The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [121]
With the patient lying upon her side…the operator stands facing the back, with the fingers resting upon the buttocks, and manipulates the perineum, using the thumbs in alternation, stretching the tissues away from the median line. Only one thumb should be used at once…. The patient should also be made to execute breathing movements, in which both the abdominal and the perineal muscles are vigorously contracted during the act of expiration. Under the instructions of a physician, the manipulations may be somewhat extended and varied by introducing the forefinger into the vagina or rectum, the muscle being grasped between the forefinger and the thumb and thoroughly pressed and stretched.5
Happy now? The manual is full of such instruction: fingers inserted into vaginas and rectums, the patient told to pump her hips rhythmically while taking deep, corresponding breaths. Breast massage included gently stroking, caressing, and nipple pinching. Various marketed vibrators are discussed. Pelvic massage for men included massage of the prostate; for women, “one finger placed inside the vagina”; inside the rectum and coccyx for both. Lubrication is recommended. Pregnant women needed relief, too. For them, “massage of the vagina” should be done, daily, with “strong vibratory movements,” during the last six or eight weeks of pregnancy.6 Kellogg preached against sex, but you ended up naked a lot, with a relative stranger interacting with your privates. At lunch you could look around the cafeteria tables and know that everyone else was being poked, penetrated, and prodded, and they knew that you were, too. You and the other lovely society people would share information about your treatments, and about the vices you were there to conquer. Then off to a coed lecture on what your body goes through during sex. For many years people flocked to Kellogg’s Battle Creek Sanitarium, often spending full summers there. John D. Rockefeller stayed there, as did Theodore Roosevelt. Kellogg wrote with glee of turning his “despairing throng” of clients into “happy and useful people.”7
In 1972 the American Medical Association declared that masturbation is normal and in no need of medical management.8 As we saw in the chapter on diet, the Kellogg company had already, by that time, separated its breakfast cereals from antimeat, antisex, and antimasturbation messages. Advertising needs to track the culture’s sensibility closer than doctors do. We live in a period that is remarkably approving of sex in general; yet, while Kellogg raged against the body’s desires and we speak of them as healthy, he talked a lot about actual genital sex, whereas we speak mostly of sexiness. In our discussions of sexiness you will hear about secondary sex characteristics—breasts, hips, body hair, soft skin—but the old antisex sermons were replete with dewy, engorged, blushing genitalia, and descriptions of the hot exhalations of the body in its rhythms. In antisex speeches, the body sighed, heaved, gave way, sweated out salts and oils, perfumed the air with its potent musk. We say we now approve of the sexual body, but look at how we hover at a distance.
Sex advice has often been presented as having a goal other than happiness, especially advice to not have sex in order to be good, or advice to have sex in order to have babies, but a great proportion of sex rules are presented as keys to happiness. The Buddha said sex was not sinful in any way, but that it got in the way of enlightenment. As we saw, he suggested that the way to nirvana, ultimate bliss, was to have no sex at all. By contrast, other Buddhist sages have disagreed and seen sex as a path to enlightenment. Tantric sexual practices use the euphoria of sex