Summary
We have seen that sex has three functions, the reproductive, the relational, and the recreational. We have shown it probable that a great deal of unnecessary marital conflict comes from one party holding relational sex to be all-important while the other considers recreational sex to be of more importance. Finally, we have indicated that it is most likely that if they can compromise this difficulty by each meeting the other on his own ground a part of the time, much of the haggling will stop and many unnecessary divorces will be avoided.
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Center Report, 1972,5 (5), 12.
I have known such women socially; I have never had one as a counseling client.
Bierer, J.,Innovations in Social Psychiatry, London, Avenue Publishing Co., 1969, p. 35.
This grows logically out of what has been the attitude of the Christian church in America from the beginning. I know of no book actually tracing Protestant antisexuality down from the beginning to the present in any great detail, but perusal of Walker, W.,A History of the Congregational Churches in the United States. New York, Scribners, 1900, 541 pp., Wilbur, E. M.,A History of Unitarianism. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1952, 2 vols.; and Luccock, H. E., and Hutchinson, P.,The Story of Methodism. New York, Methodist Book Concern, 1926, 508 pp., will show that Calvinistic belief in original sin and Arminian belief in the perfectability of man combined to set Americans up for acceptance of the idea that nonreproductive sex was wrong and to go along with the idea common in the Victorian era, for which we are still paying in the attitudes of our older generation, that females are without the capacity to enjoy sex. I should say that this, coupled with the long-standing Christian belief that women should dutifully provide sexual relief for their husbands, explains why so many women, if not completely destroyed sexually by religion, often are able to appreciate sex only relationally.
The exact reading is: Celeste is cold, chilly, white on white. Aloof as a supernova Bitter as iron A frigid, erotic Snow Queen.Penthouse, March, 1973, p. 45. Copyright 1973 by Penthouse International, Ltd., and reprinted with the permission of the copyright owner.
Jack and Jill are too much at home in psychological theory to be easy subjects for counseling. Jack is a liberal minister who long since has joined the ranks of the theologians who believe Christian antisexuality to be errouneous if not downright dangerous. Jill is a social worker who grew up in a staid Calvinist family, got away from its teachings, and later came under the influence of a Freudian psychiatrist in social work school. She is fully aware of the importance of sex in marriage but steadfastly quotes Freud to the effect that neither therapist nor client should seek to change the values with which the client grew to maturity. Neither Jack, Jill, nor I can find that quotation in Freud, but her professor said that Freud said this so Freud stands astride their marriage like the Colossus over the harbor at Rhodes-over and above all efforts to compromise their differences. After thirty years of marriage, Jill is still good in bed but sex is infrequent, foreplay is often interrupted because of fancied slights, and all sexual activities are highly relational. If Freud made this statement, it is diffucult to understand why, and even more difficult to understand why, after seventy-five years, anyone would still accept it as valid.
This does not need a case as evidence or for example. I doubt that there is a married man or woman among the readers who has not experienced this kind of recreational sex.
I spent several years as a college teacher. The first year I was a teaching fellow, unmarried, and under twenty-five. During that year between counseling my students, both male and female, and listening to the bragging of my fellow graduate students, I heard accounts of almost every kind of recreational sex known to mankind. I was not hired to counsel, had no files that could be locked, and had a good memory, so kept no records except the required grades. The general impression was that even as early as 1942 many males were after recreational sex and many of the females went along only in hopes of developing a relationship that would ultimately lead to marriage. This was known as “setting the hairy “bare” trap.”
I have been away from teaching for fourteen years, but I have been associated in various ways with schools, social agencies, etc., during the intervening period. I would hazard the guess that with the growth of greater freedom for women and the increasing number of arrangements by which couples live together without marriage, there is an increasing occurrence of female recreational experience and more male relational sex, but my observations have been concentrated upon a small group of rather atypical youth-not enough data to support more than an impression.
Much of the observation underlying the origin of this idea came from observing one couple over a long period. During the first ten years of their married life, she apparently accepted recreational sex. Then he was forced to work away from home for a year and to be home only on weekends. Seemingly she became very lonely, turned inward upon herself, and became excessively relational in her sexual attitudes, berating him for the slightest miscue in foreplay and refusing sex on the smallest of pretexts because of a joke or fancied insult. After almost fifteen years of this kind of unpredictable actions and more than twenty-five years of marriage, she is again beginning to enjoy a good laugh and a friendly wrestling match in bed as she did in their earlier married life.
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The Rev. Maxwell H. Morris, Th.D., following studies in the Old Testament and ancient history in the University of Oregon, the University of Washington, and the University of Southern California, spent a year in Jewish studies at the Hebrew Union College for Rabbinical Studies in Cincinnati. His interest in the psychology of sex grew out of his attempts to understand phallic and fertility cults.
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Morris, M.H. The “Three Rs” of Sex. J Relig Health 17, 48–56 (1978). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01533133
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01533133