photographer’s studio, Karen is fascinated by her own surface. She is a perfect symbol of our visual age.
In a disco, at her every step, mirrors split, enlarge, and multiply her image. If she adores disco dancing, it is only because it allows her to exhibit herself and observe herself at the same time. No matter that the endless beat deadens conversation, for her partner is usually as involved with his image as she is with hers. For me, dancing is an expression of elementary courtship, a crude pretense of sexual restraint, a publicly approved opportunity for exhibitionism. I have always hated dancing, and now I simply refuse to engage in it, although I don’t mind watching others—particularly Karen—throwing themselves all over the place for my amusement.
My governess allowed me to watch TV for no more than five hours a week, and I spent my adolescence almost entirely without seeing it. Most of my American contemporaries, however, by the time they graduate from high school, have watched about twenty thousand hours of television, an equivalent of nine years on the job. As a result they’re poor talkers and are easily fatigued by conversation. In constant need of adolescent distraction and entertainment, they find silence, reading, and solitary reflection synonymous with boredom. The disco, that noisy grave of human interaction, becomes the clinic for their never-ending withdrawal from an incurable addiction to television. Thedisco is their ideal playground: it kills language, it shrinks time, and it chops up awareness.
• • •
Many of my friends in India were mystics who believed that only by physical, moral, and emotional experiments can one discover one’s intimate nature—and the nature of intimacy.
From them I learned that as a man can ejaculate without having an orgasm, and have an orgasm without ejaculating, so is he also capable of reaching one orgasm after another. To obtain such freedom and control, I mastered a technique of tightening and relaxing my pelvic muscles; I learned to cut off the flow of semen at the point of orgasm, allowing the pleasurable release of the climax to take place freely yet sustaining the tension and rigidity needed to maintain my excitement.
Later, my friends volunteered another revelation. A man who knows what he is after, they said, should never rely on pleasing his woman by just playing with her clitoris and fucking her. He must be able to keep his woman lying on her back while he, placed between her thighs, slowly pokes his hand, palm upward, inside her, and with his fingers following the delicate curves of her vagina, probes for the secret love-spot hidden on the abdominal side of her canal, between the pubic bone and the lump of the cervix. Through forceful squeezing and tapping of that love-spot the man can cause his woman to secrete a milky love-juice, which, during an all-powerful orgasm, she will ejaculate—as a man ejaculates—through her urethra. To many Indian mystics that juice is the woman’s own semen, not much different in its substance from the semen of a man.
On dozens of occasions Karen has willingly submitted to my bringing her to this type of orgasm; on many other occasions she has reached spontaneous climaxes without,as I once crudely told her, lifting a finger off herself. In response, she said that a man who comes but cannot go is hardly her idea of a perfect lover; that, in fact, she considers my ability to hold off my orgasms, or to go through a series of them, a hang-up as morbid as the control it requires.
Now that I no longer depend on opium to slow me down sexually, I regret that I left India before learning how to deaden or—should I wish it—even eradicate my sexual urge. For even though sex is a veritable well inside me that drains me as I draw from it, ever since boyhood I have allowed it, several times every day, to absorb most of my energy.
One night she slid her hand along the inside of my thigh, and when,
In a disco, at her every step, mirrors split, enlarge, and multiply her image. If she adores disco dancing, it is only because it allows her to exhibit herself and observe herself at the same time. No matter that the endless beat deadens conversation, for her partner is usually as involved with his image as she is with hers. For me, dancing is an expression of elementary courtship, a crude pretense of sexual restraint, a publicly approved opportunity for exhibitionism. I have always hated dancing, and now I simply refuse to engage in it, although I don’t mind watching others—particularly Karen—throwing themselves all over the place for my amusement.
My governess allowed me to watch TV for no more than five hours a week, and I spent my adolescence almost entirely without seeing it. Most of my American contemporaries, however, by the time they graduate from high school, have watched about twenty thousand hours of television, an equivalent of nine years on the job. As a result they’re poor talkers and are easily fatigued by conversation. In constant need of adolescent distraction and entertainment, they find silence, reading, and solitary reflection synonymous with boredom. The disco, that noisy grave of human interaction, becomes the clinic for their never-ending withdrawal from an incurable addiction to television. Thedisco is their ideal playground: it kills language, it shrinks time, and it chops up awareness.
• • •
Many of my friends in India were mystics who believed that only by physical, moral, and emotional experiments can one discover one’s intimate nature—and the nature of intimacy.
From them I learned that as a man can ejaculate without having an orgasm, and have an orgasm without ejaculating, so is he also capable of reaching one orgasm after another. To obtain such freedom and control, I mastered a technique of tightening and relaxing my pelvic muscles; I learned to cut off the flow of semen at the point of orgasm, allowing the pleasurable release of the climax to take place freely yet sustaining the tension and rigidity needed to maintain my excitement.
Later, my friends volunteered another revelation. A man who knows what he is after, they said, should never rely on pleasing his woman by just playing with her clitoris and fucking her. He must be able to keep his woman lying on her back while he, placed between her thighs, slowly pokes his hand, palm upward, inside her, and with his fingers following the delicate curves of her vagina, probes for the secret love-spot hidden on the abdominal side of her canal, between the pubic bone and the lump of the cervix. Through forceful squeezing and tapping of that love-spot the man can cause his woman to secrete a milky love-juice, which, during an all-powerful orgasm, she will ejaculate—as a man ejaculates—through her urethra. To many Indian mystics that juice is the woman’s own semen, not much different in its substance from the semen of a man.
On dozens of occasions Karen has willingly submitted to my bringing her to this type of orgasm; on many other occasions she has reached spontaneous climaxes without,as I once crudely told her, lifting a finger off herself. In response, she said that a man who comes but cannot go is hardly her idea of a perfect lover; that, in fact, she considers my ability to hold off my orgasms, or to go through a series of them, a hang-up as morbid as the control it requires.
Now that I no longer depend on opium to slow me down sexually, I regret that I left India before learning how to deaden or—should I wish it—even eradicate my sexual urge. For even though sex is a veritable well inside me that drains me as I draw from it, ever since boyhood I have allowed it, several times every day, to absorb most of my energy.
One night she slid her hand along the inside of my thigh, and when,
Similar Books
