SEXUAL COMMUNISM A SUCCESS

from _The Stiffest of the Corpse:  An Exquisite Corpse Reader_
, ed. by Andrei Codrescu, San Francisco:  City Lights Books, 1988.  


AUREA VENERA IGNOTA: THE ONEIDA COMMUNITY
AND COITUS RESERVATUS
by Sam Abrams

Although there are timid dissenters beginning to publish, the official
glib, grad school opinion of the American communal experiments of the
19th Century remains, as it was enshrined in Parrington's _Main
Currents_, that they failed. And hearing the great Shaker song "The Gift
To Be Simple" used as television theme music, one is tempted to agree.
The supposed failure is predicated on the short term of the experiments,
but was Kitty Hawk a failure because the flight lasted only twelve
seconds?

There is one particular case -- the Oneida Community -- that, although
not without ironies, to my mind clearly establishes the success of the
experimental movement.  As Kitty Hawk established that mechanical flight
is possible, so Oneida proved that the abolition of selfishness is
possible.

"We have admitted from the beginning that our free principles in regard
to property, labor, and love could not be carried out without the actual
abolition of selfishness; so our success has been avowedly staked on the
answer to the old question: Can we be saved from sin in this world?
And the world looking on has predicted our downfall.  But we have
succeeded." (2nd Annual Report of the OC Association, 1850)

The summary of John Humphrey Noyes, the founder, after the breakup: "We
made a raid into unknown country, charted it, and returned without the
loss of a man, woman or child."

The success of the OC was long masked by the domination of one book,
Robert Allerton Parker's _A Yankee Saint_, a book (much like Duberman's
on Black Mountain) which has many scholarly virtues, hut which (again
like Duberman) omits the essential . In Duberman the lacuna is ART; in
Parker it is JOY. Only in 1970, when the elderly Constance Noyes
Robinson, a descendant of the OC stirpicults (eugenic experiments),
published her volume, did it become possible to form a full image of the
OC.

And the key phenomenon is JOY. Hundreds of people for twenty-five years
in deed and in speech in paradise, then, there. Datum: none of the 100+
children who came of age during the experiment left; they all stayed,
many returning to the community after college.

"My maternal Grandmother who had been one of the dissidents at the
breakup, told me, in her old age, that there had never been such
happiness as they knew in the old Community.  I believe this was an
honest testimony...Most of the principle facts of this history I have
known, some of them from early childhood, but the new and overmastering
impression I gained...from reading the story...as the Oneida Communists
told it, is of all-pervading happiness." (Constance Noyes Robinson in
the preface to Oneida Community, An Autobiography, Syracuse University
Press, 1970).

Anyone who reads through the selection of original writings from the
Community that constitutes her hook, or spends some time with the great
collection of Oneida publications at the Dartmouth Library, cannot
escape that impression. As the Bloomie's smoked salmon counter is the
epicenter of consumption in the western world, so the Oneida Community
was the highpoint of happiness.

Two hundred and fifty folks happily engaged, in the full glare of
publicity, in a radical economic.  social and sexual experiment. "BEFORE
HEAVEN AND EARTH WE TRAMPLE UNDERFOOT THE DOMESTIC AND PECUNIARY
FASHIONS OF THE WORLD!"  They published detailed accounts.  During all
the twenty-five years of the community, they issued a weekly newspaper,
which included scrupulous reports of their experiments in all aspects of
life, in economics, child rearing and breeding, politics, work roles,
music, diet, clothing, and most famously, sexual practices and
relationships.

The extent of their openness is hard to believe.  They invited a hostile
gynecologist to come investigate what he called "one of the most
artificial sexual mal-relations known in history," allowed him free
access, answered his questions with admissions that even shock today,
for instance, telling him that sexual relations for females usually
began by eleven years of age.

They invited visitors and almost every distinguished person who passed
their way (e.g., Henry James) accepted their invitation to examine "an
association established on principles opposed at every point to the
institutions of the world".  No wonder that Anthony Comstock (who
boasted of having burnt in his career 160 tons of books) established the
Society for the Suppression of Vice specifically for the suppression of
the OC.  Yet open and openly, opposed by politicians and clergymen and
freelance bigots like Comstock, in the midst of Victorian America, they
survived for twenty-five years, and were happy.

Before turning to the specifics of their sexual experiments, which is
where the focus for further research should fall, I will cite just one
example for the sake of the flavor of the OC.  John Humphrey Noyes beat
Thoreau, whose _Essay On Civil Disobedience_ is dated 1849, by fifteen
years in declaring his personal independence, on the same grounds that
Henry David resigned, from the United States. The OC, from its
formation, stated that "so Long as our government stood with one foot on
the neck of the slave and with the other trampled the rights of the red
man, we had no sympathy with it.  The Community for many years previous
to the breaking out of the rebellion asserted their independence of the
government and in heart and spirit disclaimed allegiance to it."

The sexual innovations of the OC were rooted in their religious
heterodoxy. They subscribed to the perfectionist heresy that consists
essentially of the belief that the second coming of Christ has already
occurred and thus we are living in paradise. We only need to conduct
ourselves according to the "ordinances of heaven" in order to realize
that we are living in paradise. The name 'perfectionism' signifies that
humans are capable of achieving perfect sinlessness in this world.

Noyes became converted to this view in 1834 and rapidly emerged, between
activities in the Underground Railroad and the publicity fuss evoked by
Greeley's publication of his personal declaration of independence, as
one of the movement's leaders.

It had long been one of the most cherished tenets of perfectionism that
among the "ordinances of heaven" group marriage or free love was one of
the most important, and Noyes' followers urged him to put this into
practice. But although he experimented with other heavenly ordinances of
communal living, he long resisted endorsing except in theory any sexual
experimentation.

Noyes married in 1834. It was within this marriage that he achieved his
most profound and startling insights, which led directly to the
discovery that made the Oneida Community possible and which implies most
significant possibilities for us today. As might be expected, from the
very first days of their marriage, John and Harriet shared views on
women's liberation that would be considered advanced now. For instance,
on their wedding day they posted a notice in the kitchen to their
friends that said since the "practice of serving three meals daily
subjects females almost universally to the worst kind of slavery. " they
would serve only breakfast and for the rest their friends could help
themselves.

By the sixth year of their marriage, they were living in an economically
communist but sexually monogamous commune, and Harriet had undergone one
extremely difficult live birth and four extremely difficult stillbirths.

Noyes decided to abstain from sex until he had solved the problem of
birth control. He saw that in the primitive medical conditions of his
time, sex without birth control was a form of murderous exploitation of
women by men.  It is easy for us to forget nowadays that until quite
recently pregnancy and giving birth were not merely painful but always
life-threatening and often fatal.  He and Harriet agreed that celibacy
was better than further risking her life.  For Noyes, to decide was to
publish, and not the least daring of his publications was his
denunciation of sexual relations without contraception as "a
relationship...in which, at every level of society, husbands become the
blandly unconscious murderers of those they love and had pledged
themselves to protect."

Noyes had a second insight, without which he might have been content to
follow the Shaker example and accept celibacy, but having had it, he was
driven on to his great discovery. The second insight was not new.  Poets
have understood it since at least Catullus.  But Noyes was the first
that I know of to express it in logical and expository, as opposed to
lyric, form.  (His peculiar American charm was, of course, that he was a
pragmatic rationalist and religious enthusiast.  I suppose I have to
give Parker credit.  His title, _Yankee Saint_, neatly sums that up.)
This second point was the "dividing the sexual relationship into two
branches, the amative and the propagative, the amative or love
relationship is the first in importance."

With these two principles, he set himself to the task, in 1844 in Putney
Vermont, of discovering how "the benefits of amativeness can be secured
and increased and the expenses of propagation reduced to such limits as
life can afford."

He well understood how much was dependent on his quest.  Success would
allow, to mention just one of the freedoms he sought, that "childbearing
be a voluntary affair."

And he succeeded completely, so that fourteen years later, the Oneidans
could boast "our principles accord to woman a just and righteous freedom
in this particular, and however strange such an idea may seem now, the
time cannot be distant when any other idea or practice will be scorned
as essential barbarism."

How Noyes discovered what he did is still a complete mystery to me. What
he found was a method of fucking, closely related to certain Tantric
practices, which he called Male Continence and which scholars of sex in
the OC have called _coitus reservatus_.  Male Continence was, and I
define it minimally, for its precise definition is one of the matters
which I am writing to encourage, a method in which the act of fucking is
prolonged for hours without ejaculation.

"I experimented on this idea and found that the self-control which it
requires is not difficult; that my enjoyment was increased; that my
wife's experience was very satisfactory, as it had never been before;
that we had escaped the fears and horrors of involuntary propagation.
This was a great deliverance."

The discovery of this method was central to the creation of the Oneida
Community as a complex marriage. The method was particularly well
adapted to a group marriage, since it had to be taught and practiced.
Young boys practiced with women past menopause and young girls with
older men who were experts.  With this key bit of wisdom in place, the
Oneida experiment became possible, and as anyone who looks into
Robinson's hook must see, successful.

"Do you really practice free love?" And Noyes replied, "Is there any
other kind?"

"Never has a couple eloped from the Oneida Community... The discipline of
the passions is more radical here than with the Shakers, inasmuch as
total abstinence is often more practicable than moderation...We wonder
at the fact and still it is true.  A hundred young folks have passed the
age of temptation at the Oneida Community, and yet there has never been
an elopement."  (The Oneida Circular, 1869.)

So the first topic I call to your attention for further investigation is
the success of the OC. Yet another, of immediate pertinence, of huge
potential, is WHAT EXACTLY IS MALE CONTINENCE.  The publications of
Oneida, although, as you can tell from my quotations, of tremendous
frankness, leave this point ambiguous -- DID MEN WHO PRACTICED MALE
CONTINENCE HAVE ORGASMS WITHOUT EJACULATION?  Early students of the OC's
sexual practice took the answer to be no, and the Karezza movement of
the 1920s elaborated theories on the great benefits of sex without
orgasm for either gender.

However!

Several of the physicians and sexologists who have studied the OC refer
to their fucking practice as _coitus reservatus_ and Kinsey in the
_Human Male_ volume defines _coitus reservatus_ as ORGASM WITHOUT THE
EMISSION OF SEMEN BY ADULT MALES WHO DELIBERATELY CONTRACT THEIR
GENITAL MUSCLES.  The Kinsey survey found five males in their sample of
4,102 who practiced this technique at the time of the survey in the
1940s.

In 1974 1 inquired of both the Kinsey and the Masters and Johnson
institutes.  At that time neither of them were investigating
this phenomenon nor did they know of anyone who was. Masters wrote me
that he thought the technique might be most helpful, but noted that an
"essential part of the technique was training the younger men with
postmenopausal females. To date, that is a relatively insurmountable
obstacle."