J. William Lloyd (J. William Lloyd) (June 4, 1857 – 1940) was an American individualist anarchist. Lloyd was born in New Jersey, and later moved to Grahamville, Florida. He based his individualist anarchism upon natural law, rather than on egoism as Benjamin Tucker did; this was a source of conflict amidst otherwise friendly relations between Tucker and himself. Lloyd later modified his position to minarchism.
Lloyd was known as the “drugless physician.” In addition to The Karezza Method, or Magnetation: The Art of Connubial Love, he authored various unpublished writings on the subject of ideal relationships.[1]
The Karezza Method is a beautiful, practical little volume. In it Lloyd, a medical doctor, addresses such concerns as the question of semen buildup. He concluded from examples of sterilized men that semen is absorbed back into the body, if it is not let out.[2]
Lloyd openly questioned the trend toward viewing orgasm as purely beneficial. Concerning the male, he pointed to a standard stockbreeder practice to not let a bull or a stallion serve too many or too often so as not to devitalize him. This practical knowledge of businessmen to him was unbiased evidence on the effects of ejaculation.[3]
Lloyd observed that karezza offered health benefits. For example, he said he knew it to “act like magic in painful menstruation,” and as a remarkable nerve sedative, even curing nervous headache. He also found it one of the best agents “for the benefit and cure of ordinary sexual weaknesses and ailments, including urethritis and prostatitis.”
In successful Karezza the sex-organs become quiet, satisfied, demagnetized, as perfectly as by the orgasm, while the rest of the body of each partner glows with a wonderful vigor and conscious joy … tending to irradiate the whole being with romantic love; and always with an after-feeling of health, purity and well-being. We are most happy and good-humored as after a full meal.[4]
However, he was “willing to concede that where the intercourse is of such a nature as to cause a congestion that is not sublimated, or where sexual congestion occurs and sublimation and [karezza] are not available, the orgasm may have a necessary place.”
In Lloyd’s day, some people objected to karezza on the grounds that it would encourage excessive indulgence in sexual relations. He responded:
Those who do not use Karezza are vastly more liable to excess, and this usually from too frequent and intense orgasms, too frequent pregnancies, or too coarse, cynical and invasive an attitude. Where there is merely a physical itch or craving gratified, with no mutual tenderness or kindness, or perhaps actually against the desire or protest of one party, sex is always excessive.[5]
Lloyd offered many practical, inspiring tips for successful karezza, including the need for lovers to give in order to benefit from controlled intercourse. “Try to feel yourself a magnetic battery,” he advised.
As you acquire the habit of giving your sexual electricity out in blessing to your partner from your sex-organs, hands, lips, skin, eyes and voice, you will acquire the power to satisfy yourself and her without an orgasm. Soon you will not even think of self-control, because you will have no desire for the orgasm, nor will she.[6]
Karezza, said Lloyd, is the greatest beautifier because it increases and makes enduring heart love. He advised that to increase sexual control, “keep the spiritual on top, dominant—loving is the first thing, and at-one-ment … of your souls, your real end.” “Sex is very close to soul.… [It only satisfies] when it unites souls, not merely copulates bodies for a thrill.”
In a chapter called “Does the Woman Need the Orgasm?” he explained in karezza, the lady “melts” her whole being to her partner and there is not an orgasm in the ordinary definition of the word, yet beneficial physical relaxation also occurs.[7]
A mystic at heart, Lloyd surmised that lovers’ experiences of oneness represent the re-creation of the divine androgyne at the heart of so many esoteric thought systems. He wrote that the full magnetic rapport of karezza occurs when:
Two souls and bodies seem as one, supported and floating on some divine stream in Paradise.… This is the real ideal and end of Karezza. You will finally enter into such unity that in your fullest embrace you can hardly tell yourselves apart and can read each other’s thoughts. You will feel a physical unity as if her blood flowed in your veins, her flesh were yours. For this is the Soul-Blending Embrace.[8]