Dr. Reuben's Mixture

By R. Z. S.

ANY WOMAN CAN! by David Reuben, M.D. 364 pages. McKay. $7.95

David Reuben, M.D., the California psychiatrist, boyish authority symbol and author of Everything You Always Wanted to know About Sex . . . etc., continues to practice writing without a license. Like EYAWTKAS, his latest effort is an ask-the-answerman approach to sex education and social adjustment. Pound for pound and dollar for dollar, the first book provided a lot more incontestable information. Any Woman Can! makes sense mostly as an overpriced, over-the-counter nostrum marketed to exploit whatever Women's Lib awareness has spread to the nation's largest day-to-day purchasing-power bloc--white, middleclass, heterosexual females.

Dubious Advice. Reuben employs his familiar casual coyness, strained informality, unconvincing case histories and weak jokes. There is also some sloppy scholarship and an occasional piece of dubious advice. For example, he gleefully quotes "a veteran police officer" who advises women threatened with imminent rape to take the assailant's testicles in one hand and smash them with the other. In his conflicting role as women's liberator and amiable guardian of traditional femininity, Reuben asks: "Should a woman really do something as terrible as that?" Naturally, the good liberal doctor would not want to be responsible for the violent consequences of an unsure grip or poor aim directed at a moving target. His cop-out answer: "It's up to her. Being raped can be pretty terrible, too."

Granted, Reuben is not a karate expert. But even his science is distorted to bolster his image as an honorary member of the Sisterhood. "Every human embryo starts out as female," Reuben asserts. It is the same nonsense fobbed off by Kate Millett (Sexual Politics, page 30), who claimed as her source not a geneticist but a woman psychoanalyst. The fallacious reasoning behind the claim is that since human fetuses start out without male genitalia. they are physically female. The fact is that sex is determined at the moment of fertilization by the combination of chromosomes contained in the sperm and egg. One may as well argue that because new fetuses of mice and men are similar, all men start out as rodents.

Happily, Reuben does not often tangle with anything so complex as high school zoology. Mostly he cheerleads for more and better female orgasms: "The female capacity for orgasm is so great that it has never been fully measured."

Patent Medicines. In subsequent chapters, Dr. Reuben sensibly relates sexual pleasure to higher erogenous zones like the brain. But generally he is too busy trying to shimmy, like Sister Kate, to rhythms established by Masters and Johnson. His chapters on how to catch and hold a man are out of the dark ages of the women's magazines. Where else could one find such statements as "selecting a husband is the most urgent and critical decision a woman will make in her lifetime," or his description of dedicated bachelors as "always charming, always engaging, but regrettably never charmed and never engaged."

There is little doubt that Reuben is as concerned with maximizing human happiness as he is with formulating another bestseller. His basic premise is that "every modern woman is entitled to enjoy the greatest sensory experiences." Yet he seems to have little appreciation of the incredible variety and uniqueness of life. While he consistently states that a woman should make up her own mind about how to satisfy her sexual appetites, he is practically Mosaic in insisting that the best place to do it is through a monogamous, heterosexual marriage. But then how does a woman make the most of her unmeasured capacity for orgasms with only one man? At this point Reuben suggests settling for quality, not quantity. Such advice, like most patent medicines, is perfectly O.K. as long as the patient is reasonably healthy. But if pain persists, better see a physician.

. R.Z.S.

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