Richard Sharon - Diary of a Lover

Another thousand?

Ten thousand?

Images of things past.

In class.

Driving.

Talking.

Mozart.

Beethoven.

Laughing.

First name.

TLR.

Beach.

Cliff House.

First night.

Warm, soft body.

Coming against me.

Living with her.

Taking care of her.

Why?

My sweet, beautiful girl.

My love.

"… remember how much I loved you."

Her last words, fleeting whispers in my ear.

I learn grief.

The abyss with no bottom.

The black plateau with no end.

But I am only eighteen.

And in time,

I will search again.

It took us a few million years, but we have finally reached the Age of the Almighty Orgasm.

Most women in times past, blissfully unaware that females were even capable of this physiological response to proper stimulation, loved their husbands, raised their families, and went about their lives with an orderly minimum of fuss and bother. In their ignorance they were happy. If men were careless clods and jackrabbits in bed it didn't really matter, because their wives didn't know there was any more to it. If sex was naughty, even for married people, if it was performed under heavy blankets and with the lights out, it was all right.' The man got what he wanted, and the woman, having performed her wifely duty, could busy herself with important things like laundry, raising children, and cooking. Most wives loved their husbands dearly and existed with them in a close-knit family environment. But those were the good old days.

Then came the sexual revolution. Some idiot, somewhere, had discovered (or rediscovered) the fact that women could have orgasms, probably while browsing through an ancient copy of The Memoirs of Casanova. Worse still, he let word of his discovery leak out. It wasn't long before romantic novels began alluding to the earth shaking, the sky falling, bells ringing, and lightning bolting. Women who read these novels began to wonder what it all meant, because the sky never fell when their brutish husbands made love to them. The discontent was vague, rambling in the distance like a far-off thunderstorm, but it was there.

Things might have eventually reverted to normal, had it not been for the movies. They took the ball from the novelists and started showing shots of puffy clouds floating through azure skies just at the crucial moments of their love scenes. Again the women wondered, perplexed because they had never seen any clouds wafting over their four-posters.

Then came the final and most telling blow; doctors, smelling money in sex the way a whore can smell a John with a bankroll, began writing books. "The Climax!" they screamed. "The climax is the be-all and end-all of marital bliss." And not just a climax, but mutual climax. They were still afraid to use the word orgasm because puritanical censors might confuse pontification with pornography. However, they described the sensations in terms so glowing that the earthquakes of the novels and the clouds of the movies paled by comparison.

Women by the millions began to read these books, and the more they read, the more they felt cheated by never having had a climax, much less a mutual climax. So, for the first time in modern history, the female began to make sexual demands upon the male. There was only one small problem: the male, used to pleasing himself alone, was not up to meeting these demands. Women who had always thought of themselves as happily married began to see their husbands in a new light of glaring sexual truth, as ineffectual climax givers. Ladies who had been completely happy never having had an orgasm began to develop the "frustrations" of which the books spoke. Formerly contented housewives began to see psychiatrists, the marriage-counselor business started booming, and divorces for "incompatibility" mushroomed. As time went on the authors became braver and started discussing orgasms instead of climaxes. Medico sexual fad developed. The idea of the vaginal versus the clitoral orgasm, which reigned for some years, was finally blown out of the saddle by Masters and Johnson. Mutual orgasm as an ideal fell into disrepute.

But the Cult of the Orgasm continued to grow, and as women's demands upon men increased, interesting side effects developed. Impotence among healthy young men reached epidemic proportions because the figure roles in sex had nearly reversed. Women wanted their orgasms, they insisted upon them, and when the men, as was to be expected, didn't deliver, the girls let them know about it by challenging their manhood and their ability to perform. As a result, otherwise normal men have become impotent due to their fear of failure. A man's ego is as delicate as a flower, and when trampled it is often some time before the flower is able to rise again.

Another effect has been the turning inward of hostility by women upon themselves. After all, don't the books say that Any Woman Can? And if a woman can't, doesn't that prove that there's something fundamentally wrong with her? Could any normal woman, bombarded by an orgasm-mad media, live with an image of herself as a frigid lover? How many millions of women, plagued by self-doubt, have faked orgasms? And for whose emotional benefit? Their lovers' or their own?

A man doesn't feel like a man anymore unless he can bring his girl off with regularity, and a woman doesn't feel like a woman unless she can go off like a Chinese New Year celebration. And just as people, being human, can't measure up to the expectations of the other religions, we now find millions made guilty by the dictates of Orgas-molo-gy, whose goals they can't fulfill, either. As a result, these people walk around with all kinds of fears, neuroses, feelings of inadequacy and self-hatred. They read books, go to shrinks, submit to horrible character mutilation in encounter groups, pay handsome prices at fancy new sex clinics, get driven into alcoholism and drug dependence, all in the fruitless quest for that elusive orgasm.

Then came the books written by people who have initials instead of names. According to them, if you weren't spending half your life in the throes of sexual delirium you were doing something wrong. They promoted making love with the emotional attachment of attending a bowling league, all in a carefree spirit of good, clean fun.

Yet, despite all of the publicity, despite the now generation getting rid of all their hangups and letting it all hang out with a right on attitude, despite the psychiatrists and the psychologists and the marriage counselors and the encounter groups and the sensitivity training and the sex clinics and the plethora of books and movies on the subject, a sizable percentage of our female population is still not able to achieve orgasm, including the so-called liberated females. In spite of all this, the rate of impotence and premature ejaculation among men is very high. Even today, the chances that a woman will find an inadequate lover are much better than the chances that she will find a good one.

Are the statistics trying to tell us something? Are they trying to tell us that orgasms, after all, just aren't that important? Is it time for women to go back to not knowing that this great, good feeling exists? Would they be happier in their ignorance?

Although I can't argue with the fact that sexual adjustments in the preorgasmic age were more childish and backward than they are today, neither can I dispute the fact that man-woman relationships in toto rested upon much firmer foundations than the fleeting ecstasy of a singular, titillated nervous system. I am not advocating that we return to this condition, the past is irretrievable in any event. But what I do suggest is the real message, the real purpose, of this book.

As a young boy living in the Age of the Orgasm I was made aware of my sexual duty to women. It was nothing overt, nothing actually stated and spelled out for me. Rather, it was the attitude of the girls and women I had known which told me, if even in a subliminal way, that I was expected to please. Ellena, the girl who picked me up at a Greek wedding, telling me that after I had made her come the only reason she allowed me to continue was because she wanted to see what I felt like inside of her, is a good example. The only thing she really cared about was her orgasm; the rest, including myself, was unimportant. It was a complete reversal of historic roles; a full swing of the sexual pendulum. Then, after being trained by Mora, I felt that the only way I could be accepted by women was by giving them orgasms. It became a matter of pride, and of conceit, with me. Why did I really seduce all of those little high-school girls? Because as Mora, in her conceit, wanted me to remember her, I, in mine, wanted those girls to remember that I had been the first one to make them come, even if they didn't know what was happening and even if it was against their will. If I couldn't make a girl come, I felt a terrible sense of failure. My preoccupation with climaxes had gone so far that it wasn't even the seduction of these little girls I wanted, as an act in itself; it was their orgasms. Because their orgasms proved not my value to them, but my value to myself. In the final analysis, women were only objects from which I extracted orgasms to feed my own ego.