So the goal of therapy and of couples work is not perfection. Nor is it the elimination of all forms of armor. Armor is sometimes useful. But it should be worked through until it becomes conscious and disposable—a functional armor that we do not have to bring to bed with us, or wear when we are playing with children or relaxing with our friends. To work through it we must examine it in the contexts of our emotional life as a whole and of our sexual life where our emotions are expressed most fully.

It is as if there were two interdependent sets of processes going on in the sexual act: physical processes such as tumescence, erection, movement, friction, detumescence, ejaculation; and emotional processes such as excitement, tenderness, and sensations of streamings, melting and fusion. The emotional and sensory factors in the sexual act cannot be adequately explained with reference to the physical factors alone, especially when these are explained in the mechanistic terms of physiology. An example of this is the fact that ejaculation may be experienced coldly, without pleasure, or intensely with overwhelming pleasure. This depends not simply on the mechanical release of tension, which by definition occurs in both cases, but on the release of emotional and sensory excitation which has been allowed to build to a high level. This is why mechanical masturbation with the hand or a vibrator is not the same experientially as intercourse leading to orgasm. The difference is not simply psychological (the knowledge that one is with the beloved) but in terms of excitation, intensity, and the many specific sensations of fusion. The involuntary pulsation in intercourse is much more extensive, so that even in mechanical terms the person is experiencing more. A person who finds masturbation the equivalent of intercourse is being prevented by blocks and anxieties from full experience of emotional tension and relaxation.

Blocks to feeling the difference between the emotional and mechanical factors in orgasm may lead to some serious misconceptions of the sexual act. Reich stated, wrongly I think, that in intercourse each person strives to attain "a maximum of tension before orgasm occurs." This can mean that in the sexual act, or in any emotional process, there is a progressive increase of mechanical tension to the point where it can no longer be sustained, so that it then must be relaxed in a process resembling fatigue. This is analogous to clenching your fist so hard that pain and fatigue force it to let go and release. Or, as in some therapy, to putting the patient in such a stressful position that the muscles are eventually forced to let go into trembling or reactive movements which the therapist considers spontaneous but which merely indicate that a mechanical breaking point has been passed. In this approach, the sexual act consists of maneuvers to increase mechanical tension (pushing the feet against a wall, squeezing the thighs together or stiffening the body to breaking point) so that at climax there is a collapse into relaxation. This mechanical-athletic view of sex is common. At climax the person collapses into an exhaustion which is usually mistaken for release.

In terms of the autonomic nervous system (ANS), erection of the penis or engorgement of the vagina are expansive (parasympathetic) processes and ejaculation or climax are contractive (sympathetic) processes. Both sides of this are pleasurable (which incidentally refutes a claim of Reich's that the parasympathetic represents pleasure, the sympathetic represents anxiety). In autonomic expansion there is also physical expansion: blood vessels engorge, the penis becomes bigger, there is an increase in muscle tonus. And a similar process operates all through the body in the sexual act: there is an overall increase in tonus, the musculature is activated powerfully, peripheral blood vessels fill up so that the skin becomes pink and warm. In a sense the whole body, in both sexes, takes on the characteristics of erection and tumescence.

This is certainly a process of increased tension. Reich, who was the pioneer in this whole field of description of sexual processes, tended to look at them over-mechanistically, but he provided some valuable distinctions, such as the following (from The Function of the Orgasm):

"Carefully recorded sex histories from analytic subjects reveal that there are two types of genital friction movements: one is a deliberate straining and pushing of the entire torso; the other a more spontaneous undulating movement arising from the pelvis itself. We find the first type in people with heightened muscle tonus. . . The second kind occurs only in people who are muscularly relaxed."

In other words, some people are hypertonic, their muscles chronically hard. In sex they push and strain in a process of further tightening and hardening, which is either not released at climax or is released as a mechanical collapse from this induced tension. Other people, who are more relaxed, are open to the build-up of a muscle tension which expresses excitement but is not hard or forced, and where movements can be spontaneous and undulating. I would say that in the first case the sex act is a process of push, in the second case a process of pull, in the sense that movements are gentle and in response to feelings of being attracted, drawn toward the other person, pulled in to melting and fusion. All movements follow on the initial attraction which, as common language shows, is felt as magnetic or a tug toward the other person. (If sexual attraction can ever be described in terms of physics, it will have to be gravity physics!)

Soft, undulatory movements do require muscular tension: total relaxation of the musculature would make movement impossible. But the muscular tension in the sex act dominated by pull is not hypertonus, it is simply tonus. Similarly the erect penis does not, contrary to the common phrase, have to be really hard; it simply has to be firm.

Extreme hardness (hypertonus) of the musculature, as well as extreme softness (hypotonus) are part of the emergency responses discussed in chapter 3. Both result from activation of the sympathetic (contractive) branch of the autonomic nervous system. This has caused some puzzlement to physiologists: how can such opposite reactions fulfill the same emergency function? But this becomes clear with reference to the ERs: hardening of the muscles is a preparation for fight or flight, as is generally acknowledged; softening is part of a fright paralysis or reaction of collapse. Unfortunately, for many people sex is an anxiety-ridden situation which evokes their characteristic ER. Some push their bodies violently or mechanically, as if attacking the partner or scared stiff; others "go away" into inertia and passivity.

In the natural, healthy case where the person can tolerate excitation, the musculature gains tonus as part of increasingly excited movement which soon becomes involuntary; but mechanical fatigue does not occur although the whole body is mobilized and the heartbeat accelerates in a steady way. Rather, as the undulatory movements of intercourse continue, the excitation builds to a point where it is overwhelming, an increase of excitation but not of mechanical tension. At this point the musculature, whose tonus has been maintained but not increased throughout the movements, goes into convulsive contractions.

In practical terms this means that although movements may become intense, powerful, even forceful, they are never hard. They can remain gentle, soft, part of surrender, being drawn into fusion with the other. It is like the strength of a plant which bursts through hard earth but is not itself hard. This is love, not the pushing mechanical movements of "fucking."

Many readers will already have some sense of the difference between the sexuality of push (making it, anxiously getting it done—fucking) and that of pull (attraction, being drawn toward fusion—loving). Most of us have experienced both, and we know that love really works. We cannot always re-create love. We may resort anxiously to pushing. Part of opening ourselves to love, however, is to let go of this anxious pushing. To do this, we must become aware of it and of exactly where the difference lies, as well as of our characteristic ways of avoiding surrender to orgasm.