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| Let's look at a typical nymphomaniac... through a keyhole, preferably. |
NOTE: This article continues my coverage of Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex (BearManor Media, 2021).
The article: "A Look at the Nymphomaniac." Originally published in Fantastic (Gallery Press), vol. 1, no. 1, August/September 1972.
Excerpt: "It is reflected that by today's standards, Madam V. wouldn't be singled out at all because of her particular sex drives. She might be classified as more normal than many other classifications designed for sexual use and abuse. Times and values have indeed changed and are continually changing. Sexual permissiveness has apparently turned around to what makes one happy and keeps one from striking out for the Rubber Room At The Happy Farm."
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| The library of Ed Wood's youth. |
Reflections: Before I get into the merits of Ed Wood's 1972 article "A Look at the Nymphomaniac," I want to discuss a topic that comes up frequently in this article and others included in When the Topic is Sex. You might call it one of the principal motifs of this collection.
Specifically, Ed Wood feels that libraries used to keep their sexually-explicit books hidden away in some dank dungeon beneath the building. In "A Look at the Nymphomaniac," for instance, Ed refers to "the no-no books which couldn't be checked out by the simple man on the street." Ed says this policy existed because the doctors of the past wanted to keep the general public ignorant about sex. Why they'd want to do that, he doesn't say.
Is any of this true? Since Ed Wood grew up in Poughkeepsie, New York, I decided to ask Shannon Butler, the current historian for the Poughkeepsie Public Library District, about how libraries worked in Ed's day. Here's what she had to say:
Adriance Memorial Library was the only library in Poughkeepsie at the time [Ed Wood lived here] with the exception of the Vassar College library, so [Ed] certainly would have come here. As far as a forbidden storehouse of books, I doubt that ever existed. In the old days of the library, the collections were all over the place, including the basement, and in those days it was a "retrieval only" system, meaning the librarian would go and get what you wanted. Perhaps by the mid-century, they might have had a separate area for the storage of more "mature" subjects but we don't have any record of old floor plans to determine if such a location existed.
So not exactly a definitive answer. Maybe this was the way it merely seemed to Ed when he was a child, i.e. the adults were keeping "the good stuff" to themselves. Reader Guy Deverell pointed me to this article, implying there was some truth behind Ed's suspicions.
Anyway, by the time Ed wrote "A Look at the Nymphomaniac," he was a grown man and had access to as much adult-oriented material as he wanted. Books, magazines, tabloids, films, you name it. Eddie devoured as much of this material as he could and then regurgitated it in his own work, adding his own fetishes and quirks along the way. In a perfect world, "Nymphomaniac" would be a neat companion piece to Ed's "Satyriasis and Prostitution" from the previous year. In truth, however, this is just a random junkpile of sketchy information and dubious ideas loosely themed around nymphomania.
In a a way, "A Look at the Nymphomaniac" is a first cousin to Ed's glossary articles like "There Are Different Words" (1974) and "Sexual Terminology" (1971). He devotes two sections of "Nymphomaniac" to defining sex-related terms, not just "nymphomania" and "nymphomaniac" but also "hyperesthesia," "priapism," "hyperhedonia," and "voluptuary," among others. My guess is that Ed must've owned some dogeared dictionary of sex terms and wanted to get as much use out of it as he possibly could. Here, it feels like Ed is blatantly trying to pad out the article with text. Maybe he was paid by the word or by the column inch.
If this article has a thesis, it's that the term "nymphomania" has historically been used to stigmatize women who simply had a healthy appetite for sex, equal to that of a man. Despite the findings of Freud and Kinsey, we still don't seem to think that women should be as interested in sex as men, so we label them as sick or abnormal. Ed describes the grossly unfair double standard:
Herewith, we then are to believe that the woman who felt she required more than the usual amount of sex was one of those horrid persons to which the nymphomaniac title was given. She could be pointed out in the street . . . be scoffed at . . . have her name bandied around in the saloons or the pool hall . . . and she might be searched out by the same type of male. However, in the case of the male who found himself in the same position as that over-sexed woman it was a different story. He was looked upon as the most virile of males. He had a healthy outlook upon the sex life. In all respects he was normal.
After reading that, you might be tempted to label "A Look at the Nymphomaniac" one of Ed Wood's more progressive articles. But, Ed being Ed, he can't stay on topic for long. He includes some nonsense—attributed to a psychologist whose existence I cannot confirm—about how all lesbians subconsciously long to be loved by men. He also says that nymphomaniacs might be responsible for "the massive attacks of VD which are striking the nation." So, yeah, not the most feminist-friendly material ever. Still, though, Ed is willing to acknowledge that women enjoy sex. That's something, right?
Next: "Prostitutes as Wives" (1971)