UN/CONSCIOUS UN/COUPLINGS
Normal and Abnormal Sex-Ways – Leo Klein
Sex ways… Are you doing them… normally or… abnormally..? Yeah. Yep. Same, same. Yep.
Lemme see. There’s Normal Way No1 where The Man mounts his Fair Maiden, face-to-face. They wrangle, mewl and quake whilst psychically beaming oaths, curses, frantic bodily instructionals, and life-coached manifestation mood-board strategies into one another’s eyes in the name of love, marriage, flirting Winning at Contract Lawyering, and… er, ugh, bleurgh… baby carriages.
Then there’s Normal Way No2 where The Man bends his property over like the Fair Chattel that it is. Sometimes a gym instructor gets sent in to orally pacify said property en rapport with Man – but purely, you must understand, to burn max calories and manage client eating disorders; and all in professional partnership with the kitchen crew’s star quack-nutritionist and their big televisual-supermarket deal. Just as The Man is about to shoot his sacred seed into his chosen Funfair Ride, security staff and some inebriated social media interns chug in for a team-building photo op! Fun! Banter! Big thumbs up! “Sorry what kind of fashion photoshoot is-was-is this..?”
Smile for the camera(s)! Wayhay! larger!larger!larger! Top bantz.
Smash-jump-cut to: morning. You’ve barely got your crinoline pantaloons and lead blouson back on, but you’ve been anointed with, huh, um… foggy, oh, yeah… a New Career Opportunity! Suits flatter your natural talents and business nous; papers are signed and, abracadabra, you are now an exemplar of the modern #feminist (American) Dream. What a nightmare! Smile and say “DICK CHEESE” – silently, of course – for The Big Casting Directors in The Sky! On with the show…
The thing I appreciated most about today’s book – Normal and Abnormal Sex-Ways by Dr Leo Klein – is learning the term “climacteric”. I can’t be bothered to explain further – including for the potential significant betterment of all present, future (and past) humankind forevermore amen ta-da etcetera – because I’m female and born evil.
Besides which, sex education of any sort is an absolute mood-killer for The Man. So we must keep turning to progressive American sexpert hypnotherapists like our author til we puzzle out what sorta model/actress hooker/waitress cadaver/secretary might – in spirit, at least – feasibly survive our current ‘post-global’ reality model. A “psychologist and marriage counsellor” practising in the 1950s and 60s based on the book’s content, Klein has no internet footprint at time of publishing – and, indeed, could be more persona than person, given much of hypnotism’s backstory is fictive.
As we’ve come to expect of these racy vintage ‘edutainment’ paperbacks, we meet Dr Klein’s supposed patients – Agnes B, Harold I, Myrtle K, Ruth S, Karl M, and Dora C; all of whom suffer peculiar yet hypnotically and psychotherapeutically solvable sexual hangups and habits. Klein is represented via a writer-reporter in Edward Uhlan, who pens the foreword and ‘ghostwrites’ the case studies in this 1962 offering from New York’s Belmont Books. Klein and Uhlan’s partnership lacks the character of previous hypnotherapist-journo pairings, and may be better understood as a moment upstream of defined and dedicated divorce and family court mediation services in America and/or perceived press/public shortfalls in traditional family doctoring TLC.
A recurring pain point for Dr Klein and his fellow American hypnotherapists during this period is fundamentally ill-matched newlyweds. His musings, approaches, and claimed successes are earnest and logical, if outdated. But his business is fixing symptoms of problems. Overbearing parent/s and in-law/s abound; idiosyncratic and restrictive belief systems, religious or otherwise, create impasses of prudishness and psychosomatic mystery; men (and some women) banked on ‘The Double Standard’ and would not be dissuaded from affairs or spousal/familial neglect because the marital contract exploited their freedom first. Often, Klein and his peers were left babysitting 20-something ‘teenagers’ forced to pantomime The Dream – with the advent of psychiatric medication proving the more effective, and lucrative, method for mass mood management than the brief, novel, stage-managed human interaction hypnotism promised.
But we don’t learn of Dr Klein’s hypnotherapy per se, as potential converts to his vocation. “Hypnotherapy” is prescribed, for instance, to boost confidence or wean someone off an unwanted and anti-social foot fetish or masturbatory impulse. (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy would be more likely suggested for the latter two examples today.) But it’s just a ‘magic wand’ waft of a word-use, so I take Dr Klein’s association with the term “hypnotist” loosely. Indeed, he comments that it is becoming an increasingly common adjunct for “psychologists, psychiatrists, and neurologists”, but says that “reports of success are, frankly, discouraging”. He mentions that he’s spent years as Director of Divorcees Anonymous of Maryland in his long career as a marriage counsellor; there’s a dejected tone to ‘his’ writing (remember that Edward Uhlan writes ‘invisibly’) – his faith in the self-deceptive syrup that is The Hypnotist’s Gift is waning.
He spunks way too much mental effort on ‘balances’ of sexual preferences and ‘deviations’. Distinguishing between a person’s consenting private indoor adult kink and a park-gate flasher (let alone daring to weigh in on weighing such matters up on the crime-punishment-prevention scale), is best left to appointed persons and policymakers, IMHO. But that is the sort of petty, passing, pervy, provocative dilemma hypnotherapists like Klein were lumbered with by shy to sham to shambolic couplings.
The book is dedicated to Klein’s wife, Claire – “who deserves so much more.”
Alas, Claire was married. And so she deserves only as much as Contractual Law minimally stipulates.
It’s nothing personal. It’s just… Capitalism Heaven For Every Body.
