Framingham Community Forum; Dr. Eleanor Hamilton: Human Sexuality In The Context Of Marriage

[Host] Last week Mrs. Margaret Mead, in explaining the generation gap after World War Two, mentioned a number of significant changes that had taken place within a short span of time, such as the computer, television, space travel, and other elements which cause the young people of these days to have a different orientation than the parents had when they were children of a similar age. And so the generation gap. But one thing she didn't mention, and it rather surprised me as a possible factor, was the pill. That is the contraceptive pill as a factor in the different attitudes of behavior. And this happens to remind me of a story about,

conveniently, a story about a woman in her 60s rather distraught who came to the doctor's office, a gynecologist, and she told him that she was suffered from terrible headaches, she was filled with tension, and that he had to do something for her and he said "well Mrs. Cohen tell me what can I do for you?" And she said "I know what you can do for me, I want you to prescribe for me the pill." So he looked at her and he said "Mrs. Cohen you're a grandmother. What good could the pill do for you? You don't need it, it won't help you." Mrs. Cohen insisted "I must have the pill." And she was almost hysterical so he says "all right all right I will prescribe the pill for you but on one condition, and that condition is that six months after you are using the pill I want you to come back for a thorough physical examination," to which

Mrs. Cohen assented. She got a prescription and away she went in a hurry. Six months later to the day, Mrs. Cohen returned to the doctor's office and she looked chipper and cheerful. She felt great and looked it. The doctor was amazed, had something new been discovered for older women? He examined her thoroughly and she was in excellent physical condition. He said "tell me Mrs. Cohen, have you been taking the pill as I directed?" And she replied "Yes indeed. Every morning I take a pill. I put it into a glass of orange juice and as I watch my 16 year old granddaughter drink it down it does wonders for my headache and tensions." [laughter] Well tonight perhaps we will find out something about the pill and other aspects

of human sexuality and marriage from our guest speaker Dr. Eleanor Hamilton. A word about her: Doctor Hamilton received her master's and Ph.D. degrees in psychology from Columbia University in New York and she is a certified psychologist not only in New York but also in the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts. She is a Fellow of the American Association of marriage counsellors and a member of the American Council of family relations. She was a co-founder of the Hamilton School in Sheffield, Mass., which pioneered in the field of nursery and family life education. She is a much sought-after lecturer on marriage and a regular columnist for "Modern Bride." She has also authored several books, "Partners in Love," and "Sex

Before Marriage." Dr. Hamilton was married in 38 years ago to another psychologist and author, A.E. Hamilton and has shared with him the bringing up and the education of their four children. It's my pleasure to present Dr. Hamilton, Human Sexuality in Marriage. [applause] [Hamilton] Thank you, Rabbi. Sexuality is that form of psycho-biogenic energy that stirs each of us to desire closeness to one another. It draws all manner of life forms to seek each other for contact, for warmth, for pleasure, and for

reproduction of their kind. The spiritual effect of the orgasm itself is a sense of oneness with God. The physical effect of the orgasm itself is a sense of oneness with another human being which translates itself into creativity on every level. Sometimes that creativity results in the birth of a new individual but always it results in the birth of a sense of renewal and a fresh and new vision of life. I've never known anyone in all my clinical practice, which has extended over a number of years now with thousands of patients, I have never known a single individual to consider himself a bad person at the moment of orgasm. This is identified with goodness and at-one-ness. Now, man is sexual from birth to death. We've only known this relatively recently

actually. Early in the days of marriage counseling, with some of us who were doing research on the subject were wondering what the range of sexual excitement and interest was. We asked an old lady of seventy who was one of our colleagues. The question was "at what age did sexual interest stop?" And she says "I'll let you know." [laughter] We know that infants of as young as 2 weeks and probably before that experience orgasm. We know that from the fascinating study of "Sexology Magazine" which took everyone who was in "Who's Who" who is over 65, now let's grant that's a pretty highly charged collection of a selection of people. But the vast majority of these people who are in "Who's Who" over age 65 reported an active and happy sex life. Actually all the evidence seems to point that we are

sexual from birth unto death and when we think of this fact and when we think that only about half the people of the earth are married at any one time, it's rather interesting that we have limited our talk about sexuality to the married. It's like saying that, as my host of dinner said, it's like saying of the world is divided between men and women and that they all get hungry but only the men can eat. So that as we think about sexuality actually we have to think about sexuality for the whole span of life. But tonight we'll think about it only in terms of marriage. Sexuality and good health seem to go together. I'm not suggesting that one is causal of the other. Namely that if you have good sex you tend to be a healthier person. But certainly we see clinically that these two factors do go

together and there may well be an interaction. Certainly in marriage the sexuality, the adequacy of the sexual response, one to the other, is a very good barometer of the quality of the marriage in general. If marriages fall apart they generally fall apart because communication has broken down or because their sexual life is not functioning as well as it might. So that what we're talking about tonight, sexuality in marriage, is probably one of the two major factors in keeping marriages alive and happy. I have to say parenthetically, and perhaps we can get into it more at length a little later, that marriage in America has really failed. One in three of our marriages are ending in divorce today. In the state of California I understand it's one in two. Amongst the ministerial profession its one in four, a group that would be highly motivated to stay together. Now when we think about

sex in marriage let's think about what are those things which increase the quality of sexuality in marriage and what are the things which stop good sexuality between people in a marriage. Certainly the things that stop it are the following: jealousy is one. I'd like to tell you that there are both psychic factors and there are physical factors but one of those on the psychic side, psychologic side that stops good marriage, is jealousy. Another is possessiveness. A third is over- control, that is one fellow who has to to boss the other one, or I call it put into operation the forcing current. A fourth one is the negative critic. As a matter of fact on this matter of negative criticism just let a wife be negatively critical of her husband and you'll find that he will not be

able to get an erection. Just let a husband be negatively critical about a wife and he'll find that she's not very responsive. Just let the matter of either trust or-- particularly trust. Just let that break down and you will find that responsiveness, sexual responsiveness, begins to wane. One of the commonest complaints that comes to my office is the wife who says that her husband comes in the back door, runs his hand over the dust and the furniture, begins to blow off steam about how the house is untidy and the children are noisy and a few other little things and then want to climb into bed with his wife. Wives are not exactly ready to-- for sex at that moment. Another goes back to childhood and that is the preconceived notions of right and wrong that we get induced in our

earliest childhood. I think the church here has been very much at fault and needs to take responsibility, and as a matter of fact the church is taking responsibility today perhaps more than any other organized group, to change the pattern and change some of the wrongs that have been committed in the name of the church in this matter of promulgating so many untruths in connection with sexuality in the name of right. And people walk into marriage with these preconceived notions which are very damaging to their having a good sexual life, particularly such things as masturbation, I hope to get into that presently. I can remember even back in my day when the Boy Scout manuals talked about masturbation and self abuse. And I'm sure that you can still find such books floating around that instead of considering masturbation as a very good thing, which indeed it is, as a matter of fact the word masturbate means "to pollute with the hand."

Now nothing but an evil-minded adult could have named such a good act by such an evil name. Because auto eroticism is a much better word for it, or self-gratification and it has a place from the earliest of childhood till the latest time in adult life that we can think about, either in marriage or out of it. So this I think that some of my colleagues feel that if we could relieve people's guilt and fear about masturbation alone, we could relieve psychiatrist of their couch patients by about 50 percent. Another is of the negatives that take away from good sexuality, is the childhood conditioning about "don't feel." I've called this "the great screw up." [laughter] Because from earliest infancy everything that feels good to us, namely sucking feels good, you see this is a highly erotic thing, it it's pleasurable.

Defecating is pleasurable. Eating is pleasurable. Touching your own genitals is pleasurable. Sucking, I mean snuggling up next to your mother's breast is pleasurable and all these things are things which in our society we've been taught to train our children to get their positive affirmation from Mama when they don't do them. That is if they hold off crying for food until the mama, till the clock says it's a four hour schedule is up, to train not to go to the bathroom in your pants because mama approves you when you don't and disapproves you when you do. And to keep your hands off your own genitals because nice little girls and boys don't do that. And so on and so on and so on. All the things that feel good and which are good signal systems to let you feel good as well as feel good are converted to

feel bad when you're feeling good and feel good when you're feeling bad. Now you can see what kind of a screw up that does to us when we get to be a little bit older. Because when we're really feeling good we say "gee we ought to knock on wood, something awful's going to happen" instead of saying "that's a good signal system, I'm really feeling good so it really must be right." And on the whole it's true that what really feels good is really right and vice versa. But we get so terrified, we call it pleasure anxiety actually. I had to laugh because I was at a lot talking to a Unitarian group one time and the Unitarian minister introduced me as a woman who would lay them in the aisles and-- [laughter] I tell you I was filled with pleasure anxiety. Now other things that can cause hurt

on the-- can retard good sexual thing is the trauma that some children do experience very young, that is a child who has been raped or a child who's had a very traumatic scare reaction to sexuality when they were young can often bring such things into adult life and it is responsible for some of the timidities and fears of their adult, their marital sex and these things have to be considered as we talk about some of the sexual problems which I will talk about a little later this evening. Also the training that doesn't allow a child to feel, that is to express feelings generally. You see sexuality is something which is a feeling-ful response. It isn't something that you do up in the top of your head. It's something you do with your whole feelings and with your body. Now most of us are taught to use our heads but very few of us are

taught to use our emotions. As a small child very early is told don't-- "big brave boys don't cry, and nice little girls don't get angry. Nobody's supposed to be afraid. And God help you if you have a sexual feeling." Well what we really need to do is to teach people how to get angry. Teach people how to allow their feelings of sadness to be expressed, to teach this how that we can express fear and how we can express sexuality. It's a how, not the don't. But we grow up with this great big don't, which means that we grow up tightening all the muscles involved with feeling. Because you see with every feeling, emotion by definition is feeling in movement. And you can't have feeling moving since it doesn't move in outer space and it doesn't move up here in the top part of your brain. It moves through your whole body. And there are certain muscle groups that have to do with every feeling that the human being is

capable of expressing, that is in anger what we do is we we want to punch. We want to bite. We want to kick. We want to claw. We want to choke. We want to scream. And the muscles involved in doing these acts are the ones that go into operation in primitive man. Now in adult, in civilized man we've learned that we solve our problems with our brain not with our brawn, but the muscles still go into tension to act. And if they have no place to go, that is if they are kept from moving, they are tightened up like this. And if they're tightened up chronically they go into spasm and at the spasm stage what we've got is things like bursitis or this temporal mandibular joint dysfunction or some of the other manifestations of held-onto anger. We can talk about sadness now, sadness is is man's own provision for letting down his expressing his feelings of sadness. And he

cries or he sobs. And this is what he ought to be allowed to do. If one is unable to express anger in a physical way, I don't mean hit somebody, in a perfectly painless way like pounding a couch or playing golf or banging pots and pans around or slamming a door or do whatever you need to do physically to get rid of the anger tension. What you do is you hang on to all these big muscles and sex which is very tender reaching one. Sex involves the muscles of reach. It's this these muscles right in here and the muscles in the groin. If you watch a little monkey clinging to its mother or you watch anybody reaching, you look at a child reaching for its teddy bear or its mother, you'll find that the muscles of reach are involved and these are the muscles that are involved with expressing sexuality. But if you're holding on to these muscles you can't let a sexual feeling move through your body and get it expressed in a tender sexual way. And this is one of the great problems that happens to people in their inability to

come to orgasm. One of the things you see that stands in the way of good sexuality is this early training that teaches us not to express feelings. And as an adult one of the things that will help sexuality is to learn how to let feelings get expressed physically and then, I mean not always going to hurt anybody, because anger does not have to have any negative result whatsoever. You can pound a couch and who does it hurt? I never forget the relief it was to me when my husband took me out to the town dump once with a whole basket full of old crockery we wanted to get rid of and said "C'mon just throw." And we threw those dishes and it was just-- I can't tell you the relief it was. [laughter] It really picked up my sex life too. [laughter] Now. What are the things that really help sexuality? First of all is the atmosphere of freedom between two human beings

because love really is liberating. Love is not possessive. See, so many people feel that if you love somebody your jealousy is a sign of love. Actually it's a sign of insecurity and a person who's insecure can't possibly be as good a sexual partner as a person who is secure and jealousy is a sign of insecurity and so is possessiveness a sign of insecurity. It's when the doors can be wide open that the bird can fly in or out that the bird chooses to be with the person that she loves to be with or he loves to be with. You see there's a great pleasure in being with someone who would rather be with you than with anybody else in the world and not because there's some chain around them or this bond of holy matrimony bed. One of the reasons I think that extramarital affairs are so entrancing is that there is no chain around them. As one husband in his 40s said to me "you know the extramarital relationship just has it

all over marriage relationships because extramarital people who are having a relationship know that either one of them could leave at any time and they're there because they'd rather be together than any other place." Now this same atmosphere let me say may be brought into the marriage if you have the courage to do it. One of the things I shall be forever grateful to my husband, who died a year ago in his 80s, so for his age 38 years ago, 39 it would be now, and you think back to that time he was wise enough to say to me at the time of our marriage and I was only 22 and I thought he must be off his rocker at the time. But I've subsequently found how wise he was when he said "promise me only one thing: that you will let your love go where ever it goes. This is no jail between us." And it is true that when this atmosphere exists between two human beings the quality of their sexuality is very much improved. Let me tell you a

secret. Every act we do makes someone love us more or less, every act we do. Now real security comes by doing acts that if somebody else did it to us we would love them more for having done it. And if we do something that would make someone love-- that we would love them less if they did it to us, it makes us love ourself less. And in doing these acts that are not very lovable we start loving ourselves less and that is the source of insecurity. Not whether there's an extra man outside there waving at your wife or at your husband or any of these things. If you are making yourself a lovable human being, your husband or your wife will probably prefer to be with you than with any other person. And this is a source of security, not whether he is having a monogamous relationship with you. We so often, by the way, confuse the

word monogamy and loyalty. I've seen hundreds of persons who were monogamous and not loyal and I have seen many more who were not monogamous and were loyal. So let's not confuse those two words. So the atmosphere of freedom, remembering that love is liberating. Good communication is tremendously important between partners in love if they're going to have good sexual lives and good communications means really being able to talk on a level of trust, the whole truth and not the truth that's partially withheld. The moment there is something that you're withholding from a person that you love, a barrier goes up between you. Now we excuse ourselves in saying "it would hurt them if they knew that I had lunch with Mary Jane today" or "it would hurt them if I knew something." But actually it it's what you don't know that hurts

you, not what you do know. There's a very interesting little game which is useful to play and I think that you could play it together if you were very careful and if you had a good monitor for it. That is to have several married couples facing each other. Asking each other various questions, one simply listens, the other asks the question and then-- rather the one asks the question who is listening and the other one talks for five minutes without interruption, without judgment, without anything at all except just listening. Namely is there something that I should know? Tell me something that you like about me. Tell me something that we are in agreement about. And the fourth question is tell me how I can love you better. And then you reverse roles and answer the same four questions and you can do this for two or three

hours at a time. You'd be amazed at how much this establishes communication and how very much people have not been in communication, they would discover they've not been communicating about all kinds of things. Now an attitude of appreciation is tremendously important. We expand and relax when we feel we are appreciated. When we feel that we're negatively criticized or or someone is judging us, we tend to contract our hands and our feet get cold, our body is uptight. That phrase that the young have brought us, uptight, is a wonderful one. We actually do get cold hands and cold feet and you can't make love when your feet are cold. [laughter] And hands the same way. You really need to have somebody appreciating you and a warm word of praise is just like a blanket of warmth around you, you melt, you relax, you feel good. We need praise as a necessary vitamin, it's more important than vitamin C

and almost as important as food. But praise is an atmosphere of appreciation. Particularly appreciation of our sexual selves and of our bodies. So frequently we have been taught to believe that everything below the waist is dirty instead of is clean, is beautiful, is sweet. Many women particularly suffer from negative attitudes about their own genitalia particularly. They need-- and also about the male genitalia. They need to have women, need to have their eyes trained to see the beauty of the male genital to see how-- what a marvelous thing it is to watch it move from flaccidity, this little thing that gradually moves, I think Havelock Ellis called it the dance of life and women's eyes need to be trained to see the beauty of this and to appreciate the texture of the penis, it's like a rose leaf with a dew on it.

It's like so many other things that are utterly exquisitely beautiful and yet how many of our girls come into marriage with the notion that this is something ugly, that thing, they've been told by their mothers don't watch any man who is unzipping his pants and showing you that thing. So girls grow up feeling afraid to look. Or afraid to be seen. And yet good sexuality is a revelation, one to the other, because we need to reveal ourselves one to the other to have good sexuality. And speaking of revelation, one to the other, one of the best ways that any two human beings can discover to make-- to do the things sexually for the other that the other really enjoys is to ask the other to masturbate to orgasm for himself and let the partner watch how he does it. Now this sounds as a shocking thought to many people but it is the quickest road to arriving at having somebody teach you how they come to orgasm that I know. Now,

I've talked a little already about this ability to move feelingfully. There are ways to teach people to do this, by the way. In the clinic, in my own practice I teach every person who says they're having difficulty coming to orgasm, I teach them how to breathe in a way so that they can send a good feeling right down through their body that passes down through their groin and travels down the inside of their legs and comes out in a tingling radiation feeling in the bottoms of their feet, it also sends warmth into their hands and their feet. To be able to breathe in this way you cannot have muscular blocks above, in other words, if you are all tied up here and I think if I went around this room and put my hand on the shoulders of each of you I'd find maybe half of you, at any rate, with a tension up in here. Or you can't have a block there or up here in the back or in a few other spots that I could

describe and expect this kind of breathing to take place. Now knowledge of basic facts of stimulus and response. We are so ignorant about what makes-- what makes what happen. So many men have a very difficult time understanding that the word clitoris, the fact of the clitoris is the key to women's sexuality. They think that because it's so very pleasurable for a man to put his penis inside the woman's vagina that her vagina must find it just as pleasurable. Actually it does not. Not unless it is very much in contact with the clitoris. I've sometimes rather crudely said to men "look, you know it's just exactly as if you hung your penis out a window and expect to come to orgasm that way. [laughter] You might by chance, you might by mental stimulus alone, but the chances are you wouldn't." Now actually most women need

considerable, and by considerable I mean you know 30 minutes or more. Incidentally the average woman comes to orgasm in 30 minutes. The average man in three minutes. Just take a look at what the what the problems of this is, so you can see how very important it is to raise the level of the woman's excitation. Now another thing about raising the level, many men know very good petting techniques. Very clever about it. But then it's just like having a switch in an electric light plug. He's knows all about how to get the light. He switches in and then he comes around and puts, and transfers, pulls the plug and puts his penis in the vagina and expects there still to be light. Now obviously if you pull out the plug and disconnect the power source you're not going to get light. And this is exactly what happens to many people in the in the process of of their sexual experience. And then they wonder why the woman didn't come to orgasm. She has-- she was stimulated but the stimulation stopped before

the point of no return. And then she was simply not able to get through to orgasm. It's extremely important to know this matter of the of the relationship of the clitoris to the female orgastic response. Now practice is important. Many people think that you can just do what comes naturally. Masters and Johnson find that, when in their work where they're working with people that have real sexual disabilities, that, and they now can cure about 85 percent I think, that's about the rate of remedy, of cure, of healing, that to most of us can do that today with we have sexual knowledge. I wish we knew what to do with the other 15. It really just breaks my heart sometimes when you are confronted with one of the 15 percent of people you can't help, but he has his people who come out there to St. Louis work for 10 solid days. They come to him for four day, hours at a stretch and then he sends him home to back to a motel and says "practice," and

they practice for several hours every day. Now the matter of focusing creatively on the act of love making is a very important thing. So many times both men and women find themselves, but I think particularly women, find themselves thinking about everything else, "when the children come in, did I order the groceries, will my mother call, is the door locked?" you know, on and on. "Am I taking too long?" I think this is a thing "oh dear me I'm taking so long he's going to get bored" and so on and so on and so on and so on. Now all these thoughts tend to send the excitation level down instead of up. So the act of being able to focus creatively on the act of lovemaking is very helpful, and here a man can often help a woman tremendously by directing her thoughts to what is really going on down there or really going on between them.

Here is one place where pornography has often been quite helpful as an aphrodisiac. I don't believe pornography belongs with the young, they don't need it. But some of us who are married and who need a little [laughter] extra help, there is a very useful function and I hope that pornography does not get banned, I just wish that there was some better written ones. [laughter] Incidentally pornography for women has not yet been written. I wish-- somebody could make their fortune you know. Those of you who are good writers really could go to town if you wrote good pornography for women. There's a difference between pornography for men and pornography for women by the way. Women want something that has emotional content. Men want action. The pornography for men, it's actually like a Western action action action action action. A woman wants an emotional build up of some kind of pretty-- you know pretty fast emotional build up. Incidentally there are some other things for example you'll notice that all around the world today are sensory training workshops. That is

learning to train all of the senses. There are nerve endings of pleasure all over the body, all over the body and many of these are quite damped down. Training ourselves to utilize the sense of touch, the sense of smell, to to our sense of sight, the sense of movement, all of these our training processes which add to the joy in sexuality between a man and a woman. And encounter groups, you'll find this sort of thing, encounter groups is a training in honesty between people. The sensitivity training is is a training in becoming more sensitively aware of what you are seeing and what you are encountering. The commonest complaint in sex for example is a man's hands or woman's hands touches but doesn't feel what it touches. There's learning to feel what it is touching, to know, to be sensitive, to be aware. This is what makes sexuality so exciting between two people, not just dead

hand touching, as one woman said "my husband strokes my clitoris as if he were simonizing the car." [laughter] And it's a little crude but I mean this is what is you know what does happen sometimes to sensitively touch, sensitively be aware of what you're touching. Many people wonder if some of these, you know, there are any chemical stimulants. For example, they most often speak of alcohol and marijuana. Alcohol is a depressant and is very anti- sex. Actually it's a rare man who can have a good erection after two drinks. One drink may loosen his inhibitions, but two may lessen his ability to make love at all. And the same goes for women, it's more likely to make her go to sleep than it is to rouse her sexually or make her a particularly good sexual partner. I never experienced marijuana myself but I have a

growing number of patients who tell me that their sexual lives have been improved by marijuana. I think this has yet to be researched out but I have begun making it a practice now of asking clinically every patient I see if they are using it by any chance and if so what effect has it had on their sexuality, and those who have have reported about 100 percent yes it did improve their sexuality, which is quite surprising to me. I think that has yet to be discovered. LSD is completely NG as far as being helpful. People go off on their own trips in LSD, they're not concerned with the other. The concern in the interaction is what is involved when you have good sexuality. Now there are-- I already talked to you a little about the role of masturbation and I want to talk just another word about that because one of the problems between people sexually, in a marriage, is that one person is of high energy potential sexually and the other of low. That is you can have a man or a woman

who wants sex three times a day seven days a week literally and you can have the partner who loves their partner wanting sex about once or twice a month. Now you put these two people together and you can imagine what you get. The tension is incredible. In marriage counseling we know that the sexual needs of the most eager partner need to be met one way or another. Now that doesn't necessarily mean by intercourse. There are many roads to Rome. It's no more difficult if you're married to a person who is a high energy potential person, it's no more difficult to bring that person to orgasm by non coital means that it is to rub his back or do any of the other lovely things that you wouldn't think twice about doing. You would be happy to do. So that this matter of either helping the other person to orgasm when you yourself don't feel like it or encouraging auto-eroticism when-- as a possibility within the marriage set up is something worth considering. It's

also useful by the way when one partner is sick and the other well or they're separated or this matter of one in a mood and the other not. I've seen many men particularly who are very high, under high pressure business and particular in a city like New York and when they're in periods of high production or in wheeling and dealing or under stress of one sort or another, as many men are for long periods of time, particularly in the upper levels of endeavor, they may be utterly nonsexual beings almost for a period of time and their wives can sometimes suffer quite incredibly during that time, they think their husband's having an affair with another woman or they think that they're no longer lovable or they think all sorts of things. And if they can simply understand that, or if two people can understand and open this up between them so that they can know that there are times when one wants it more than the other and make the adjustment by way of

non-coital means, keeping in mind that the needs of the most eager partner need to be met or what you get is a kind of frustration that leads to bitchiness or to blowing off at the kids or screaming at them when you'd really rather scream at your husband or just scream. So this is an important factor. The time of day is an important factor in sexuality. Probably people over 30 should consider their best sexual times during the day in the morning, before night time at any rate, sex after the kids are in bed and particularly after your adolescent-- good heavens they don't go to bed, means that adults who wait for that time of day for their sexuality are likely to be very short-changed. The sexual energy is higher in the morning and much more creative lovemaking takes place in the morning or in the early afternoon than it does in the very late

afternoon or in the evening. So allowing for your for lovemaking at a time when energy is high will increase the quality of your sexuality. It's better to set the alarm and get up an hour earlier or even better to go to sleep and out of a dream wake up and find your body moving responsibly to your partner. This is perhaps one of the miraculous experiences that well married people have shared as something very beautiful. Like to talk a little about some of the old wives' tales connected with sex that I think I could explode for you very fast. One is that you shouldn't have sex when you're menstruating or you shouldn't have sex in the few weeks before you have a baby. Out of the work of Masters and Johnson, both of these myths have been exploded. It is perfectly healthy and good for you to have sex during menstruation and it is

perfectly good and healthy to have sex right up to the moment of delivery. One of the real problems in having, in pregnancy, is a great desert that occurs in that six weeks before the delivery and the six weeks after. The six weeks after, you still have to abstain. But the six weeks before there is no reason for abstaining. And to cut that three month desert to six can relieve a great deal of the pressure that people experience in that long a time with no sex. Another of the myths is that the man should always take the initiative. This is utter nonsense. Women seem to feel that even after, that the man should be the hunter and the seeker and the woman the one found but even after they've been found they still keep wanting to be found. [laughter] Well actually it's very pleasurable, as most men would tell you, to have the women sometimes seek them and to have a change about so

that whoever is really feeling sexual communicates that they do feel sexual and one of the things we are very afraid to do is to reach for what we want. Almost any man will say "you know my wife would only tell me what she wants, I'd be so happy to try to to give it to her. But she she just won't tell me, she thinks I'm a mind reader and I'm no mind reader." Well the woman will say "I asked him once and he turned me down so I'll never ask him again." Now can you imagine what a man would say if it had happened to him? He really would know that maybe she didn't feel like like at that time he'd come right back at her another time. Women need to do the same thing, they need to know that that there are times when you don't feel like it when a man will take a rain check on it or you take a rain check on it. But that if you don't ask, the other person is not likely to be a mind reader and to reach for what you want and to reach hoping and knowing that someone will respond responsively to you.

Maybe not positively in the sexual sense at that moment but at least responsively and to acknowledge you. The major sexual complications that hit the marriage counselor are quite obviously the usual ones which is the problem of frigidity in the female or the problem of vaginismus, that's a involuntary contraction of the vagina at the moment anything enters a vagina, instead of accepting it it rejects it and clamps up. In the male the problem of impotence and the problem of premature ejaculation. There are other minor things that men sometimes experience. But these are the major ones that do hit the marriage counselor very frequently. I have people sent to me from all over the world with these problems. And as I said before about 85 percent of them can be cured. And rather easily, most of them, most of the time. Now the

problem of premature ejaculation. There are two techniques that are very very useful. One was designed by a man named Dr. Siemens and it's always amused me that a man whose name is Siemens [laughter] should have worked on this particular problem. But he has, he consults with both the man and wife and I've used this technique too many times and it works very well. Both man and wife are in agreement first and agree to the process. The wife then masturbates the husband's penis to the point just prior to-- he gets a signal to-- that he's about to ejaculate and then he tells her to stop and she stops and they wait a moment and then again she masturbates him until the point of just-- until he gets a signal he's about to ejaculate and then he stops. And these practice sessions are, they always end with bringing the man to an orgastic release. But they stop so that

longer and longer and longer period of time elapses before he really needs to say stop. I've often wondered whether it was the technique or whether it was the approval of the woman of the male penis that did the job. Because so many men who suffer from premature ejaculation are those very same men who as little boys went to the bathroom to masturbate and learned to do it so fast before Mama could say "what are you doing in there Johnny?" [laughter] And they had to learn to do it fast to get by with it. Instead of momma saying "Take your time, have fun, you've got all day." [laughter] Which is what I hope the parents of today will do, by the way. But these same men have to readjust their training. Now Masters and Johnson have another technique which has worked very well. They say that with practice that in about three

days they can take almost any man who is a premature ejaculator and change that pattern and they use a combination of Dr. Siemens' technique and another one. They teach the woman to pinch the, to put her fingers, her forefinger on the front of the corona. And these two fingers on the back and one on each side of the ridge. And again to masturbate with the other hand the penis or even with that hand. And then when the man gets a signal he's about to ejaculate, to pinch, to come down hard on that and has to be quite a firm pinch and the man has to show the woman just how hard to do it so she doesn't pinch so hard to hurt him but she does pinch enough to prevent the ejaculation. Now a practice of several-- of an hour to-- over several days in about three days, that can almost almost 100 percent have been their record on premature ejaculation. Impotence is a little bit more difficult. Impotence is really a sign of fear.

It's a-- you see, you failed to get an erection once, the next time when you're about to you think "oh gee last time I failed." And the minute that thought crosses your head "oh gee last time I failed" then one tends to fail again and then one gets a little bit worried and then the minute one's a little bit worried, one feels "I've got to do produce something, I've got to produce something." Now that combination of anxiety plus "I've gotta produce to meet the demands of somebody else" is what is militates against good erection. So the technique there is to have no demand made whatsoever, that is to begin once again to teach the penis that it can have fun. I've often worked with the part-- the opposite partner in this because it's very helpful and I'll often say to a wife "look some time when you're out to dinner in a in a fancy dining room with a long table, long table cloth and it's absolutely obvious that he couldn't possibly have intercourse with you, just reach under the table and play with his penis and see what happens." [laughter]

Now the impossibility of it and the man knowing it's impossible that he-- he'd have to perform or anything would be expected of him, discovers he has a terrific erection. Or if he's driving a car and his wife reaching out, she knows he can't and he knows that she knows that he can't possibly have intercourse with her while he's driving a car or some of these other situations in which he can be pleasured with no demands made on him to produce, so that once again his penis is taught that it can have fun and it doesn't have to work. Doesn't have to be made to do something and that it is perfectly capable of erection. Then there are some positions that are very helpful. For example, Masters and Johnsons did find that the usual position, we call it the missionary position in my profession, is not very good for someone who is having problems with impotence namely if the man is on his back and the woman sits over him so that she can easily raise up and can easily

once again go into a play reaction, just playing with his penis, is very much easier for him to maintain an erection in this way than when he's above. With frigidity there are two kinds. Actually there's a woman, a very low sexual energy potential who seems like a passive kind of person and this is a very different critter from the person who was very high highly sexed person but who still is unable to come to orgasm. As you can well imagine in the method of treatment is different. Now with a person of very low sexual energy potential who maybe only wants to have sex once a month or so and some don't even want it but once in six months, I've seen patients like that, it's very very difficult to raise the energy potential of a low energy person. This is the most discouraging of all discouraging, to me at least, because you can always take down something or channel energy that's there, but to raise it up is very difficult. Now all that I've been able to do with people with very

low energy potential is to make very certain that there are no psychologic blocks, number one. To see to it that they aren't suffering from low blood sugar, which does seem to make a real difference as people who suffer from hypoglycemia really have to watch out and change their diet and to eat frequently and there's a perfectly good test for this you can have a 5 hour glucose tolerance test in the PBI and if you do happen to have a hypoglycemic picture then to get right away on the hypoglycemic diet, which is incidentally a very good, tasty diet. It does help quite a bit. These people have very low energy sexual energy. Plus teaching them all the ways you can to pleasure their mate, and not just assuming that because they are so low sexually in their energy production that this is what is normal. You see so often we judge people's normality by what we are ourselves in that if a person-- we often in our field say that anybody who is a nymphomaniac or a

Don Juan is really someone with more sex than you have. And actually this is not a bad definition. But if you can teach the person of low sexual energy that this is not necessarily normal at all and that what they need to do is to learn other ways that they can bring their partner to sexual pleasure and also to see to it that just as many of the techniques to make sex pleasurable for them is is used and also to reduce the demand that they come to orgasm. Many a woman says of this nature, and this is a woman who is likely to say it would be "I'd like very much to have sex if we didn't get so upset that I don't come to orgasm." It's a person of very low sexuality who enjoy the cuddling, who likes to be held, who would love to pleasure her husband, but herself she just doesn't have it. Now that this is quite a different person from the person of very high energy potential but is suffering from a block. This person gets absolutely frantic they get highly aroused sexually. They get right up to the

to the moment of orgasm and then they'll say "I'm up against a wall, I can't get over the top. I just can't, it's like a blockade." Now this person needs to be taught all these other techniques, she needs to be taught some sexercises. She needs to be taught how to breathe. She needs to be-- need to examine whether there are psychological factors. And very often hypnosis is useful. I have found increasingly that under hypnosis a person can be given a, under hypnosis, a post-hypnotic suggestion that will help them get over the wall and get through this blockade that they are so distressed by. Now there are some mechanical things that help also. Teaching such a person to masturbate is a very useful one if she can learn to come to orgasm by the masturbation route she's already well on her way to coming otherwise. Of recent years have been a lot of fun made of this little vibrator device called, it's called "stimulant," it's made in the shape of a penis, it's sold as a facial massager [laughter],

it's operated by batteries and it's a very useful little training device for women who are suffering from frigidity. That is, it's very much more potent than a penis is, the only trouble is you can get addicted to it [laughter] because no penis can possibly compare with it. But it is sufficient to break through this block, you see it's a nerve block, it's like the little girl who's taught that she can get a green light up to here but when she gets almost there she turns on the red light and this conditioning is so strong in her that the red light goes on even when she's now married and she wants to be able to have the green light all the way, and believe me she gets right at that point, on goes the red light. So getting through that, some of these devices and some of these techniques are very very useful. But the one that I really had more help-- more success with than any other is teaching how to breathe and, I've already mentioned it, and to masturbate. Vaginismus

is, as I said before, the involuntary contraction of the vagina so that the woman who is quite excited and sexually thinks she's ready and the moment something touches the external genitalia her vagina just clamps like that and the penis simply cannot be received. Now this represents a very pesty problem in the treatment of a sexual problem, I mean in treatment. But it is treatable and it's often treatable and much swifter time than you might suppose. Here again training devices are useful. Doctors used to give women a series of graduated tubes and let them start with just a very small thing. They were called vaginal dilators and they often used to get them to virgins prior to marriage hoping that they could get their own vagina dilated before prior to marriage, they don't usually do that anymore because most girls today have involved with petting techniques which are much better and most of them have had

intercourse anyway prior to marriage. But at any rate, the use of a finger or, one can use dilated, I mean these graduated dilators if one wants to. But again hypnosis is a very very helpful one. Often these girls represent persons who have had a real fear shock connected with sexuality at a very early age and being able to regress them under hypnosis to the point of shock and to then under hypnosis also suggest a new way of response, a new way for their muscles to respond. Also teaching them how to contract and relax their vagina. That's incidentally a very good sexercise that every woman ought to practice anyway. Fifty, sixty times a day. It's as simple as can be. Most doctors now teach women who are having babies, after they've had a baby they teach them to do it just as a matter of health because it keeps all those muscles from just getting flabby and and

opening up and soft and then later on having to have operative procedures. But learning how to contract and relax the vagina is a very important sexercise. I think I should probably stop there. And I can answer all the questions that you like if we have any time left. I would like to close saying that I hope that every man here can feel with a husband of mine, one of my patients who said to me, "some men go home to go to bed but I go to bed to come home." Or can every woman here can say with the Virgin Mary when she was asked how it felt to be impregnated by the Holy Ghost. Her answer was "simply divine." [laughter, applause] [male speaker] We thought that you get married and love conquers all, but you say it doesn't.

[Hamilton] How can a young girl be a virgin at marriage but a satisfactory sexual partner in marriage? Well I think it's interesting, I think the emphasis ought to be on the young because the earlier, and by earlier I don't mean young teenager, I think probably the earliest that coital sex is satisfactory for a girl is 17. I've met very few people under 17 who were really ready for the involvement of a coital, I'm not talking about non-coital, petting to orgasm, or anything like that, I'm talking about a coital relationship, there are very few under-17 who are ready and somewhere between 17 and 22, if a girl begins to have sexual relationships with a boy, she tends to have much-- she can have pretty good ones, I say "tends to" because a lot

depends on what's happened to her before. This word virgin covers a multitude of sins. Because a virgin can be a virgin whose had a great deal of sexual experience but has not had intercourse. You can even get pregnant without having intercourse, I hate tell you. And some girls have and still they are virgins. So I have to qualify what you mean by virgin. [laughter] But a girl who has not had intercourse can get to be a very satisfactory sexual partner in marriage by having a good sexual experience all along the way and if she's been deprived of sexual experience along the way she can begin to masturbate, she can learn, begin to reach, she can begin to educate herself to have positive attitudes towards sex and she'll also have to learn that after she's married she's going to have to practice and and not expect that it's all going to just come just naturally.

"Are simultaneous orgasms usual and necessary?" Number one they're neither usual nor necessary. They represent peak experiences actually. A few sexual artists manage to have them with greater frequency than others. But whenever they happen they're delightful. But it is important that each person come to orgasm and it doesn't matter a bit whether they come together. Except that when these wonderful times do occur you can rejoice. "Comment on the use of breast kissing to arouse women. Comment on the place of fellatio and cunnilingus in marital love." Funny, I completely forgot oral-genital discussion of this, I suppose it's because my being near Boston. [laughter] [Male speaker] You don't want this? [Hamilton] Well sure I do, come on.

Well, you might be interested that Kinsey in his study found that over-- they were classifying what was normal sexual activity and by normal sexual activity, if more than 50 percent of their sampling said that they practiced it in spite of the law, he figured that that was pretty sexual-- normal activity and certainly mouth-genital contact is-- occurs in more than 50 percent of the persons in Kinsey's sampling. And it is a very usual form of lovemaking. I have to say that hardly a month goes by but what some young newlywed drops into the office and starts off with "I'm embarrassed to be here but." Well and I reassure there's nothing she can't talk about and she'll say "well I'm afraid my husband is a pervert." [laughter]

And so I ask him what it is he's done that makes her think that. And then he goes on to say "well he wants me to kiss his penis." Now this is well within the range of normal activity. It happens in animal life and the life of the sexual artists throughout the ages. And it's one of the in the endearing actions that people who love each other certainly engage in. Many women, go back to the first question and comment on breast kissing. Many women are enormously aroused by breast activities. I've known of a number of women who say they can come to orgasm just by stimulus, stimulation of the breast alone. Now this isn't usual but it is so arousing for some women. Now for some women it's irritating. And you have to know your woman. [laughter] One of the quite interesting thing that comes that Masters and Johnson found out is that there are no two women alike. In all

of their study, they photographed, and I've seen these motion picture color films. Women bring themselves to orgasm. What happens inside them becomes, can you imagine the technical problem of doing this? I sat in a room watching these films with about 200 doctors way back when they first showed them to us and we just sat there and cried, literally tears rolling down just to see them, the courage it took and the incredible ingenuity that they had gone to, just to imagine training 200 some odd women to come to to orgasm under klieg lights or something let alone what else they did. But they found that there were no two women who had the same pattern of stimulation of themselves and you get loads of men coming, or I get loads of men coming to the office saying "I have satisfied all the girls prior to my marriage. We just got along fine. But now I can't bring my wife to an orgasm." Well I again say "watch her, how

she masturbates and you try doing it the way she does it to herself. And I think you'll learn a lot because there are no two girls alike and this matter of breast sensitivity is a wide range. Well this is an interesting one, "how do you overcome this feeling of self-consciousness between husband and wife in the effort to have a better sexual relationship?" Incidentally the little game I told you to play is a very interesting one in doing that. Perhaps just in attending a lecture like this it helps or beginning to do things like bathe each other or do some, or rub each other's backs or enjoy having sex in the living room instead of in the bedroom or in the kitchen or beginning to do small things with each other and gradually discovering that this is really very nice. And if each one can be appreciative of the other there is nothing that will close them up faster or increase self-consciousness like a negative comment

like saying "you're clumsy at this" or or you know the kinds of negative things that people say. Use praise it helps, you can move mountains with a little praise. "What about the pill and does it have an adverse effect on sexuality?" Actually it increases for some women, decreases for some women. It's a highly individual matter and even from pill to pill, from one kind of pill to another kind of pill. I've had patients tell me that on one kind of pill that they have all sorts of side effects of depression and decreased sexuality on another form of pill that they don't. So this is a highly individual thing. "Can a marriage continue when sex life is stopped?" Yes it can. I have seen some marriages manage and they get together sort of on habit like a brother and sister living

together. I think something also stops often for such marriages, some of the electric spark goes out of it unless they have taken unusual unusual care to increase the quality of the companionship. You know if they've had good sex before that they will not have stopped. I wonder a little about when sex stops, I wonder about the quality before it stopped. "Is there any truth to the concept that age 40 or thereabouts is a dangerous age for men, marriage sexually?" You know there is some truth to it but not because of the age so much as the fact that by age 40 or thereabouts a man is able to lift his nose from the ruts in the road on his professional life. That is he isn't struggling as hard as he was. His children are sufficiently growing up and getting on toward the

college age so that he doesn't feel that they need him quite as much as before. And if he is not as happy as he might have been with his marital partner he may feel that at last he has the leisure and the time and his conscience will let him. And he begins to look around him and he may have an extramarital affair, he may leave the marriage and divorce his wife and go off and I mean many a man will say "look I've done my stint, I've fulfilled my obligations and now I have a chance at last to live. And if the marriage has not been good then that's about the time when they will decide, they can be a conscientious person and decide it's time they can get out of it. Also around then, even when the marriage is good, they may have been workhorses together. When two partners are so used to working together and fulfilling the mundane requirements of life that they begin

to feel they want a little excitement, a little interest, a little variety. It is an age when many people take on, who have very good marriages, take on extramarital relationships and these can sometimes be a great addition to the marriage. They can help rather than hinder but they will help only if the marriage is a good one. If the marriage is a bad one the extramarital relationship will threaten even further the marriage, so one has to be very careful in extramarital relationship is to first see the marriage is in good state and in good condition. Then an extramarital relationship can sometimes pick up the marriage so that the whole quality of sexuality between man and wife is improved. I've seen this happen many many times. [Host] Dr. Hamilton I just want to explore that a little bit more with you-- [Hamilton] No really, I'm sure you-- [laughter] as a minister it must be real tough to hear me say a thing like that. [Host] Now you say it may help. Are you assuming that ignorance is bliss or

the wife knows about it? [Hamilton] I'm assuming the wife knows. [Host] The wife knows and she says "this is a good thing, go ahead"? [Hamilton] Right right. [laughter] [Host] Are there many women who will? [Hamilton] Yes, quite a lot of men and women. [Host] Are they common? [Hamilton] Yes. [laughter] [Hamilton] I'm sure that you're going to hear much more about this when whoever it is talks to you talks about communes and group marriages as alternates to marriage and so on. But anybody who thinks a extramarital relationship is going to wreck a marriage has another thing coming and where there is real trust-- now the problems come where one tries to do it in secrecy, tries to put something over on the other. That's where real disloyalty comes from, were two people sit down together and acknowledge together that there are many many sides to the personality

of any human being and one human being can hardly expect to touch all the facets of the human-- of another human being, can hardly expect to. And there may be somebody else who will who will touch off facets of that personality that make it come alive and make it seem as if for a short period of time that part of the person has a chance to shine. And unless, I mean if the marriage relationship is good, when there's no threat that the husband's going to leave the wife or the wife's going to leave the husband or they don't pay any other price, that is if a husband doesn't go off spending all his money, hard earned money, on some other woman or something like that, those are ex-- other things. But were two human beings acknowledge that something good could happen to one or the other by moving lovingly toward another person for a period of time or in combination with the marriage, you will often find that this will increase the whole quality of the sexual life between the basic pair. And it's something that's been almost never written about. Almost nobody talks about it but is nevertheless a clinical fact that every marriage counselor who

really knows what they're doing will have seen many many instances. [laughter] "Could you give us some suggestions for encouraging the right kind of positive sexuality in our children so we won't perpetuate hang ups in our children?" I suggested, I think I gave some suggestions of the kinds of things that you could do. One is to simply acknowledge that some of these basic systems of the body are pleasurable and that certainly when you find your children reaching for their genitals that you allow them to do so and to acknowledge that it is pleasurable to them to do so. And that as they get to be a little to the age of some sociability with their-- when they have to meet the other, the rest of the world in the supermarket and other places that you explain to them that this is one of the private things that they do like taking a bath is done in private and

other things you do in private, dressing and undressing, or swimming in the nude or these are all private. It's one of the private acts. You may also have to tell them about "when Great Aunt Mary comes to call, she was brought up at a different time. She has more of a hang up so let's not worry her, especially if Aunt Mary is being counted on for college. [laughter] But the positive acceptance of auto eroticism is a very great help. Not getting scared when you see children having their sex play that they do. Now, the sex play of children is of the doctor variety, playing Doctor. Doctor games, or house games, dressing and undressing each other. They generally do not try having intercourse and if they do they don't succeed. You don't have to worry. [laughter] I never forget I was teaching nursery school many years ago we had a student teacher who was terribly upset

when she saw a little girl sitting on top of a little boy so just-- I wouldn't do this today, but back there to assuage the teacher, she was so upset, I said to the little girl, I said "Janie, hop off of Rufus, I don't think he likes that." Rufus looked up at me and says "Oh yes I do." [laughter] But. I do think that one of the best things you can do for children is to develop a positive sexuality in yourselves because when you really feel good about sex you're going to convey that to your children. And children by the way are not traumatized by seeing their parents kiss and they're not even traumatized by seeing their parents have sexual intercourse. If they were more than half the world would be so traumatized because more than half the world lives-- the whole family lives in one room. So if you think that this has not caused all the trouble that Freud said it would, it may help you. You don't have to have the bedroom door so locked and leap out of

bed if your child happens to walk in. And if they says "What are you doing?" you can just say "I'm loving mama, this is one way grownups love each other." And a child quite often will just smile and walk right out of the room. I think that at a later age when they come to the age of adolescence is when most parents get really hung up because they're so afraid their daughters are going to have an illegitimate child or their boys are going to get stuck with an early marriage or some such thing with a shotgun affair. Parents of girls are more afraid than parents of boys, but I think that it is up to parents to tell them that they are sexual beings and that one of the ways that without any harm to them that they can express their sexuality is that they-- is through auto eroticism or through mutual auto or through mutual handling, caressing to orgasm. Many parents are afraid of that but it is very good training actually for the love, for future

lovemaking. And it satisfies completely the sexual need of both the boy and the girl. And instead of it being a don't it's a how to do. And letting them know very well the result of what, that intercourse is connected with with the pregnancy and they ought to know the facts of life. And I could go on and on but I don't think we have time for it. I think that may give you some idea. [Host] Change of pace. [Hamilton] "As a widow with several children should I feel guilty about sexual (inaudible)?" I'm sure it's better for your children that you be a sexually satisfied human being. And if you bring to this sexual relationship that you are having with these various persons a real love and a real tenderness and send them back, the man, even if they're married, to their own marital relationship, better off than they were before and without trying to take the man away from his wife or

break up his home. I suspect that this may be good for all of you, all concerned. As a matter of having several different men in the house I don't think this is harmful to children as long as the relationship is good and warm and decent and human, children have various friends. They understand they have more than one friend and I think on the whole they're rather glad that their mother or their father can have a friend of the opposite sex, I've never seen children traumatized by such a thing. How would-- [laughter] "Is it unusual for a husband to have an occasional wet dream even though he has a satisfactory sex life?" No it's not at all unusual. Many persons do. "How do you know if a young girl has an orgasm? You mentioned children as little as two

weeks." Yes with it with a tiny baby it almost looks like an epileptic seizure and many a mother has been quite frightened when she saw her baby. It's when a little movement like that and some mothers have thought their babies were having a dream of intrauterine life or or were just not coordinated or something like this. A little older child you see that all the manifestations of the orgasm, the panting, the getting warm, the change of the breathing pace, the bouncing up and down of the pelvis and practically the whole phenomenon. Because we so often have frightened children so young, you're not likely to see it. It's only occasionally where a child has been very comfortably handled and particularly in the early infancy period. Too often even in changing a diaper a mother will change the baby's diaper where they have "ew," the dirty baby bed so that the cold hand and the stiffness of the hand connected with the whole genital region has already scared the kid so

that the child's early genital-- I mean her early genital reactions make very well be quite put off, even in that very early six and seven months in that period. But if it hasn't, you can, if you keep your eyes open you'll see it. "And what about the woman who climaxes in five minutes and the man who endures for hours as partners?" [Host] There are all kinds. [Hamilton] You know there are all kinds. I had a number of persons like this and it is it does represent kind of a problem. Now generally a woman can enjoy having a man inside her for quite a long time after she's come to orgasm but occasionally you find a woman who can't, who it just irritates. And if this is so then she simply has to either let the man begin earlier if she knows this about him, to begin to stimulate him so that he has a good deal of advanced stimulation and then only as

they learn each other's timing, have him come in toward the end. Or consider going on with him, with her hands, with her mouth, or with under her arm, or her big toe or anything else now that would bring him to orgasm by some non-coital means. Many a girl by the way will have multiple orgasms. I've known many women who have five even up to 20 orgasms in the same, in a single session. "What is the road from clitoral stimulation to vaginal orgasm?" I'd like to lay the ghost on this one if I could. An orgasm is an orgasm and this nonsense promulgated by the psychoanalyst way back I think even they are learning better but Freud at one point said that "clitoral stimulation was an infantile form of sexual orgasm for the woman" is absolute nonsense. Just plain four letter word. [laughter] The clitoris is always the major

stimulating factor in the woman's orgasm and why do you want to change it any more than you want to change having the penis, I mean change from the penis to the big toe of the man? I mean it's just it's so silly, it's what the feminists call male chauvinism because they happen to think a vagina is so great because it feels so good to them it's what I said before that the clitoris has to be involved. Now it's only when a woman is-- there are a few exceptions-- some women are very well endowed by where their clitoris is placed and some men are very clever and learn how to get in a position so the clitoris is involved. And so therefore or learn how to tap the roots of the clitoris. And I literally have to show you, because some men will come in like this the bang bang and they don't have any sensation to the woman. What do you have to learn to do is to rock and roll so that this kind of a movement. There's one reason for that little exercise I started to show our friend down here of learning how

to raise the lower pelvis and the men to learn how to raise it so it can move like that and the woman does get clitoral stimulation. Now there are a few women whose uterus is so placed so that as it as it bangs in, his penis does bang in, it it pushes it like this and that seems to to to stimulate the roots of the clitoris in some way. And for these lucky women they may be able to have an orgasm with only vaginal penetration. But I wish we knew more about the electrical chemical, I mean this charge but the thing we talk about a charge, an emotional charge, I think we're going to find there really is a charge, electrical charge of some sort. And if the if the charge is enough prior to the beginning of the penetration sometimes that that alone will take a woman into orgastic release. Sometimes just by imagination alone. I've known women who come to orgasm just by mentally thinking to orgasm, but

that isn't the usual method. The usual and most common method is use of the clitoris and well-stimulated, well-stimulated around it. [Host] Last one, shall we make this the last one? There's several on this. "You spoke of other alternatives to marriage, what are some? Who and how would such systems develop in our society?" You know I could talk about this but you know you're going to have a whole evening on it and I don't want to steal the thunder or or I'm sure you'll have somebody who will deal with this and take a whole evening with it so let me bypass this. "Would you comment on extramarital sex?" I think I did comment on this, and "would you comment on the alternatives to conventional marriage?" Well I have I've had a number of patients for example who have menages a trois, and I have had some who've had multiple marriages. I talked only the other day with a marriage of five who had incorporated their marriage because it was the only way legally they could have a division of all their

property and so on. [Host] Five couples? [Hamilton] No, five persons. And if you will, you might very much enjoy reading Robert Rimmer's book. He lives right around here near Boston, have you read "The Harrad Experiment"? Or have you read his book "Proposition 31." Or "The Revolt of Yale Marratt"? Now "Proposition 31" is a very interesting story of a marriage of four, and the Yale Marratt one is a marriage of three. And the Harrad experiment, I'm sure you all know, it's sold into the millions already. I never lecture on a college campus without the kids asking me what do I think about the Harrad experiment. [applause] OK I think we've probably had enough. [applause] [Host] Thank you very much Mrs. Hamilton, we haven't had enough, actually

we should have covered this subject in at least two evenings because there are so many ramifications and so many details that ought to be gone into but we certainly thank you for the effort and the information and the inspiration and now they're going to go out and practice. [laughter]