The Chapman Report, page 19
When Dr. Gleed published a brief summary of his findings in a psychiatric journal, one of his most avid readers was Dr. Chapman, then about to begin his bachelor survey. Dr. Chapman promptly initiated a lengthy correspondence with Dr. Gleed and soon had the old analyst’s statistics and the means by which to allow for error in his own future interviews. After Dr. Gleed’s death, his papers were willed to Dr. Chapman, who culled from them what more he needed. The Double Poll, as Gleed’s papers were privately called, was known only to Dr. Chapman and his associates. It had never been published or publicized. It was kept as a secret measuring stick. Yet, Paul told himself incredulously, here Dr. Jonas seemed to know all about it. Paul speculated on how this was possible. At last, he concluded that Dr. Chapman had disclosed all his procedure to the Zollman Foundation, and it had been leaked to Dr. Jonas.
“Yes, the Double Poll, among other checks,” Paul heard himself say.
“I’ll concede that you can allow for a certain amount of conscious lying. As a matter of fact, it’s quite clever of Dr. Chapman. But how can you detect unconscious lying and allow for it?”
“Well—can you be specific?”
“A married woman comes in to see you tomorrow. You ask your set questions. She replies. She means to be honest, and she answers honestly. Or so she believes, and you believe. But memory of events in childhood or adolescence is clouded, faulty, inaccurate. Reported sexual behavior is not always true sexual behavior. Freud made that clear. You are wrestling with a woman’s unconscious. She cannot deliver what is hidden from herself, what is repressed and latent. She may relate fantasies as facts, and by now believe them to be true. She may be passing along what analysts call screen memories, recent memories overlaid on old ones, so that the old ones are distorted.”
“Our check questions, each differently worded, usually catch this,” said Paul.
“I doubt it. She may repeat the same partially false answer a dozen times, to a dozen different questions, because she believes it to be true. Also, she may be blocking out certain events and really be convinced that they never took place. I’m simply saying that the overt, obvious, conscious reply is not enough. It doesn’t say enough, and it’s often not accurate.”
“It’s accurate often enough,” said Paul doggedly. “What would you suggest? You can’t put each volunteer into full analysis.”
“I’d trust each one more if she was under amytal narcosis.”
Paul shook his head. “My God, Victor, it’s tough enough getting three thousand married women to talk sexual behavior without also demanding that they take truth serum. You’d wind up with a handful.”
“Perhaps a handful would be better than three thousand,” said Dr. Jonas mildly, “if you could count on what they were saying.” He rose, sauntered to the window, and closed it. “You know, I’ve heard out hundreds of married women in my time. I used to be one of the five marriage counselors of the Conciliation Court in Los Angeles. It’s a legal thing. If one of the two parties in a divorce wants a hearing, the other must, under subpoena if necessary, show up and talk it out with a counselor. One year, we undertook a thousand cases—kept half of them married. I’m still in marriage counseling on a private basis.”
“Do you use amytal narcosis?”
“When I have to. But infrequently. That’s not the point. My colleagues and myself aren’t digit-hunting like Dr. Chapman. When we take a woman’s sex history, we aren’t interested only in frequency of intercourse and orgasm. We’re concerned with inner emotional degree and gradation more than outer physical sum and amount. That’s the crux of it. That’s where we most violently differ with Dr. Chapman.”
Paul finished his chartreuse and watched as Dr. Jonas circled the room. He reached the desk and half sat on it. He stared down at Paul. “I was just wondering how to go on without annoying you.”
“You’re not annoying me a bit. I’m sold on what I’m doing. I think Dr. Chapman is a human being, but an important one, and I feel privileged to be associated with him. If I sound a little sophomoric, I’m not. I’m thirty-five, and mature in a half-assed sort of way. If I didn’t believe in this, I’d clear out in two minutes. I’d go back to teaching literature or writing books—or something more useful like marriage counseling—if I considered that vocation more valuable. No, you’re not annoying me at all. I’ve heard almost everything you’re saying before, but not said as well.”
“More chartreuse?”
“No, thanks. The talk is heady enough. As to your remark that we’re after physical sum rather than emotional degree, I think you’re way off base. That’s not the point at all.”
“Isn’t it? I wonder.” Dr. Jonas returned to his chair.
“We’re in the business of statistics—not lonely heart advice.”
Dr. Jonas frowned. “By publishing for the layman, you’re in both.” He held a silver letter opener before his nose, regarded it fixedly, then placed it on the desk blotter. “Your Dr. Chapman is primarily a biologist. As such, he brings his special point of view to the survey. What he is interested in is numbers. I’m not. I’m a psychologist. I want to know about feelings and relationships.” He found a magazine on the desk. He opened it, and Paul saw that it was Encounter. “I was reading an article by Geoffrey Gorer, the English anthropologist. Witty and profound. He speaks of these sex surveys, one in particular. By the standards of the interviewers he says—” Dr. Jonas sought the quotation, and then, finger on the page, read aloud—” ‘Sex becomes a quite meaningless activity, save as a device for physical relaxation—something like a good sneeze, but involving the lower rather than the higher portions of the body. If tensions build up, one either takes a pinch of snuff or a mistress; it doesn’t matter which.’ ” He lowered the magazine. “You can correct me if I’m wrong, but I am not aware that Dr. Chapman has ever used the word love in print or speech.”
Paul said nothing.
“I’m not badgering you,” said Dr. Jonas. “I miss that word. All your diagrams, graphs, tables, are devoted to the physical act—quantity, frequency, how much, how often—yet this doesn’t tell these married women a damn thing about love or happiness. This is separating sex from affection, warmth, tenderness, devotion, and I don’t think it should. Dr. Chapman, like so many in his field, implies that regular sexual outlet, orgasm, means happiness and health. It doesn’t, believe me. So-called normal physical sex can represent love, but it can also express anxiety, fear, vanity, compulsion. I’m saying that using the physical act of sex as a unit of judgment on normality or happiness or health can be all wrong. Physical sex is one part of the whole man or whole woman. It doesn’t determine character. Rather, a human being’s character determines his or her sexual behavior. Terman put it best. Sexual adjustment in marriage is mostly an expression of the very same factors which enable a man or woman to adjust successfully in any human relationship. Your sex life is the slave of your overall personality. If you are a sufficiently integrated personality, so that you get along happily in career, socially, and so forth, the odds are you’ll get along sexually. If your life is an emotional mess, it may not show up in Dr. Chapman’s impressive charts. A woman may have three magnificent orgasms in a week. This is fine, normal, what all must strive for, Dr. Chapman will say. But this woman may still be miserable, wanting in tender love and joy of life.”
Paul had been slumping in the plastic-covered chair, long legs outstretched. Now he pulled himself upright. “I won’t deny our limitations,” he said. “How do you measure love? It’s impossible—”
“Then why pretend that measurement of coitus and orgasm is a measurement of love?”
“Dr. Chapman doesn’t say that—”
“But since he says no more, people believe it. If a large number of people show up in his digits as performing intercourse three times a week, then he labels it biologically normal. But suppose my wife and I are not physically and psychologically endowed to perform three times a week. Once a week is fine for us. We read these charts and think we are abnormal, and this implies wrong and guilt and invites suffering. I just don’t believe that because something is shown to be widespread that it is automatically the right thing and the healthy thing.”
“You’re reading only one side of the coin,” said Paul. “There’s another. Turn it over. Obversely, it reads—well, just the opposite of what you’ve been arguing—that telling everyone certain sex practices are widespread removes the shame and abnormality from them. And I say that this is helpful. It liberates millions from needless repressions and guilts.”
“I’m not sure I like that kind of gamble.”
“Sometimes it’s necessary,” said Paul. “You lock yourself up in this pretty bungalow and theorize, but we’re out listening to three thousand real women with real sex histories. That’s reality. That’s the way the world is living. The peddlers of ignorance, of medieval morality, smear us for this. They say we are collectors and purveyors of erotic filth. You have no idea of the resistance we meet. They put Dr. Chapman with D. H. Lawrence, and Rabelais, and De Sade, and Henry Miller. But that’s not the worst of it. While we’re locked in battle with these roundheads, we have at our rear the special eggheads, the lint pickers and pinhead tabulators, the intellectual critics.” He held up his hand. “I’m not saying you are among them, though to all intents you might as well be. But despite this, while our arms and strategy and banners may not be perfect, we go on fighting, because we know the cause, and we know we are needed. Perhaps our means to the end is wrong. Perhaps the end does not justify the means. Well—perhaps. But we are fighting, because we know someone must win a more tolerant morality and a new climate for sex—and since someone isn’t doing it, now, right now, then we must.”
Paul halted, breathless. Momentarily embarrassed by his outburst, he sought his pipe. Dr. Jonas smiled. “You’re all right,” he said.
“As I told you, I believe in this.”
“Maybe I’ve been a little rough on you. I don’t mean it personally—”
“Christ, you don’t have to apologize to me.”
“… but, you see, I don’t believe in this. When we spoke on the phone, you said we had the same goal, so let’s talk. Well, yes, that I believe. The same goal. You know, Paul, prattling on about tolerance and wisdom and better life used to be the province of radical or liberal boys, the very young. Now, I think it’s time for the men to take over, do the boys’ work. I’m sick of idealism being related to puberty. I think the business of idealism belongs to tough, sophisticated, mature grown men. I want to confine Puritanism behind a small iron fence, as you do, make it a curiosity and symbol of the dead past, like Plymouth Rock. I want men and women finally free and unafraid. They must be led out of bondage to that better place. Yes, we are in full accord about that. The question is: Which road will take us swiftly and surely to that place? I have an idea, and I don’t think it is Dr. Chapman’s road.”
Paul was suddenly conscious of his assignment. “But we’re going in the same direction. That’s the important thing. I’m sure Dr. Chapman would appreciate your criticisms—”
“I doubt it.”
“The survey is his entire life. He’s always trying to improve it. He’s a pure scientist.” Paul hesitated, aware of the skepticism in Dr. Jonas’ face. “You don’t believe me?”
“Well—”
“You seem unreasonably hostile to him.”
“Because, in my opinion, he is not a pure scientist. He is as much, if not more, a publicist and politician. Those strains degrade the breed, the purity.”
Fleetingly, Paul remembered the conversation on the train, when Dr. Chapman had defended the Scientist as Politician. He considered paraphrasing Dr. Chapman’s explanation of the necessity, but then he thought better of it.
“I think,” Dr. Jonas was saying, “you make the mistake, Paul, of mixing your own identity with Dr. Chapman’s. You are devoted to truth. And, you can see how I might be useful. But Dr. Chapman, I am sure, is not you, far from you.”
“We’re not that unlike.”
“You may not want to be, but I have a hunch you are. However, that’s neither here nor there.”
“But it is. I’d very much like to get you together with Dr. Chapman. Let you see for yourself.”
Dr. Jonas eyed Paul curiously. “Is that why you are here?”
“Not exactly,” Paul said too quickly.
Dr. Jonas studied the blotter on his desk a moment. His fingers fiddled with a small clay ash tray in the shape of a sombrero. When he looked up, his voice was gentle. “Well, before we find out exactly why you are here, you might want to hear me out a few more minutes. I have a little more to say about your survey. My sense of completeness would be frustrated if I did not finish. I would keep thinking at night what I should have told you.”
“By all means,” said Paul, relieved.
“From the outset of your investigation, I noticed, Dr. Chapman, like several others before him, seemed to choose the orgasm as his unit of measurement. At first, I saw nothing wrong with that. It was something to start with. And, as you have remarked, how can one measure love? All right, Men—the orgasm—but what alarmed me, what I now deplore, is the ill usage of his findings in the bachelor survey, and the dangers inherent in publishing the married female survey. Of course, Dr. Chapman is a biologist, so I can understand his affection for subhuman animals. I was not surprised when he quoted Edward Elkan, writing in that Bombay sexology journal, as stating that no female animals, except some bony fish and the swan, ever have orgasms. Nor was I surprised when Dr. Chapman reported that the average male primate indulges in sex as a reflex action, that he has his orgasm seventeen seconds after intromission, just long enough for the species to survive. But when he related this latter information to the revelation that the average single male interviewed reaches orgasm in one hundred and nineteen seconds—less than two minutes—I was disturbed.”
“Why should you be? It’s a fact.”
“Your fact. Others have different facts. Dickinson found the average to be closer to five minutes; Kinsey found the average to be between two and three minutes. But let’s say it is a fact. I don’t object to that. What I object to is that by implication Dr. Chapman condones the fact—says brief duration of intercourse is right and good, because it is widespread and therefore normal. I’m not sure it is right and good—I speak of marital relations—and neither are most psychiatrists sure it is right and good. What is natural and easiest for the male as an animal may not be suitable to the condition of marriage that he has invented. I wouldn’t be surprised if many men took this as license to abandon control.”
“I can’t believe that, Victor, not while women—and this I have heard from them—relate potency and virility to prolonged intercourse. And don’t forget Hamilton’s findings. He asked his women, ‘Do you believe that your husband’s orgasms occur too quickly for your own pleasure?’ and forty-eight percent answered yes, in one form or another. Most men sense this or understand it.”
“Well, maybe. Mind you, I’m not saying rapid ejaculation is always wrong. An excited, erotic response can be good, if it does not stem from hostility. And often, of course, a female may he pathologically retarded in her response, and then there is no need for the male to indulge in unnatural masochism. But generally, this is not the case. And I think Dr. Chapman’s use of his figures on male orgasm have been harmful. Furthermore, I don’t like the way he separates orgasm from emotion. In your tables, each orgasm represents a single numeral, no more, no less, no different from any other. But don’t tell me an orgasm with a streetwalker is the very same as orgasm with a pretty virgin you have married. Or that orgasm attained in harried seconds on a public stairway is the same as one attained during a leisurely vacation in a mountain hideout. Even worse, to Dr. Chapman, that numeral on orgasm is the end of the sexual relationship.”
“Isn’t it?”
“For the male, technically, yes. But you’ve just been talking to some thousands of females. For many of them, it may not be an end but a beginning. What about procreation—pregnancy, childbirth, motherhood?”
“You’re right, of course,” said Paul. “I’m sure Dr. Chapman understands that. It’ll be clear when the new work is written.”
“I see no evidence of it in what I’ve read to date. You may think, Paul, I’ve drifted far afield. But I don’t believe so. You throw a lot of cold figures out to men and women who are deeply concerned. They read them, or misread them, or are misled by what they read, and they’re no higher from hell than when they started. I was going over Dr. Chapman’s female pie graphs last night, and I was appalled at some of the master’s sketchy and dogmatic comments to the Zollman people. In graph after graph, he seemed to be saying that women who enjoy orgasms frequently are certain to have happy marriages, as if that was all there was to love. I’m more inclined to plump with Dr. Edmund Bergler and Dr. William S. Kroger. Remember what they wrote? ‘If a woman typically experiences orgasm in a series of clandestine relationships, but is cold in marriage, her orgasm is not proof of health but of neurosis.’ There are a hundred authorities who believe orgasms are not so closely related to marital success as Dr. Chapman would suppose. I really worry that Dr. Chapman’s undigested nonsense can do infinite damage.”
“I think it’s a pity you saw this new material before Dr. Chapman could study and edit it.”
Dr. Jonas pinched the point of his hooked nose. “I only read it because Dr. Chapman saw fit to submit it to the Zollman Foundation. And that’s one more point I wish to make. Do you mind?”
“Please—”
“Your boss is too impatient, too much the man in a hurry. Fretfulness, haste, may be estimable qualities in a promoter, but they work to the detriment of a scientist. Don’t think me pompous or stuffy about this. I’m really concerned. If you must excuse or qualify what you have written, then don’t submit it to be read. I’m referring not only to the latest findings he gave the Zollman directors but the books he has and will submit to his profession and the lay public. And even his pronouncements in the press—I read that big interview he gave when he arrived here—all about men and women having different attitudes toward the sexual act. It’s taken him a long time to learn what Lord Byron knew by instinct in 1819—‘Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart/‘Tis woman’s whole existence.’”
