some of her delusions/obsessions.”
Interestingly, the scary emails these days do come from unhinged women more often than men. What unhinges them and drives their freak engines?
Reich would be disheartened to discover they are driven by sex but in a negative way—by the need to place limits on the sexuality of others, especially to judge other women for being too old or too fat or too young or too skinny or too married or too single or too whatever. You could have a business or financial disagreement with these women—and they will leap to attacking your looks and sexual desirability. Like lame stand-up comics, it’s the only material they have. They can’t feel good about their own sexuality if they aren’t being caustic and critical of other women.
Their belief system is built around a stunningly simple theory: I am perfect, you are not. How imperfect the rest of us are depends on the state of the crazy mind at any given moment.
Does anyone really believe these women are having the amazing sex and great orgasms they claim? I don’t—because I know that great sex, even good sex, makes you feel generous toward others. You are too grateful to launch into tirades about other women’s desirability quotients. Rather, you are more likely to write odes to the penis or whatever body part has brought you such great pleasure.
Wilhelm Reich was a dreamer who apparently didn’t spend a lot of time around ordinary women, especially the kind who call themselves “goddesses” and “queens” and self-describe as “gorgeous” –and if they were any of those things, especially “gorgeous,” you would get that message from someone other than the ladies themselves. While he talked about “people”, he was—as a disciple of Freud and Marx—really talking about men. He said that apocalyptic orgasms—a condition of “sustained sexual bliss”—would cause people to leave their routine jobs and find directly meaningful work.” Note, he never said what that search might mean for women in early 20th Century American when women’s work was child-bearing and home-making.
Perhaps best known now as an object of derision, Reich believed in orgone, an imaginary form of energy. The Orgasmatron in Woody Allen’s classic film “Sleeper” was a send-up of Reich’s orgone accumulator, a telephone-booth size plywood and metal box where volunteers like Mailer, Jack Keroac, William Burroughs and J.D Salinger all spent time seeking apocalyptic Os.
Today the people most likely to be powerfully driven by sex are religious zealots, judgment girls and prudish women— often those categories overlap—whose motivation is to limit the sexual expression of others. Some of them are really crazy—crazier than Reich ever was.
copyright 2008-2011, www.sexyprime.typepad.com; PARTIAL reposts only permitted with link back to original article on SexyPrime
Why, oh why, is the desire to control others such an enduring human trait? It has caused such misery through the ages. We possess the intelligence and skills to seek happiness, each in our own way, and to incorporate as much or as little sex in our lives as we want. It matters not at all to me that others are uninterested in sex; it should not matter to them that I am.
Posted by: Hardin Reddy | August 05, 2011 at 06:12 AM
"She was adamant that older women (over 50) are sexually finished"
I truly hope that before that woman becomes 49, she realizes how incredibly wrong she is!
Let me state at the outset, that I am not especially attracted to older women, per se, in that I don’t seek them out specifically, though there are a great many women older than my 52 years, that I find to be quite attractive.
About 18 months ago, I was at a Swinger party, with 60 or so people crammed into a three bedroom house, with most socializing and a few sexualizing. I found myself sitting next to a woman who told me she was 68, and she looked it. She was not one of those 68 is the new 37 type women. If I had met her elsewhere, I would have guessed her age at about 70.
She explained that she had never been very sexual, and worked her life as a school teacher until she retired at 65. Only then, had she and her husband decided that they might as well explore their sexuality, which she had found greatly to her liking. She said she had never been a fan of oral sex, but now loved giving and receiving. She was vivacious and charming and sexually inspiring.
At a later point in the party, I ran into her again. She had changed from her clothing into leather fetish wear that left her breasts, ass and pussy exposed, and was wearing nipple clamps connected by a chain. She then boldly propositioned me, and I would have been thrilled to take her up on the offer, but my ride was leaving. I have regretted passing up on that offer ever since. Her face may have shown the passage of her years, but her sense of sexual fun was obvious, and anyone would be lucky to share sack time with such a woman.
Michael aka AssMaster
Posted by: Michael AssMaster | August 08, 2011 at 02:17 AM