EuROTICAby Eurydice (c) 1999
All In The Family
"Mommy, it's alive!" Frank Booth in Blue Velvet
Joe Senior d. 1987 (m. Betty)
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Jim d. 1982 (divorced) John d. 1992 (m. Patty) Joe (m. Sally) Jack (divorced)
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Jay (m. Fran) Mary Nancy
"My husband and I never once talked about sex," grandma Betty Amerita chirps over porkchops. "I can't recall ever discussing my sex life. Now everyone does: nothing is veiled, and nothing is clear. Sex didn't use to be so significant in people's lives, and it didn't last that long."
At 80, Grandma Betty hasn't had sex in decades and so, she says, she has nothing to tell me. Short, with stiff red hair and deep-set blue eyes, in big blue earrings and a blue power-suit, she has a mischievous squint, muscular biceps and a huge girlish smile belying her taciturn pose. Her husband died years ago after an arduous illness. "At first I dated," she admits. "But eligible bachelors my age have too many women to choose from. We went to dinners. They gave me hugs. I couldn't bother. My first date later moved in with another woman, but I don't mind: I am prettier than she is." She giggles. At her Seniors' Center she bowls with a man who has a perma-nent erection implant which he manipulates with a 'pacemaker', and an 85-year-old 'gal' who brags that foreplay gets better at her age. Despite her shyness and wariness, Betty is relaxed about sex topics in the way of most older folk; experience and sagacity turn off people's moral censor.
Betty has witnessed a lot of sexual change in her day. She met her husband on her walk to school; she was 14, he was 20; they exchanged secret love letters until she was 18, when he asked her brothers for her hand. She now has an 11-year-old great granddaughter, Gina, whose mother left her husband, Betty's grandson by her son Jim, for a lesbian. At the table, Gina is complaining about her teacher who is 'a virgin', which she repeats derisively like a curse, as proof of her incompetence. Betty doesn't understand why sex has become so puzzling. "We got no teaching when we were kids," she says, "but we just knew what to do. All this talk is cheap."
The occasion is Betty's 80th birthday. The dinner, featuring elk tamales, venison chili and heaps of grilled meats in clay platters, is attended by five generations of Ameritas. The dining room sports floral beige-and-gold wallpaper and windows that show gnarled snowcapped rocks. At the head of the polished table sits Joe who, at 62, is the latest family patriarch. To his right is Betty, to his left his wife Sally who runs in and out of the kitchen, and across from him myself; to my right I have Patty, the widow of his brother John, and to my left Jack, his only living brother. Along the table sit Joe's daughters and Patty's son Jay with their respective mates and children.
The morning before the birthday dinner, Joe's two daughters, Mary and Nancy, ages 37 and 30, had picked me up at the Denver airport and driven me, up through 10,000 ft snowy peaks and down through black clouds dropping sleet, to Colorado Springs—a town populated by pride-puffed, astonished-looking cadets in buzzcuts, state-fair beauty-queen blondes and beer-bellied men who looked me up and down and testily shouted 'Howdy.' On the way, the sisters had given me the tale of the four Amerita brothers, Jim, John, Joe, and Jack. Jim's wife left him for his best friend and the shame made him drink himself to death at 42. John's wife fought with him until he succumbed to an aneurysm at 55. Joe's wife is devoted and meek. Jack divorced and then found refuge from the spousal contest of wills in homosexuality. The two perky sisters, liberated and articulate as they were, made grossed-out, scandalized faces when I brought up their parents' sex life. Their parents had never talked about sex, they said, not even to advise them as teens, when it might have been appropriate. They'd be shocked to know their parents were having sex at all.
"I've inherited my parents' sexual unhappiness," Mary is telling me before the big dinner, chopping tomatoes. "I worry I am sick. I can't trust myself." She has bleached bangs she hides behind, unglazed searching eyes, and a New Age fluffy efficiency that at times turns into an uninhibited little-girl whine. Like most Ameritas, she bears an inexplicable dejection, a troublesome capacity for regret and a need for empty space, and submits her lovers to this unresolvable pathos, which frays their love. She hasn't benefited from antidepressants, anticonvulsants, mood stabilizers, et al, though she's been given up to 13 chemicals at a time, which nearly killed her.
"I don't know if my Dad likes me, or loves me," she says rapidly, the knife trembling in her hand. Years of therapy have eroded her inherited dread of words; now words are her only assurance. "I don't know if my Dad knows love. My relationship with Dad turned bad when I had to separate my identity from him through sex.Dad shook my prom date's hand so hard he brought him to his knees. I was afraid of getting pregnant, afraid of my parents; I made out in the car for hours in the woods every day, got stopped by cops. I lost my virginity, drunk, at 18. Then I had it bad. I met guys in bars and went to their hotels and fucked without protection. I became anorexic to get male attention; it gave me power, but I didn't know what to do with it. I never ate. I just had one guy after another. I had 25-30 lovers, more than any of my boyfriends had. I had a hard time saying no to men who wanted me, out of insecurity. I had no self-esteem because I didn't think my Dad liked me. Now I worry about AIDS." It's a tale of familial bondage, of a post-Freudian Hamlet haunted to her shaky core by the undiscoverable secrets of her father's ghost. Ignoring her parents' pleas, Mary had left home at 19, finished College in Denver and had a 6-year relationship with a photographer with whom she built a business. After she confessed to an affair she had when he'd gone to his ex-wife, he left her and married a simpler woman. Mary got a disability claim to avoid their loans and found refuge with uncle Jack. ("Jack helps people empower themselves—the opposite of my Dad. Dad is a power lord. It comes from grandpa—those men never smiled or gave praise.") At 48, Jack sold his belongings, bought a Winnebago, and drove with Mary and his lover to Mexico. In traveling, she found peace. But when she came to Denver to pack up her remaining affairs, she met a hippie guitarist named Rick and got engaged. Her parents objected to his youth and career. "Their unresponsiveness took the wind out of my sails," she says at high velocity again. "I can't believe their opinion mattered to me. Without realizing it, I got my business going again, the sex got boring, I stopped coming. If I'd been sexually irresponsible and conceived like they all did, they'd be OK with me marrying him."
Rick is 26, an affectionate, shy beer-drinking vegetarian. He helps Mary at work and is proud of her for not being a 'baby factory' and grossing $100,000 a year. "We're now another sexless yuppie couple that can't let go of stress," she adds. "My sexuality is pure panic. Mom raised me to be a wife; Dad took me fishing and camping. But in my teens I lost access to him, because I was a girl and couldn't follow his footsteps at work. Now I both want a man to protect me and a man I can boss. I'm in No Man's Land. I support Rick financially, but I wish a man would make me stay home and have a baby. I'm a workaholic like Dad. Rick likes it." Mary suffers from the predetermined gender roles in a family that only allows for victims or bullies. She can't admit she may not need a man. She has money, doesn't legally depend on the will of a man, and marriage is no longer the most crucial decision in her life; but social conditioning dies hard.
Her eyes betray this bewildered disorientation as she puts the quesadillas in a frying pan and stares at the bubbling oil, her body intensely inert, her gaze hungry. Like many Americans, she uses work to alleviate her sexual maladjustment. She spends her earnings to nurture herself with massages, psychic readings, vitamin infusions, aromatherapy wraps, removing the fungus from her intestines, the mercury from her teeth. She weighs 100 lbs and still pinches imaginary rolls off her taut belly with disgust. "Dad thrashed me if I didn't eat my spaghetti. Many power games in my family were fought over food," she says, staring at me as if ready to leap and run.
Mary visualizes 'spaghetti-shaped molecules' during sex. She had her first orgasm at 25. She orgasms by touching herself or being fingered. Because of it she finds little reason for penetration, though she loves to be cuddled. She blames her fears on sexual abuse by her cousin Jay. Her voice gets shrill and infantile when she relates this, and she briefly shrieks, close to a temper tantrum. She didn't remember this trauma until recently, when she read an article on the subject.
At age 4, she says, Jay put worms in her pants. At age 6, they played doctor, and Jay put a thermometer in her bum. At age 8, they drew with their fingers on their backs, playing 'Guess the Picture.' But at 13, Jay threw pencils down her shirt, grabbed her breasts, pulled down her pants, and fingered her. She fought him off, saying, "Please, I don't want you to," which he misread as passive female euphemism; she felt violated and controlled, but acquiesced to it because when he touched her, he wasn't mean and taunting, but needy and nice. "Transgression was my first sexual intimacy," she screeches, "at an age when sex was a sin. I didn't speak up for myself and it affected the rest of my sex life: I can't say no. I resent that men still control me in sex; what they want is infinitely more important than what I want. That's my Amerita legacy."
In strict households, sex stays in the familial grip too long. As kinship laws allow love but no sex, at an early age we perceive trust and sex, love and orgasm, as antithetical. People spend lifetimes trying to integrate familial and sexual fulfillment. Mary and Jay were divided at puberty by her training in femininity that taught her to see her physique as a resource for marriage, and his training that taught him to assert his desires forcefully. To reach maturity, Mary had to recognize her powerlessness and attach herself to a strong man; Jay had to compete with men for the possession of women and acquire power. The trauma that ended their childhood was only a parody of normal gender roles. Afterward, she says, both retreated into silence, starvation, and mood shifts—a disorder resulting from paralyzed desire and a grim view of sex as a loss.
Mary wants to confront Jay, but fears that "the shaming dynamic continues, and he can still act like he has the right to get in my pants." She hasn't outgrown her sexual discomfort, and lives with rage. She's sexually outspoken, but her theory-heavy articulation further separates her from her sexuality. Our tidal wave of sex revelations and interpretations hasn't helped people like her treat sex any less clumsily and ambivalently. Today over half of child suicides are related to sexual identity. Teen crime, which is on the rise, is also linked to unacted sexual needs.'Family values' are making the world safe and manageable by making sex a hydra-headed source of terror
The feast has made me ebullient, so I plunge to the point: How does everybody here view sex? They whistle, holler, and say nothing. Joe makes a dirty joke that I am told is 40 years old; it ends with the phrase, 'a man lives on beer, dinner, pussy.' Mary turns to Jay and asks belligerently, "Are you a man, Jay?" Jay reddens. "She doesn't ask Jack that," Jay's mother, Patty, sneers. Jack winces. Wiry and sculptured like a greyhound, ponytailed and flashy, Jack mugs like Joe, but, unlike Joe, he is convinced and articulate, having worked on both. "She doesn't need to," he says. "You should fuck my son," Patty whispers to me. I recognize the signs of family life.
The only one undaunted by the subject is Patty, the widow, who keeps divulging in my ear explicit anecdotes. "I love young men; I do my neighborhood stud," she chats, relishing her boldness. "I tried to fuck my age after John died, out of respect for my son; I joined a dating service to be sure the men were safe and clean, but older men are creepy. The few I went to bed with couldn't get it up or found me too aggressive. One was impotent. Another died. I mention condoms and they think I have AIDS. Men my age go for youth. I had a gentle well-hung hunk for a husband and I won't take less. It's too bad I can't get at him," she mouths, quietly furious.
Her son Jay smiles a lot and radiates a plain-spoken sanity. He is spectrally thin, long and hunched like an El Greco figure in cracked glasses and tattered thriftshop clothes. His wife, Fran, sullen and peevish, stays out of our badinage. Peppery bangs hide her forehead; a loose shirt conceals her body. Her smile sits frozen, self-effacing, unvarying, and so guarded that no one addresses her. Jay's kids are skittish, acned, starry-eyed teenagers. They hope to attend a nearby Community College. The older son, a wispy nonplused wrestling champion, can only talk about his girlfriend with whom he recently lost his virginity in the car. The daughter, his 17-year-old twin, has the dazed, riveted gaze of an ingenue. She tells me her boyfriend is 15 and not allowed to date, and adds that the entire cheerleading team in her school is pregnant. The youngest boy is the top bugler at school; he says he's 'holding out for a girl who's strong'; he plans to marry, stay on the land, and work in concrete. Last night, he whispers, he smoked pot for the first time.
Ours is a time in American history when a stranger can approach a working-class family and ask to interview them about their sexuality with impunity. Talking about sex has become a national pastime, an innocuous sublimation, as our dinner conversation reveals. Although they were at first leery of my interest, and feared being judged, the Ameritas were grudgingly flattered and eventually welcomed the chance to put their voices on a map, and treated me with abandon. I slipped into the role of a favorite family member—favored because we had no history, so they felt free to talk without hurting my feelings.Also, my probing gave their lives a passing erotic charge.
I chose the Amerita family because they live outside our modern cybercorpobureaucracy. The men work in concrete; they are rugged and resilient, with permanent tans, callused trowel-like palms, reddish whiskers and eyes the color of denim; they drive American-made trucks, have high thresholds of pain, a devout respect for machines that require coordination and solitude, and are content to have found a routine and a purpose in life. The women combat the men's silence and exclusive work culture, and try to find a place for themselves; they too wear blue-jeans, drive vans, have stonewashed eyes and are big-hearted and uneasy in their bodies; and they too are resigned to passing through life with a neutral pleasant expression, having seen little of the world.
The history of this family originates, time and time again, with two teenagers copulating in a parked vehicle—in a brief irruption of lust—and marrying after a surprise pregnancy. Each new couple disregards this legacy and treats sex as disruptive, in a time-honored misguided attempt to safeguard the familial stability. The parents contrive to banish sex by keeping it unmen-tionable and end up recreating the cycle. In the end, the Ameritas depend on the chaos of their sexual urges to shape their social ties. Their silence cancels their choice. This is the history of the family: a story of the struggle to control desire. In a way, this is the theme of our civilization.
The next day I visit Jay's house, white amidst 1,700 acres of shimmying firs that cannot be divided, after driving through a monotony of ashen lunar scapes and ochre grazing fields dotted by pockets of scrappy one-story houses, tire-fenced mobile parks and trading posts marked 'office' or 'store.' The home has ceilings high like skies and starkly undecorated walls. Its coziest spot is a closet where he keeps his guns, a calendar with a busty bikinied blonde, and photos of his sons with their first kills lying decapitated at their feet. Fran welcomes me, her small eyes looking out from a nest of insecurity, with the gaze of a trapped animal. Her hand in mine feels waxen. She has a narcoleptic disassociated manner. Jay promptly takes me for a walk.
"My Dad was to retire up here," he says; "he died on his retirement day. He gave me everything; at 17, I got the model A Joe now has." For most Ameritas, Dad has the place of God as the absolute guarantee of meaning. "Mom was never content. She left Dad, which beat him terribly. Then he met a nice young gal who loved him fiercely, but Mom heard and came back and he gave in because of the obligation to keep family together. He said she was cold as a bridge in bed, but he stuck to her. People forget those ideas now—except for me. I wish Fran was stronger. But I married someone unlike my Mom: thrifty, loyal; Fran is a lamb." Then he quotes Homer.
He is crisp and watchful, but also unsheltered and childlike. In his youth, he studied classical guitar, wore a beret, traveled to Europe and majored in agriculture to fulfill the family dream of returning to the land. John bought him an orchard at 19. At 21, he was glad to meet Fran, 'anxious to get virginity over with' and to get away from the family by making a new one. Fran was ten years older. An East Coast Irish Catholic teacher who wanted to live naturally, she pursued Jay, the disheveled hippie who had no other romantic choices in the small town. When she conceived, they married. They stayed together out of a sense of duty fueled by their isolation. Their main pleasure was weed, which they grew and smoked until the kids became old enough to notice. Fran is the only woman he's ever known. She doesn't like sex. "It would be tremendously exciting to try lots of people," he admits, "but I can't be a cheat; I see no way to meet my needs and be right by her. My sex organ is extraneous." At 40, he consoles himself with the knowledge that his sexual reticence has been rewarded with familial success, but he can't help feeling desire when he looks at women, even on TV, and he fantasizes avidly. He mentions Connie Chung.
When the orchard couldn't support his brood, Jay took up concrete. "I worked for Dad in town. I didn't move there because he envied my life and I feared the cycle of possessions that trapped him." I ask Jay why he didn't have an affair in town, go to a strip bar, hire a prostitute. "I'm a serious person," he says in his disengaged gentleman-pioneer tone, implying that sex is frivolous. He twists his whiskers into hooks and contorts his body into an old man's. "I haven't followed needs for myself. The curiosity is there, but it hasn't killed me."His eyes peer into mine, and his thin hands quiver, as his scrupulous words tumble from his mouth with finality. His gaze keep asking, Do you like me? His burgeoning melancholy gives me a sense of suspense.
I bring up Mary's trauma. "No way," he protests. "Mary and I were brother and sister. I lost my virginity to Fran. Mary is always on the offensive, like my psycho-Mom." All around us, picturesque mountain ranges loom claustrophobically. The yard is littered with trucks slowly aging into hot rod material. He stands marooned in this unworldly space whose emptiness mirrors his, bursting with a need to divulge and redeem years of stored-up wants. His confession has the mindless constancy of a machine. Then he glances at my thighs and asks me about myself.
On the following day I bond with Joe by rising at 6am ("Women sleep too late") and helping with his hot rod, handing him screws from neatly labeled boxes which he twists into the fender with surgical precision. His shrewd eyes bend dubiously in my direction as he talks and fills a white plastic cup with Skoalwashed spittle. The crisp air carries a brazen scent of manure. Joe's father, Joe Senior, left his farm for Colorado Springs where he worked in concrete. Joe kept up the business, but lives in the outskirts of town because he only finds comfort in emptiness.
He is a short 56-year-old man with a habit of hitching up his pants with his wrists, as if his hands were perennially dirty. He looks alienated from his earth-toned house, his clean clingy white T-shirt, his wife and daughters, as if they're all incomprehensible to him. His face is ageless, burned-brown, with deep lines that connect his eyes to his chin in a dinosaur grin. A stream of hassled scowls punctuates his humdrum talk as if he is constantly at a loss for words. Joe's philosophy in life is that nothing can be gained by talk. He associates talk with women losing their precarious self-control and becoming overwhelmed by their deranging needs. When they get needy, he turns the TV louder. ("Dad hates strong women," the girls say. "He loves us, but does not like us as women.") He resents Sally's new job at the bank which puts him in a higher tax bracket, forces him to eat later than is good for digestion and keeps her 'on her fanny' rather than working in the yard. "I like to be far from people," he says, "so she got the job to talk."
His only joy is his immaculate 1932 Ford model A he inherited from his brother John. When, admiring it volubly, I feel its body with a fingertip, threatening to damage its varnish with my skin oils, he cautions: "You can touch my wife, you can touch my daughters, but you can't touch my car." The little truck is a shining sophisticated extension of himself.He likes his women to visit the shop and watch him battle against age, rust, dirt and mechanical limitations. He talks of driving them to shows across America, going to Disneyland, feeling like a family again. "We need some girls in bikinis on it," he jokes.Then he derides Mary, who's photographing it for him, for using the fancy word 'collage,' which she offers to make on his wall. He abhors big words.
Around the car he's relaxed enough to open up. He recalls his premarital trysts with braggadocio. He was in the Army as a youth, stationed in Germany where all the girls in Capri pants ("The ass showed pretty good") loved the American soldiers. "I lost my virginity at 17 with a girl I did with 4 guys. My brothers and I would go to parties, get drunk and do it, I like to think it was great all the time. Cute girls were dumb." By 18 he had married. Marriage was like make-believe to him at first. "I still had wild oats to sow," he assures me, grabbing an imaginary dick.
That night, like every night, he showers. When he yells "Soap!" Sally runs, telling me, "I must go wash his body." He comes out of the shower boar-like, wrapped in an incongruous lush bathrobe and announces to me coquetishly, "Ask anything." I ask about his conjugal lovemaking. He says familial sex is not simple. Even the idea of putting his arms around his wife in public is disagreeable to his sense of propriety.He can either discuss family or sex.So he resumes recalling his extramarital peccadillos. He stares into space and strokes his whiskers pensively. His sexual manhood lies in the impetuous past, outside the confines of respectability and family. Like most men of his vintage, he treasures the memories of brief, inconsequential sexual encounters as the peak emotional and physical experiences of his life. I suspect this is the irony of his manhood.
Later that night, after he's gone to bed, Sally tells me she 'loves' their marital sex: "When the kids left, we fell in love all over again; we really enjoyed tender sex, 3-4 times a week. After 36 years we know everything about each other's bodies. I remember Joe saying about his parents when they were in their 50s that they were too old to have sex," she chuckles. "But since my hysterectomy Joe desires me less. He never admits it; he says it's me who desires him less or I'd dress sexy for him, and he picks skimpies in catalogues for me to buy. They won't look like that on me. At 55, my body is changing. He wants me to initiate sex. I try, but I'd rather cuddle. I need to be reassured first. I've never discussed my sex life before. When sex is between husband and wife, it isn't right to talk about. It's too easy to hurt those you love." Yet she talks on for hours, even after she finally loses her voice, persisting in a cracked whisper into dawn.
At 16, Sally babysat the kids of Joe's brother Jim, met Joe on leave, and fell in love. "He fell in lust," she chaffs. "He was a good kisser and made me feel special because we were always alone. I loved the attention." She wrote to him in Germany every day.When he promised to marry her, she slept with him in his car. "I didn't orgasm, we had no room to move around." He left her for his old girlfriend who pretended to be pregnant. Then Sally got pregnant, and he married her. Still pregnant, she caught him having an affair with Patty's sister. He denied it, then told her it was normal for men to have extra perks. "He'd slap me around and trap me down yelling lies. He wanted to be good, but he couldn't, because of his peter," she recalls repugnantly, suddenly sobbing. After she had Mary, she left him for a day. He promised to change. "Then he and John started poking Jim's wife, and both got crabs," she says, unfazed by the infraction of two brothers fucking the third brother's wife in a fearsome testimonial to familial closeness. "I was pregnant with Nancy. It went on until Jim's wife left him for his best friend. John's wife, Patty, demanded her own sexual freedom. I wouldn't risk the family for an affair and I never regretted that," she vows, unconvinced, "but I feel betrayed even now. Joe Senior had an affair on his wife in the early years, it runs in the family. I thought of leaving, but I felt responsible for my kids' security; he was the breadwinner. When Mary left home, it broke up our family anyway."
Now she fantasizes about an affair but doesn't dare act on it—she'd rather override her sexual impulses to safeguard the frail cohesion of her socially acceptable self. This is how culture conquers nature. "He is my husband and I love him," she sobs on. It disturbs me that the bulk of her only conversation about her sex life is accompanied by ardent tears. Her 'satisfactory' sex is so sad. Sally's love life, stilled by the logic of either/or, has taught her how naive it is to assume people can love one another without conflict. "Relationships are how we learn who we are. New relationships take too much energy. People have two options in life: we either copy or reverse our parents." Her own mother had divorced Sally's Dad for a salesman whom she chose not to marry.
She's dressed modestly and neatly, and sits in an attitude of animate service, earnest and reassuringly sensible, free of the inquietude of most Ameritas. She is an affable considerate hostess, a patient softspoken Mom, a trustworthy mate. She has a frosted perm, a thin careful mouth. As she talks, her lip quivers, her gentle face crumbles, and she looks lost, nostalgic for simpler times when her children hadn't grown into fellow adults. "I like to cry," she apologizes, forcing a smile, still grieving her unredeemed decency. As each day proceeds like the one before, and the house, the town, the state, the country around her seem caught in a speechless freeze, she expects that any moment, without warning, without pity, her standstill world will collapse and she'll be uprooted again, when Joe's dead, into the unknown, before she has glimpsed the meaning of life.
The next night Mary's sister Nancy and I sit by her parents' fake fireplace feeding it tweedy pellets, surrounded by faux wood paneling, hearing every floor creak and running faucet upstairs, knowing we can be overheard through the heating system, and she tells me she never touched herself as a kid because sex was dirty, and 'got rid' of her virginity at 17 with a ski instructor who treated her as a 'prize.' She's giving herself a pedicure and has no underwear on.
Unlike Mary's, Nancy's angst is superficial. She has a newscaster's bubbly talent to summon italicized excitement from the banal. She is at once plucky, cheery and listless, masochistic and untortured, and switches in and out of these modes mercurially and seamlessly.
After her first lover, she says, she got 'sex fever,' went on the pill, and had waitressing jobs and one-night stands in bathrooms with men who she says felt threatened by her overt desire to merely fuck them. She found a surrogate family among punks, enrolled at the Institute of Art to study painting, and embarked on a 3-year relationship with Sal, a sexually overbearing man whose possessiveness she took as proof of his love. They were always alone and he made her feel special. They had screaming jealousy scenes during which he hit her.When she caught him in bed with another woman, he chased after her. After he got violent, they always had sex; if she wanted sex, she made him angry until he'd slap her and make up. She thought she'd never leave him, but when he moved away, she stayed, met feminists and built herself up, only to get involved with a misogynist 'bad boy'. He was the first man who made her feel 'sexy.' He liked biting, pinching, spanking, watching her pee. He used nipple clamps, whips, leather straps on her, and once, when she was handcuffed, he slapped her in a trance of maniacal rage, until she kicked his balls. They had 'insatiable sex'. She didn't orgasm, but liked the patience bondage required, the heightened sense of her body. He wore a cock ring so he wouldn't come; he liked the control. He made her shave every hair off. They broke up when she found another woman's g-string in his bed.
Nancy has been with her current boyfriend, Bob, 8 years. When they first had sex, he tore her vagina. During their carefree student life, he was her mentor in art. They started fighting because she felt she 'had no voice'. She was used to men ignoring or shaming their women. She'd get hurt and teary and break down like her Mom, instead of naming her needs. She couldn't see Bob was not Joe. "Mom can be dynamic, but when she's with Dad she shrivels up," Nancy says, depicting her own love life in her attempt to deride her Mom's. "He yells, and she cries pathetically and can't express herself. No man pushes me around like that. Mom gets angry with Bob because she recognizes her own patterns vicariously .She wants me to have an affair, but, unlike her, I make a conscious choice to be monogamous." Her toenails wriggle happily in their foamy supports as she recalls nonchalantly this arduous quest to fashion herself as a free, outré woman. The intensity her mother had found in Joe, Nancy has sought in trendier ghosts of her Dad.
Nancy had an affair that everyone but Bob knew about. Carlos wrote her poems, called her his Sadeian fantasy. They had a fling for 5 days and, even as Bob proposed to her, she opted to leave Bob; on the day she moved out, Carlos told her he'd fallen in love with a woman who would support him financially. She came back to Bob in remorse. "Bob is selfish," she says. "His work comes first. Now I want to get married and he doesn't. He'll never leave me, even if we're miserable. I want newness and adventure, but I don't want confusion and disruption, so I stay."
Her solution for now is tantric sex, which she hopes will free her from her parents' 'non-sensual ethic'. "Sex is only part of eroticism; it always ends at the same place. Tantra makes sex less pedestrian and helps me value, not degrade, myself." She and Bob have sex to relieve their stress. He likes finishing in her mouth, so she won't conceive. He doesn't like dirty talk, and she misses it. Like Joe, he likes her in sleazy lingerie, so Nancy wears it when she feels good about her body. She wants to try a threesome, but Bob is too private, 'like Joe'. During sex, she often sees Bob as an alien monster with two heads and a worm body, 'creepy and gross'. Sometimes, when she's about to come, she sees a field in the howling wind and a white gate snapping shut.
Hearing this ex-punk, her eyes aglow and her lips puckered languidly, describe a sex life that duplicates her parents', confirms the sheer unending pervasiveness of our normality. The subtle drama of Nancy's life is that she's traveled far and wide on every forbidden sexual path away from home, and somehow she has never left home. Her sexual possibilities appear endless, but centuries of mistrusting any stimulation outside the narrow familial bounds and of seeing fidelity as the touchstone of happiness, stand in her way. Even if Nancy and Bob break up their family ties in the name of sexual freedom, they can only recreate their restrictive bonds, which they saw their parents sustain, with new partners, repeating the familiar pattern that had not made them happy before, in the hopes that the match rather than the culture needs to be changed.
Jack saunters downstairs to check on us. "Jack is supernatural," Nancy says, hugging him adoringly. This is why I think Jack is the family darling: because familial heterosexuality is so complicated, messy and serious, deviations present an attractive alternative to a normality that opposes or dilutes most natural sexual needs. The family sees Jack as an irregular but freed man.
When we are left alone, I ask how he first knew his homosexuality. It's the vital question the family hopes I'll answer. "I was always gay," he replies, disavowing a conscious choice. "But I'd learned my male chauvinistic programming well. Therapy unhooked me. My brothers didn't have those skills: you had to be thin, successful, smart, married, have kids, a house, a secure job, a retirement account.Gay people stretch the boundaries of sexuality and are vital to our evolution; that's my special role in my family-tribe: as an alternate model in the powerful male continuum."
Om, 40, Jack's mate of 15 years, is boyishly inquisitive and playful. Jack makes sure Om is respected, with a marital devotion Amerita wives envy. But Om Bloom, born Thurmond Salisbury, is not entrusted with a new Amerita generation. Having no children liberates Jack from half of the family's expectations and makes work (the other half) less pressing. Homosexuality has released Jack from the all-Amerita paradigm and absolved him from the rigid codes and familial hassles that restrict male-to-female partnerships. ("Jack's difference is not about sex, it's about [male] companionship," Joe told me in a tone that showed he too preferred male company.)
Jack left concrete for a Masters in Counseling and worked in Corrections for 20 years. He met Om in a store; Om saw Jack's name on his Visa, found his number in the phone book and called to say he found him attractive. Jack invited him for a brandy. They moved in together, meditated, frequented nudist beaches, ogled pretty boys, but had sex rarely after Om confessed to an affair. When Jack's parents died, they came out to the family. When John died, they invested their savings, calculated a stipend to live on, and migrated from Baja in winter to Big Sur in summer, doing watercolors and reading the Dow like an astrology chart.
Like his brothers, Jack had married in his youth and resisted divorce, viewing it as a failure. He won't tell me about his 7-year marriage to his college girlfriend. Like Joe, he has trouble broaching marriage and sex. Others tell me the couple was deeply in love, hippies with junky cars and a shack with a spool for a table where guests carved their names. They fought a lot. When she threw Jack out, he was crushed, because loyalty, of the sort his parents had, mattered to him more than sex and sexual freedom. Some family members say his ex-wife is now a dyke.
I've been with the Ameritas two weeks, before I get together with Patty. She buys me lunch in a deluxe stripmall and offers to take me shopping. Her indomitable lust is now diverted by rapacious material consumption, she explains: "When I shop, I am calm.I don't need anybody, I don't talk. I take myself outside the anxiety of this world." Money was her leverage with John: she'd vow to leave him and take half his equity unless he bought her $20,000 facelifts, nose jobs, cheek implants. "John was bad with people," she says, "so I took my mother's advice: take the money, buy the ring yourself. Make him pay for sex." ("John didn't leave her only because he wouldn't give her the satisfaction to take half of what he had. Now she's got it all," Joe had said.)
The Ameritas still blame their family turbulences on Patty's unruly sexuality. She was the model for Joe's girls' rebellion.She had more fun than a mother has license to, and the family has clamored for her accountability, for it strikes them as unfair that Patty, who put her needs before the family's, has grandkids, while Sally, who was faithful, has none. The sisters-in-law are considered mirror opposites. At 58, Patty is flinty-eyed, highstrung, big-headed in the Nancy Reagan mold, and exhaustingly voluble. Her face is pretty in a lacquered baroque way, like a doll's.
She has been an Amerita most her life. She could 'say no to boys' until she met John. She conceived at 17 and they eloped. She cooked and dressed up and waited for him to come home, and didn't suspect his infidelities, for she didn't 'know married men misbehaved.' In her 20s, she was childlike, a high-school dropout with a tough pregnancy. "John handed me the paycheck and asked no questions; he bought my silence.He'd hang cash on me like a Christmas tree and people would know he was doing well by how I looked. I loved it. The more I got, the more I wanted." When he did come home, at 2 am, he was drunk and wanted to sleep or fuck; if she said the wrong thing, he'd knock her against the wall. After the fights, they'd make up and have sex. "I couldn't tell if he loved me. He couldn't have had a better wife. My wake-up call was when he and Joe got crabs from Jim's wife?we all got them. I loathed Joe. Sally never knew anyone else, he never had to do anything special for her in bed. She and Joe don't talk. Joe Senior couldn't talk with his wife, and it trickled down to his sons' families to my own son," she exclaims.
"John quit fucking around about the age a man should marry. But by then, I'd woken up." She needed a career and went to college. John, feeling threatened, refused to pay for it. She surprised him with an empty house and divorce papers. "That was his first shock," she snickers; "it broke him, not fully yet, I had to work much harder for that. He came after me like crazy. All he wanted was to make up. He paid for everything. But we still had no fun. His social life was the guys after work.He'd say, 'My wife doesn't wear Levis. My wife doesn't swear.' Like a property. I told him, 'I don't know who your wife is, but I don't like her; it's not me.' After I had my face fixed, I was out of there. I knew I was beautiful. That's my difference with Sally: I have internal strength. Then I lost control. I dated non stop and projected on men." She filed for divorce and got a job at a sheriff's office. "I was a Queen. They'd never seen anything like me. Me-me-me. It was good for my self-esteem. I slept with 100 guys. That's when I became my husband" Then she learned he had a girlfriend. "I went home in a day. He'd bought a Corvette, looked great. My sister said she'd slept with him. I never asked him." Joe also had an affair with her sister, I point out. Does this surprise her? "This is why I became a sex therapist," she replies, "to make sense of the insanity of desire." She resumes eagerly: "We made love for 30 days straight. His girlfriend's clothes and love letters were there. I demanded a new house and got one with a pool and a 30ft closet I proceeded to fill, and got my Master's in counseling. I won every fight," she proclaims. "I contended with the king. I was ruthless, but it was the only way to be with such a man."
Patty didn't win the battle. She was John's possession; it offended him to let other men steal her. Taking her back exonerated his pride—as taking a girlfriend asserted his retribution. Patty duly reclaimed him when another woman came up, and asked him for a castle. John was Tristan, the Western hero of adultery. She was the patriarch's doll, and it was her life's struggle to pussywhip him. When she lost him, she lost the orgasmic intensities of their lifelong duel.
Through all her exploits, Patty's sex life remained 'awful': "I suffered from repression. I didn't know I had a clitoris; I never had an orgasm, and didn't know it. We had sex 3-4 times a week for years, and I could have done without it." At 32, she found out about female orgasms in therapy. She tried to masturbate and hated it. She tried to climax and failed. She climaxed for the first time when she returned to John. He too had had trouble ejaculating with other women, but he felt relaxed with Patty and infallibly came. "It's the big secret nobody knows," she snorts with a ferocious laugh. "We were only comfortable with each other because we'd been together since we were kids. It's how I ended up with a great loving husband. I taught him everything out of sex books. I never orgasmed with anyone else. Neither did he. My husband was my best lover."
In this simple revelation I find the climax of my visit. It is an awesome peek through the forbidding walls of Patty's confidence. It posits the difference between talking about sex and having it. Even though she is a sex therapist, Patty is so impeccably conditioned that she could only relax sexually within the traditional model. Like other Amerita females, she left the family nest, risking ostracism and hatred, to attain the erotic fulfillment her family role couldn't afford her; she challenged the accepted order, allowed herself wide latitude, looked for more generous ways of loving; and her lonely journey to discover and educate herself brought her back to the very knot of illusion, reflexive loyalty and willful evasion by which families unite themselves. Despite the extreme unpredictability of the forces that pull people into families, and the precar-ious balance required to make families go on without suffocating their members, the familial hold remains insurmountable within the confines of 'normality'. Many Ameritas hoped that telling me their love stories would clarify the motivation of their lives and the parameters of their identities. But a family is a collection of echoes. Freud calls this the confusion of civilization and horror: we internalize social rules of acceptable behaviors and disregard what is outside the rules, even if it is our own nature, so we can coexist. This constraint turns domestic life into a prison.
Contemporary therapists try to undo the assumption that each partner in a couple has to be either dominant or dominated, which causes the constant jockeying for control that erodes loving relationships. John Gray, author of the Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus bestseller series, questions the traditional model that has the male dominant in the world and the female in charge of domestic affairs. He says the typical woman criticizes her husband or rules the household without considering his needs; the typical man confuses his yearning for sexual pleasure with his need to dominate, to be a man. As a result, most men are lonely, and understand sex only physically, as a feeling of 'I want'; if they can't have what they want, they experience enormous frustration and may resort to violence. Women are taught relationships are important. Men are taught it is important to get what they want. Both lack the skills for sexual satisfaction.
Feminist author and therapist Riane Eisler divides all relations into the dominator and partnership models. 'Domination' is based on ranking, control, exploitation, pain; 'partnership' is based on equality, empathy, pleasure. Our social infrastructure is based on dominator relations, on an intimate, social and national level, so it impedes equal ways of relating. In this system, man is an automaton serviced by his wife so that he can spend his energy working. This is why men have trouble relating emotionally to their wives and children, why they get ulcers and heart attacks.Eisler says it's impossible to have good sex in a dominator society?only intense sensations.
Gina Ogden suggests sex is 'embodied spirituality'. Most people don't have the informa-tion or cultural permission to link sex with spirit, and sex can cause spiritual damage if it's linked with domination or violence. She says our social eroticization of violence is sexual oppression. A reintegration of sex and spirit, will broaden our definitions of sex, undermine stereotypes, relieve performance anxiety, make orgasms satisfying, and introduce deeper partner communication.
These experts call for social changes to support what efforts individuals make in their own lives. They suggest that we are in the midst of a 'revolution of consciousness'; a social transformation is imminent. Practice determines our morals, as the new acceptability of divorce shows: what used to be a social bane has become a simple procedure; this has reinforced the view that social and private bliss can coincide. In 1997, the American Sociological Association announced the results of its first study tracking marital happiness over time; it showed that marital satisfaction drops drastically after a couple has children, reaching its lowest levels in the teen years. Some happiness is restored after the kids are 18, but most women never recover sexual joy
As far back as 1940, Dr. Alfred Kinsey argued that sex education had to begin at home; parents who shirked this duty, he warned, ran the risk of injuring and alienating their children, and opening a gulf between the generations that would never close. Sex is learned by osmosis and example. But because this most important aspect of life, so crucial to happiness, is not dealt with at the time when attitudes are formed, its inevitable manifestation inflicts families with uncomprehending pain. Most people dislike this state of affairs, but don't know how to handle the pervasively sexual nature of our individual and social energy, how to build a sound carnal ethic; because, despite being commonplace, marriage is the most radical personal transformation an individual embarks upon in life. Marriage involves the surrender of one's deepest ego structures to the demands of partnership. Joseph Campbell described marriage as a form of crucifixion.
I am listening to the Ameritas joke jovially, and alertly, as grandma's feast winds down past dessert. The men's eyes, unwavering like the gazes of stalkers, keep watch on my body for the tiniest reaction. The walls are incongruously decorated with Mary's amoebic photos, Nancy's vulvic paintings, and a rainbow trout Joe paid a taxidermist $7 an inch to stuff, caught in a fenced-off power-plant pond. Mary puts her arm around Jay and asks me theatrically, "Isn't he drop-dead gorgeous?" Everyone waits for me to say 'yes.' I look at Fran, obliquely studying her hands, then Sally, smiling at me in feigned naiveté, at Patty, winking ribaldly. All the women except Fran are genuinely enthused by the prospect of an illicit affair between me and Jay, who is to be the next patriarch. Their double standards stun me. I realize that repression is what renders our universe intelligible. Family, with its often unfulfillable promise of security and longevity, lulls us into numbness and fantasy. Our words may change, but habits remain the same. As everyone starts to leave, Joe looks at me red-eyed, both recalcitrant and quiescent, safely alienated from his desires, and gives me a white Amerita-Concrete T-shirt with the logo, 'Who Are These People?'