Pollyanna Unbound

WHAT THE SEX MANUALS DON'T TELL

YOU beckoned newspaper ads last week. The commodity on sale: a magazine article offering "penetrating guidance" to "anxious" husbands and wives with "secret worries." What lifted many eyebrows was not the subject of the article but the magazine that touted it: the staid Reader's Digest (world circ. 20 million), which for most of its 36 article-packed, circulation-enriching years has delicately skirted the subject it still refers to in chuckly anecdotes as "the facts of life."

Actually, the Digest cracked its boudoir boycott spectacularly in July 1956 with an article called "What Wives Don't Know About Sex." A flood of letters from readers suggested that do-it-yourself sex could be as gripping a topic for Digestion as the magazine's Pollyanna sagas of man against wilderness or science against cancer--the kind of uplift dear to Digest Editor (and Founder) DeWitt Wallace, son of a Presbyterian preacher. After a clinical follow-up piece on "What Husbands Don't Know About Sex," the magazine last June invited its readers to join Gynecologist Marion Hilliard in exploring "The Act of Love: Woman's Greatest Challenge."

Describing "the whole galaxy of climaxes." Author Hilliard ranged gushingly from the "one so slight that it is a sigh to one so profound and deep that it results in an agonizing cry ... a small death." On the other hand, the article added, "millions of women feel nothing at all." and the "timing of the climaxes can take five years to perfect." For the apprentice mate who cannot muster even a sigh. counseled Sexpert Hilliard, "the worthiest duplicity on earth" is to pretend to a man that "he can cause a flowering within her." By way of re-enlisting readers who might have grown discouraged by this sort of thing, the new Digest piece (condensed from McCall's) quotes the "official" line: "The wife should have an orgasm. If this does not happen easily, it is up to any self-respecting husband to master the technique that will make it happen." Yet, soothes Dr. David R. Mace, the how-to-do-it books place "an exaggerated emphasis on so-called 'sexual technique.'" He reassures readers that the sex manuals are no substitute for old-fashioned passion. His own summary in the Digest's digest: "So long as the emotional feelings between the couple are right, so long as there is mutual trust and love, their bodies will invariably make the appropriate responses."

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