Breaking the Silence : MAKING LOVE: An Erotic Odyssey, <i> by Richard Rhodes (Simon & Schuster: $18; 175 pp.)</i>

There are two ways of looking at Richard Rhodes’ “Making Love: An Erotic Odyssey”: as original, authentic reportage from the front lines of adventurous copulation, and as the narcissistic ramblings of a writer who has lost all perspective. Seeing the sexual act as “a sovereignty waiting to be explored, just as consciousness was for early modern fiction,” Rhodes naturally takes the former point of view. He is no doubt prepared for readers to take the latter view, however, for he is very much aware that this detailed account of his erotic life--much of it masturbatory--breaks all sorts of cultural taboos about privacy. For that he deserves praise . . . but also a kick in the shins for breaking those taboos so ostentatiously, to the point that he seems an exhibitionist as often as a purposeful, relentless reporter.

Rhodes says he became obsessed with sex because of the abuse he suffered as a child at the hands of his stepmother. He detailed that abuse in his last book, “A Hole in the World,” and no one who has read that volume will forget his description of being denied access to the bathroom due to his stepmother’s fear that he would spy on his parents’ sex life. This led Rhodes to hide bottles of urine in a closet, and to suffer intensely from a fear that those bottles might be detected. Through psychoanalysis, Rhodes came to see that his lifelong practice of masturbation--one of his two wives called it a “hobby”--was “a way to reduce the pervasive, free-floating anxiety of my post-traumatic stress disorder by focusing on an immediate bodily sensation, a way as well to edit and revise my childhood experience of torture--sexual turgidity substituting for urinary urgency, ejaculation achieved prevailing over urination denied.”

This explanation gives poignancy to Rhodes’ account of his early sexual life: his discovery of masturbation, his loss of virginity, his first orgasm, his encounters with older women and his relationships with fellow adolescents--all those early sexual milestones with which most men, at least, can identify. When Rhodes begins to describe his mature sex life, however, “Making Love” loses much of its appeal, for we no longer have the sense that the author is searching for something, that he is on a true odyssey. The problem isn’t that Rhodes’ writing is unusually explicit or that he favors somewhat unusual sexual practices; it is that he shows no interest placing sex in the context of adult relationships.

One reason for this is that much of Rhodes’ sexual life takes place without social context: He has spent many solitary hours screening pornographic videotapes in the company of no more than a bedsheet, a towel, a remote control, and a jar of Vaseline, sufficient time to have become an expert in determining which female stars actually achieved orgasm on camera. (Marilyn Chambers, for one, according to Rhodes, who applauds the makers of “Behind the Green Door” for filming her face during orgasm rather than her genitals.)

Even when making love to a living woman, however, Rhodes manages to make the sexual act primarily a question of mechanics. While one can’t dispute his assertion that “sex is a skill like any other, whether or not it’s informed and deepened by love,” Rhodes’ defiant focus on the physical side of sex, at the expense of the emotional, ends up dehumanizing everyone involved.

In his defense, Rhodes argues that his focus is an unfortunate but necessary way of preserving the privacy of his sexual partners. It is a specious argument, however, for he easily could talk about his own feelings and his relationships with bedmates without revealing identities or compromising his notion that sex is an important act in and of itself. That he does so only rarely leads us to believe that he got little out of sex but sex: little closeness, little warmth, little sense of connection.

That impression becomes all the stronger in the last 40 pages of “Making Love,” when Rhodes describes his extramarital affair, apparently an ongoing one, with a woman he calls G--. She seems as sexually voracious and daring as he, and it soon becomes clear that G-- is virtually his doppelganger: abused as a child, haunted by a violent death in the family, fiercely independent, and emotionally fragile. Rhodes, through frequent and extended sexual play concentrated exclusively on her pleasure, brings her closer and closer to real intimacy until she trusts him fully and says “I’ve never let anyone in this way before.”

Eventually sex becomes transcendent for Rhodes (apparently for the first time) as well as for G--, and at this point it’s impossible not to think that when Rhodes writes about G-- he is really writing about himself--and that in the last analysis this book is ultimately about love, not sex. Ironically, Rhodes seems embarrassed by love, not by sex, discovering in the course of the book that people are “interpenetrated and interpenetrable” emotionally as well as sexually.

Rhodes’ relationship with G-- is again symptomatic of his sexual maladjustment: the author is proud to note that he was the first man to bring her to orgasm through cunnilingus, and that he brought her to as many as 14 (!) orgasms in one afternoon, yet for the longest time he doesn’t realize that these superhuman feats may be putting enormous pressure on his partner. Only after they begin to fight a lot, and G-- retreats from love-making, does Rhodes come to understand that he’s “evolved to something like a vampire,” bent primarily on creating of his partner an “ecstatic figure,” one “drunk with sensation, overstimulated, perpetually orgasmic.” It doesn’t take Freud to see that Rhodes’ sexual life continues to be dysfunctional even with G--, that he is still substituting sex for love--and that “Making Love” is an attempt to put that dysfunction both on the record and behind him.

Rhodes isn’t going to win a Pulitzer Prize for “Making Love,” as he did for “The Making of the Atomic Bomb,” nor many new fans. This book shows him to be, as always, a first-rate reporter, but it’s hard to leave it without wishing that he had spent as much time researching the emotional side of sex as its mechanics. For all his explicitness, Rhodes still seems to be the prisoner of a culture that makes it difficult to talk freely about sexuality. His imprisonment, in fact, may have encouraged his neuroses, such as his tendency to view sex as a means of gaining approval and control rather than as an expression of desire for love.

“Making Love” is by no means an apology for the author’s sexual life, but it is a backhanded “ J’Accuse ,” a graphic illustration of how social mores--in this case prudishness--can exacerbate deep psychological wounds by forcing them underground.