Let Joy Be Confined

Listen, Fellows, the Situation is Desperate, and we've got to do something about it. We are being conned out of our most precious possession: sex. We are being taken to the cleaners.

And I mean the cleaners. That's their diabolical strategy: to make sex clean.

This is one of those deals where we get something taken away from us for our own good, and everybody knows what a miserable arrangement that is. At first the snoopers and busybodies tried to keep sex under lock and key by concocting rules about what was proper and what was naughty, and trying to make people conform to their standards. But somehow that didn't work out so good: people kept right on breaking the rules and getting a big charge out of it. A new approach was needed, and they came up with it.

What they are doing now is brutally hauling sex out into the open and making it so disgustingly wholesome and ordinary that it loses all its fine old zest and fascination. Men, we have to be on our guard against this! We have to fight it!

The parallel with Prohibition is instructive. During the period when drinking was daring, illegal and sinful, why, naturally, everybody got sozzled on bathtub gin and a good time was had by all, if you forget about those mornings after and the anguished cries of "Never again!" When the do-gooders wised up and let Prohibition be repealed, what happened? All of a sudden it wasn't so much fun any more. Lots of people went back to root beer and celery tonic. Now they are applying the same lesson to sex: repeal the prohibition, make it wholesome. Take all the zip out of it. In a word, the plot is to deglamorize sex so completely that people will just get bored with it and give it up.

In the good old days – remember? – sex was the delicious, exciting, surreptitious business it had always been. It was popular not simply because it was cheaper than the movies: it was the favorite pastime of discriminating people (and of slobs, too) because it was secret, illicit, and sometimes downright dangerous. Elderly gentlemen, heedless of high blood pressure, leapt in and out of bedroom windows; youngsters, casting caution to the winds, frolicked in the dew, risking nasty head colds and the ire of incensed parents. Sex was fun in those days. But who is going to go to all that trouble if sex is the obvious, hygienic, antiseptic thing to do?

What they're doing is subjecting sex to ruthless overexposure and setting it up so that practically everything is normal. Dr. Kinsey was the ringleader in this nefarious maneuver. A guy can spend months or even years figuring out some really nutty sexual aberration, and then Kinsey will take all the fun out of it with his graphs and tables on just how many thousands of others have already thought of the same thing. The way things stand at present, a man can scarcely be nasty-minded any more. Do you peek through keyholes? Why not? Professor P. Pingtom has tables to show that there is absolutely nothing unusual about it: 88% of American males over the age of four do the same. (The ones under four would also, but they're too short.) Do you enjoy looking at naked women? Professor Baer's book will prove with statistics that everybody else does too.(Concluded on page 134) Let Joy be Confined (Cont'd from page 45) A disgusting – and pernicious – aspect of the new sex books, the ones that come in the plain, unmarked wrappers, is their mathematical and clinical makeup. In the good old days you were certain that such a book would be full of juicy, last-moving case histories. This was something everyone could enjoy and, possibly, learn from. But what do you find nowadays? Graphs! Tables! Statistics! Surveys! This whole splendid source of vicarious sexual enjoyment has been sterilized by the Enemy.

In the field of fiction, the Enemy's strategy has been just the opposite: a relentless realism. Gone are the days when Henry James could produce a delicious sense of evil by suggesting that a man and a woman were lovers from the fact that he remained seated while she was standing. Modern novels leave absolutely nothing unsaid: sexual encounters are mapped out like diagrams for a do-it-yourself outdoor barbecue, and the result is that, since nothing is secret any more, nothing is really very exciting. When Lady Chullerley's Lover can be sent through the mails and a novel like Lolita can make the best-seller lists – in other words, when a story of sexual perversion becomes an accepted item for mass consumption – die plot to de-dirtify sex has come pretty close to total success.

And the scoundrels are attempting to assure their victory by undermining the coming generation: a horde of clean-sex moppets is being bred right under our noses. Instead of getting out, as they should, and writing dirty words on fences, these youngsters are sitting in the classrooms and being brainwashed with audio-visual propaganda about the miracle and beauty of parturition. Miracle and beauty be damned! These kids are having the ground cut right out from under them; their little unformed emotions are being warped beyond repair. When the time eventually comes for them to make with the old parturition-producing business themselves, they'll get about as much bang out of it as a C.P.A. making out an income-tax return. Things have come to a sorry pass when even the carefree sex life of children is reduced to a commonplace routine.

Obviously, our basic problem is to restore sex to its status as a furtive, difficult, and therefore highly desirable pursuit. Drastic measures are needed, and only the most drastic will do.

Legislation regulating dress is called for. Bathing suits must revert to the style of the early 1900s: women in swimming must again look as if they had fallen into the water on their way to a funeral. All such affairs as beauty contests, bare-bosom floorshows, and movies featuring half-naked sexpots are out. No more of that subversive, reactionary stuff.

A tightening of censorship is absolutely imperative. There must be a complete suppression of any hint of sex in magazines, books, TV, advertising, and all other mass media. This magazine, for instance, must be put out of business. Right away! Or, if it is allowed to survive, at least the Playmate must go, unless all she shows is her head looking over the rim of a hot-water heater or an oil drum.

A dedicated underground must be organized. Legions of phony Anthony Comstocks must roam our cities, crying out against the White Rock label, putting pants on statues in museums, bribing children to gape at girls playing tennis. They must denounce with righteous zeal any public hint that the two genders are not identical in every respect. This will work wonders in arousing die public to the realization that they must be missing something pretty nifty.

If the campaign of suppression and undercover work is energetically carried out, a salubrious development will take place: the growth of a nourishing black market in sexualia. 1955-vintage Maiden-form ads will sell for $50 apiece and speakeasy-type bookstores and girlie shows will spring into being behind doors with peepholes in them. The whisper of "Joe sent me" will once again resound throughout the land. Sex will be well on its way toward regaining the clandestine quality that is its very essence.

With the sexual interests of the country revitalized in this fashion, there is every reason to believe that the politicians will get into the act. Party lines will accommodate themselves to the new and burning issue. Democrats will favor a more liberal attitude toward sex; Republicans will orate that the present way is best. However the elections turn out, sex will again be imbued with controversy and excitement.

Indignant people of the world, let's stick together on this thing! This is no time to shirk our responsibilities. Sex is the greatest pastime that the human race has ever discovered. Let us restore it to its former glory! Let's put it back under cover where it belongs.