IS IDEAL MARRIAGE ATTAINABLE? THE REAL DIFFICULTYThe real difficulty lies in all the canons of good taste, propriety, and morality that make it difficult for men and women to form acquaintanceship. These conventions are taken so much as a matter of course that we never question them except in minor details. They are all a product of the more explicit segregation of the sexes that has existed from time immemorial and is still regarded as the backbone of our sex morality. Mental inertia and a sense of pride which prevents most persons from admitting the poverty of their associations cause the blighting effect of segregation to go unnoticed, while we waste our time on more superficial explanations of marital unhappiness. Our romantic tradition itself perpetuates the superstition that somehow, somewhere, some time, a miracle will occur and the ideal which we have long waited for will be delivered into our hands. Coincidences that bring two attractive personalities together out of a clear blue sky may well happen in the movies or cheap novels and magazine stories, but they rarely happen in real life— not often enough to base a whole system of marriage upon them. Yet that is what we are trying to do today.The only way in which men and women may have a real chance to find a satisfactory life-companion is to meet hundreds of the opposite sex under such conditions as will permit them to form friendships as easily and as wisely as is done within the same sex. In other words, when there is no difference between the conventions that govern acquaintance between the sexes and those that operate within a given sex, then, and not until then, will a marriage system based on romantic love function.*110\275\8*

Nearly one-half of all information given in general practice consultations is forgotten (Ley, 1982). Advice can be given in ways which increase the likelihood of the patient remembering it

(Fowler, 1985a). It is useful to stress important pieces of advice, using short words and sentences, giving specific rather than general advice and repeating advice. Countering myths is also important. The use of leaflets to supplement advice is vital (Fowler, 1985b). The Family Planning Information Service sets a very high standard with its set of family planning leaflets.

Included in this section is Neighbour’s handing-over phase under which heading he includes negotiating with the patient, influencing the patient and how the plan is presented. Before moving on, it is necessary to check that the patient is happy with the plan. The patient should be encouraged to accept an appropriate degree of responsibility.

*349/197/1*

*310/197/1*

*234/197/1*

Similarly, people with congenital disabilities need to be able to express their feelings about how their disability affects their sexuality.

Especially as the teens are entered, with the muddled confusion of feelings that comes with adolescence, anxieties about whether young people will be sexually acceptable and attractive to their peers can be overwhelming.

*195/197/1*

A nineteen-year-old male, married and separated from his wife, was involved in a party with three other males, two aged seventeen and one nineteen, which progressed from the home of one to the apartment of another. Two of the males had coitus with a fifteen-year-old girl who was included, and to whom they had furnished whiskey.

3 and 4. These two offenses deal with the same event as reported by two of the participants. One offender was nineteen, married and separated, the other eighteen and single. The two of them, accompanied by six other male friends, picked up two girls, aged sixteen and twenty-two, at a drive-in restaurant and took them for a “joy ride.” The older girl insisted shortly on being let out in spite of her friend’s attempts to persuade her to stay. The car was then driven to a field where four of the males had coitus with the sixteen-year-old and then took her home. The eighteen-year-old male offender denied having coitus, but pleaded guilty to statutory rape in order to avoid charges of kidnapping and rape. Both males claimed no force was used and that the sixteen-year-old girl was willing, but since the older girl who had left the party called the police, the sixteen-year-old girl was pushed into bringing charges

*372\161\2*

This lack of psychological involvement reinforces our contention that animal contact is closely related to self-masturbation. Note that self-masturbation is another activity in which the number with overt experience exceeds the number who fantasy or dream about it. Just as a man does not usually build up a psychological component about a masturbatory technique—i.e., he does not become aroused by the sight of hands despite the fact his hands have brought him to orgasm repeatedly—so a man does not usually build up a component about animals. Even a person with a moderate amount of animal contact does not ordinarily become aroused by the sight of animals; or to put it another way, you can find many men who are sexually interested in looking at (and often purchasing) pictures of human females or males, but it is virtually impossible to find a male sexually interested in pictures of animals. Again, both masturbation and animal contact are similar in that their heyday is before age twenty and that they decrease markedly later as they are replaced by sociosexual activity.

Another interesting facet of the lack of affect is the attitude the person with animal contact has toward his own behavior. While persons who have never engaged in animal contact are prone to regard it as almost the ultimate in pathology and degradation, and as ipso facto evidence of mental disturbance, the majority of persons with such experience look back upon it as a moderately shameful act, but in no sense a devastating perversion which has marked them for life. A minority, but a substantial minority, display minimal guilt feelings and regard their earlier activity as simply youthful experimentation— which, indeed, it usually was. Another example of the scant emotional significance of animal contact: not infrequently a man who has had homosexual experience in his youth may worry that homosexuality will somehow reappear and engulf him—he fears he will “turn into a homosexual”; but we have yet to interview a man who, because of animal contact in his youth, lives in dread that he will later find himself sexually interested only in animals.

*334\161\2*

The above illustration of the effect of marriage upon premarital behavior justifies our formulating a rank-order of premarital coital experience based only upon those who later married. In such a rank-order the control group occupies an intermediate position with 89 per cent of its members having had premarital coitus. Two of the three homosexual-offender groups fall below the control group, the homosexual offenders vs. adults being in next-to-last position. The lowest rank is shared by the peepers and incest offenders vs. adults. The heterosexual offenders, the prison group, and the heterosexual aggressors vs. minors and adults all occupy the upper half of the scale, with from 95 to 100 per cent of their members experienced.

A more valuable differentiation between groups is to be seen in the accumulative incidence of premarital coitus. Certain groups rank high by any age; these are the heterosexual offenders and aggressors vs. minors and adults, and the prison group. In some of these groups one fifth to one third of the members were experienced by age twelve.2 Others consistently rank low: the homosexual offenders vs. children and adults, the incest offenders vs. adults, and the control group. In brief, it is the groups whose later life was characterized by a wealth of heterosexual experience who were most involved in premarital coitus and at earlier ages than the others. The homosexual offenders vs. minors, whom one would expect to rank low in accumulative incidence, actually occupy intermediate ranks by ages fourteen and sixteen —evidently owing this to a carry-over of their relatively extensive prepubertal sex play—but thereafter they fulfill expectations by ranking low. The peepers, on the other hand, rank low by ages fourteen and sixteen (note that at this time they also rank very low in the number of female friends and companions) but subsequently rise to intermediate status.

The rate at which the accumulative incidence of premarital coitus builds up decreases rather markedly in most groups after age eighteen. Precisely the same “leveling off” was noted in our previous volume on male sexual behavior. Ultimately at older ages the group differences lessen as over four fifths of the members of every group (except the homosexual offenders and incest offenders vs. adults) become experienced in premarital coitus.

By the time they were interviewed between two fifths and nine tenths of the comparative groups had had coitus with prostitutes; the offenders and aggressors vs. children tending to have more men with such experience than their counterparts within the same tripartite group.

Age-specific incidence, the proportion of a group having premarital coitus within specified age limits, presents a slightly different picture. Considering only premarital coitus with companions (i.e., excluding prostitutes), the heterosexual offenders and aggressors vs. minors and adults and the prison group continue to rank high, but the control group rises from a relatively low position to a high-intermediate one, ultimately in their late twenties matching the figures of the prison group. The peepers graduate from the bottom of the rank-order in the period between puberty and age fifteen to second in age-period 26-30 (although the N is small). The homosexual offenders and the incest offenders vs. adults continue to rank at or near the bottom.

The differences between groups in age-specific incidence of premarital coitus with companions are more marked than those in accumulative incidence. In the first age-period, puberty-15, the range is from 16 to 60 per cent; in age-periods 16-20 and 21-25 it is from about 40 to 90 per cent; and in the next two periods, 26-30 and 31-35, the range is from the 30s up to 100 per cent. This widening of range with increasing age indicates that selective factors are affecting the various groups differently.

Excluding the first age-period which is of variable length and is a period of general adjustment, nine groups, such as the offenders vs. adults, maintain rather uniform proportions of individuals having premarital coitus with companions during the various age-periods up to thirty-five. Three groups, such as the prison, have figures which decline with age. Lastly, four—the peepers being the prime example—present larger percentages in each successive period. One is left with the feeling that these different patterns are linked with different personalities and philosophies of life. The groups that maintain their high figures— e.g., the offenders vs. adults—seemingly owe their statistical uniformity to the idea that sex is a very important aspect of life not to be deferred or hindered, and that coitus—in or out of marriage—is the only reasonable form of sexual behavior. On the other hand, groups that maintain low figures owe their uniformity to disinterest (as in the case of homosexual offenders vs. adults) which imposes a ceiling On coital activity, or to moral restraints (as in the case of incest offenders vs. adults). A floor, so to speak, is provided by the five-year length of our age-periods. It is hard to envision a group of unmarried, sexually active, partially to wholly heterosexual males living five years without at least one third of them having had coitus with a friend or acquaintance at least once in that period. The other groups, whose percentages rise and fall more markedly, appear to have no such powerful stabilizing factors. Their activities fluctuate with a great variety of circumstances. Four groups generally show an increase with age; these seem to be “late starters” who subsequently blossom out. For instance, the successive rise of the peepers may simply be a sign of their growing out of the ineptitude and insecurity of their younger years. The rise of the incest offenders vs. children, however, is more likely the product of impending marriage. Three groups, the prison and control groups plus the aggressors vs. adults, show a decrease in age-specific incidence with age. As yet we have no explanation for this.

The age-specific incidence of premarital coitus with prostitutes is in general considerably less than that with companions; in particular types of offenders it is rare at any time for it to exceed that with companions. One can see in some groups, however, that the incidence of coitus with prostitutes approaches the incidence of coitus with companions later in life. Also the differences between the incidences of commercial and noncommercial coitus are less among the homosexual-offender groups than among the heterosexual groups.

There is an increase, with age, in the range. Between puberty and age fifteen some 21 percentage points constituted the age-specific incidence range of coitus with prostitutes; by age-period 31—35 this had increased to 73 points. One has the impression that with increasing age, patterns of preference become more marked. Those who find reward in a certain activity continue it; those who find the activity less rewarding give it up and this difference in behavior expands the range.

Some clusterings may be noted in the rank-orders. The homosexual offenders and, to a lesser degree, the control group may be found in the lower third of the orders from age sixteen onward. The homosexual offenders are always neatly ranked in order of their heterosexual orientation. There is also a tendency for the aggressors to head the rank-orders. Two of the aggressor groups monopolize first place in all save one age-period.

*296\161\2*

The families with the smallest number of children were those from which came the homosexual offenders vs. adults and the aggressors vs. minors: the average (median) individual came from a theoretical family of 3.7 children including himself. The largest families were those in which the incest offenders vs. adults were reared, the number of children being 6.1. The prison group was intermediate, and the control-group figure was 4.4. No groupings or trends of consequence were noted in this matter of family size.

Taking the numbers of individuals with families of various sizes, we calculated the probabilities of a person being the eldest, youngest, or an intermediate child. We than compared these ex pected probabilities with what our subjects reported. The agreement was generally quite good, but there were three glaring discrepancies: the homosexual offenders vs. adults, the aggressors vs. children, and the peepers had too many of their members being the youngest child. The “fit” between probability and report was also not too good for the aggressors vs. minors, but this may be the result of small sample size. Aside from the exceptions mentioned, it would seem that birth order is unimportant in this study of sex offenders.

Similarly unimportant is whether or not an individual was an only child or in any case reared alone. There is a positive correlation, naturally, between family size and the percentage of persons who were only children. The proportion of only children ranges from 3 per cent (for the incest offenders vs. minors, who came from the second largest families) to a surprising 22 per cent (for the aggressors vs. minors, who came from the smallest families). The control and prison groups are around the 10 per cent level.

In investigating the matter of the gender of siblings, we devised a ratio showing the number of brothers per 100 sisters, with the subject excluded. Immediately evident is the fact that the majority of sex offenders have an unduly large proportion of brothers. The control group is nearly evenly balanced with a 101.5 ratio, and the prison group is not badly skewed, but 11 of the sex-offender groups had more brothers than the control group. Only four groups, the offenders vs. children and the three aggressor groups, had more sisters than brothers. Aside from this trend toward masculine siblings no important generalizations can be gleaned from these ratios.

*258\161\2*

Their frequencies of premarital masturbation are, by and large, not unusual, and ordinarily put them in intermediate positions in the frequency rank-orders in the various age-periods. In general their frequencies exceed those of the control group, and the same may be said for the mean frequencies. Too few married peepers are in our sample to allow meaningful calculation of their masturbation frequencies.

In most groups there is a continued decrease among the single males in the age-periods from puberty to twenty-five in the proportion of total outlet derived from masturbation. Among the single peepers, however, the proportions at age-periods 16—20 and 21-25 are essentially identical; the customary decrease has been temporarily checked at a 60 per cent level. This percentage earns them fifth rank in age-period 16-20, but in age-period 21-25 it puts them in second place. This same sort of pattern, also at the same levels, is seen in the exhibitionists, and suggests a retardation in sociosexual (and especially heterosexual) adjustment. Since masturbation frequently accompanies both peeping and exhibition, one may consider this another reason for the similarity between the two groups. However, one cannot say that the offense modus operandi wholly explain why the masturbatory proportion remains undiminished in age-period 21—25, because the average exhibitionist was first convicted for exhibition during age-period 26—30, when the proportion of total outlet derived from masturbation falls substantially for both exhibitionists and peepers.

The peepers’ masturbatory fantasies are rather peculiar. They rank third (8 per cent) in sadomasochistic fantasy, first (11 per cent) in fantasy of animal contacts, and second (22 per cent) in bizarre fantasy. In brief, while basically heterosexual, they are relatively predisposed to the more exotic forms of fantasy. Their high standing, below only two aggressor groups, in the sadomasochistic category is surprising, since peepers are ordinarily regarded as rather timid souls averse to violence. However, our sample of peepers includes a minority of aggressive individuals who doubtless are responsible for most of the sadistic fantasies.

Peepers share with the incest offenders vs. adults the unhappy distinction of having worried over masturbation more than any other group. Some/58 per cent of the years in which their masturbation occurred were also years in which they worried about it. One is tempted to speculate that their guilt or apprehension regarding peeping, an activity commonly accompanied or immediately followed by masturbation, may have colored their attitude toward masturbation. In this connection it is of interest that the exhibitionists, whose offense behavior also often incorporates masturbation, occupy second place in the rank-order of worriers.

The majority of peepers learned of masturbation through talking or reading and observation (44 per cent, fifth in rank-order). An average number learned by being masturbated by another person and relatively few discovered it for themselves. The; number who learned visually is all the more interesting when one recalls that the peepers had only an average amount of prepubertal sex play—yet more of them learned of masturbation by observation than did the members of groups characterized by much more extensive prepubertal sexual experience. This acquisition of knowledge by observation does not seem to have led the peepers to any unusual amount of pre- or postpubertal masturbation, which is in keeping with the general tendency of the peeper to watch rather than to do.

*219\161\2*