Learning about sex (psychologist, men, woman, husband)

[RonPrice]

LEARNING ABOUT SEX
Getting help from experts…

Part 1:

In those 33 years leading to the birth of my son in 1977 human sexuality was studied extensively. This prose-poem is a brief survey and summary of the three major studies, and their place in my life both before and after 1977. In that year, 1977, I was teaching about human relationships and several of the social sciences at the then Ballarat College of Advanced Education. I was a husband, two years into my second marriage, and a father by that year of three children; I was the secretary of the local Baha'i community, and a regular attendee at a local fitness centre.

I aimed at this centre, where I went two or three times a week, to achieve "mens sana in corpore sano", a famous Latin quotation often translated as, "a sound mind in a sound body." Sadly, however sound my mind and body became as a result, I had another episode of bipolar 1 disorder in December of 1977, an episode which had nothing to do with the fitness of my body, my diet or my sex life. Still, what I had learned about sex in those 33 years was still of personal value, and I discuss that learning and information below.

Part 2:

The Masters and Johnson research team, composed of William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson, pioneered research into the nature of human sexual response, as well as the diagnosis and treatment of sexual disorders and dysfunctions from 1957 until the 1990s. In 1957 I was just on the puberty cusp and, although I had begun to take a serious interest in sex, my teenage libidinous energies were channeled into sport and school, family and friendships.

Part 2.1:

The work of Masters and Johnson began in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Washington University in St. Louis and was continued at the independent not-for-profit research institution they founded in St. Louis in 1964, originally called the Reproductive Biology Research Foundation and renamed the Masters & Johnson Institute in 1978.

In the initial phase of Masters and Johnson's studies, from 1957 until 1965, they recorded some of the first laboratory data on the anatomy and physiology of the human sexual response based on direct observation. They studied 382 women and 312 men in what they conservatively estimated to be "10,000 complete cycles of sexual response."

Their findings, particularly on the nature of female sexual arousal; for example, (i) describing the mechanisms of vaginal lubrication and debunking the earlier widely-held notion that vaginal lubrication originated from the cervix, (ii) showing that the physiology of orgasmic response was identical whether stimulation was clitoral or vaginal, and (iii) proving that some women were capable of being multi-orgasmic, dispelled many long standing misconceptions.

Part 3:

They jointly wrote two classic texts in the field, Human Sexual Response and Human Sexual Inadequacy, published in 1966 and 1970 respectively. In 1971, as I was travelling-pioneering for the Canadian Baha’i community to Australia, Masters and Johnson married. I remember reading their two books back in the late 1960s and early 1970s. By 1974 I was a senior tutor in human relations at the, then, Tasmanian College of Advanced Education. I was 30 years old and on my way to the second and final marriage in my lifespan. These two books were among the many that I drew on in that course in human relations which I developed and taught to trainee teachers. This program was one of the first in its kind in Australia at the time.

Both of their books were best-sellers and were translated into more than thirty languages. Masters and Johnson were the focus of a television project called Masters of Sex based on a 2009 biography by author Thomas Maier. The American cable network Showtime debuted Masters of Sex, a dramatic television series on 29 September 2013. The series stars Michael Sheen as Masters and Lizzy Caplan as Johnson. I watched the first part on television last night.(1) I had not followed the lives of Masters and Johnson since those 1970s and, after 40 years, I was surprised at the developments in their lives and in the studies on human sexuality which I had not kept up with in the last 20 years: 1993 to 2013.

Part 4:

Alfred Kinsey(1894-1956) was an American biologist, professor of entomology and zoology, and sexologist. In 1947 he founded the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University, now known as the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. He is best known for writing Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948), and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), also known as The Kinsey Reports, as well as The Kinsey Scale.

Kinsey's research on human sexuality, foundational to the field of sexology, provoked controversy in the 1940s and 1950s. His work has influenced social and cultural values in the United States, as well as internationally.2 I came to know of their work by the 1970s but, during the 1940s and 1950s, I was occupied, as I say above, with other matters, other studies, and other aspects of my childhood and adolescent life.

Part 5:

The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality, published in 1976, was the final of these three major studies that had come into my reading and interest inventory by the second decade of my young adulthood, a period of time from 20 to 40 according to one model of human development used by psychologists.

Shere Hite(1942- ) is an American-born German sex educator and feminist. She was making the point that clitoral stimulation wasn't happening during coitus. That's why women have difficulty having orgasms. They don't have difficulty when they stimulate themselves. Shouldn't we just rethink the idea of what sex is, and what equality is? That's what Hite wrote and went around the country saying.

Together, these students of human sexuality added immensely to my knowledge-base by the time I entered the late 1970s, and my middle age in the early 1980s. I was, by then, in my second marriage, was involved in raising three children, and teaching about human relationships to post-secondary school students.-Ron Price with thanks to (1)SBSONE TV, 8/10/’13 and 10/10/’13, and (2)Wikipedia, 9/10/’13.

What is that inner white wonder
which my warrant forged in heat
long ago cannot own? Surely, it
was not the elusive orgasm that
experts said was yours, if only our
seas could meet, and that surging
tenderness could yield some new
harvest that would make all life’s
slings and arrows less outrageous.

As I lean toward you and make my
home in your warm receptivity, you
say my name as if it was your own,
but this is not always so, for barriers
there are which cause separation and
remoteness. My weakness and some
sadness reaches out to touch a shore,
but it can not always make it, & I am
stranded out in a great ocean's deeps.(1)

Did Kinsey, Masters, and Hite help
us on our way these past years, these
decades, when we have been together?

Not in the deeper reaches of the spirit
where life’s tests and difficulties often
rub one raw, & leave one seeking some
larger resolutions and inner harmonies.

(1) Roger White, “Coral and Pearls,” The Witness of Pebbles, George Ronald, Oxford, 1982, p.62; and ‘Abdul-Baha, Baha’i Prayers, Baha’i Pub. Trust, Wilmette, 1985, p.106.

Ron Price
9/10/’13.

[purehuman]

I don't hold no store by Masters and Johnson...I disagree with a lot of their research and the way they got it...Shere Hite talks like she speaks for all women...and she doesn't. Everyones different...I don't consider these people "experts",at all...I think a couple of people who've been together for any length of time could give you better advice any day. And as for natural physiological responses...we've known about them forever...at least if you were interested enough , or aware of your own bodies responses ,you would.

[RonPrice]

Thanks purehuman for your thoughtful comments. Much appreciated.-Ron

[Ghengis]

Last edited by RonPrice; 10-10-2013 at 07:05 AM.. Reason: to add some words

this cracks me up

[RonPrice]

In Australia where I have lived for more than 40 years humor is just about compulsory. Always pleased to get a laugh.-Ron Price, Tasmania

[Rubi3]

Nancy Friday's finding about sex are quite revealing. Imo, she covers information not mentioned by Masters, Johnson or Hite.

[ConeyGirl52]

I think the idea of feminism and women's liberation was mostly horse-pucky. And as someone born and raised thinking I was liberated (but neither having the social status nor the economic luxury to fully benefit from it) I feel qualified and obligated to say that. I was born in 1961, and to me the idea of being liberated amounted to, "I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and never let you forget your a man". Of course, you have heard of Helen Reddy.

Now at age 52, Im wondering, "Yeah, but why exactly do/did I want to??"

I'm not saying we should go back to the, "Women should be barefoot and pregnant - not allowed to drive a car - never go to college - never learn self-sufficiency" or anything of the like. If I can be a mason, or a carpenter, then cool - I should be what my gifts allow. God may not gift me with child-bearing - so, just like in a tribal society, I may end up a warrior as well.

A truely liberated woman doesnt need a man for anything but procreation. Cool, but that is severely out of balance with nature.

Men and women in a relationship should have equal but seperate roles. I didnt come into being by some super-natural means from a man's rib; and surely that man did come from a perfectly natural means from me.

I am going backwards somewhat - back to a tribal role. The male being the warrior/hunter and the female being the nurturer and life-bringer. One is not weaker than the other, and they both play an important role in the well being of their family, as well as their society. How does the daughter of a woman learn how to deal with a man when the woman that gave birth to her only needed a man for sperm?

How does the son of this same woman ever learn to be a man?

Liberation and feminism in the 1960's was necessary; but I personally feel that feminism in 2014 is unbalancing for the family nucleus, as well as society in general. Sort of like anything in moderation is alright, its when we get to extremes that everything becomes out of whack. Im starting to wonder what is so 'feminist' about proving I can do almost everything that a man can, yet have no clue what its all about when it comes to knowing how to nurture that same man. Where does one get the energy to do it all?

P.S. The poem is cool.

[RonPrice]

Belated thanks, ConeyGirl52, for your thoughtful, honest and insightful comment. I am moved to add a little more on feminism to enrich this thread which is developing a healthy life of its own.-Ron Price, Tasmania
_______________________
INTRODUCTION

Part 1:

I’m not sure when I first came across feminism as an idea, as a movement, as a literary and intellectual, sociological and philosophical field. It was probably in the sixties sometime and probably when I was at university and first studying sociology in 1963-1964. Helen Gurley Brown, a feminist pioneer in my time, had published Sex and the Single Girl, but my agenda at the time did not include reading feminist literature. In 1962, when Sex and the Single Girl, came out I was ensconced in matriculation studies and, from 1963 to 1967, I was working on my B.A. and B. Ed. In the late 1960s I was starting my teaching career, working among the Inuit, getting married, and dealing with the rigors of bipolar disorder.

The earliest days of feminism in my life are entirely vague. Feminism, of course, has roots that go a long way back, at least to Mary Wollstonecraft in 1793, if not before. My mother was part of that developing tradition, at least as I see it now, since she was a teenager in the roaring twenties, as well as a poet and a reader in the serious side of life. By the late 60s, women’s studies, or feminist studies, had become an interdisciplinary academic field.

Part 2:

The notes in my file on feminism I began to collect in about 1993, just after I finished the first edition of my autobiography. I was teaching sociology, among various social sciences, at a Technical and Further Education college in Perth Western Australia, and teaching mostly women from 17 to 57. After 20 years of collecting relevant articles, 1993-2003, in my sociology and philosophy files, I opened a separate file on feminism since it was obvious that the resources on feminism I had been gathering in my sociology and philosophy volumes, among other disciplines like history and psychology, needed to have their home in one place, a place that included the more populist resources on feminism. The deeper facets of feminism in the above-named disciplines are now found here—and not in those other files. After more than a decade of collecting items in this new file, 2003 to 2014, the results, the table of contents which I place at the beginning of this file, indicate the details of my collection.

In 2009, I began a men’s studies sub-section of this file. Men’s studies is also an interdisciplinary academic field and it emerged in the early 1970s. It had come into my life in the 1990s, but I did not begin a serious study of men’s studies and gender studies until the last years of the first decade of the 21st century.

Ron Price
4/7/’08 to 29/6/’14.
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ONE BATTLE BEGINS

A sequence of poems, especially a sequence that now exceeds seven thousand, over three million words, and deals ostensibly with the four epochs of the Formative Age beginning in 1944(a Baha'i history perspective), should deal from time to time with issues that relate to genre, to the relations between the sexes, to a theme that has had significant prominence during this half-century, during what came to be called the "second wave" of feminism and would continue beyond into many other "waves."

It is not my intention to give even a brief summary of this issue and the history of feminism here; that is done admirably elsewhere in many texts in sociology and history and a burgeoning of examinations of feminism and gender relations. Gender relations, issues of masculinity and femininity, sex and marriage, have been central to my own experience of life and the experience of Baha’is in their communities.

The following poem makes some personal statement about these issues, my experience and that of my contemporaries . There has certainly been an element of war, a war in this gender divide, a war that has been one of the primary engagements in my life and has had an enormous impact on me, greater than any of the contemporary wars in the last half of the 20th century that filled the print and electronic media. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, Unpublished Manuscript, 2000(updated on 4/7/08)

There has always been an emotional tension,
god, right back to grade one when I was six2
and the prettiest things in the world sat behind
me in school and I wondered what was under
the soft white cloth under their dresses which
I could see by turning my head at a certain angle
with little effort: attraction and repulsion learning
slowly custody of my eyes like some kind of
photographic emulsion. Was this the first sign
of a burgeoning and gentle masculinity, right-there
at-the-start, a threatening, mysterious and attractive,
but-not-attractive attraction which reared its penetrating,
not-so-modest, head, revealing a naturalness,
an emotional insecurity, an unease, an ambivalence;
and exposing both capacity and incapacity to deal
with an emerging tension that threatened, over time,
to tear me apart? Was this force socially constructed?

Was it sustained, over time, by varying degrees of relationship?
Was it threatened by female assertion of a newly-emergent autonomy?1
Who was this source of pleasure, this instrument, this mystic virgin,
this fertile mother, this friend, this companion, this partner, this lover
that I reconstruct in my mind’s eye in images from blank nothingness,
to warm and inner white, to erotic richness that reflect my dependency?
With love came faith’s bricks and planks and rusted nails that wound;
with love has come spare plan of gold, a vein thin and long.
I lost and found my self-control and lost again in blunder.
I’m not sure I will ever keep it in its place within my mind
of wonder. Some jihad may control this force.....
but jihads aren’t for plunder, just for wonder....

1. Bruce Woodcock, Male Mythologies: John Fowles and Masculinity, The Harvester Press, Sussex, 1984, p.82. Many point to the 1960s as the eventual beginning of this assertion; others go back to the Reformation period. There are many theories of the long, persistent and necessary rise women.
2. In 1951, Shoghi Effendi, Citadel of Faith, p.91; I was in grade six at the time when the Baha'i spiritual and administrative centre began the development that has led to the present Arc on Mt. Carmel.

As the struggle for the rise of the World Administrative Centre began in 1951, my own battle began, fought in the confines of my brain for, it would appear, the remaining years of my life.

Ron Price
19/4/'00 to 29/6/'14.