The Sex Therapists: What They Can Do and How They Do It (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior Book 15)

  Table of Contents

  * * *

  Introduction

  More Like a Nurse than a Hooker

  The Right Not to be Gay

  Swinging as Therapy

  Lay Analysis

  A Good Excuse for an Orgy

  Let Them Cure Each Other

  In Praise of the Electric Toothbrush

  About the Author

  The Sex Therapists

  John Warren Wells

  Lawrence Block

  * * *

  copyright © 1972, 2012, Lawrence Block

  All Rights Reserved

  Introduction

  In the following pages you will make the acquaintance of:

  A prostitute who accepts referrals from psychiatrists and thinks of herself as more like a nurse than a hooker . . .

  A psychiatrist who helps homosexuals function as heterosexuals . . .

  A couple who engage in group sex to learn how to be better lovers . . .

  A couple of psychotherapists who seduce their female patients . . .

  A self-appointed guru who runs orgies and calls them encounter groups . . .

  A clinical psychologist who pairs off patients for sexual experimentation . . .

  And a woman who found her way to sexual fulfillment with an electric toothbrush.

  And you just might wonder what in the hell they’ve got in common.

  Well, I certainly wouldn’t blame you for wondering. What puts all of these people between the covers of the same book is that their experiences all illustrate various facets of the topic of sexual therapy.

  Sexual therapy is a relatively recent phenomenon. In one sense it’s been around forever—or at least as long as there have been some people whose sex lives have been less than ideal, which I would certainly presume dates from the expulsion from Eden. But until fairly recently, the methods of dealing with various forms of sexual dysfunction seemed to be more concerned with causes than treatment. Conventional psychotherapy operated more or less on the premise that some aspect of a personality was responsible for a person’s inability to function in the sexual sphere. Through various forms of talk-therapy, the patient was encouraged to understand how previous experiences had created inhibitions of one sort or another, with the idea in mind that understanding would lead to resolution of the underlying problems, and hence to amelioration of the sexual difficulty. Sometimes this worked and sometimes it didn’t.

  In recent years, many responsible persons have come to the conclusion that, whatever the underlying causes of emotional discontent, the first step toward improvement lies in dealing with precisely those problems which beset the patient here and now. According to this school of thought, if a man has a morbid fear of raincoats, the first thing to do is cure his fear of raincoats. With that out of the way, one may inquire into the origin of the fear. Or one may not bother inquiring into the origin of the fear, simply contenting oneself with the knowledge that the poor fellow no longer goes into an anxiety attack every time he sees a yellow slicker.

  The value of this orientation is especially apparent in the area of sexual problems. If a man is sexually impotent because he hates his mother, his feelings toward her are not his main problem; his main problem, and the thing most likely to interfere with his enjoyment of his life, is that he cannot get an erection. Investigate the origins of his hatred for his mother and he may still remain impotent. Cure his impotence, render him sexually adequate, and he very well may go on hating his mother—a sentiment which may be unfortunate, but which is a hell of a lot easier to live with than impotence.

  The major breakthrough in dealing directly with human sexual problems was achieved by the Masters and Johnson clinic in St. Louis. After an extraordinary investigation of human sexual response, Masters and Johnson turned their attention to the problems of sexual dysfunction and acted on the premise that it was possible to cure sexual problems simply by curing them, that specific techniques could be applied to specific problems and that successful results could be achieved in this manner.

  We won’t examine Masters and Johnson at length here if only because there are several books available which cover the subject far better than I could. The interested reader would be well advised to consult the second Masters and Johnson book, Human Sexual Inadequacy. If it proves difficult reading (as it does for most people) there are several books available which, in essence, translate M and J into basic English. In addition, the reader might wish to familiarize himself with The Couple, by an anonymous husband and wife who took their sexual problems to Masters and Johnson; the program is explained very intelligibly, and if one can get past the mild nauseating style in which the book is written, it can be valuable. Also revealing is Surrogate Wife, by Valerie X. Scott as told to Herbert d’H Lee, the former a pseudonym for a sexual surrogate employed by Masters and Johnson, the latter a pseudonym for a successful novelist. I’m not sure how strictly accurate the book is, but it’s very much worth reading for its insight into M and J methodology, and it’s well written.

  This book concerns itself with various ways other therapists have adapted M and J techniques to suit their own therapeutic practices. It deals, too, with approaches of other professionals to the idea of sexual therapy, and with ways in which individuals have attempted by themselves to deal with their sexual problems.

  • • •

  An important point:

  I am not a psychiatrist, a psychologist, a psychotherapist, or much of anything other than a writer. I do not endorse or condemn any of the techniques or therapeutic approaches discussed in the following pages. I do have my own opinions, and I’m sure they will be detected fairly easily in certain instances, but these are the opinions of a layman and should not be considered as endowed with authority.

  • • •

  Another point, which holds true for all of my books but is particularly pertinent here:

  All of the names in case history material have been deliberately altered, and physical descriptions and geographical data have been reworked to the point where identification of any of these people is absolutely out of the question. I have taken particular pains to render the professional persons interviewed and/or discussed utterly unrecognizable. Furthermore, I will not under any circumstances divulge the identities of any of these therapists, nor will I recommend therapists to anyone. If you want therapy, please don’t ask me where to go for it. Should you have specific ideas on the type of therapist you want—and you have that right, certainly—you may consult any psychologist or psychiatrist and tell him what you have in mind; if he’s not the right man for you he’ll probably know it, and he’ll probably be able to put you in touch with someone who is.

  More Like a Nurse than a Hooker

  Edith is a tall, slender girl with severely cropped dark brown hair which she frequently covers with a dark brown wig. Her hands, with long narrow fingers, are an arresting feature, as are her alert and direct brown eyes. She is about thirty, an attractive and well-mannered young woman with a well-modulated speaking voice and an excellent command of the language. She lives alone in a spacious three-room apartment on Manhattan’s East Side just a few blocks from the official residence of the Mayor of New York. She keeps, appropriately, a pair of Siamese cats; their sleek grace and air of aloof mystery complement the personality which she herself projects.

  She was married for three years and has been divorced for almost seven. Shortly after her divorce she began working as a call girl
, visiting men’s hotel rooms or turning tricks in her own apartment. A little over a year ago she began the metamorphosis from call girl to sexual therapist.

  • • •

  EDITH: It’s very nice being a professional person. Of course prostitution is supposed to be a profession, isn’t it? The world’s oldest, I understand. But it’s just not accorded the respect of the other professions.

  I didn’t make a sudden decision to stop accepting the usual sort of dates. It happened gradually. Not because of any desire to escape from prostitution, I don’t think. There were other factors. Convenience, for one. My therapy practice, if I may call it that, was building up to the point where I had quite a few hours of the day booked in advance. And Johns tended to call trying to book those hours, and I found myself more and more frequently in the position of having to turn down dates because they conflicted with my appointments.

  Another factor was security. This operated in two respects. First of all, as I began to see more and more patients and to get referrals from a greater number of doctors, I was reaching a point where I just didn’t need tricks from a financial standpoint. Even if I was only seeing one patient, I was earning enough to live on. I get five hundred dollars a week, or more often a thousand dollars for a two-week course of treatment. I’ve earned as much as three times that as a call girl, but I’ve also had stretches when the phone simply refused to ring, so I had always felt myself under pressure to earn money whenever the opportunity presented itself.

  I feel I ought to take in fifty thousand dollars a year. Of course that’s an enormous amount of money and one shouldn’t have to earn that much, but I’m very future oriented. I want to retire by the time I’m forty at the latest, and I want to be financially independent when I do. That means saving thirty thousand dollars a year, which is no problem at all if I earn fifty thousand. As a matter of fact, I’ve noticed that I’ve been saving a larger proportion of my income since I stopped ordinary prostitution. I suppose there are a few explanations for this. Henry would say that I’m experiencing less guilt and that in the past I compensated for guilt or attempted to expiate it by financial irresponsibility. It may be simpler than all that. It’s a simpler life, more ordinary, an easier routine, and I think that may have made it easier for me to regulate my expenses. But I wouldn’t want to disagree with Henry. He has a habit of being right.

  Another way that security comes into play is in a physical sense. Prostitution, especially with strangers, can be a very frightening way of life. You hear a voice on the telephone and you have to make a snap judgment. A man tells you that Joe from Kansas City gave him your phone number, and you have to decide on the basis of that whether he’s all right or if he’s a potential sex murderer or blackmailer or undercover cop. I’ve never had a really bad experience that way, but I’ve heard and read enough horror stories to realize the amount of danger involved. One Jack the Ripper is all you need.

  So I found that, as my therapy practice began to build up, I was turning down dates unless the callers were old customers. That was the first step. Then gradually I began weeding out some of the old customers. I became more selective. The ones who made a habit of showing up drunk, the ones whom I found personally obnoxious in one way or another. I never said I was getting out of the business, just that I was busy. Not many of them were very persistent. I would give out other numbers, a couple of girls I knew who would take tricks. Finally I saw that what I really wanted to do was drop all of my ordinary tricks, so I called a few steady customers and told them I was getting out of the business, then had my telephone number changed and gave out the new number only to the doctors who were referring people to me.

  Most of the time now I’ll be seeing two or three patients at a time. Once I had four patients at once, and that was a little hectic. Not that the sexual pace was that intense. There have been times when I’ve turned as many as a dozen tricks in a day. With patients, though, it’s different. You have to get personally involved with them. It’s not just a matter of spending more time with them than with a John. You have to expend more of yourself. Seeing four men at the same time was exhausting for me, and I also felt that I might be cheating them. With an ordinary trick you can turn yourself off and function on a purely mechanical level, but in sex therapy you have to do just the reverse, you have to turn yourself on, mentally even more than physically, and four was too much. I’ve set three as a maximum, and ultimately I’d like to raise the price to $750 a week and cut down to a maximum of two at a time. What would be absolutely ideal would be to see only one man at a time and charge a thousand a week or two thousand for a two-week session, but I’m a little worried that I might just succeed in pricing myself out of the market.

  Here’s something amusing. At least I find it amusing. Even after I stopped taking any outside tricks at all, even after my business was one-hundred percent therapy referrals, there was a time when I still thought of myself as a prostitute with a gimmick. I felt that I was a therapist the same way those girls at the massage parlors are masseuses, that it was a useful euphemism and nothing more. Gradually I began to see myself more as therapist and less as prostitute. No blinding flash of light, just a growing realization. I came to see that I was performing essentially a medical function, a psychotherapeutic function. I was playing an important role in helping men overcome sexual dysfunctioning.

  I’ve almost reached the point now where I can feel free to proclaim myself a sexual therapist in social situations. At a party, for example, when someone asks me what I do for a living. I identified myself that way in a conversation just the other week. I said I was a sexual therapist, and this fellow said he felt very much in need of therapy, and I said I only took referrals from psychoanalysts, but he interpreted all of this as cocktail party chatter and I let it go at that.

  I got into a discussion with Henry on this subject. He came up with some interesting observations on the idea of identity as a function of perception of self. In other words, you are what you think you are.

  I’m not sure just how much of that I buy. To an extent you are what you think you are, but there’s a point where self-perception becomes self-deception, and the mental hospitals are full of men who think they’re Napoleon. That doesn’t make them Napoleon. You’re also the person you are in existential reality.

  I do know, though, that I feel a lot more like a nurse than a hooker.

  • • •

  JWW: It was Henry who recommended that I see Edith, just as he has recommended other men see her for other purposes. I’ve known Henry for several years. He is an established psychotherapist with a rewarding practice. In recent years his practice—and, indeed, his own interests—have tended to focus increasingly upon the general area of sexual performance.

  • • •

  HENRY: I began to agree more and more with Masters and Johnson. Their argument is that sexual inadequacy is its own problem. From my own experience, that’s indisputable. A man comes into my office because he can’t get an erection, let’s say. Well, that’s his problem. He could spend five years in intensive talk therapy finding out why that’s his problem, and he might trace it back to some childhood incident, some improper resolution of the Oedipal situation, some unorthodoxy in toilet training, whatever. And this tracing might or might not be accurate, and it might or might not help him to know how it all started, but all he cares about and all he really ought to care about is that he can’t get an erection, he can’t get it up. If you can cure that, you’ve solved the greater portion of his problem. If you can cure his impotence, it’s very often the case that you’re justified in forgetting about the sources of his problem. The various neurotic defenses that he’s thrown up over the years can be left undisturbed. As far as that goes, it’s often best to leave them undisturbed. I know of all too many cases in which analysis has had a devastating effect upon people. You peel away all those defenses and they die of exposure, and too often that death is literal—just consider the syndrome of a person making an enormous brea
kthrough in an encounter group and committing suicide shortly thereafter . . .

  The work Masters and Johnson did was enormously impressive to me. Here they were actually curing problems—impotence, premature ejaculation, frigidity. Not by a few years of talk but by a week or two of specifically sexual therapy. I found all of this tremendously exciting and immediately looked for a way to use these breakthroughs for the benefit of my own patients.

  The first and most obvious way to do this was by sending people to Masters and Johnson. I did refer several couples, and the results were uniformly excellent. But this wasn’t the answer in all cases. There were several difficulties. Cost was one of them. Not merely the price of treatment—which is high—but the need for the patient to spend a couple of weeks in St. Louis.

  This was particularly a problem when the patient was, say, a husband who for one reason or another was not prepared to take his wife along to St. Louis. Perhaps she has an orientation which would preclude her participating. Perhaps the husband’s main interest is not in performing with her but with his girlfriend. Whatever the reason, I found that in a large proportion of cases it was impossible to pack off husband and wife and send the pair of them to St. Louis.

  Now, Masters and Johnson have a program designed for such instances, what they call sexual surrogates. What this amounts to is that the man, whether he’s single or simply unwilling or unable to bring his wife along, is supplied with a paid sexual partner who has been trained by Masters and Johnson to replace his wife in his course of therapy. The sexual surrogate program seemed like a good one to me, but it also seemed to me to have certain built-in disadvantages. The surrogates were not prostitutes, for one thing, but instead were young women whose moral outlook permitted them to participate in this program for compensation without thinking of themselves as prostitutes.

  I thought—and still think—that there were great dangers in this, dangers from the standpoint of the sexual surrogates themselves. Essentially they were being turned into amateur whores, and the potential for emotional damage to them seemed considerable. In addition, the St. Louis operation goes through an elaborate routine to ensure that the male patient will not know the name or address of his sexual partner, that he will not be able to contact her afterward, and so on. I felt that the security could not be one hundred percent effective, on the one hand, and at the same time felt that the artificiality of the encounter could have a detrimental effect upon the male patient. Consider: he goes off to St. Louis, he spends a week or two with no real social contact except the artificial contact with his surrogate partner, he knows her under a false name, and then he emerges from this false situation into the real world he’s always been living in. Also, he’s probably had to invent some reason for his wife why he has to be out of town and virtually incommunicado for two weeks, and when he returns with his sexual problems presumably solved he has a choice of inventing an explanation or telling her the truth ex post facto, either of which can be difficult.