YOUR MARITAL HEALTH/SEXUALITY FROM ANOTHER PERSPECTIVE: ELLISONIAN SEX

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YOUR MARITAL HEALTH/SEXUALITY FROM ANOTHER PERSPECTIVE: ELLISONIAN SEX

Monday, May 18, 2009 | 5:18 am

Ellisonian sex, then, is a male-driven, female-responsive sex of intense and rapid sexual energy buildup in the male and slower, more generalized, somewhat less urgent response in the female. Orgasm was the ultimate goal, but touching, particularly for women, was enjoyable if not necessary. The penis and its spontaneous erection was the center of male sexual response, and the clitoris with its connections to the vagina and the uterus was the center of female response. Marriage was a natural manifestation of the desire for prolonged companionship, but might have to be augmented by some type of sexual variety to keep it alive. Men acted and entered, women reacted and received. In spite of this mechanical-sounding emphasis, Ellis was a new romantic who valued closeness and tolerated deviation from “the normal.” Paul Robinson states, “Havelock Ellis is the most unambiguously Romantic of the great modernists … at the heart of his sexual writings stands the same union of physical and emotional energies that one finds in Keats and Schlegel.”

Ellis’s work confronted a guilt and fear about sex that permeated daily living. To save ourselves from what he saw as our innate sexual sickness, the Reverend Doctor Sylvester Graham suggested that we rid our diets of meat, animal products, and all spicy foods. Graham suggested that these caloric corrupters be replaced with, of course, nutritious Graham bread and Graham crackers. He was joined in his concern for the digestive sexual degeneration of American by Dr. John Kellogg, who invented corn flakes to save us from too much snap, crackle, or pop in our sex drive. The first modern perspective on human sexuality and its relationship to intimacy offered a freedom from this type of restrictive, fear-inducing approach to sex. At the same time, however, Ellis’s views about sexual energy, male and female differences in sexual response, and the power of sexual variety are still present today, and they strongly influenced the work of Alfred Kinsey, the pioneer of a second perspective on sexuality.

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