YOUR MARITAL HEALTH: ELLISONIAN SEXUALITY AND MODEL OF SEXUAL RESPONSE
Ellis was one of the early writers to describe the “buildup and discharge” model of sexual response, and it became the model for future researchers. He wrote, “Tumescence is the piling on of the fuel; detumescence is the leaping out of the devouring flame.” This energy buildup and energy discharge model was related essentially to the genitalia, although Ellis was also one of the first to describe erogenous or erogenic zones responsive to touch.
Ellis thought that male sexuality was “predominantly open and aggressive,” while female sexual response was “elusive,” slower, and much more elaborate. While men responded to touch, the penis was the focus for them. Even the scrotum was seen as without much sensitivity.
Ellis saw the nongenital areas as sexually responsive in the female. He felt that the breasts were particularly sexually responsive. Women were viewed as sexual “all over their body,” and much more “total” in their sexual response, more mentally and emotionally involved. He wrote, “In a certain sense, their brains are in their wombs.” By this unfortunate phrase, he meant that women were not the asexual beings of Victorian doctrine, that they were in fact highly sexual. The misrepresentation of this view became “women are preoccupied with sex,” are more emotionally involved in it. Women came to be seen as sex objects, sexually driven by some innate procreative and unique feminine drive.
Ellis changed his views of marriage throughout his career. He continued to view it, however, as a natural state, “the most natural expression of an impulse which cannot, as a rule, be so adequately realized in full fruition under conditions involving a less prolonged period of mutual communion and liberty.” He added, “The needs of the emotional life. . . demand that such unions based on mutual attraction should be so far as possible permanent.”
He would later add that some form of erotic variety was necessary, even within marriage, but that such variety should be in the form of sensitive affairs, “liaisons” of love that protected, even enhanced marriage. Like most researchers, he felt that marriage could not compete with variety, his own theories paralleling the change from exclusivity to a search for variety characteristic of many marriages.
Ellis did not think much of traditional Western marriage. He felt that Western marriage deromanticized the marital relationship, making a contract out of a natural state of relating, changing the substantive joining of two people to a formal agreement between two partners. He repeated that marriage was “not a contract, but a fact.” As with all of the theorists of the first three perspectives, Ellis struggled with the conflict between the erotic and hedonistic on one hand and the romantic and intimate on the other.
Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Albert Moll, Edward Carpenter, Auguste Forel, Iwan Block, Magnus Hirsch-feld, and certainly Sigmund Freud were all influential in the period of sexual transition beginning in the 1890s with Ellis’s work. Masters and Johnson’s recent book On Sex and Human Loving traces many of these influences on what philosopher Paul Robinson calls this “modernization of sex.”
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