Sex-O-Babble : Decades Before the Dr. Ruth Era, Thurber and White Suggested That Too Much Concern : With the Psychic Aspects of Sexuality Can Really Kill the Mood

We have been told recently, in numerous alarming magazine articles and surveys, that the contemporary male is reluctant to commit himself to marriage--or any lasting relationship with a woman--and consequently, women, especially if they are older than 30, have scant chance of finding a suitable mate, much less of going to the altar.

No one seems to know quite how to explain this depressing phenomenon, or what to do about it, although our society is not without an abundance of psychologists, psychiatrists, sex counselors and advice columnists.

Actually, this problem was treated with remarkable insight and prescience by James Thurber and E. B. White in their little book, first published in 1929, “Is Sex Necessary?”

Although White and Thurber spoke of being in a “sexual revolution,” they obviously had experienced only the preliminary feminist wave of the ‘20s, not the far more revolutionary women’s liberation movement of the ‘60s, which included the introduction of the Pill.

Even so, they seemed to understand our sexual predicament and put their fingers on it in the lucid prose for which both are so admired.

I suspect, however, that Thurber wrote this book, though White contributed a perceptive footnote on Thurber’s drawings. And there is a ripping preface by Lt. Col. H. R. L. Le Boutellier of Schlaugenschloss Haus, King’s Byway, Boissy-le-Doux-sur-Seine.

Col. Le Boutellier (who sounds suspiciously like Thurber) traces the problem back to the primeval soup:

“Men and woman have always sought, by one means and another, to be together rather than apart. At first they were together by the simple expedient of being unicellular, and there was no conflict. Later the cell separated, or began living apart, for reasons which are not clear even today. . . . Almost immediately the two halves of the original cell began experiencing a desire to unite again--usually with a half of some other cell. This urge has survived down to our time. Its most common manifestations are marriage, divorce, neuroses and, a little less frequently, gunfire. . . .”

The authors find the root of the problem in the American concern with the psychic aspects of sex. “The American idea is to point out, first of all, the great and beautiful part which the stars, and the infinite generally, play in Man’s relationship to Woman. The French, Dutch, Brazilians, Danes . . . can proceed in their amours on a basis entirely divorced from the psyche.”

They suggest that sex has been destroyed by books on sex. For example, a young man who doesn’t know whether what he feels for a young woman is love or passion consults a book on sexology and finds, in a chapter on “The Theory of the Libido,” the following:

“The ideal healthy outcome is to find the child in whom the process of repression has been accomplished with no fixations of interest at lower stages of adaptation, in whom the Oedipus complex has passed into a ‘normal’ phase of the castration complex inhibition, and in whom a free-moving libido is developing sublimation in active interests free from paralyzing inhibitions or antisocial tendencies.”

Confronted with this alarming analysis, the young man flees to Oregon, “where he raises fruit fairly successfully and with no antisocial tendencies.”

The authors hold that sex and marriage in the 19th Century were economic and patriotic; men and women needed children to build the nation. There was no psychic element. “There was not a single case of nervous breakdown, or neurosis, arising from amatory troubles, in the whole cycle from 1800 to 1900, barring a slight flare-up just before the Mexican and Civil wars. . . .”

They place part of the blame for the alienation of their times on the tendency of men to place women on a pedestal, to think of them as unattainable, something too precious to be touched.

In the early part of this century, they hold, women discovered their “right to be sexual,” and they “fell to with a will.”

It was this change, they suggest, that caused the problems of today.

“The transition from amiability to sexuality was revolutionary. It presented a terrific problem to Woman, because in acquiring and assuming the habits that tended to give her an equality with Man, she discovered that she necessarily became a good deal like Man. The more she got like him, the less he saw in her. (Or so he liked to think, anyway.)”

But I’m afraid that their thesis on the masculinization of women would be anathematized today as sexist, which indeed it is. I see no reason why a woman can’t be sexually aggressive and remain feminine.

Still, there may be some validity in their notion that it is our concern with the psychic aspects of our sexual relationships that makes them so difficult to maintain.

This book offers no answers to the problems it describes. If the reader seeks guidance, I recommend Thurber’s later book, “Let Your Mind Alone,” in which he puts a pox on all the how-to books that first began to burgeon in that era.

“Man will be better off,” he said, “if he quits monkeying with his mind and just lets it alone.”

It’s something to think about.