For the discerning: When this book first came out in 1961, people asked me if it was based on my personal experience. To avoid any misunderstandings, let me explain. I always had a complaint: that the most intense sensation of absolute biological happiness we experience, the sexual one, intensifies and reaches its climax in the scream of orgasm, only to annihilate us as it diminishes. This indescribable sensation has a taste of eternity. Yet no one and nothing has been able to capture, describe, or stop it. I believed at the same time that we owe this sensual happiness to the serpentine, as much as to our bodies. That's what I was trying to capture. Only when I finished writing did I realize that, beyond my hymn to man-love, I was also sending a liberating message to women.