talk crap, Nicholas!’ She had risen and abruptly left the room. I recall feeling at the time that I’d nevertheless touched on something.
Anna, while seeming to enjoy my advances in bed and my caresses above the waist, still involuntarily resisted even the slightest dalliance below it. The Grotto of Not was effectively out of bounds.
While I had been prepared to kidnap her in an attempt to cure her heroin addiction, I certainly wasn’t going to attempt to overcome her fear of intercourse by forcing myself into her.
That I didn’t persist may well be a sign of weakness on my part, but on every occasion I had attempted the preliminaries, it had ended in copious tears. Our closeness was being placed in jeopardy and, I told myself, love isn’t only about a well-dipped dick bringing her to a climax. Anna was otherwise doing everything in her power to please me and took obvious delight in doing so. Sometimes the smaller picture becomes the more valuable in the gallery of human experience. Or so I attempted to convince myself.
Had I known at the time about Anna’s three years of conditioning by Konoe Akira, which ultimately led her to the absolute conviction that the loss of her virginity meant the destruction of her perfection, her intellect and aesthetic appeal, I would have been much closer to understanding her fears.
The carefully inculcated sexual complex the nefarious Japanese colonel had planted in Anna’s mind meant that no man could be permitted to enter her. She had already killed to defend this absolute belief. The blood and horror of killing Takahashi when he’d attempted to force her to disobey her master’s instructions seemed the perfect reinforcement needed to bring about the condition of vaginismus.
Professor Denmeade stressed that it was the patient herself who must effect the cure with the help of a practised psychiatrist, and until Anna was willing to embrace both factors, acceptance and treatment, it was unlikely that she would recover from her deeply entrenched fear of male penetration. ‘But she will still be capable of enjoying clitoral stimulation,’ he concluded.
I then explained that Anna had also resisted my attempts at clitoral stimulation. Denmeade then suggested this might be an additional psychological factor and until Anna was willing to undertake therapy her rejection of my attempts to touch her was also likely to be permanent.
‘Have you tried oral sex?’ he asked. ‘It may well be that your finger represents the male phallus while your tongue doesn’t.’
I hadn’t, and while today this would seem a curious omission, I should point out that in the early fifties most women thought of oral sex as somehow perverted, almost never performed out of marriage, and even within only under duress.
If women avoided fellatio, it was absolutely taboo for any decent, self-respecting middle-class male to engage in cunnilingus. This was the preserve of heavily pomaded gigolos with dark sideburns and pencil moustaches who spoke with thick Spanish accents. Putting it into crude male parlance, a cock was clean, a woman’s fanny wasn’t. This was a belief held not only by males but also by many women at the time.
I was fairly sure that Anna, despite her background as a captive of the Japanese and as a comfort woman in the Nest of the Swallows, would not have experienced a male using his mouth to bring her to climax. She may well never have climaxed to a Japanese soldier during penile penetration either.
But, of course, this was all speculation on my part. All I possessed was a smattering of knowledge concerning her captivity; what had actually happened to her I was yet to learn. I had no idea, for instance, that Anna was still a virgin. While she had told me she’d kept herself for me, that I would be the first, I had taken this to mean the first lover she would accept of her own free will.
As a comfort woman, I incorrectly surmised that she had been raped daily, that in her mind she
Anna, while seeming to enjoy my advances in bed and my caresses above the waist, still involuntarily resisted even the slightest dalliance below it. The Grotto of Not was effectively out of bounds.
While I had been prepared to kidnap her in an attempt to cure her heroin addiction, I certainly wasn’t going to attempt to overcome her fear of intercourse by forcing myself into her.
That I didn’t persist may well be a sign of weakness on my part, but on every occasion I had attempted the preliminaries, it had ended in copious tears. Our closeness was being placed in jeopardy and, I told myself, love isn’t only about a well-dipped dick bringing her to a climax. Anna was otherwise doing everything in her power to please me and took obvious delight in doing so. Sometimes the smaller picture becomes the more valuable in the gallery of human experience. Or so I attempted to convince myself.
Had I known at the time about Anna’s three years of conditioning by Konoe Akira, which ultimately led her to the absolute conviction that the loss of her virginity meant the destruction of her perfection, her intellect and aesthetic appeal, I would have been much closer to understanding her fears.
The carefully inculcated sexual complex the nefarious Japanese colonel had planted in Anna’s mind meant that no man could be permitted to enter her. She had already killed to defend this absolute belief. The blood and horror of killing Takahashi when he’d attempted to force her to disobey her master’s instructions seemed the perfect reinforcement needed to bring about the condition of vaginismus.
Professor Denmeade stressed that it was the patient herself who must effect the cure with the help of a practised psychiatrist, and until Anna was willing to embrace both factors, acceptance and treatment, it was unlikely that she would recover from her deeply entrenched fear of male penetration. ‘But she will still be capable of enjoying clitoral stimulation,’ he concluded.
I then explained that Anna had also resisted my attempts at clitoral stimulation. Denmeade then suggested this might be an additional psychological factor and until Anna was willing to undertake therapy her rejection of my attempts to touch her was also likely to be permanent.
‘Have you tried oral sex?’ he asked. ‘It may well be that your finger represents the male phallus while your tongue doesn’t.’
I hadn’t, and while today this would seem a curious omission, I should point out that in the early fifties most women thought of oral sex as somehow perverted, almost never performed out of marriage, and even within only under duress.
If women avoided fellatio, it was absolutely taboo for any decent, self-respecting middle-class male to engage in cunnilingus. This was the preserve of heavily pomaded gigolos with dark sideburns and pencil moustaches who spoke with thick Spanish accents. Putting it into crude male parlance, a cock was clean, a woman’s fanny wasn’t. This was a belief held not only by males but also by many women at the time.
I was fairly sure that Anna, despite her background as a captive of the Japanese and as a comfort woman in the Nest of the Swallows, would not have experienced a male using his mouth to bring her to climax. She may well never have climaxed to a Japanese soldier during penile penetration either.
But, of course, this was all speculation on my part. All I possessed was a smattering of knowledge concerning her captivity; what had actually happened to her I was yet to learn. I had no idea, for instance, that Anna was still a virgin. While she had told me she’d kept herself for me, that I would be the first, I had taken this to mean the first lover she would accept of her own free will.
As a comfort woman, I incorrectly surmised that she had been raped daily, that in her mind she
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