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how many men in this book cite the ages of eight and nine as the time of their first masturbation, fantasy, or sexual sensation.
    Other ages that pop out of these pages like old friends are eleven and twelve, the beginning of adolescence (earlier these days than ever). By now the girl has introjected her mother’s example; sex has become something to be avoided. The boy wants to be like his father. What he learns from dad validates and contradicts what mother taught him: When dad cracks off-color jokes, mother looks pained. Dad waits till she’s not around to tell them. Sex may not be nice, but men do it and women don’t ... at least, not nice women like mom.
    The simple erotic curiosity and pleasure of the three-year-old has changed and begun to run on separate and sexually defined tracks, but what the young boy and girl have in common are feelings of shame and anxiety.
    DRAKE
    I have always had a conflict, apparently irreconcilable, between sexuality and personal ethics, a conflict which (I now realize) could have been avoided had I not been given in adolescence a view of women’s sexuality quite remote from the facts. I was brought up to believe that sex was the expression of married love, and that in courtship the man would lead the girl to marriage and to the realization of her own sexual nature.
    Girls I regarded as paragons of purity. Photographs of (not really) nude women revealed beautiful curves, with no ugly penis, and nothing messy. Nothing had indicated that women cultivated sex per se. They wanted to have babies and preNancy Friday
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    sumably were prepared to “undergo” intercourse, as they were prepared to undergo the pain of parturition.
    Meanwhile, my own experience of myself was different.
    Semen was messy, but I could not keep from masturbating, from enjoying my penis. I had thoughts in which women actually enjoyed seeing, handling, even receiving my penis.
    Words came into my mind which no respectable girl would tolerate. So my spontaneous sexuality seemed to involve degrading women, and this went right against my deep conviction that we have no right to treat anybody as less than a person. I felt guilty. I invented symbolic subterfuges, in which garters replaced genitalia.
    Very gradually, I have discovered that female reality is not far from male reality, though I can’t pretend to have completely shed my instinctive response of guilt. When I first saw a real woman’s body, I was amazed to find it as complex and as messy as my own. My wife obviously enjoyed sex and indicated a few things she wanted me to do to give her pleasure, but that was still an offshoot of legitimate lovemaking. It left a lot of my own thoughts unaccounted for.
    In the last few months I’ve had my eyes opened by a long and frank discussion with a woman I have a great deal of respect and affection for, who amazed me by telling me that she goes to bed with men regularly because it’s “pleasurable,” better than masturbation, which she also enjoys a lot.
    This inspired me to open the subject with my wife, who told me she masturbates frequently – I had never guessed. Without wishing to change my life-style particularly, I just feel relieved to know that I’ve no reason to feel guilty about my thoughts and feelings, that I am not degrading women by having them.
    Planning this letter has been very useful, too. I have never analyzed my fantasies before, and I’ve found that doing so has taught me a lot about myself – and also made me more ready to accept myself. I have the best orgasms by fantasizing about a particularly good-looking woman that I have seen Men In Love
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    that day. When the penis stiffens, prior to ejaculation, the images change radically and are quite uncontrollable.
    One incident – a real happening, not a fantasy – brings together many of my fantasy themes. As I walked through the city center on my way home, I felt I just had to relieve myself. So I slipped up a darkened passageway. I had