The Karezza Method

Karezza is controlled non-seminal intercourse. The word Karezza (pronounced Ka-ret-za) is from the Italian and means a caress. Alice B. Stockham, M.D., was the first one who applied it as the distinctive name of the art and method of sexual relations without orgasmal conclusion. But the art and method itself was discovered in 1844 by John Humphrey Noyes, the founder of the Oneida Community, by experiences and experiments in his own marital life. He called it Male Continence. Afterwards George N. Miller, a member of the Community, gave it the name of Zugassent's Discovery in a work of fiction, The Strike of a Sex. There are objections to both these names. Zugassent was not a real person, therefore did not discover it. It was Noyes' Discovery, in fact. Continence, as Dr. Stockham points out, has come to mean abstinence from all intercourse. The Oneida Communists do not appear to have opposed the female orgasm, therefore it was well enough for them to name it Male Continence, but Dr. Stockham and I agree that in the highest form and best expression of the art neither man nor, woman has or desires to have the orgasm, therefore it is no more male than female continence. And a single-word name is always more convenient than a compound. For which reasons I have accepted Dr. Stockham's musical term, which is besides, beautifully suggestive and descriptive. another writer on this art (I first heard of it through him; he deriving it from Noyes) was Albert Chavannes, who in a little book on it, called it Magnetation, a name which I coined for him. It is perhaps not a bad name; but I now think Karezza better.