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Can women and men live without sex and still stay healthy? Yes, they can. People cast away on isolated islands have gone for years without sex and have not experienced any physiological or psychological breakdowns or deficiencies as a result. Priests, nuns, and many mystics, such as the great Mahatma Gandhi have eschewed sexual union and not damaged their health or decreased their longevity.
Sex, of course, is necessary for propagation; nature has provided this instinctual drive so that the species will survive. The drive is effective because of the variety of intense pleasures derived from its fulfillment. But no harm will occur to the normal individual to whom sex is denied.
Almost all adult human beings somehow have the feeling that experiencing sex frequently is a requirement for good physical and mental health, even if intellectually they know better. Both men and women who have enjoyed sex at regular intervals become frustrated, sometimes desperate, when it is withheld for (what seems to them) a long time. The sex aggressions of men at war in foreign lands and of sailors who have been at sea for months are well known. Such behavior stems more from a feeling of deprivation than from pure physical necessity. A person who voluntarily renounces or limits sexual intercourse-as priests, nuns, and others do for varied reasons-suffers no ill health or mental anguish as long as the renunciation corresponds to his emotional needs. If, however, a person desires sexual union and has deep, unmet needs for this form of human intimacy, yet is unable for some reason to meet the need, the resulting sense of deprivation and frustration may create emotional problems.
Sometimes unusual sex actions are stimulated by nonsexual deficiencies. For example, male children with a dread of being abandoned by their mother often will masturbate excessively. Men who have repressed homosexual tendencies (frequently the result of having a passive-or dead-father and a dominant mother) often are inclined to act oversexed in order to “prove their manhood.”
The beliefs (most of them specious) which most individuals have on “what kind” of sex is desirable, and “how much,” have several sources:
- So-called “scientific” information obtained from books, articles, and lectures.
- Customs, traditions, and advice conveyed by relatives and friends.
- Customs, traditions, and examples transmitted by literature, radio, television, movies, and advertising.
Tradition molds many beliefs and habits having to do with sex in marriage. For example, consider the barbaric custom of the honeymoon-particularly in past centuries, when the girl’s chastity was treasured and important. In those days the bride and groom, who hardly knew each other, departed to a strange geographical area and into sexual intimacy. Usually the bride possessed only hearsay information on sexual matters and the husband’s sexual experience had not necessarily prepared him to understand the needs of a virginal bride. They hurried away from the courtship milieu of jollity, gregariousness, and traditional optimism into a new sexual environment of their own, and were expected to emerge a week or ten days later with all the tenderness, love, and devotion needed to create a successful, happy marriage-whether or not the sexual experience had been traumatic for one or both of them.
A modem version of the same ritual occurs today, with an additional cultural expectation introduced: the newlyweds are expected to achieve mutual sexual satisfaction during the honeymoon. The young couple usually is launched with a lavish wedding and a tremendous amount of effort and expense on the part of both their families. The newlyweds are under pressure to “have fun” on their honeymoon and to return looking radiant and serene. Frequently the opposite happens. We estimate that most honeymoons are periods of frustrating sexual disappointment. The honeymoon may be an exciting novelty, but usually it results in confusion even when there has been premarital sexual experience. The situation of the bride who cried all through her honeymoon is a common one. Sex, like anything else, has to be learned; and even if the two have had relations before marriage, the marriage state places them in a new psychological milieu to which they must adjust. Now they are “legitimate,” and they believe that their sexual experience will therefore be better. Now they are legally tied; they cannot walk away from each other. They feel the sex act must be a success every time; otherwise, the marriage is disintegrating.
This situation is aggravated by the pronouncements of most sex consultants, books, and articles on marriage. They usually indicate that sex is the keystone of marital success. We disagree. Sex is significant; and good sex is satisfying and emotionally nourishing. Sex is highly desirable, but it is not the only vital force in marriage, either during the honeymoon or later.
The situation is muddied further by the conflicting views of “experts” who give “scientific” information on sex. It is important that all “expert” opinions on sex be taken with a grain of skepticism.
Most “scientific” information on sex comes from two sources:
Psychiatrists and other physicians writing about data obtained from the experiences of their patients, and social scientists generalizing from data obtained in surveys conducted by means of some type of questionnaire.
In point of fact, conclusions based upon the medical data obtained from patients are not necessarily applicable to most people. Patients go to doctors for the treatment of one or more problems. If they have come for psychiatric therapy, they expect to spend many hours discussing sex and exploring the negative aspects of themselves, their spouses, their friends, and so on. Few (if any) will pay twenty-five or thirty dollars an hour and then spend the time discussing pleasant and satisfactory experiences. The gynecologist or the family physician who writes a sex book is scientific only in regard to anatomy. The nonanatomical aspects of the text are based upon his own personal sex experiences plus whatever his ailing patients have told him.
Some of the most popular tracts on sex and marriage are written by gynecologists whose practices consist to a great extent of women who spontaneously and voluntarily talk freely to the physician in their efforts to describe their personal discords. The fact that a person talks and answers questions in a doctor’s office (instead of in a public bar or a living room) does not prove that the individual is accurate or objective, and certainly does not indicate that his conclusions are generally applicable. Almost all patients’ views on sex are subjective and weighted; especially since those who feel the need to discuss their sex lives usually have special problems.
The same difficulty causes the flaws in the Kinsey reports (and in most other studies whose data comes from question-and answer procedures). Although Kinsey made an important study, one that required courage to initiate, we cannot overlook one important fact: he depended primarily on volunteers to answer his questions. Can we be sure that the people who volunteer to answer sex questions are representative? Some of the Kinsey interviewees talked two or three hours about their experiences evidently revealing intimacies was fun for some.
Also, there were considerable differences in experience and ability among Kinsey’s interviewers. Only recently, the work of the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard has demonstrated that the nature of an interviewing context (including the interviewer’s attitude) has a tremendous influence on the interviewee’s response. An interviewer who strongly believes that, say, many wives have intercourse with other men when their husbands are on trips, will come up with much more evidence to support this view than will an interviewer who holds the opposite opinion at the start of the investigation.
Nevertheless, the Kinsey material provides the most complete and reliable data we have on the sexual practices of middle- and upper-class Americans. It reveals that increasingly in our culture, sexual intercourse is not confined to married people; and it is certainly not limited to sexual congress between men and women.
The bulk of the Kinsey material and of other surveys (which primarily relate to college students) concerns homosexuality, masturbation, premarital intercourse, perversion, post-divorce sexual activities, the activities of spinsters and bachelors, and adultery. To our knowledge, no one has studied a sample of normogenic (average) married couples in significant numbers and scientifically determined what married people think and do in relation to sex. Little is known about socio-economic class differences, let alone ethnic idiosyncrasies.
Where does sex fit into marriage? It is almost impossible to estimate (except with respect to a specific married couple, after many hours of interviews) because so few studies have been made on the subject, and those which do exist are limited in scope and objectivity.
The answer to this question also depends upon time and circumstances, for sexual needs are fundamentally psychological. Middle-income spouses who have been married for a year and have no children, but want some, may have different sexual needs from the husband and wife without jobs, so poor they can’t pay the rent, who therefore are afraid to have children. A couple married for thirty years, with four children in college, may have different sexual needs from a couple married for five years, with only one child. Such differences are not merely due to age. Boredom plays a more significant role in decreasing the frequency of intercourse than do withering sex glands. Also, a couple whose sex experience is beautiful and satisfying may engage in sex less frequently than an unhappy pair frantically experimenting for a solution to their discord.
There is no accurate sex information which gives exact answers for everyone, since there are so many variables. Yet in the United States, the sex ethic has become all important. As we have already stressed, the fallacious concept that sex determines our lives is spread far and wide by those promoting the tremendous sales of products supposed to enhance sexual attractiveness. Also, “authorities” on sex lecture, write, and give sexual advice for a fee. Naturally, they exaggerate the importance of sex in marriage. Offering complicated sex techniques is a profitable profession, and the more difficult the techniques, the longer the expensive counseling will last. The most popular sex manual has been through countless revisions and has outsold all other books except the Bible.
The myth that perfect and heavenly sex must be experienced by an individual before he can consider himself normal has become the foundation for a national mania. Sex success is the theme of social instruction and of almost all advertising, even for products not in any way associated with the sex act.
Spouses who are disappointed in sex are profoundly concerned about their difficulty. This is a reasonable reaction, if the disappointment is well founded. Men often wonder about their manhood or suspect that their wives are frigid or malicious. Wives wonder about their frigidity and suspect that perhaps their husbands are having affairs or that they are effeminate or at least inconsiderate or ignorant of satisfying sexual techniques.
Spouses will try anything to bring about a happier union, one closer to the sex-success image which is our national demigod. Many a man and wife have spent a small fortune to go to a posh luxury lodge where they hoped they would miraculously achieve a sexual congress they couldn’t bring about in their own bedroom. If the weather is nice and the view is good, something may come of the weekend, but it is not apt to result in unusual sexual satisfaction. People frequently buy new houses, hire interior decorators-with the hope that a fresh environment will improve sexual relations.
If the various manifestations of sex were accepted as natural, and if people could abandon the view that there is a single absolute standard to be reached by all who are normal, the unhappiness of many couples would decrease-and their performance would automatically improve.
Our concern in this chapter has been with the problem: Is great, great, GREAT sex necessary for a satisfactory marriage, for a workable marriage? If sex is not up to culturally created expectations, is the marriage a failure?
It need not be a failure. It can be a good marriage even if the partners don’t find heaven in bed.
Next, is a less-than-heavenly sex performance “normal”?
No one knows the answer, neither clergymen nor doctors. No one knows what normogenic sex performances are in marriage. Scientists have studied pathological marriages, but not normal ones. Small-sample research (such as that by Epstein and Westley at McGill University) supports our contention that sex is not essential; it has been found that some apparently well-adjusted spouses have “given up” sex after a few years of marriage.
In summary, the important thing to remember is that there is no absolute standard against which the success of married sex can be measured as one would clock a hundred-yard dash. Occasionally, there are medical abnormalities (such as disfigured or diseased genitals, impotence, and a pathological fear of sex), but assuming that these are not present, there is only one important question: Is sex a source of pleasure-in the spouses’ own judgment?
What is a satisfying sex experience for two people may well be undesirable for two others, and vice versa. For example, it is estimated by most physicians that more than half of all women married an average of ten years and having three children have never experienced an orgasm. In a sampling made of such cases most of the women were not aware that they had not had a full sex act. They derived varying degrees of pleasure from the physical intimacy with their husbands. Equally interesting is the fact that the husbands frequently did not know that their wives voluntarily made the same noises and motions which they had heard or read were performed by passionate women; the husbands had accepted these as spontaneous and derived satisfaction from them as evidence of the wives’ pleasure.
Spouses should not permit their satisfactions to be influenced by authority figures (such as actors and actresses), advertising, art, literature, and social customs and traditions. Personal sex values concern the two people involved. For example, we know a couple in their seventies. Every evening they bathe and dress elegantly for dinner. They treat each other with the dignity and courtesy of a blossoming courtship. At night when they go to bed they hold each other throughout the night, even though they have not exercised their genitalia for years. The elderly gentleman has described their experience as “having a ten-hour orgasm every night.” For these two, it is a complete and wonderful sex act, and a very satisfying and nourishing one. Who is to differ with them?
Is sex important in married life? Yes, it is. It is one of the cements which hold the bricks of married life together. But the when, the how, the how often, and the quality can only be determined by the people involved.
