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By Root 507 0

played to exploit or fight off sexual impulses These are all, in effect, perversions of the sexual instincts in which the satisfaction is displaced from the sexual act to the crucial transactions which constitute the payoff of the game. This cannot always be demonstrated convincingly, because such games are usually played in privacy, so that clinical information about them has to be obtained secondhand, and the informant’s bias cannot always be satisfactorily evaluated. The psychiatric conception of homosexuality, for example, is heavily skewed, because the more aggressive and successful ‘players’ do not often come for psychiatric treatment, and the available material mostly concerns the passive partners.

The games included here are: ‘Let’s You and Him Fight’, ‘Perversion’, ‘Rapo’, ‘Stocking Game’ and ‘Uproar’. In most cases the agent is a woman. This is because the hard forms of sexual games in which the man is the agent verge on or constitute criminality, and properly belong in the Underworld section. On the other side, sexual games and marital games overlap, but the ones described here are readily available to unmarried people as well as to spouses.

1 · LET’S YOU AND HIM FIGHT

Thesis. This may be a manoeuvre, a ritual or a game. In each case the psychology is essentially feminine. Because of its dramatic qualities, LYAHF is the basis of much of the world’s literature, both good and bad.

1. As a manoeuvre it is romantic. The woman manoeuvres or challenges two men into fighting, with the implication or promise that she will surrender herself to the winner. After the competition is decided, she fulfils her bargain. This is an honest transaction, and the presumption is that she and her mate live happily ever after.

2. As a ritual, it tends to be tragic. Custom demands that the two men fight for her, even if she does not want them to, and even if she has already made her choice. If the wrong man wins, she must nevertheless take him. In this case it is society and not the woman who sets up LYAHF. If she is unwilling, the transaction is an honest one. If she is unwilling or disappointed, the outcome may offer her considerable scope for playing games, such as ‘Let’s Pull A Fast One on Joey’.

3. As a game it is comic. The woman sets up the competition, and while the two men are fighting, she decamps with a third. The internal and external psychological advantages for her and her mate are derived from the position that honest competition is for suckers, and the comic story they have lived through forms the basis for the internal and external social advantages.

2 · PERVERSION

Thesis. Heterosexual perversions such as fetishism, sadism and masochism are symptomatic of a confused Child and are treated accordingly. Their transactional aspects, however, as manifested in actual sexual situations, can be dealt with by means of game analysis. This may lead to social control, so that even if the warped sexual impulses remain unchanged, they are neutralized as far as actual indulgence is concerned.

People who are suffering from mild sadistic or masochistic distortions tend to take a primitive kind of ‘Mental Health’ position. They feel that they are strongly sexed, and that prolonged abstinence will lead to serious consequences. Neither of these conclusions is necessarily true, but they form the basis for a game of ‘Wooden Leg’ with the plea: ‘What do you expect from someone as strongly sexed as I am?’

Antithesis. To extend ordinary courtesy to oneself and one’s partner; that is, to refrain from verbal or physical flagellation and confine oneself to more conventional forms of coitus. If White is a true pervert, this will lay bare the second element of the game, which is often clearly expressed in his dreams: that coitus itself has little interest for him, and that his real satisfaction is derived from the humiliating foreplay. This is something that he may not have cared to admit to himself. But it will now become clear to him that his complaint is: ‘After all this work, I have to have intercourse, yet!’ At this