Only Human - Chapter Two

How many women are enough in one man’s lifetime?

            That’s a very sexist question, isn’t it?  Perhaps I should ask, how many sexual partners are enough in one person’s lifetime?  What is the optimum number?  The ideal figure?

            For me the number was one.  Across six decades, we shared everything two human beings can share: friendship, love, sex, fun, adventure.  Kids.  And some bad stuff, too, especially at the end of my wife’s life.

            What did we miss out on?  Variety, I guess. 

            I envision the answer to my question geometrically.  A vertical line at right angle to a horizontal line.  The horizontal line represents the number of intimate relationships.  The vertical line stands for the depth of each such relationship.  The longer the horizontal line, the shorter the vertical one… and vice versa. 

            Consider this extreme: a man whose purpose is to have sex with as many women as possible.  Such men have existed and presumably exist today.  John Curtis Holmes was a porn star who died in 1988 at the tender age of 43.  He crammed a lot of sex into those few decades.  His documented credits include 543 films.  Complications from AIDS eventually killed him.  His life, his legendary penis, his drug use, drug dealing and other criminal activities are all widely documented in books, including an autobiography, some bios and in-depth articles, and a couple of documentary films.  The single fact that interests me here is the sheer number of sexual encounters.    He once claimed to have had intercourse with more than 14,000 women.  Holmes himself later admitted that he pulled this number out of thin air when his career was waning.  Still, in a film career that ran roughly from 1967 into 1987, if he had sex with half a dozen women on average per film, he easily must have topped 3,000. 

            That was how Holmes primarily made his living.  The films were supplemented, and sometimes surpassed, by his drug dealing. which supported his own addiction.  In the documentary “Wadd: The Life and Times of John C. Holmes,” he’s compared to Elvis Presley… the King (of pornography in Holmes’s case).  If so, he was a king without a kingdom.  Fundamentally, he was a sex worker, albeit a famous one.  It didn’t make him rich or powerful.

            “Sex workers”, usually meaning prostitutes, comprise an enormous ---and some say humanity’s first --- profession.  The profession has a union, appropriately the International Union of Sex Workers.  According to the IUSW, the U.S. has somewhere between one and two million prostitutes (quite a vague, but still impressive, estimate); China, more than five million; Russia, three million; India, the same.  Certainly, those workers with long careers must rival John Holmes’s RBI record.  Or perhaps they even surpass it, albeit they remain unsung.

            The toilers in Holmes’s world do it for the dough.  They expressly, one might even say emphatically, are not looking to procreate.  Ironically, procreation is the primal and primary purpose of sex.  Spraying one’s seed as far afield as possible is a fundamental strategy for survival of the species, to wit: 

After a certain age, most adults settle into long-term partnerships that remain relatively stable for years, even a lifetime. But it’s not uncommon, either, for people to have briefer, less committed relationships: hookups, “friends with benefits,” extramarital affairs and the like.

This poses something of a problem for evolutionary psychologists, who seek to explain much of human behavior as inherited adaptations that have arisen over tens of thousands of years. It’s easy to find an adaptive reason why men might seek short-term sexual relationships. After all, a promiscuous man could potentially sire dozens, even hundreds of children, thus contributing more of his genes to the next generation — a win, in evolutionary terms.

            The pleasure and the prestige of seducing many partners are obvious “bonuses” for the promiscuous male.  In fact, so  rewarding are these two aspects of promiscuity that they have become ends in themselves, rather than facilitators of a larger end game (i.e., lots of offspring).  The prestige of the seducer needs very little validation. One example, I think, suffices.  The “Bond Girls” of the 50-year-old film franchise include such in-your-face monikers as Honey Ryder, Pussy Galore, Holly Goodhead and Mary Goodnight.  Bedding these beauties is part and parcel of Bond’s image, his persona, his claim to fame, just as much or more than his prowess in all manner of combat and sport.  Indeed, seduction is his primary sport.  Gone is any conception of conceiving.  Social Darwinism triumphs over its biological counterpart.  The male moviegoer may be titillated.  But pleasure has very little to do with Bond’s sexual exploits.  It’s all about the prestige.  Bond is the “R” rated rendition of John Holmes. 

            I contend that prestige predominates on the male side of the equation.  And, so, I repeat my question: How many women are enough in one man’s lifetime?

            There is, of course, the first one.  More precisely, there is the when of the first one.  When a lad loses his virginity implicates the potential for a great deal of prestige… or the embarrassing absence thereof.  In my day ---the Sixties--- it wasn’t unusual to graduate from high school as a virgin.  Graduating from college in that sorry state was much rarer, but not unknown.  Ben (Dustin Hoffman) of “The Graduate” (1967) probably was a virgin until Mrs. Robinson got hold of him.  One of my college frat brothers was as well, if memory still serves. 

            It’s hard to ignore the data from such sources as the famous Kinsey Report, which chronicled an unexpectedly high amount of hanky-panky among the American populace at large.  But it’s also true that much lying and exaggeration infuses the conversations of teenaged boys and young men.  I can assure you that was true 60 years ago.  And apparently it’s still true today.  Here’s what a 15-year-old study found: “60 percent reported lying about something related to sex: 30 percent lied about how far they have gone, 24 percent about their number of sexual partners, and 23 percent about their virginity status.”

            Once this threshold challenge ---loss of male virginity--- is mastered, a male’s sexual career can get underway in earnest.  Some hard wiring can come into the picture.  Many of us are attracted to a certain type of woman, defined by race, physical characteristics, personality traits, etc.  Some will be attracted to other males.  And some, God help them, may be attracted to children.

            In mid-2025, the news is dominated by the late Jeffrey Epstein.  I watched a few episodes of a 2020 documentary called “Surviving Jeffrey Epstein.” Epstein had been found dead in his prison cell a year earlier.  According to the Department of Justice’s indictment, “As set forth herein, over the course of many years, JEFFREY EPSTEIN, the defendant, sexually exploited and abused dozens of minor girls at his homes in Manhattan, New York, and Palm Beach, Florida, among other locations.”

            Epstein’s prestige, as a billionaire, may have facilitated his predatory behavior.  But it’s unlikely that prestige figured into his predation.  Based upon what I saw and heard in the documentary, he was an obsessive predator.  Perhaps Holmes was, obsessed, too. 

            According to the Mayo Clinic,

Compulsive sexual behavior is sometimes called hypersexuality or sexual addiction. It's an intense focus on sexual fantasies, urges or behaviors that can't be controlled. This causes distress and problems for your health, job, relationships or other parts of your life.

Compulsive sexual behavior may involve different kinds of commonly enjoyable sexual experiences. Examples include masturbation, sexual arousal by using a computer to communicate, multiple sexual partners, use of pornography or paying for sex. But when these sexual behaviors become a major, constant focus in your life, are difficult to control, cause problems in your life, or are harmful to you or others, that's likely compulsive sexual behavior.

            Kinsey and others revealed that a lot happens behind closed doors that we guys don’t usually reveal to the world, or even to our best friends and closest relatives.  Fair enough.  Even so, I’m going to crawl out on a limb here and suggest that most males follow a predictable, even mundane, trajectory from the loss of their virginity.  For a while, most young men sow their wild oats, i.e., according one online dictionary, means, “engag[ing] in a period of wild or irresponsible behavior while young, especially involving many casual sexual relationships.”

            How long this “period of wild or irresponsible behavior” lasts depends on a number of factors.  One involves the question I asked at the very start of this chapter: how many women are enough?  Another is falling in love.  ‘THE ONE’ comes along, he tumbles for her, and that is that.

            Or is it?

            Enter the serial monogamist. 

Serial monogamy is the practice of moving from one longer-term sexual partner to another. A serial monogamist could have lots of relationships that last only a short time or several relationships that last a year or more.

For example, some serial monogamists may date a series of people one after another, each for a few weeks or months at a time. Others may date someone for a longer period of time but find themselves struggling to stay single when they break up.

            Serial monogamy combined with marriage and divorce can get expensive.  But indefinite financial obligations might not be the only ongoing aspect of a string of marriages.  Consider Willy Nelson, for whom the fourth time was the charm:

The legendary country singer-songwriter has admitted that he's made his fair share of relationship mistakes over the years, but marrying wife Annie D'Angelo was "about the smartest thing [he] ever did."

Prior to D'Angelo, Nelson was married to his teenage sweetheart, Martha Matthews, from 1952 to 1962. He then married singer Shirley Collie in 1963 before their split in 1971. He and Connie Kopeke got married that same year, but the two divorced in 1988. The "On the Road Again" singer has eight children from his four marriages, two of which he shares with D'Angelo, whom he's been married to since 1991.

Though his past marriages didn't work out, Nelson has never wavered in respecting the relationship between his children and their respective mothers. He also still has love for his previous partners, noting in his joint memoir, Me and Sister Bobbie: True Tales of the Family Band, that the words "former wife" aren't part of his vocabulary.

            Some men stay married, but find variety outside their marital bonds.  They may have long-term mistresses or merely occasional, casual encounters.  These extramarital relationships and encounters may provide the variety they crave, whether to relieve their boredom or to provide a form of forbidden fruit.  I remember seeing a gangster film sometime back in which the protagonist justified his infidelity like this:  “My wife’s lips kiss my children.”  I think you get the idea.

            According to Brides magazine, 23 percent of men and 19 percent of women admit to cheating.  The same article says that 15-20  percent of marriages are infected with infidelity, at least according to one report.  This doesn’t seem so bad to me, although I suspect the figure understates reality.  Just my gut talking here.

            I have another gut feeling, based on casual (but extensive) observations.  My impression is that many married couples are like salmon.  They court, marry, spawn.  Then they focus their attention away from sex and romance and onto food.  At least in America.  According to the Centers for Disease Control, 40 percent of American adults (100 million of us) are obese. 

            Now I could be dead wrong.  But I don’t see these fellow citizens as conducting passionate sex lives with their spouses after they have ballooned.  Much less do I envision them “running around on” their spouses, to use a term my parents would have recognized.

            While I may have carried a few more pounds at times during my half-century of marriage  than was seemly, I was never obese.  Indeed, at times I was downright slender.  And though my Joey was a really good cook, ours was never a relationship centered on food. 

            So how can I explain 54 years of fidelity?

            As a lifelong fancier of films, I think my best answer can be borrowed from a snippet of dialogue in the 1965 movie “Shenandoah”:

Sam: I want to ask for your daughter’s hand in marriage.
Charlie: Why? Why do you want to marry her?
Sam: Well, I love her.
Charlie: That’s not good enough. Do you like her?
Sam: I just said I….
Charlie: No, no. You said you loved her. There is some difference between love and like. You see, Sam, when you love a woman without likin’ her, the night can be long and cold, and contempt comes up with the sun.

            I liked my Joey from the time we worked together on the Marian Catholic High School student newspaper way back in 1964.  We were friends before we ever dated.  She liked me too.  And that never wore off, not even during our sixties and into our seventies.  Had she lived longer, I have no doubt that this liking would have been sustained between us.  As one expert put it:

This advice from the Shenandoah film impacted me years ago. For all the effort I put into being a loving person and loving unconditionally, I put forth as much effort “to like.” When we love a person, a book, a church, a religion, so much so, we may forget to like them. And, this can lead to hate.

But stop. And like.

Liking isn’t so apt to become obsessed. Liking isn’t so quick to hold false expectations. Liking is more open-minded, has a sense of humor, and can move past faults while yet aiming for the higher ideal.

            For me --- and I dare to assume for my Joey, too ---  our mutual liking trumped all temptations, surmounted any possibility of boredom, and made it easy to answer the question “how many?” with the simple answer: ONE.