Satyriasis and Nymphomania

Abstract

Judged on the basis of his novel, Go to the Widow-Maker Jones has earned the title of being the most sex-obsessed writer of fiction in the United States, with the possible exception of William S. Burroughs, but whereas the latter indulges in lurid homosexual fantasies of the most detailed kind, fantasies induced under the power of drugs, James Jones celebrates the glory of normal copulatory activities. Sex is love and love is sex, sex is bliss, Heaven on earth, if the right partner is found. Promiscuity is only natural, a sort of interregnum of experimentation, until full orgastic consummation is achieved with the ideal mate, though even then an occasional going astray is not out of the question. Marriage is a trap in that it curbs the freedom of the couple to sleep with whom they please, but, as Jones shows, there are ways of breaking the contract in secret without being caught. What Dreiser defended as varietism for the male has today become a widespread cult worshiped by both sexes. In his novel Jones undertakes to demonstrate at great length the truth of the proposition that variety is the essential spice of sex.