I shall know why, when time is over, and I have ceased to wonder why. He will tell me what Peter promised. I locked eyes with him, and it seemed for an instant I caught hold of shared secrets, things that they all knew, things they could not tell, things so profoundly connected to their wealth and their roots that they could never be outgrown or expurgated or overcome. As soon as we look at the relation of sex and love in our time, we find ourselves immediately caught up in a whirlpool of contradictions. In Victorian times, when the denial of sexual impulses, feelings, and drives was the mode and one would not talk about sex in polite company, an aura of sanctifying repulsiveness surrounded the whole topic. Males and females dealt with each other as though neither possessed sexual organs. The details were considered a little unpleasant to discuss. However, some people believed that ignoring such a vital part of the human body and self would lead to a morass of neurotic symptoms. We now place more emphasis on sex than any society since that of ancient Rome, and some scholars believe we are more preoccupied with sex than any other people in all history. And this is not just an American obsession. Across the ocean in England, for example, from bishops to biologists, everyone is in on the act. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

Open The Times Literary Supplement or any other newspaper, any day (Sunday in particular), and the odds are you will find some pundit treating the public to his or her views on contraception, abortion, adultery, obscene publications, homosexuality between consenting adults or (if all else fails) contemporary moral patterns among our adolescent. Many therapists today see patients who come for help to talk about sex, a great deal of sexual activity, practically no one complaining of cultural prohibitions over going to bed as often or with as many partners as one wishes. However, what our patients do complain of is the lack of feeling and passion. The curious thing about this ferment of discussion is how little anyone seems to be enjoying emancipation. So much sex and so little meaning or even fun in it! Where the Victorian did not want anyone to know that he or she had sexual feelings, people are now giving it away like biscuits at tea time, and ashamed if they do not. Before 1910, if you called a lady sexy she would be insulted; nowadays, she prizes the compliment and rewards you by turning her charms in your direction. Our patients often have the problems of frigidity and impotence, but the strange and poignant thing we observe is how desperately they struggle not to let anyone find out they do not feel sexually. The Victorian man or woman was guilty if one did experience sex; now people feel guilty if they do not. #RandolpHarris 2 of 19

One paradox, therefore, is that enlightenment has not solved the sexual problems in our culture. To be sure, there are important beneficial results of the new enlightenment, chiefly in increased freedom for the individual. Most external problems are eased: sexual knowledge can be bought in any bookstore, contraception is available everywhere and couples can, without guilt and generally without squeamishness, discuss their sexual relationship and undertake to make it more mutually gratifying and meaningful. Let these gains not be underestimated. External social anxiety and guilt have lessened; dull would be the man who did not rejoice in this. However, internal anxiety and guilt have increased. And in some ways these are more morbid, harder to handle, and impose a heavier burden upon the individual than external anxiety. The challenge women used to face from men was simple and direct—would she or would she not go to bed?—a direct issue of how she stood vis-à-vis cultural mores. However, the question men ask now is no longer, “Will she or will she not?” but “Can she or can she not?” #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

The challenge is shifted to the woman’s personal adequacy, namely, her own capacity to have the vaunted orgasm—which should resemble a grand mal seizure. Through we might agree that the second question places the problem of sexual decision more where is should be, we cannot overlook the fact that the first question is much easier for the person to handle. In my practice, one woman was afraid to go to bed for fear that the man would not find her very good at making love. Another was afraid because she did not know how to do it, assuming that her lover would hold this against her. Another was scared to death of the second marriage for fear that she would not be able to have the orgasm as she had not in her first. Often the woman’s hesitation is formulated as, “He will not like me well enough to come back again.” In past decades, you could blame society’s strict mores and preserve your own self-esteem by telling yourself what you did not did not do was society’s fault and not yours. And this would give you some time in which to decide what you do want to do, or to let yourself grow into a decision. However, when the question is simply how you can perform, your own sense of adequacy and self-esteem is called immediately into question, and the whole weight of the encounter is shifted inward to how you can meet the test. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

College students, in their fights with college authorities about hours girls are to be permitted in the men’s rooms, are curiously blind to the fact that rules are often a boon. Ruled give the student time to find oneself. He was the leeway to consider a way of behaving without being committed before he is ready, to try on for size, to venture into relationships tentatively—which is part of any growing up. Better to have the lack of commitment direct and open rather than to go into sexual relations under pressure—doing violence to his feelings by having physical commitment without psychological. He may flout the rules; but at least they give some structure to be flouted. My point is true whether he obeys the rule or not. Many contemporary students, understandably anxious because of their new sexual freedom, repress this anxiety (one should like freedom) and then compensate for the additional anxiety the repression gives them by attacking the parietal authorities for not giving them freedom! What we did not see in our short-sighted liberalism is sex was that throwing the individual into an unbounded and empty sea of free choice does not in itself give freedom, but it more apt to increase inner conflict. The sexual freedom to which we were devoted fell short of being fully human. #RandolpHarris 5 of 19

We all have observed drama after drama, engaging in sex was like setting out to shop on a dull afternoon; desire had nothing to do with it and even curiosity was faint. The crucial point is that in sheer realistic enlightenment there has occurred a dehumanization of sex fiction. The battle against censorship and for freedom of expression surely was a great battle to win, but has it not become a new strait jacket? Our dogmatic enlightenment is self-defeating: it ends up destroying the very sexual passion it set out to protect. Maybe more people should focus on intimacy. Although many people deny its operation in themselves, most psychologist recognize the existence and importance of a need for intimacy. Intimacy comes from the Latin, intimus, meaning the innermost. This is a need for more than just closeness; it is a need to be on the inside of another person’s experiences. If we share intimacy wit another person, it is as if we are inside that person’s skin and able to experience some of the inner life of that person. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

For a great many of us, there is not enough closeness, not enough being with another person. Although there are undoubtedly many people whose needs for intimacy are being met, there are many others who do not know how important such closeness is for them, or, if they do know, they are unable to satisfy their need for it. Marriage counselors and other psychotherapists indicate that high up on the list of problems that people bring to them is an inability to get close, to let someone get close to them, or to sustain any form of shared intimacy. Some people who are deprived of intimacy begin to display neurotic behavior. An individual who is neurotic has an emotional condition characterized by much anxiety and conflicting motives; this condition is often stimulated by choices that all seem bad. However, two people can feel close while taking a walk, having a talk, looking into each other’s eyes, sharing a burdensome responsibility, experiencing common grief, joy, worry, guilt, or sexual desire. All the many different forms of intimate expression can be divided into groups or dimensions. People who are really fully functioning human beings relate to others through all of these dimensions; ultimately, no judgments can be made as to which of these dimensions is more important, desirable, or necessary. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

You are energy, you body is energy. The unfolding, the development of your biological process is you, is your body. Your body is an energetic process, going by your name. It delights me to say that I am my body, with deep understanding of what that means. It gives me identity with my aliveness, without any need to split myself, body and mind. I see all my process—thinking, feeling, acting, imagining—as part of my biological reality, rooted in the Universe. However, the new emphasis on technique in sex and love-making backfires. It often occurs to me that there is an inverse relationship between the number of how-to-do-it books perused by a person or rolling off the presses in a society and the amount of sexual passion or even pleasure experienced by the person involved. Certainly nothing is wrong with technique as such, in playing golf or acting or making love. However, the emphasis beyond a certain point on technique is sex makes for a mechanistic attitude toward love-making, and goes along with alienation, feelings of loneliness, and depersonalization. One aspect of the alienation is that the lover, with his age-old art, tends to be superseded by the computer operator with his modern efficiency. Couples place great emphasis on bookkeeping and timetables in their love-making. If they fall behind schedule they come anxious and feel impelled to go to bed whether they want to or not. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

My patients have endured stoically, or without noticing, remarkably destructive treatment at the hands of their spouses, but they have experiences falling behind in the sexual time-table as a loss of love. The man feels he is somehow losing his masculine status if he does not perform up to schedule, and the woman that she has lost her feminine attractiveness if too long a period goes by without the man at least making a pass at her. The phrase “between men,” which women use about their affairs, similarly suggest a gap in which women use about their affairs, similarly suggests a gap in time like the entr’acte. Elaborate accounting and ledger-book lists—how often this week have we made love? did he (or she) pay the right amount of attention to me during the evening? was the foreplay long enough?—make one wonder how the spontaneity of this most spontaneous act can possibly survive. The computer hovers in the stage wings of the drama of love-making. “Don’t you miss yourself, and all you used to chain, it always ends. And you keep on running backwards, keep on chasing your own demons, so don’t waste another hour, and let me in. Disarm yourself, release the fear. Disarm yourself, and hold me near. Give yourself to me. Look to other people turning, while you’re hiding in the shadow, so don’t run away in silence. Let me in,” reports Emma Hewitt and Dash Berlin (Disarm Yourself). #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

It is not surprising then, in this preoccupation with techniques, that the question typically asked about an act of love-making are not, Was there passion or meaning or pleasure in the act? but How well did I perform. Take for example the tyranny of the orgasm, and the preoccupation with achieving a simultaneous orgasm, which is another aspect of the alienation. I confess that when people talk about the apocalyptic orgasm, I find myself wondering, Why do they have to try so hard? What abyss of self-doubt, what inner void of loneliness, are they trying to cover up by this great concern with grandiose effects? Even the sexologists, whose attitude is generally the more sex the merrier, are raising their eyebrows these days about the anxious overemphasis on achieving the orgasm and the great importance attached to satisfying the partner. A man makes the point of asking the woman if she made it, or if she is all right, or uses some other euphemism is possible. We men are reminded by Simone de Beauvior and other women who try to interpret the love act that this is the last thing in the World a woman wants to be asked. Furthermore, the technical preoccupation robs the woman of exactly what she wants most of all, physically and emotionally, namely the man’s spontaneous abandon at the moment of climax. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

This abandon gives her whatever thrill or ecstasy she and the experience are capable of. When we cut through all the rigmarole about roles and performance, what still remains is how amazingly important the sheer fact of intimacy of relationship is—the meeting, the growing close with the excitement of not knowing where it will lead, the assertion of the self, and the giving of the self—in making a sexual encounter memorable. It is not this intimacy that makes us return to the event in memory again and again when we need to be warmed by whatever hearths life makes available? Our bodies are sensitive to a wide variety of stimulations. We respond to every form of physical contact and touch. The skin of our bodies is loaded with the most sensitive information-gatherers, delicate receptors that keep the brain in a constant state of awareness. It is a most basic form of getting information and of getting close. Our intimate encounter involve verbal, visual, and even olfactory [sense of smell] elements, but above all, loving means touching and body contact. Perhaps the touch is so basic—it has been called the greatest of all senses—that we tend to take it for granted. Unhappily, and almost without our noticing it, we have gradually become less and less touchful more and more distant, and physical untouchability  has been accompanied by emotional remoteness. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

It is as if the modern urbanite has put on a suit of emotional armour and, with a velvet hand inside an iron glove, is beginning to feel trapped and alienated from the feelings of even his [or her] nearest companions. It is a strange thing in our society that what does into building a relationship—the sharing of tastes, fantasies, dreams, hopes for the future, and fears from the past—seems to make people more shy and vulnerable than going to bed with each other. They are more wary of the tenderness that goes with psychological and spiritual openness than they are of the physical nakedness in sexual intimacy. The way sexuality is being used today is causing a state of alienation from the body and a separation of emotion from reason, and the body is being used as a machines. “There are few more depressing sights than a progressive intellectual determined to end up in bed with someone from a sense of moral duty. There is no more high-minded puritan in the World than your modern advocate of salvation through properly directed passion,” reports the London Times Literary Supplement. A woman used to be guilty if she went to be with a man; now she feels vaguely guilty if after a certain number of dates she refrains; her sin is morbid repression, refusing to give. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

And the partner, who is always completely enlightened (or at least pretends to be) refuses to allay her guilt by getting overtly angry at her (if she could fight him on the issues, the conflict would be a lot easier for her). However, he stands broadmindedly by, ready at the end of every date to undertake a crusade to assist her out of her fallen state. And this, of course, makes her no all the more guilt-producing for her. This all means, of course, that people not only have to learn to perform sexually but have to make sure, at the same time, that they can do so without letting themselves go in passion or unseemly commitment—the latter of which may be interpreted as exerting an unhealthy demand upon the partner. The Victorian person sought to have love without falling into sex; the modern person seeks to have sex without falling into love. The new sophisticate is not castrated by society, but like Origen is self-castrated. Sex and the body are for him not something to be and live out, but tools to be cultivated like a T.V. announcer’s voice. The new sophisticate expresses his passion by devoting himself passionately to the moral principle of dispersing all passion, loving everybody until love has no power left to scare anyone. He is deathly afraid of his passions unless they are kept under leash, and the theory of total expression is precisely his leash. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

The new sophisticate’s dogma of liberty is his repression; and his principle of full libidinal health, full of sexual satisfaction, is his denial of eros (drive of love to procreate; urge). The old Puritans repressed sex and were passionate. That is as in the passion of Fallon and Michael on Dynasty, in the episode A Real Instinct for the Jugular (original air date 7 December 2018 on the CW),  and it was a very different thing. Our new puritan (with a little p) represses passion and is sexual. His purpose is to hold back the body to try to make nature a slave. The new sophisticate’s rigid principle of full freedom is not freedom but a new straitjacket. He does all this because he is afraid of his body and his compassionate roots in nature, afraid of the soil and his procreative power. He is our latter-day Baconian devoted to gaining power over nature, gaining knowledge in order to get more power. And you gain power over sexuality (like working an enslaved person until all zest for revolt is squeezed out of him) precisely by the role of full expression. Sex becomes our tool like the caveman’s bow and arrow, crowbar, or adz. Sex, the new machine, the Machina Ultima. This new puritanism has crept into contemporary psychiatry and psychology. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

 It is argued in some books on the counseling of married couples that the therapist ought to use only the term “fuck” when discussing sexual intercourse, and to insist the patient use it; for any other word plays into the patients’ dissimulation. What is significant here is not the use of the term itself: surely the sheer lust, animal but self-conscious, and bodily abandon which is rightly called fucking is not to be left out of the spectrum of human experience. However, the interesting thing is that the use of the once-forbidden word is not made into an ought—a duty for the moral reason of honesty. To be sure, it is dissimulation to deny the biological side of copulation. However, it is also dissimulation to use the term fuck for the sexual experience when what we seek is a relationship of personal intimacy which is more than a release of sexual tension, a personal intimacy which will be remembered tomorrow and many weeks after tomorrow. The former is dissimulation in the service of inhibition; the latter is dissimulation in the service of alienation of the self, a defense of the self against the anxiety of intimate relationship. The former was the particular problem in the 1800s, the latter is the particular problem of ours. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

The new puritanism beings with it a depersonalization of our whole language. Instead of making love, we have sex; in contrast of intercourse, we screw; instead of going to bed, we lay someone or (Heaven help the English language as well as ourselves!) we are laid. This alienation has become so much the order of the day that in some psychotherapeutic training schools, young psychiatrists and psychologist are taught that it is therapeutic to use solely the four-letter words in sessions; the patient is probably masking some repression if he talks about making love; so it becomes our righteous duty—the new puritanism incarnate!—to let him know he only fucks. Everyone seems so intent on sweeping away the last vestiges of Victorian prudishness that we entirely forget that these different words refer to different kinds of human experience. Probably most people have experienced the different forms of sexual relationship described by the different terms and do not have much difficulty distinguishing among them. I am not making a value judgment among these different experiences; they are all appropriate to their own kinds of relationship. Every woman wants at some time to be laid—transported, carried away, made to have passion when at first she has none as in the famous scene between Fallon and Michael in Dynasty. However, if being laid is all that ever happens in her sexual life, then her experience of personal alienation and rejection of sex are just around the corner. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

If the therapist does not appreciate these diverse kinds of experience, he will be presiding at the shrinking and truncating of the patient’s consciousness, and will be confirming the narrowing of the patient’s bodily awareness as well as his or her capacity for relationship. This is the chief criticism of new puritanism: it grossly limits feelings, it blocks the infinite variety and richness of the act, and it makes for emotional impoverishment. It is not surprising that the new puritanism develops smoldering hostility among the members of our society. And that hostility, in turn, comes out frequently in references to the sexual act itself. We say “go fuck yourself” or “fuck you” as a term of contempt to show that the other is of no value whatever beyond being used and tossed aside. The biological lust is here in its reducito ad absurdum. Indeed, the work fuck is the most common expletive in out contemporary language to express violent hostility. I do not think this by accident. However, does physical intimacy mean sex? In the broadest meaning of the term—sensuality—it does mean sex. Yet, even though most people may automatically think of sex when they hear the words intimate or intimacy, sexual caressing or intercourse is far from being the only form that physical intimacy takes. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

Indeed, there is no guarantee at all that two people, involved in the most passionate forms of sexual behavior, are being intimate in the least! Sometimes sexual activity is a means of evading, hiding from, denying, or taking intimacy. How can this be? Sexual response is a relatively unconscious, or even automatic, behavior. While the best sexual expression is the most conscious, the most aware, the most holistic of our experiences, it can still happen without much thought or willing. However, being intimate, getting close and expressing it, requires a great deal of consciousness and intent. Because we have come to see sexual expression as a very intimate form of behavior, many people are able to convince their partners (or others) and even themselves that they are really close when, in fact, they have given little of themselves to the relationship. Physical intimacy, like other dimensions of intimacy, requires that the individuals involved be at home with their bodies, that they like, enjoy, and accept their physical beings, and that they recognize and appreciate the importance of touch and caress and other such forms of making contact. However, the Queen of England averred on her wedding night, that sex is too good for the common people. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

It was too late for man, but early for God; creation impotent to help, but prayer remained our side. How excellent the Heaven, when Earth cannot be had; how hospitable, then, the face of our handsome neighbor, God! Tenderness and respect—never selfishness—must be the guiding principles in the intimate relationship between husband and wife. “Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband. Let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence: and likewise also the wife unto the husband,” reports 1 Corinthians 7.2-4. It is the destiny of men and women to join together to make eternal family units. In the context of lawful marriage, the intimacy of sexual relations is right and divinely approved. There is nothing unholy or degrading about sexuality in itself, for by that means men and women join in a process of creation and in an expression of love. The union of the genders, husband and wife (and only husband and wife), was for the principal purpose of bringing children into the World. Sexual experiences were never intended by the Lord to be a mere plaything or merely to satisfy passions and lusts. We know of no directive from the Lord that proper sexual experience between husbands and wives need be limited totally to the procreation of children, but we find much evidence from Adam until now that no provision was ever made by the Lord for indiscriminate sex. #RandolphHaris 19 of 19