To the Editor:
Leslie H. Farber [“I’m Sorry, Dear,” November 1964] has some perceptive things to say when he examines the assumptions of sexology in the context of more general 20th-century liberalizing values. He proves himself seriously parochial, however, when he speculates that “little attention was paid to the female orgasm before the era of sexology.”
The only reference for comparison available to Dr. Farber (and perhaps to too many sexologists) seems to be that of the Victorian Western world. We know, in fact, that many non-Western societies have been just as self-conscious about establishing physical standards for sexual performance as our own. Sex instruction, for instance, plays a major role in various African adolescent initiation rituals, and Oriental literature is replete with very explicit sexual manuals. Anthropology, with its concentration on pre-industrial peoples, often offers little more than an escape from our contemporary problems, but on the subject of sex values, some comparison would seem to be in order.
Ralph A. Austen
Cambridge, Massachusetts
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To the Editor:
The mechanistic outlook has been dethroned in physics, experimentation with isolated and dislocated items has been effectively criticized by the Gestalt psychologists. But now both have taken up residence in the humanities, and many of the thin and rather absurd results have been accepted by a growing public. Dr. Farber’s perceptive essay should help us to escape from the grip of a rather paralyzing myth. His essay could—and I hope it will—also be read as a challenge to thinkers in multiple fields to find their way back to the use of insight, judgment, and good sense in matters pertaining to men. My thanks to COMMENTARY and to him for a splendid article. . . .
Paul Weiss
Sterling Professor
of Philosophy
Yale University
New Haven, Connecticut
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To the Editor:
. . . Leslie Farber’s article is an attempt to enhance our insight into an area of intimate human concern. While there is much sexual explicitness in contemporary writing, it is seldom as justifiably employed as here.
Dr. Masters, following Kinsey, seems to be unaware of the fundamental difference between sexual release and sexual relationship. A mutually gratifying relationship involves release, but release does not necessarily involve relationship. . . . As Dr. Farber implies, Masters has elevated his own confusions to the status of laboratory finding. Masters’s work would be a low comedy of errors were it not for the tragic entailments of taking his confusions seriously.
There are many who are less pessimistic than Dr. Farber with regard to woman’s ability to attain orgasm regularly. Nevertheless, even they will commend him for illuminating the extent to which the orgasm has become as rigid a contemporary norm as were any of the older ritual imperatives in their day. . . . Publication of the article is an important contribution to the exploration of the relevant issues of our times. . . .
Richard L. Rubenstein
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
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To the Editor:
As a subscriber of sixteen years standing, I was both shocked and dismayed by the article. . . . With all due respect for Dr. Farber’s professional attainments, I am convinced that the article has no place in COMMENTARY.
A. A. Figen
Santa Monica, California
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To the Editor:
I have read Dr. Farber’s article with great interest and much questioning. Actually it deals with three problems: first, the general thesis that “sex for the most part has lost its viability as a human experience”; second, whether a scientific experiment like the one discussed is justified or not; and third (whatever the answer to the second problem may be), whether it is a good example to prove the basic statement. I do not believe that that is the case, for Dr. Masters and his volunteers cannot be considered as typical for the whole present situation. About the experiment itself I would say, from the scientific point of view, that it is methodologically inadequate, because it brings the consciousness of the experimental situation into the sexual experience which in this way is distorted in its very nature. Beyond this self-defying character it trespasses the limits of experiments which should be applied to human beings.
But if we return to the main thesis of the paper, I agree with the author that there is a dangerous trend toward the depersonification of sex, which, however, is counter-balanced by a tendency in the younger groups to self-restraint and the creation of exclusive relationships even in the pre-marital situation. But one must indeed ask whether the general objectifying forces of our culture will not prevail over against the longing for truly human relations.
Paul Tillich
University of Chicago
Chicago, Illinois
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To the Editor:
. . . . With a peculiarly modern twist, Dr. Masters’s project degrades utterly the value that we associate with the pursuit of knowledge. I fear that his work, though it lacked any element of sadism, brought to mind almost immediately the “experiments” conducted in the concentration camps for scientific purposes. . . . In both cases there is an aura of utter meaninglessness attendant upon an apprehension of significant human experience. Human response is reduced to a mechanical operation in which feeling and thought—the soul, so to speak—is irrelevant. . . .
One must protest against absurdity cloaked as science. The human imagination, as we all know, is fertile enough to devise an infinitude of projects for all purposes. . . . Yet there is a clear line, not subject to laboratory tests, but perceptible nevertheless to sensitive people, between importance and triviality; between the pursuit of knowledge and the realization of infantile fantasy; and ultimately between civilization and chaos. . . .
Marilyn Bentov
Cambridge, Massachusetts
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To the Editor:
. . . Dr. Farber’s article is to be applauded as a great service to morality. I hope that it initiates a discussion in which the accent that has been placed in recent decades on sexuality, as something standing by itself, is reversed. Dr. Farber is defending the whole human being. Implicitly he is asking for a return to the classical moral standards.
COMMENTARY’S publication of this piece is a great service to a saner ethic of personal behavior.
(Rabbi) Arthur Hertzberg
Temple Emanuel
Englewood, New Jersey
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To the Editor:
. . . The road out of our dilemma, Dr. Farber thinks, lies in the possibility which sex offers man for regaining his own body through knowing the body of his loved ones. However, instead of prescribing treatment that might result in such mutual self-fulfillment, the author launches a criticism of the research of Dr. William H. Masters into female sexual response; an attack that approaches the scurrilous, unworthy indeed of a scientist of Dr. Farber’s status. . . .
There is a disturbing inference throughout the article, however unintended, that “ignorance is bliss.” Dr. Farber seems to bemoan the fact that the details of physiological development and function should ever become common knowledge. Indeed, one might well infer from a cursory reading that both the psychological and the physiological understanding of sexual response are at best a necessary evil.
Let us review knowledge of the sexual response of the female prior to Masters’s research. Since the early years when Dr. Robert L. Dickinson made the fundamental obstetrical-gynecological approach to female sexuality, resulting in the anatomical charts and methodologies common to medical practice today, almost nothing had been done of a pure research nature in the area of female sexuality. Kinsey had done impressive statistical studies and the marriage manuals had much to say, but most of the latter was a smattering of folklore, quotations from antiquity, and extrapolations from psychotherapeutic conclusions growing out of either seriously disturbed or quite highly neurotic women.
. . . Whatever else one may think of Dr. Masters’s work, he did set about through the media of primary research to discover some basic physiological factors in female sexuality, not at all unmindful of psychological and other aspects that make sex life more or less meaningful. Commendably, moreover, he has not foisted himself upon the public as an amateur psychologist or psychoanalyst but stuck to his obstetrical gynecological research. As for parading his findings before the public, nothing could be more erroneous. As one who has sought on a number of occasions to have Dr. Masters present his research data, I can testify that it is almost as difficult as getting Sigmund Freud at a seance. He is meticulous in seeing to it that only professional people are present, that the press, and writers of popular magazine articles in particular will be barred. . . . To be sure, part of this attitude has been defensive—an attempt to guard his work against religious or scientific fanatics before he has had a chance to complete it. . . .
In contrast to the care which Dr. Masters has used in sharing his material is Dr. Farber’s procedure: he has branded Dr. Masters as little more than a voyeur and exhibitionist, by presenting a one-sided view of his data in a publication which, although directed to a sophisticated audience, is probably read by far more lay than professional people. The risk is that both elements of his readership will not take the time nor have the opportunity to examine the primary research data. . . .
Surely he must not mean it, but Dr. Farber seems to imply that there is something far more lamentable about a study of the responsiveness of the human body than about the most intimate examination of the psyche. Yet how well he must know that successful psychoanalysis or psychotherapy calls for the most minute exploration of the conscious and unconscious ideation, attitudes, and feelings of a patient. There is no “holy of holies” to which the therapist is denied entrance. . . .
Dr. Farber’s assertion that the researcher into the physiology of sex could not avoid contaminating his own love life is puzzling indeed from one who has spent most of his life in the practice of a profession that examines the most intimate areas of feeling and response . . . including the sexual. The fact that unconscious needs are present in professional work—even determination of career choice—is no secret. Likewise, it is well established that every person who works professionally with the affectional lives of people must, through training and self-understanding, learn to “turn off” at the end of the professional contact in order to be a free and self-fulfilled individual in his own right. But is this any less true of the psychotherapist than of the gynecological researchers? . . .
Admittedly, the methodologies of Dr. Masters would be stilted . . . in the boudoir. No less true is it that psychological insights when first “tried on for size,” make one into more of a mechanic than an artist in interpersonal relationships. But people who have never learned to walk, or who have been too crippled in walking to attempt it again on their own, must begin somewhere. . . . Dr. Farber’s pathetic parody of the struggling couple . . . would be considered by marriage counselors as a step on the road to cure: . . . “I’m so sorry, dearest, let me help you,” could be music indeed to a woman who for ten years had never known that her husband cared whether or not she attained any pleasure. . . .
Through skilled treatment by the psychotherapist, the mechanics of feeling and relating can hopefully become second nature to the patient . . . so that what has been learned in the psychotherapy laboratory becomes spontaneous in the interpersonal situation. Why should this be any less true of physiological than it is of psychological understanding? . . .
The dilemma of sexuality in the modern marriage deserves careful study . . . but before we become too critical of the scientific efforts of each other we should be able to offer a bit of cure, not just an existential diagnosis.
Aaron L. Rutledge
Merrill-Palmer Institute
Detroit, Michigan
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To the Editor:
. . . Dr. Farber’s article . . . reflects an attitude that most people, including many women, share. He seems to think (if I can cut through that rather studied opaqueness) that he is rejecting modernism for the old-fashioned views of the bedroom.
But . . . things were no different then . . . for the woman at least. . . . It is, in a very profound sense, a man’s world, and therefore the women in it lead incomplete lives, with the best and strongest of them constantly struggling to be two things at once: a “person” as well as a “woman”—and inevitably paying some price for the struggle. If a woman’s life is so organized as to be surely incomplete, how could her sex life be otherwise? But for an analyst to conclude that the problem lies with unrealistic expectations is an indication of how profoundly it is a man’s world, and how widespread is the corruption.
Ann J. Lane
New York City
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To the Editor:
. . . Dr. Farber seems to want to retrieve sex from the two never-never lands of romantic glow and laboratory glare and to restore to it the humane light of day-to-day existence. The aim is admirable, but his counsel will not help it to be achieved.
Throughout the article there runs an assumption that is unrealistic, naïve, and curiously at odds with the author’s stated anti-romanticism and his description of the dialectics of sex. This assumption is that sexuality in humans, when allowed to assume its natural place among the exigencies and pleasures of life, takes care of its own problems. We are assured that the infrequency of orgasm among women caused no remarkable perturbation until our century, when it seems to have suddenly become a problem foisted upon us by sexologists, psychoanalysts, and women’s suffragists. This begins to make Dr. Farber’s view seem romantic in its own way, rendering all of past sexual history a paradise from which we fell only about sixty years ago. The author’s romanticism becomes obvious when we notice that the villain in his piece is not only “the modern will” but also the human will in general, for he has nothing good to say about it in any form.
He leaves us to conclude that the sexuality of humans should not be focused upon as a problem, and a fortiori, that its particulars—e.g., orgasm—should not be the object of study, nor the achievement of orgasm an intention of the conscious will.
But I neglect the article’s blast at Dr. Masters’s investigations and their function as a “constitutive symbol” of our malaise. Knowing of this particular method of “research” only what Dr. Farber tells me, I find it as preposterous as he does and perhaps even more outrageous. It reminds me of nothing so much as the infamous “research” carried on in some circles of Nazi medicine. Even so, I have two objections to Dr. Farber’s treatment of it.
First, he seems to draw the unwarranted conclusion that all study of the physiology of orgasm is out of place. Yet the fact that science sometimes mocks itself (by mocking humanity) is no argument against science. Does Dr. Farber deny, as he seems to, that this physiological process should be studied by any method?
Second, in the length, detail, and tone Dr. Farber employs to report Dr. Masters’s experiments, I detect a certain fascination with the subject. Objecting to sexology’s democratization of knowledge, he has proceeded to practice it himself, reporting not only the fact that the laboratory “research” took place but dwelling on it for several pages, and speculating about how it took place. There is some voyeurism here. Dr. Farber has, I believe, taken this particular project much too seriously, and I suspect he did so because he takes sex too seriously in the first place. It is apparently such a mystery for him that, on the one hand, he idealizes its practice in times past while, on the other hand, he is both shocked and fascinated by the clinical approach some people make to it in our day. I believe, however, that we should avoid both these extremes, which can be done only if we do not exalt sexuality at the expense of the will.
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Pornography is by no means an exclusively modern phenomenon (Dr. Farber ignores its existence prior to de Sade), and pornography is one form of willful attention paid to sex in its detail and variety. Reading of Dr. Masters’s movies, my principal objection to them was that they were not intended as pornography, for which I think a better case could be made than for the “scientific” procedure described. But Dr. Farber seems to have as little use for pornography as for sexology. Instead, he wants innocence—that is, sex innocent of contamination by the will. The only innocence we may achieve, however, is an innocence of the will, which is really not innocence but a slow correction of the will in the direction of kindness, responsibility, and the power to act in integrated freedom.
I sympathize with Dr. Farber’s objection to removing sex from everyday realities and responses. I wish that his remedy did not contain its own form of the disease.
Tom Driver
Union Theological Seminary
New York City
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To the Editor:
. . . The sexual relationship is so romanticized, sentimentalized, and vulgarized in both popular and highbrow circles that Dr. Farber’s hard-headed realism comes as a breath of fresh air. He has shown us in an honest way the possibilities as well as the limits of sex as one means of human fulfillment. His biting (and terrifying) report on the Sex Research Project points out with sharp clarity and irony the essential difference between sexual activity which is merely a dehumanized set of mechanical responses to mechanical stimuli, and a sexual relationship which is a genuine mode of expressing and consummating human love. The Sex Research Project is a ludicrously extreme instance of the preoccupation with mechanical orgasm as the total measure of sexual success.
We are indebted to Dr. Farber for the sober good sense which he has brought to his reflections on these delicate matters. In putting sex into its proper human perspective, he has made a significant contribution to our self-understanding. For through his eyes we can see not only what we are but also what we might become.
Marvin Fox
Dept. of Philosophy
Ohio State University
Columbus, Ohio
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To the Editor:
. . . Dr. Farber’s whole indictment is, in one sense, so unconscionably reactionary, so unabashedly male, so drastically counter-revolutionary, that many husbands, for whom the pathetic and passionless “I’m sorry, dear” has become something of an after-play ritual, will find themselves bolstered and engaged. . . . It seems that Dr. Farber most vigorously objects not to the division of erotic activity into “pleasuring” and “being pleasured,” but to the fact that modern man has had a reversal of his traditional role in this dichotomy forced upon him. . . . Where once the test of masculine prowess was the taking of pleasure, the test has now become the . . . giving of pleasure. No matter how potent a man’s own climax may be, if he cannot produce orgasm in his mate, he is no man at all. Hence the pathos of Dr. Farber’s title, hence the comforting appeal of his thesis: that the very occurrence of female climax is a nefarious discovery. . . .
A sad joke, though, about the divergence between Farber and Masters is that both are after the same thing: good sex. Each pleads for his own vision of what is natural, but both focus on the moment of female orgasm. . . .
Dr. Farber is doubtless correct in feeling that whatever the findings of Dr. Masters’s experiments, humanly . . . they are a washout. . . . Sex cannot be divorced from its context; . . . “effectivity” is a value of machine parts, not of private parts. . . . Would Dr. Masters decree the bed of an erratic wife a sort of technological disaster area? . . .
But Dr. Farber, like the British Colonialists who bloody well wished the natives had never heard of democracy, longs for that bygone era when woman was “content with the mystery and variety of her difference from man”—i.e., when she did not expect to have, and was therefore untroubled when she did not have, her climax. “I cannot believe that previous centuries were not up to our modern delights,” he laments, but he offers not a jot of evidence to support this crucial proposition. Yet I would be inclined to speculate (also with nothing in the way of verifiable support) that Western sex is “better” now than when woman submitted herself dutifully to the ordeal of man’s lust. . . .
I think the final inadequacy of both Masters and Farber is that neither has evolved a successful vocabulary or prose style for talking about sex. The language of the laboratory can only put us off. . . . [but] Dr. Farber’s olympian tone isn’t much more satisfying than Masters’s. . . . Even though he gives himself away as something of a Romantic, Farber makes no constructive Frommian call for a more meaningful approach to interpersonal union. Instead, his tone is cynical and pessimistic, frequently verging on sarcasm, as he views from on high all pathetic lovers caught in scientism. . . .
Can it be that only fiction—not the quasi-Reichian fiction of Oceanic Orgasm . . . but a fiction that encompasses the whole meaning and variety of erotic life—will enable writers to restore the moment of climax to perspective in a fully human context?
Jacob R. Brackman
Harvard College
Cambridge, Massachusetts
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To the Editor:
I wish to congratulate you . . . for having the courage to publish Dr. Farber’s article, which runs counter to most fashionable discussion of the subject. Building on . . . D. H. Lawrence and Denis de Rougemont, . . . Dr. Farber has shown how the masturbatory ideal has become our lot. It is curious that with all the current freedom of expression on the subject of sex, it is the one subject which no one seems to want to discuss. Now that Dr. Farber has broken the ice, perhaps constructive discussion will ensue and the lessons of the laboratory will be challenged.
Harold Wolozin
American University
Washington, D.C.
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[More correspondence on Dr. Farber’s article will appear in our May issue.]