Thy Neighbor's Wife Quotes

“Unlike the millions who casually masturbate in solitude while looking at girlie pictures in Playboy and similar magazines, the massage man preferred an accomplice, an attendant lady of respectable appearance who would help him reduce the guilt and loneliness of this most lonely act of love.”
― Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife: A Chronicle of American Permissiveness Before the Age of AIDS

“While the moral force of Judeo-Christian tradition and the law have sought to purify the penis, and to restrict its seed to the sanctified institution of matrimony, the penis is not by nature a monogamous organ. It knows no moral code. It was designed by nature for waste, it craves variety, and nothing less than castration will eliminate the allure of prostitution, fornication adultery, or pornography.”
― Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife: A Chronicle of American Permissiveness Before the Age of AIDS

“Interestingly, the historic case of 1868 in England that first defined obscenity-known among lawyers as the Hicklin decision- evolved out of the prosecution of a pamphlet describing how priests were often so sexually aroused while hearing women’s confessions that they sometimes masturbated and even copulated with their repentant subjects in the confessional.”
― Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife: A Chronicle of American Permissiveness Before the Age of AIDS

“The average married man, if he had the energy, could have sex with several women without diminishing the affection and desire he felt for his wife. But women like Judith- unlike truly liberated females like Barbara and Arlene- could not simply accept a man as a temporary instrument of pleasure; they wanted soft lights and promises, not just a penis but the man attached to it.”
― Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife: A Chronicle of American Permissiveness Before the Age of AIDS

“Men admitted to being endlessly fascinated with the naked female form; they appreciated women in a detached, impersonal way that women, even those women who were flattered by such attention, rarely understood.”
― Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife: A Chronicle of American Permissiveness Before the Age of AIDS

“It seemed that the penis per se, except to male homosexuals, was not a very salable commodity in the sexual marketplace of America. Few women could be aroused by the sight of an erect penis unless they were warmly disposed to the man who was attached to it.”
― Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife: A Chronicle of American Permissiveness Before the Age of AIDS

“Many male habitues of massage parlors, like Talese, did not like solitary masturbation; in the parlance of the younger generation, it was a “downer.” And yet to be masturbated by an appealing masseuse, to be in the physical presence of a woman with whom there was some communication and understanding, if not love, was gratifying and fun.”
― Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife: A Chronicle of American Permissiveness Before the Age of AIDS

“In his parochial school, the nuns had advised him and his classmates that they should sleep each night on their backs with their arms crossed on their chests, hands on opposite shoulders- a presumably holy posture that, not incidentally, made masturbation impossible.”
― Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife: A Chronicle of American Permissiveness Before the Age of AIDS

“Many couples in the room merely watched the proceedings in wonderment, and to them the visit to Sandstone was a learning experience, a biology class, an opportunity to become increasingly knowledgeable about sex in the way that people traditionally learned about almost everything except sex, through the observation and imitation of other people.”
― Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife: A Chronicle of American Permissiveness Before the Age of AIDS

“In Connecticut the crime of oral sex could be punishable by a thirty-year jail term. In Ohio it was one to twenty years. In Georgia such a “crime against nature” could lead a practitioner to life imprisonment at hard labor- a penalty far more severe than having sex with animals, which in Georgia was punishable by only five years.”
― Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife: A Chronicle of American Permissiveness Before the Age of AIDS

“While the quest for adventure that had long plagued him now tempted him to remove his clothes, an even more persuasive force within him prevented him from doing so, mainly because he feared revealing for the first time in front of so many people that unpredictable organ he assumed was everyman’s burden- although, as he was apparent from the number of flaccid phalli he saw around him, no man seemed burdened tonight except himself.”
― Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife: A Chronicle of American Permissiveness Before the Age of AIDS

“in a male-dominated world, Reich suggested, there was an “economic interest” in the continued role of women as “the provider of children for the state” and the performer of household chores without pay.”
― Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife: A Chronicle of American Permissiveness Before the Age of AIDS

“Departing from Freud’s exclusively verbal analysis, Reich studied the body as well as the mind, and he concluded after years of clinical observation and social work that signs of disturbed behavior could be detected in a patient’s musculature, the slope of his posture, the shape of his jaw and mouth, his tight muscles, rigid bones, and other physical traits of a defensive or inhibiting nature. Reich identified this body rigidity as “armor.”
― Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife: A Chronicle of American Permissiveness Before the Age of AIDS

“He believed that all people existed behind varying layers of armor which, like the archaeological layers of earth itself, reflected the historical events and turbulence of a lifetime. An individual’s armor that had been developed to resist pain and rejection might also block a capacity for pleasure and achievement, and feelings too deeply trapped might be released only by acts of self-destruction or harm to others. Reich was convinced that sexual deprivation and frustration motivated much of the world’s chaos and warfare.”
― Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife: A Chronicle of American Permissiveness Before the Age of AIDS

“Group nudity could also be personally beneficial, according to psychologist Abraham M. Maslow, who believed that nudist camps or parks might be places where people can emerge from hiding behind their clothes and armor, and become more self-accepting, revealing, and honest.”
― Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife: A Chronicle of American Permissiveness Before the Age of AIDS

“Too many people were obsessed with their heads and were alienated from their bodies, Perls believed, adding: “We have to lose our minds and come to our senses.”
― Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife: A Chronicle of American Permissiveness Before the Age of AIDS

“The penis, often regarded as a weapon, is also a burden, the male curse.”
― Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife: A Chronicle of American Permissiveness Before the Age of AIDS

“Lawrence probes the sensitivity and psychological detachment that man often feels towards his penis -- it does indeed seem to have a will of its own, an ego beyond its size, and is frequently embarrassing because of its needs, infatuations, and unpredictable nature. Men sometimes feel that their penis controls *them*, leads them astray, causes them to beg favors at night from women whose names they prefer to forget in the morning. Whether insatiable or insecure, it demands constant proof of its potency, introducing into a man's life unwanted complications and frequent rejection. Sensitive but resilient, equally available during the day or night with a minimum of coaxing, it has performed purposefully if not always skillfully for an eternity of centuries, endlessly searching, sensing, expanding, probing, penetrating, throbbing, wilting, and wanting more. Never concealing its prurient interest, it is a man's most honest organ.”
― Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife: A Chronicle of American Permissiveness Before the Age of AIDS

“Hefner explained in an interview that was published in Playboy: “Man is the only animal capable of controlling his environment, and what I’ve created is a private world that permits me to live my life without a lot of the wasted time and motion that consume a large part of most people’s lives. The man who has a job in the city and a house in the suburbs is losing two or three hours a day simply moving himself physically from where he lives to where he works and back again. Then he has to take the time and energy to go out for lunch in some crowded restaurant, where he’s more than likely dealt with in a rushed and impersonal fashion. He’s living his life according to a preconceived notion—certainly not his own—of what a daily routine ought to be…. The details of most people’s daily regimen,” Hefner went on, “are dictated by the clock. They eat breakfast, lunch and dinner at a time generally prescribed by social custom. They work during the day and sleep at night. But in the mansion it is, quite literally, the time of day that you want it to be…. One of the greatest sources of frustration in contemporary society is that people feel so powerless, not only in relation to what happens in the world around them but in influencing what happens in their own lives. Well, I don’t feel that frustration, because I’ve taken control of my life.”
― Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife

“And so there is nothing new in Thy Neighbor’s Wife. Nor is there anything old.”
― Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife

“They were unabashed voyeurs looking at him; and Talese looked back.”
― Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife

“As the months went by, Talese began to see the masseuse as a kind of unlicensed therapist. Just as thousands of people each day paid psychiatrists money to be heard, the massage man paid money to be touched.”
― Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife: A Chronicle of American Permissiveness Before the Age of AIDS

“Bullaro blushed. Barbara guided him around the room to meet other people, but all he saw in furtive glances were dangling breasts and hairy chests, bare buttocks and white thighs, pubic hair of various colors, penises that were large and small, circumcised and uncircumcised, and, remarkably, unerect.”
― Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife: A Chronicle of American Permissiveness Before the Age of AIDS

“Whatever influence Bullaro’s normally cautious character might have exerted over the passions of his penis were now nonexistent, and he unhesitatingly followed her and quickly undressed.”
― Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife: A Chronicle of American Permissiveness Before the Age of AIDS

“An individual with genital character, according to Reich, was fully in contact with with his body, his drives, his environment- he possessed “orgastic potency,” the capacity to “surrender to the flow of energy in the orgasm without any inhibition…free of anxiety and unpleasure and unaccompanied by fantasies”; and while genital character alone would not assure enduring contentment, the individual at least would not be blocked or diverted by destructive or irrational emotion or by exaggerated respect for institutions that were not life-enhancing.”
― Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife: A Chronicle of American Permissiveness Before the Age of AIDS

“Isn’t it exhausting, one could ask, this emotionally wrought involvement with so many sources, so many intimacies? For most of us it would be. But it is this novelist’s heart, this writer’s strange and insatiable passion for observation, for describing in all of its spectacular complexity the bewildering and plentiful world, that raises this brilliant and unruly book from its time, and makes it a classic of cultural journalism.”
― Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife

“It is his bottomless interest in other people, famous and unfamous, his loving immersion in their pasts, in what their mothers said to them when they were children, and what their childhood bedrooms looked like, that distinguishes him from the run-of-the-mill journalist. For him the story is not over when the book is sent off to the publishers. He stays in touch with many of his sources for years, for decades, still interested in what happens to them, still gathering information, still involved.”
― Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife

“MOST BIG BESTSELLERS of the past deserve to be relegated to the damp bookshelves of guest bedrooms in country houses, but Thy Neighbor’s Wife is not one of them. The writing of it took Talese nine years, and those years show, in the richness of the stories, in the density of detail, in the sweeping, panoramic view he gives us of America in flux.”
― Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife

“In the chamber, [Frances Hamling] sat close to her husband [William Hamling, about to go before the US Supreme Court on 4/15/74], trying to repress the anxiety she felt about his future. Four years in prison and $87,000 in fines was hardly a matter of casual contemplation. Since nobody was supposed to speak or even whisper in the chamber, she diverted herself by glancing around at the room's opulent interior, the impressive bone-white china columns and red velvet draperies that formed the background behind the polished judicial bench and high black leather chairs. A gold clock hung down from between two pillars, signaling that it was 9:57 a.m. -- a few minutes before the justices' scheduled arrival. Along the upper edge of the front of the room, close to the top of the forty-four-foot ceiling, Frances noticed an interesting, voluptuous section of Classical art: It was a golden beige marble frieze that extended across the width of the room and showed about twenty nude and seminude men, women, and children gathered in various poses. The figures symbolized the embodiment of human wisdom and truth, righteousness, and virtue; but the bodies to her could as easily have represented an assemblage of Roman hedonists or orgiasts, and it struck her as ironic that such a scene should be hovering over the heads of the jurists who would be questioning her husband's use of illustrations in the Presidential Report on Obscenity and Pornography.”
― Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife: A Chronicle of American Permissiveness Before the Age of AIDS

“Charlotte, N.C., 273 Chastity belt, 55 Chaucer, Geoffrey,”
― Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife