Is Sex (Still) Necessary?

Way back in 1929 — so almost a century ago — the great E.B. White (of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little fame) and the equally accomplished James Thurber (The Secret Life of Walter Mitty) were unknown quantities when they produced a spoof of the many popular books published during the Roaring Twenties that expounded gimcrack Freudian sexual theories.

Their collection of essays — titled Is Sex Necessary? Or, Why You Feel the Way You Do — was so unexpectedly popular that it went from a tentative initial print run of just 2,500 copies to the New York Times bestseller list, launching the publishing careers of both future stalwarts of The New Yorker.

The initial printing rolled off the press just a week after the Wall Street crash that helped trigger the Great Depression, so you can well imagine that the love lives of its readers needed a little perking up.

Sample chapters:  — The Nature of the American Male — How to Tell Love from Passion

— What Should Children Tell Parents?

— Claustrophobia, or What Every Young Wife Should Know …

In a preface to the 1950 edition, White wrote:

Thurber and I were neither more, nor less, interested in the subject of love and marriage than anybody else of our age in that era. I recall that we were both profoundly interested in earning a living, and I think we somehow managed, simultaneously, to arrive at the conclusion that ... the heavy writers had got sex down and were breaking its arm. We were determined that sex should maintain its high spirits.

Writing alternate chapters, they amused each other by inventing cockamamie (no pun intended) pseudo-sexual terms (much like Freud himself) such as the Überträgung Period, Diversion Subterfuge, Osculatory Justification, Recessive Knee, and my personal favourite — Schmalhausen Trouble. Nobody ever wants Schmalhausen Trouble, believe you me.

(Confession: I and most of my friends are suffering from Recessive Knee even as you read this. Don’t look down, but there’s a fair to middling chance that you are, too.)

The two mischief makers also invented psychologists and sex researchers with such credible names as Dr. Karl Zaner and Dr. Walter Titheridge, professorial-sounding sobriquets similar to those populating the Freudian advice manuals that were all the rage in the Jazz Age.

Sample footnotes: — See Titheridge’s poetry but don’t read it. — This is the first mention in this article of Narcissism. Don’t worry, you’ll hear more.

Is Sex Necessary? Or, Why You Feel the Way You Do included Thurber’s “unconscious drawings” of curious dogs, “sex substitutes” such as “six-day bicycle racing,” couples in full swoon, and men dwarfed by women. These and other drawings in the book were the ur-doodles that birthed Thurber’s celebrated cartoon career at The New Yorker.

This sketch in particular slays me, but they are all top drawer:

So anyway.

Now that we’re more than halfway through the Twenty Twenties, I’ve taken it upon myself — given the appalling lack of interest from anyone out there who knows anything about sex — to adapt the topic to what appears to be the single most pertinent existential question among my peers: Is Sex (Still) Necessary? Or, Why Your Skin Now Feels the Way Crocodiles Do.

To a man (and woman), my peers remember the way Jacqueline Susann potboilers like The Valley of the Dolls and The Love Machine used to titillate our parents, what with all that frantic unzipping of pants going on and sweaters coming off and bodices heaving and how everyone was always wanting everyone else.

I mean, so they tell me.

Keep in mind that I’m the guy who (true story) once threw out a signed copy of The Happy Hooker album (also titled Xaviera!), the spoken-word audio record released in 1973 by Xaviera Hollander, because it had been drenched in a basement flood at my in-laws’ and stank like Trump’s latest insider trading scam for big institutional investors.

This just goes to show how much I know about sex, notwithstanding transfixed hours spent poring over my aunt’s stack of glossy, perfumed Cosmopolitans in a basement bathroom, where I learned all about what Nora Ephron aptly described as the magazine’s promotion of “sadism in modern man and masochism in modern woman.”

Anyway, if the heading Is Sex (Still) Necessary? comes across as a bit stiff, as I fear it might, there are some alternate titular candidates under active consideration for this fresh labour of love:

— Sex, Drugs and Cinnamon Rolls! — When I Get That Feeling, I Need Tea From Darjeeling

— Fear of Flossing — Cheap Throat

Now naturally, all of this has attracted millions of dollars in research funding, because whenever a government agency sees the words “aging,” “wellness” and “pilot project” in the same grant proposal, somebody gets a new conference in Tuscany.

The undisputed leader in the field is the Institutum Investigationis Romanticae Provectae, located in a tasteful beige office park somewhere outside Climax, Sask. Its motto is “Satis certi sumus,” or in the vernacular parlance of the day: “We’re Pretty Sure, Eh.”

The Institute recently convened the Sixth International Symposium on Mature Intimacy, attended by more than 700 experts, three chiropractors, an accountant who wandered into the wrong ballroom and a nondescript keynote speaker who was accidentally introduced twice because everyone forgot he’d already spoken.

The proceedings produced several groundbreaking papers, among them:

— The Psychosexual Implications of Adjustable Beds Operating Independently — The Erotic Consequences of Reading the Instructions Before Assembly

— From Passion to Practicality: The Unexpected Seductiveness of Correctly Labelled Extension Cords

and, of course, the widely cited

— Oops

The last of these consisted of only one page, but delegates agreed it captured the subject perfectly.

The conference also introduced a number of newly recognized syndromes:

Mutual Staircase Negotiation. This occurs when two partners arrive at the bottom of the stairs at bedtime and spend several minutes discussing whether either of them actually needs to go upstairs and whose turn it is to rinse out the CPAP hose.

Ceremonial Pillow Engineering. Once thought to be simple fussiness, researchers now believe this involves an unconscious attempt to recreate the geological layering of the Dumheller-area Badlands using memory foam.

Chronic Beverage Interruption. Patients repeatedly remember they should probably have one more glass of water before bed. This cycle can continue indefinitely. If it does, neither partner will enjoy much sleep that night … but not for the reason that once afforded pleasure.

Vestigial Libido Retrieval Disorder. Sufferers become convinced they were once wildly passionate but can’t remember where they put it. This is popularly known as “I don’t know where we went wrong but the feeling’s gone and something inside has died and I just can’t hide and strike another match, go start anew, and it’s all over now, Baby Blue.”

The disorder most feared by clinicians, however, is Simultaneous Orthopaedic Noisification, in which both partners attempt a spontaneous embrace on a water bed and immediately produce enough creaking and aquatic sounds to convince nearby neighbours that the 7:30 roll-on/roll-off MV Coho ferry to Port Angeles is leaving the Inner Harbour.

According to the controversial Dutch-American psycho-geriatrician Dr. Willem van Hootenhoffer-Pfaff (whose credentials have never been successfully translated), this alarming crepitation is entirely normal.

“These are not joints,” he writes. “These are applause.”

(His critics accuse him of oversimplifying.)

Even more controversial is Professor Eunice Birtwistle-Bladderwick’s theory of Romantic Momentum Collapse. Her exhaustive 14-year study demonstrated that, among Baby Boomers, the average interval between saying “Shall we …?” and actually doing anything measurable is approximately 47 minutes, during which the couple may:

— let the dog out; — let the dog in; — wonder whether they already let the dog in; — discuss whether tomorrow would be a better day to rotate the mattress; — search for the television remote; — discover two other remotes for non-smart televisions that were far less aggravating to operate; — decide to watch one episode of the British detective series Vera “just to unwind”; — awaken during the closing credits.

Dr. Birtwistle-Bladderwick calls this Narrative Deflection. The hoi polloi call it Tuesday, again relying on a simpler, less academically rigorous approach to worldly affairs. And by affairs, we don’t mean affairs.

Meanwhile, the prestigious Journal of Mature Psychodynamics has concluded that the principal obstacle to romance among budding golden agers is a condition they call Lactating Intrauterine Malevolent Penile Deferred Initiative Carnal Kegel Syndrome.

Quite a mouthful, as it were, so it is generally referred to by its unfortunate acronym, which modesty (and a sense of prudent plangency, to be honest) prevents us from spelling out here.

Go ahead and knock yourself out.

In severe cases where “Vitamin V” comes up, as it were, short, this syndrome can be temporarily attenuated via the use of the dreaded penile pump (PP) — mieux connu dans l’autre langue officielle sous le nom de pierre poilievre (également abrégé en PP).

But disappointing reports from the field indicate that under performance pressure, ahenh, PPs have shown an unfortunate penchant for noisy self-inflation while out on the stump, as it were, eagerly blowing whatever early advantage they enjoy and then just as quickly withering like pink balloons that stayed too long at the fair. They can sometimes be heard sounding squeaky, angry bursts from their pursed and wrinkled lips, and have been known to cling painfully to the flesh of involved parties long after their moment has passed.

However, my own investigations — conducted with the meticulous scientific rigour of a man standing in the pharmacy aisle wondering why reading glasses now come in packages of three — suggest that none of these experts has identified the true enemy of late-life romance.

In my experience, the chief predicament is that by the time you’ve found your glasses, taken your evening pills, charged your hearing aids, stretched your lower back, adjusted the thermostat, moved the cat, argued about whether the bedroom window is open, closed or merely “emotionally open,” and finally crawled into bed ...

… you can’t remember what all the fuss was about. And anyway, by that time she’s out like Foreman in the eighth round of The Rumble in the Jungle.

Which, according to Dr. Lionel F. Ropeadope’s latest paper, is a classic case of Terminal Schmalhausen Recurrence.

Nobody wants that.

Except perhaps the cat, if it’s true that all generalizations are false.