SEXIS WRONG

missive and most possessive sexual contact possible.”
Not to put too fine a point on it, particular sexual acts have a
range of subtle, semiconscious, and unconscious meanings
that go far beyond individual relationships to connect to power.
In this, Legman was following Freud, but, in his account,
it is prudery and censorship as much as childhood traumas
that create “vicious and unpleasant people,” and there are a
lot of them.
Legman (again following Freud, but in so much more detail)
As in all conduct books, precise descriptions blur into gentle
but firm recommendations for things one really ought to try
and things one must learn to do correctly. Despite his insistence
that oral sex represents the satisfaction of an “ego
drive,” Legman is clear that it is almost always a prelude,
however elaborate, to intercourse. “The scissors” is a favorite
position because it (somehow) allows lovers to move
gracefully from oral sex to coitus, a desirable but not mandatory
end to the proceedings. It is so comfortable that the
couple can fall asleep or do almost anything else, like reading
or eating or chatting, without withdrawing the penis from the
vagina. Intercourse again? No problem. The continuous connection
of “the scissors” is Legman’s utopia.
He cross-tabulates the possibilities,
going so far in his notes as to draw
up sex-position multiplication tables.
was interested in how jokes, sayings, slang, and customs reveal
these senses of the power currents of sex, scattering
occasional light into the dim corners of everyday awareness.
When we say, “He’s pussy-whipped,” we’re revealing a lot
about the relationships between men and women, fear and
genitals. The folklore of sex is a kind of collective Freudian
slip, culturally shared if rarely taken up for analysis.
When Legman turns to technique, the second edition of
Oragenitalism becomes a strange mix of instruction manual,
conduct guide, and household advice book, still underpinned
with interest in psychological mysteries. As a how-to book, it
is delightfully personal, the youthful vigor of the original still
there. Legman is chatty and helpful, urging lovers to be suave
and graceful, and offering solutions to common problems,
such as the best way to slide a pillow under a woman’s hips.
He makes suggestions about ways to be comfortable outof-doors.
Following his original text, he is encyclopedic: He
catalogs positions prone, seated, and standing, clothed and
unclothed, lights on, lights off, man superior, woman superior.
He lists all the ways the mouth, tongue, lips, chin, and
cheeks can be put to use, then moves on to the thumb and
fingers. He cross-tabulates the possibilities, going so far in
his notes as to draw up sex-position multiplication tables.
Advocating practical elegance, Legman is interested in manners:
It’s rude, for example, to gag or make a face, even if you
really are choking on a pubic hair. The man should find discreet
ways of wiping his face, lest he give the impression that
he finds the taste of his lover unpleasant. Whatever you do,
don’t rush to the sink! Fresh orange juice comes in delightfully
handy, but squeeze cut oranges over your beloved—don’t
be a hopeless duffer and try to open a can of juice in bed.
And so on.
Overall, Legman emphasizes that intercourse
will take place, noting that none of the world’s
religious teachings forbids oral sex as a preliminary.
And overall, it is intercourse that
women want because their femininity is most satisfied when
there’s the possibility of having a child with their lover. Here’s
another key to Legman: Despite his own research with gay
men and sexual experiences with lesbians documented in his
notes and memoir, he was a heterosexual man of his time
and firmly believed that men and women had essential and
distinct natures. Maladjustments to these were the cause
of tremendous suffering. Like many writers on sex, Legman
could shift from radical to conventional in seconds when the
topic was women.
Despite its jostling detail, for a contemporary reader Oragenitalism
suffers from a lack of illustration. Legman himself is
often annoyed by the difficulty of describing sexual positions
and motions using language alone. He gets frustrated trying
to describe the favored “scissors” and suggests drawing
stick figures. Or perhaps, he proposes, falling back on
his love of typeface, the reader can imagine two capital V ’s
lying side by side, or a capital W. Unfortunately, in 1969 as
well as in 1939, photographs or drawings required backing
and capital. Although his research files are full of sketches
and diagrams, Legman couldn’t pay to have them made into
plates. And then there were the barriers to publishing erotica,
which were crumbling but not fast enough. In 1971 a French
edition of Oragenitalism became impossible to sell because
of its explicit jacket.
By the early 1970s the fall of American censorship and, more
important, the big money to be made meant that illustrated
sex manuals like Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex were becoming
mass-market, over-the-counter products. Too late for Oragenitalism.
Legman’s first book—censored before it could be
celebrated, and reviled, widely plagiarized, censored again—
was published by small houses and more or less passed by.
Placing Oragenitalism next to The Joy of Sex gives a sense
of how far out on a limb Legman was, even by comparison
with the “New Freedom” washing over the English-speaking
66 EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT SEX IS WRONG