the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

OOPS 8
were allowed to finish what they started. (You’ll understand the signifi -
cance of this shortly.) Draw your own conclusions about Noyes’s real mo-
tive here. The system did keep unwanted pregnancies to a minimum, and
ensured that lines didn’t form for access to the most attractive members of
the community. But suffice it to say that the ascending-fellowship system
led to a lot of grumbling among the community’s younger men and women
and ultimately hastened the demise of the Oneida Community.
But the rule that best qualifies as the Perfectionist catch-22 was
Noyes’s rule about “male continence.” Because his own wife had known
the tragedy of four stillbirths during her fi ve difficult pregnancies, Noyes
decided that reliable birth control was of primary importance in a community
that drew a distinct line between the ideas of sex for pleasure and
sex for procreation. (Why, he wrote, should men “sow seed habitually
where they do not wish it to grow?”) In his relations with the fertile but
delicate Harriet, he had avoided unwanted pregnancy for two years by
employing the challenging practice of coitus reservatus, or simply refusing
to ejaculate during or after sex. The metaphor Noyes used to explain the
technique to his followers was that of a boatman on a river near a waterfall.
Basically, he said, the closer you row your boat to the falls, the harder
it becomes to turn back. Therefore, he advised, paddle only in the calm
waters far upstream. Noyes claimed the practice was satisfying for both
himself and his partner, and in fact Oneida may have been the only place
in Victorian America where the female orgasm was the primary goal of
sex. Perhaps the most telling evidence of Noyes’s charismatic leadership is
that the community’s men agreed to practice coitus reservatus as well.
Of course, rules mean nothing unless there’s a way to enforce them.
To help keep the community’s men from straying from the righteous path,
Noyes created a process called “mutual criticism.” According to author
Kern, it was “a kind of proto-encounter-group therapy, in which an individual
was publicly judged by his peers and frankly told of his faults, annoying
habits, idiosyncrasies, and virtues.” A man who displayed what
the community derided as a “rooster spirit” in his pursuit of sexual part-