Love at a Tender Age (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior)
Table of Contents
* * *
Introduction
A Letter from Noreen
Three Little Maids from School
A Letter from Ruth
Like Father, Like Son
A Letter from Susan
A Male Soul Trapped in a Female Body
A Letter from Diane
My Life Has Had Its Ups and Downs
A Letter from Nick
Maria’s Rap
A Letter from Howard
Some Background Notes to an Open Marriage
A Letter from Karl
Daddy’s Girl
A Letter from Wes
I Thought My Parents Were Cool
A Letter from Vicki
The Girl in the Front-Row Seat
A Letter from Betsy
I Knew a Lot About Fucking but Nothing About Girls
A Letter from Peggy
An Epilogue . . . With Love and Squalor
About the Author
Excerpt: Older Women and Younger Men:
The Mrs. Robinson Syndrome
Love At A Tender Age
John Warren Wells
Lawrence Block
* * *
copyright © 1974, 2012, Lawrence Block
All Rights Reserved
Introduction
A couple of months ago I found myself in upstate New York with an evening to kill. A woman I knew lived in a nearby city, so I called up and invited myself over. I had had an unfulfilled yen for her during the years of her marriage. About a year and a half ago she’d gotten divorced, and just recently she’d commenced living with a guy. Life is overflowing with missed opportunities.
I drove over there and the three of us sat around drinking something alcoholic and smoking something illegal. After an hour or so she went out briefly to pick up her kid and the guy and I went on talking about something or other. A little while later the door opened and she returned, skipping gaily across the room and throwing herself lightly into my lap for a kiss.
Well, the kiss turned into something of a production number. After a bit she struggled playfully to extricate herself, and I as playfully restrained her and carried manfully on. And then she struggled again, and a too-small voice squealed “Mr. Wells!” in my ear, and I raised my eyes and saw the mother standing bemused on the other side of the room, and looked quickly down, to discover I had been rather passionately embracing her thirteen-year-old daughter.
Such moments happen often in dreams, especially if I eat Mexican food shortly before retiring. In dreams the situation usually deteriorates rapidly, with the final scenes generally taking place on a high and precarious stairway; the stomach evidently wants to put all one’s phobias in one basket. Life, praise God, is rarely so dramatic. The girl extricated herself, giggled nicely and decorously, and seated herself on a nearby couch. Someone got drinks. Conversation resumed.
And, during a lull, someone or other asked what I was currently working on. “Oh, a book,” I said. “on, uh, the sexual experiences of, uh, children and teenagers.”
There was one of those pauses. Then the mother said, “I never realized just how carefully you research these things.”
• • •
This is not a book about so much as it is a book of. I have no particular theories to offer on how best to function as either a parent or a child; indeed, the material I have had the good fortune to compile seems to point in several directions simultaneously. The reader who approaches the following pages looking for points to be made and threads to mesh will perhaps be less successful than the reader who views the individuals he will encounter as individuals, each with a story or portion of a story to tell, each supplying one piece of the jigsaw puzzle of sexual maturation in contemporary society. But this book holds only a few dozen pieces of a thousand-piece puzzle, a particularly subtle puzzle with no straight edges for the border. The book asks more questions than it suggests answers—and I suspect it’s better for it.
Sexual development has never been an easy process. Perhaps it’s not supposed to be; perhaps it is implicit in the human condition that this should be a difficult stage. I have found myself wondering lately whether the process is more arduous now than in times past. “May you live in interesting times” is a curse in the Orient, and God knows our times are distressingly interesting.
In many respects, this era of the New Morality should make things simpler, and in many respects perhaps it does. Certainly, young people are more knowledgeable about sex than their parents were at the same age—which should not blind us to the extent of ignorance many of them display on sexual matters, by the way. And certainly there is less conventional guilt; fewer teen-age masturbators worry about going blind or growing hair on their palms, and fewer girls fret about getting a baby from soul kissing.
Yet an increase in sophistication brings its own headaches. Aside from technology’s contributions of drugs, mobility, and the like, the most glaring reward of the New Morality is the erosion of the superstructure of conventional standards. The normative mores—i.e., that code of behavior which, it is taken for granted, Society expects will be followed—have never been less clearly defined. Not too many years ago, for example, the normative mores strongly dictated premarital chastity. To be sure, this did little to guarantee such chastity, but those confronted with the option of premarital sex at least knew what they were supposed to do, and could make their choice accordingly.
Confusion, then, is a dominant chord in contemporary sexual development. In a sense, the pattern is that there is no pattern.
• • •
One respect in which this present volume differs from the bulk of my work is that, in the majority of cases, I have had no personal contact with the individual subjects. Although I have met with a few of them, the majority I know only through correspondence.
There are reasons for this. The young often lack mobility, and those most likely to write to me in the first place are least likely to be able to come to New York to be interviewed, or even to be able to get away from the parental home should I be in their area. Perhaps more important, I’m quite certain most of my correspondents don’t really want to meet the person to whom they have unburdened themselves. My role in their lives is a combination of sounding board and confessor. I am a faceless, voiceless entity somewhere in New York, to whom anything whatsoever may be written with impunity. So many of the letters I receive contain lengthy apologies for wasting my time, adding that the writer has no one else to confide in. Such confidences can evidently be shared without embarrassment through the mails, and such embarrassment would result from a subsequent meeting. It is not difficult to understand why they hang curtains in confessionals.
That so much of this book is in the form of correspondence is both good and bad. The weakness lies in the fact that the reader has no more hope than I of being quite certain just how much of the material included is literally true. An incident described in a letter may have happened. It may be sheer fantasy. To be sure, there are opportunities for lies of all sorts in a direct interview as well, but one likes to think that face-to-face meetings afford a better chance of determining truth or falsehood.
On the other side, correspondence possesses the great virtue of being readily conveyed to the reader in its original form without having first been filtered through the perceptions and prejudices of the reporter. I have interfered as little as possible with these letters. Assuming that the manner in which something is said is often as relevant as its content, I have edited as little as possible, changing senten
ce structure only when clarity would be otherwise sacrificed, and revising unorthodox spelling on the premise that linotype operators have a difficult enough life as it is. A certain amount of cutting has been inevitable for space considerations, but I have kept it to a minimum. The letters you’ll read are essentially the letters as I received them. You’ll be spared the dubious pleasure of struggling with some truly chaotic handwriting, and you’ll miss the thrill of coping with green ink on dark blue paper. Girls of a certain age are partial to such color combinations. I’ve no idea why.
Every other chapter consists of a single letter, complete unto itself. That I have made use of these letters in this fashion is not entirely a result of a determination to emulate the meatpackers and use all of the pig but the squeal. It had struck me that some of the most interesting material has come to me in this fashion—one letter, fascinating in its implications, duly answered, and no more ever heard of its author. In such cases, one must be more careful than ever to recognize the possibility that the letter is fantasy or put-on, but, as I’ve remarked elsewhere, fantasies and put-ons are as revealing in many ways as the truth.
• • •
Enough! Introductions bore the reader and the writer simultaneously, the reader anxious to get on to the meat of the book, the writer at least as anxious to turn in his manuscript, pick up his check, and go out and get drunk. I’ll end this now and permit us both to go our separate ways.
A Letter from Noreen
Dear Mr. Wells,
I am sixteen years old and have a very strange problem, at least for someone my age.
My boyfriend and I have been married for about three or four months and are expecting a baby in a couple of months. The problem is our parents. They don’t know we’re married. I’ve been living at home and so has he, but my pregnancy is getting to the stage where it will start showing pretty soon and we don’t know what we should do.
My husband thinks we should just say we’re going out on a date and not come back, but I disagree. I think we should sit them down and tell them, but I am afraid of what they’re going to do and say.
They object very highly to us being or getting married before we graduate and that’s in two years. We are both juniors in school and he wants to quit at mid-term and share a duplex with one of his friends because his friend can’t afford the rent by himself and we need a place to stay.
And I’m sure they’re gonna try to make me give it up for adoption or have an abortion, neither of which I care too much for. I want this child more than anything in the world and so does my husband. I have had a lot of experience with children babysitting and working in a children’s hospital so I don’t have any doubts about my ability to take care of him or her.
And another problem that recently came up was our parents wanting us to date other people. They think we are too young to be engaged, much less married, and for heaven’s sake, not a mother and father. We have already told them that we love each other very much and don’t want to date other people but they still say we’re too young to know what love is.
What do you think? Please be honest because I’m sure there are lots of people out there with our problem but won’t admit it.
Sincerely yours,
Mrs.———
P.S. Could you please put your answer in a plain envelope and address it to so my parents won’t suspect anything. Thank you.
Noreen
Three Little Maids from School
A couple of years ago I wrote a book on female bisexuality that a publisher persisted in titling Women Who Swing Both Ways. While the title did have the virtue of candor, it was not one of my all-time favorites. Among other things, I felt its general lack of couth would discourage its purchase by women, whom I presumed would be somewhat diffident about toting such an unequivocal title to the cash register.
I was quite surprised when the book returned heavy feedback in the form of letters, the overwhelming majority of them female readers. And I was further surprised by the high proportion of adolescents among my correspondents. Here, for example, are a pair of letters from a fourteen-year-old girl living in a small town in the Southeast:
Dear Mr. Wells,
I am fourteen years old and I have been a homosexual all my life. I’ve always wanted to make love to girls but most of them think I’m crazy although I don’t think they could resist if they were alone with me for very long. The reason I say this is because I’ve had many girls (even black girls) tell me that I am “sexy” or fresh. The reason they won’t let me make love to them is because they’re scared that they’ll get a bad name.
I know that you said you never put people in touch with one another but I was wondering if you could tell me the name of a club or something, or someone who could tell me the name of a girl. If you can’t I’ll understand but I’d like for you to write me back any way.
A Friend,
Lorraine
Dear Mr. Wells,
I was glad to receive your letter. The reason I hadn’t wrote back sooner is because I haven’t had any time alone until now.
You ask me to tell more about myself so here goes. When I was six years old I fell in love with this girl about two or three years older than me. She had brown hair, she’s fairly dark, and she has curves in just the right places. She is very sexy and can turn any male (in his right mind) on—and she really got to me.
My sister had a birthday party and invited the sister of my love to it. At this time I was eight! I told the girl that I was going to have a nude party and I’d invite her sister to it and that we’d have a party by ourselves. I don’t know if she told her I said that or not.
Last year our class took a trip to another school to see some art exhibits. I was pleased to sit by a girl who I have liked a long time for sexual reasons. In other words she makes me feel real good. I decided I would prop my arm up on the seat behind her which I did. I then stuck my hand near her breast and that’s when she decided she’d hold my hand. (Wonder why!) I moved my arm from around her, placing it on her leg. I moved my hand on up and started fooling around. That’s when she told me that if I didn’t stop she would move, so I left her alone. I didn’t think she would sit with me on the way back to our school but she did. I made her promise not to tell anyone what I had tried to do.
A day or two later I wrote her a letter telling her that I loved her, and that I would not do anything she didn’t want me to do. She thought it was funny so she showed it to a few kids in our room. She also showed it to her mother, who took it to the principal. The principal called in the people who had read the letter and they had a meeting in the office. I figured he would get in touch with my parents so I decided I’d beat him to it. My parents told me I would have to get help but they waited until my mother got a call from the principal, and through him they got me started going to a head shrinker. I didn’t really mind because she was pretty and she was shaped even better.
This year I entered the eighth grade. (By the way, everybody in the county now knows I’m a homosexual.) There was a girl in two of my classes who I liked very well. I told her I liked her for a girlfriend and she didn’t say anything to me but she went to the office and tried to get transferred from both of my classes. She did get transferred out of one of them. A month later she started talking to me as if nothing had happened.
I really have this big thing about black girls. Most of them really turn me on. They know I like girls but they don’t know if I’m all girl myself. Sometimes they’ll ask me if I’m half boy and I’ll tell them to take a little trip with me and I’ll show them, or I’ll say, “Could be.” Actually I’m not. I just figure it might get me a little further. They are always coming up to me or rubbing on me and saying something real sexy but I can’t do anything very easily because we’re at school!
I am in love with a black girl. At school she acts like she don’t like me but she has met me at places and we did a little petting. I’ve also did a little petting with this white girl but I don’t care anythi
ng for her. That’s as far as I ever went because no one would let me go any farther. I’m just waiting for the chance . . .
Sincerely,
Lorraine
Larraine’s letters are certainly not typical. She was quite certain of her sexual orientation at a very early age. While this is not uncommon among males, I have found it to be relatively rare among females. The emergence of lesbian desires occurs more often in adolescence, and seems usually to be marked by more confusion and ambivalence than Lorraine reports. (For that matter, I’m inclined to believe Lorraine has undergone rather more anxiety on the subject than her letters indicate.)
My most extended correspondence on this subject has been with three girls in a Midwestern city who wrote to me actively and at length over a period of almost a year. I find their letters particularly instructive because of the way they reveal the changes these girls have gone through in that period of time. Ideally, I’d reproduce them in full, but to do so would take up the better portion of this book. Here, then, severely edited to save space but otherwise verbatim, are letters from Ellen, Grace, and Louise.
Dear Mr. Wells,
Recently my friend Grace and I got a copy of Women Who Swing Both Ways. I’ll be 16 in March and Grace will be 19 in February. Grace had sex with a boy when she was 15. I’m still a virgin. I’ve been aware of my bisexual tendencies for some time. I never did anything about it because I was much too inhibited . . . One night last September Grace was spending the night at my house. We discussed bisexuality again; I realized we were both getting excited, and I got up enough nerve to suggest that we French-kiss each other. We did, several times, hugged and stroked each other, and that was about it. Then we got so paranoid about the whole thing that we stopped all physical contact . . .
A male bisexual friend of ours suggested we try a sensitivity experiment, touching and stroking each other, each mirroring the other’s actions, until we felt uneasy at the action and said, “Stop.” We tried that. We touched each other everywhere but breasts and genitals . . .