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In addition to possible physiological setbacks, which can include illness, family and money problems, there can be misunderstandings all through relationships but particularly at the beginning. Studies of what male college students wanted on a first date compared with what they thought the girls wanted show that they misunderstood each other right from the beginning. Whereas only half the men and women actually wanted or expected to kiss on this first occasion, three-quarters of them thought it was expected. Even studies of engaged and married couples show tremendous areas of misunderstanding, so obviously there is room for a good deal more openness if relationships are to be successful and enjoyable.
Even if the level of communication between two individuals is not all that great there are certain things that one can learn from research and other people’s experiences that help decide on a person’s sexual availability.
Women of all ages are less permissive than men, but up to the age of twenty there is a slight rise reaching a peak then and declining thereafter, especially in those who have children. Women with girls in their late teens are least permissive of all and are only exceeded by the deeply religiously committed.
The way people talk about sex can be revealing but it is a mistake to go entirely by what a person says on the subject. One study, for example, found that attractive girls were more likely to have premarital intercourse but that the attitudes to intercourse they expressed were no different from those expressed by unattractive girls. Similarly, studies of girls from religious families tend to show that they have intercourse younger than girls from non-believing homes yet their upbringing and outward signs would tend to point in the opposite direction.
Kinsey found that women living in urban areas were more sexually experienced. About 60 per cent of American men aged twenty to twenty-two admit to having had premarital intercourse (according to one survey), and the figure is about the same in Germany, Canada and Norway, rising to 75 per cent of English men. The English also lead this chart in ‘one-night stands’, especially among women, a third of whom claimed to have experienced one-night stands as opposed to fewer than 10 per cent in the other countries. The fear of AIDS may have reduced such behaviour recently but probably not to a large extent.
Once we get away from groups of people and consider individual personalities, things become more interesting. For example, studies have found that submissive girls are almost without exception virgins whereas only about one third of dominant women are. Extroverts, hardly surprisingly, have intercourse much more often and do so at an earlier age, with more people and in a greater variety of positions. The differences are quite large. For example, 45 per cent of extrovert men in one study had had intercourse at the age of nineteen compared with only 15 per cent of the introvert men. The difference in women was even more startling — introvert women had intercourse three times a month whereas the extroverts experienced it on an average of seven and a half times a month.
Psychologically ill people tend to be promiscuous, have more premarital sex and have more ‘hostility’ and ‘lack of satisfaction’, according to one study. Very sensitive people tend to experience more impotence (men) or frigidity (women) — that is, men failing to erect or ejaculate and women failing to have orgasms. People with so-called ‘hysterical’ personalities were found in one study to be sexually very experienced but highly guilt-ridden.
Social give-aways that reveal sexual activity are fairly useful when assessing the field. For example, smoking and drinking are good clues to a teenager’s sexual activity. Sexually inexperienced teenagers rarely get drunk and in one study sexually active teenagers smoked more than would be expected. Teenage girls who smoked more than twenty cigarettes a day were almost never virgins.
Girls who live away from home are more likely to be sexually experienced and girls living by themselves are least likely to be virgins. The lowest level of teenage sexual activity is found among girls living at home with both natural parents.
We have seen that attractive girls have more boyfriends but it does not stop there – they also have more intercourse. Attractive girls provably have a more active sex life and research shows that they have twice as many male friends and have been in love more often. Attractive girls say that more of their friends have had intercourse but perhaps all of their friends are attractive!
The subject of virginity comes high on the priority list of sexual attraction for many people and many men still want to marry a virgin. Very little is known about why boys remain virgins but some have religious scruples or other moral objections. It looks as though the vast majority simply have not had the opportunity.
In one survey of late-adolescent boys 58 per cent said they wanted to marry a virgin or, more exactly, to be the only sex partner the woman they marry has had.
The majority of girls (more than ninety per cent) are not virgins on their wedding day. About two thirds claim in surveys to have slept only with their husband-to-be but all such evidence must be taken with a large pinch of salt. Clinical experience suggests that this is much too low a figure and that many have had other sexual partners but dare not admit it — even to themselves on occasions.
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What happens normally is that boys and girls think about the things that interest or excite them while masturbating. The pleasant sensation of masturbation reinforces the enjoyment of the fantasised person, situation or object and the adolescent takes this image or fantasy ‘on board’ as part of their growing sexual personality. How and about what the adolescent fantasises depends to some extent on his or her personality and several studies have been done in this area. In one, ninety-five men were shown silhouettes of female figures which had various breast, buttock and leg sizes. The researchers found that different types of men emerged according to their
preferences for the silhouettes. The ‘breast men’ tended to be Playboy readers, extrovert and masculine in their interests, and those who liked small-breasted women tended to be inward-looking and submissive, drink little and hold fundamental Christian beliefs. Men who liked large buttocks were also keen on neatness and order and those who liked small ones were work-centred and uninterested in sport. The most remarkable characteristic of those who preferred large legs was that they drank little and were shy in social situations. Men who preferred small legs drank very little but they smoked, and read sports magazines rather than Playboy. In general, a preference for large women was linked to ambition and a high consumption of alcohol whereas men who preferred smaller women were persevering and of a higher social class.
Similar studies of women looking at male outlines show that they prefer ‘V’s rather than ‘pears’ in male body shape. Women who liked large men were more likely to be interested in competitive sports. Smaller women preferred large men and so did those raised in fatherless homes.
There are definite class differences in likes and dislikes. In one study which involved psychiatrists, psychologists, porters, maintenance men and soldiers being shown fifty colour photographs of women, some women were found to have almost universal appeal regardless of the age, social class or marital status of the men. There were some interesting differences too. The porters and soldiers preferred the photos of naked, large-breasted women who were being sexy, and the psychiatrists preferred young, clothed girls who were ‘unconventional’ or ‘provocative’. All the men tended to choose attractive and dressed women when asked to select a possible wife from the photos and they avoided those women shown in provocative or sexy poses. This and other work suggests that what a man finds attractive in a woman depends upon her age, social class, personality and to some extent on what he wants of her.
Research done with women looking at pictures of men shows that the professional and educated positively disliked the muscle-man type and preferred conventional, dressed men who were slim, dark and sensitive looking. Many men think that all women like muscular,
hairy-chested, broad-shouldered men with large penises, but studies have shown this not to be true. Women overall like men with small buttocks and a tall, slim physique and many in one survey said they were actually put off by the features men thought women liked.
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Her sexual fantasies change during early adolescence from being relatively impersonal to being more explicit and more excitingly personal. Usually the fantasies of early adolescent girls are of a fairly vague nature, frequently involving situations such as stripping, prostitution and rape. Girls of this age may search for newspaper items and books about these things and then discuss their findings with their friends at school in the hope of understanding what they are about. It is a paradox that a girl of this age is likely to assume that she is a sex expert and may reject sex information from her parents and teachers. This is perfectly normal.
Fantasies may be suppressed because they are seen as disgusting and any that involve her father or a father-like figure are nearly always severely suppressed. A girl’s behaviour may, however, be the exact opposite of what she really wants because of her attempts to control herself. For example, it is common for girls who unconsciously want to be close and loving to their fathers to consciously avoid all contact with them at this stage.
During early adolescence masturbation usually increases in intensity and frequency but does not change much in form. Any bad masturbation habits a girl has already acquired tend to become further entrenched and fixed at this stage. Girls who rub their vulvas to have an orgasm usually further refine their own particular pattern of stimulation but new features often emerge. One technique, for example, is to clasp the whole vulva when arousal has reached a certain stage and then to count to ten before resuming stimulation.
Very guilty girls who want to get it over with as quickly as possible do not use delaying tactics such as these, often to the detriment of their ultimate enjoyment of sex.
The other change that occurs is a considerable increase in shame as the full sexual significance of masturbation dawns on a girl. This comes about because her sexual experience seems to contradict all that she has previously supposed to be ‘nice’ in a girl. Some girls accept the situation easily but others have more difficulty. Some repress their sexuality so completely that they actually give up masturbation in early adolescence. Others struggle against it and try to keep it under strict control. For example, some girls promise God they will never do it again. Some reinforce their control by telling themselves that they are doing themselves harm or that they will change sex as a result. This last fear arises from the fact that until the last forty years or so masturbation was spoken of as being essentially a thing boys did. Many a girl therefore used to believe (and some still do) that she was the only girl who did it, and even if she asked her friends (which was rare), to try to get reassurance, they too denied masturbation because they had been made to feel guilty about it.
This rise in shame about masturbation can lead to changes in behaviour and some of these can be annoying. Common examples are frequent hand-washing for fear — amongst other
things — that others may be able to detect that she has been masturbating, and a neurotic
over-concern about spots. A girl may become even more secretive about her sexual interests and is often easily embarrassed when sex is mentioned by adults. Her mother’s sexuality can also lead to embarrassment and even frank hostility. If her mother becomes pregnant, for example, she can feel compromised and ashamed.
Of much more concern though are those early adolescent girls who somehow dissociate themselves from their sexuality and try to find ways to indulge it whilst denying to themselves that they are doing so. The deception does not take the form of straightforward lying — it is really an internal self-deception based upon a psychological trick. Examples are endless. One is to separate fantasy from its associated masturbatory activity – in this way it is possible to deny to oneself the sexual nature of the act. On the other hand, fantasy alone may be used as a masturbatory act or the fantasy may be highly symbolic and apparently non-sexual. Another way is either to deny that an orgasm has occurred or to experience it only after the physical act is complete. Yet another is to displace the orgasm from the genitals to some other part of the body, especially to the oesophagus (gullet) or the stomach. Some incidental activity such as rope climbing or cycle riding may be utilised to produce an orgasm. These and many other ways may be used, both at the time and in adulthood, to deny that there is (or was) a sexual content to the early-adolescent stage. This denial has poor implications for the girl’s future.
Although early-adolescent girls talk about sex to each other, it is usually in a non-personal way. It is rare for girls, unlike boys, at this stage to involve their own sex physically in their sexual activities, although they often develop emotional crushes on admired older girls or school-mistresses. A helpful way of thinking of this is to understand that the girl usually thinks of the older person as being successful in an area of concern to her. This is often in sophistication and attractiveness to men. The girl wants closeness, partly to learn the secret of success and partly to be held in esteem, almost as a friend, by someone she admires. True lesbian activity at this age is very rare indeed and parents need not fear that crushes will mean that their daughter will become a lesbian.
The majority of girls are keen to test out the effectiveness of their changing bodies in attracting male attention. Most girls first experience kissing and perhaps breast fondling during this stage. Some relate wildly exaggerated stories to their friends with the aim of emphasising their desirability.
Although some girls display little or no open interest in boys at this stage, for a variety of reasons, most of which need cause no concern, others become over-involved. Apart from rebellion, other motives for early intercourse include the inability to face up to masturbation. Unless she renounces sex altogether and regresses to childhood, the only other course is to seek sexual stimulation from others, usually boys. Such a girl may well intend to go no further than allowing the boy to masturbate her but since these girls usually go for considerably older, more experienced boys, intercourse is likely to result.
However, very few girls of this age experience intercourse in any adult way, and the danger is that this pattern of inadequate and unsatisfactory response to intercourse becomes fixed. Girls should be advised, not warned, against too early intercourse for this reason. Experience shows that the vast majority of girls are not ready for intercourse at this stage of their development.
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The processes by which a child eventually comes to feel with certainty that he or she is a boy or a girl — so-called gender identity — proceed slowly and with confusion. (The process can go awry and this is discussed later under transsexualism.) One process which affects the issue is the one of identification with the same-sex parent. Whether it is instinctive or whether they are identifying with and copying their mothers, many young girls display marked femininity in their behaviour. Many are like miniature women and by three or so have developed social skills which many a young man would like to have.
Girls also seem to be able to discern the sex of another individual earlier and more reliably than can boys. When a girl discovers the genital differences between the sexes, or even before, she pays more attention to her father than before, and where her relationship with both her parents is good the change is marked. She wants to attract her father’s attention and to involve him in her life. In an elementary way she may compete with her mother to take trouble on his behalf and be of service to him. She may want to get into his bed and drive her mother from it. Later she may say she is going to grow up and marry daddy. Clearly her father is her first heterosexual love and in some way she is involved with him physically. She wants him to kiss and cuddle her and may show signs of jealousy at any attention her mother receives. Many a little girl uses her feminine skills effectively to get her own way with her father. If he is really cross with her it can emotionally disturb her for hours or even days, but maternal displeasure has much less effect. If she learns from him that she is attractive, lovable and valuable she will have confidence in herself as a woman later in life. Nevertheless, if the father is over-close, as some are, perhaps out of a latent fear of adult women, she can later have difficulty in leaving him psychosexually for another man. The balance, as in so much to do with sexuality, is a fine one.
A part of a girl’s mind may in one sense hate and fear her mother, because she thinks that her mother realises that she wants an exclusive relationship with her father. She fears her mother will retaliate. However, she also loves her mother and realises that her mother is her care-giver. As a result she remains attentive to her mother, to see if her secret has been discovered. It is thought that the greater empathy that women have compared with men comes from this developmental stage, as does a woman’s skill at concealing her true feelings.
A boy does not have to make the same switch from his mother, but his feelings about her and his father are similar to, but the reverse of, those of a girl. The intensity of such feelings tends to increase during the phallic stage. Physical contact with his mother may lead to an erection and his interest in her body may intensify. Many men who say they find partially dressed women more arousing than naked ones may have started this notion at this stage because they are more likely to have seen their mother partially, rather than wholly undressed. A mother may be unconsciously provocative to her son of around the age of five but at the same time sharply rebuke him for his sexual interest in her. Simultaneously his increasing fear of retaliation by his father leads to this so-called Oedipal interest in his mother being controlled rather than given free rein.
From clinic work with adult men it seems that two important consequences follow from this. The first is the establishment of a notion of female sexlessness. This view of women is, of course, reinforced by our culture which declares that girls are ‘sugar and spice and all things nice’. The second consequence is that the boy enters the world of men. Females and their interests are spurned as inconsequential. The view develops that girls are best avoided and they are often banned, to the chagrin of many of them, from boys’ games. Identification with the father, or another, available male person, proceeds more rapidly and the boy strives for mastery over male pursuits. One reason why boys identify with their fathers later than girls do with their mothers is that mothers are more continuously available as models for girls than are fathers for boys. In any case a boy probably first identifies with the mother as it is she, rather than his father, who first outlines the conventional male role for a boy. Women teachers may later continue the process which rewards boys for masculine behaviour and disparages them for feminine interests.
Most boys stop masturbating as the phallic stage ends and gives way to the stage of latency which roughly corresponds with the infant and junior-school years. Curiously, adult men seem to have no conscious recollection of childhood masturbation and its later rediscovery at puberty is regarded as a new acquisition. This is in contrast with women, about a third of whom say they cannot remember a time when they did not masturbate.
Girls do not resolve the problems of the Oedipal stage in the same brisk fashion in which most boys do. Their interest in their father continues although perhaps in a weakened form. Sometimes it is later displaced on to horses, which may symbolise masculine power, although, no doubt, there are other reasons for a girl’s love of her horse.
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Unfortunately sex is none of these things for a lot of people at some stage of their lives. We all have a sex drive of some kind, whether it’s weak or strong, indulged or ignored and our perceptions of ourselves as sexual beings vary enormously according to our upbringing. To copulate then is natural – it can be undertaken with anyone and not necessarily even in the context of an interpersonal relationship. However, we can do a lot better than simply copulate because we are highly elaborate verbal and emotional creatures and even genital sexual expression is a very complex business.
Does anything go then?
That’s entirely up to you. As doctors seeing people with real problems we don’t condemn anyone for what they are or what they do but you will have to decide how you interpret and react to the book for yourself and your family. We have tried very hard not to let our personal preferences and prejudices come across. Each family will apply the contents of this book differently according to its race, religion, economic state, level of education, level of expectations, personalities, their care for each other and their family, and so on. For this reason we have included articles on homosexuality, prostitution and several other areas not immediately and obviously to do with the family. However, the majority of parents worry about homosexual influences on their young teenagers at some stage; and the majority of the clients of prostitutes are married men, so an understanding of even these subjects is of considerable importance to an understanding of family love and sex.
We have written articles with no clear beginning and no end because sexuality has no beginning and no end. The baby who has just been born is at one and the same time at a starting point (for him) but an end point for his recently pregnant mother. One’s first love-affair is a vital milestone along the path of life yet will, however important it seems at the time, fade away and be displaced by more mature love. Our life experience in love and sex do not go with us to the grave — they live on in our children and their children.
So, in conclusion, what we hope will come out of this article is a better future based on improved man-woman relationships. This comes down to real, live individuals relating to and understanding each other, and not to religious, political, philosophical or medical theories and rules. The world is in a rather troubled state but there is hope for the future if only the basic unit of society, the family, can be made to work better. This it can only do if its members understand each other better and live in this increased knowledge and understanding.
Having said this, there is no such thing as perfection and few people’s lives are ‘ideal’ in this or any other area. But this does not mean that we should not or cannot have some notion of what is worth striving for.
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