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Potency jokes—another rich vein of Legmanian source material—invariably conceal the fear of inadequacy or impotence behind outrageous boasts: First woman: "Did you hear about the woman who had quadruplets? I understand that only happens once every 60,000 times." Second woman: "My goodness, when does she get her housework done?" Although the characters are women, the perspective is male; as Legman notes, women never compose dirty jokes but are nearly always the butt of them. The alleged insatiability of the female also runs as an undercurrent through that story—providing a way for the male who is worried about his sexual adequacy to blame it on his partner. This principle comes clear in the joke about a wife whose doctor informs her that her husband is suffering from the physical effects of dissipation: "Dissipation? But doctor, that's impossible. Why he's been home every night since we were married."
Across the Threshold. Legman's arguments are buttressed by an informed understanding of psychoanalytic theory and by a wide acquaintance with the classics. He makes a convincing case for the naked hostility hidden in most vulgarisms for the sex act. Two examples are the transparent sexuality of the most romantic of marriage rituals ("Carrying the bride across the threshold really means crossing the threshold of the bride, doesn't it?"), and the homosexual tendencies of the Don Juan ("The actual meaning of the urge to get through intercourse as fast as possible is that one hates the woman, or women"). All this suggests the obsessive quality of man's erotic fears—and the cathartic character of the dirty joke.
"People do not joke about what makes them happy or what is sacred to them," Legman says. "They joke only about what frightens or disturbs them." He agrees with Freud that "it is not our hatred of our enemies that harms us: it is our hatred for the people we really love that destroys us." By giving vent to this ambivalence, unacceptable at the level of consciousness, the dirty joke plays a small but necessary part in preserving man's emotional balance.