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

by Lawrence Block

  Paul’s relationships with women had been extremely unsatisfactory. On several occasions he had attempted sex with prostitutes. In each instance he was unable to get an erection until the prostitute fellated him, at which time he became erect and had a climax. This seemed to him proof of his homosexuality, as he could only function by engaging in a form of sex which he identified as homosexual. He also found he disliked these prostitutes and found their company depressing, which hardly seems surprising, and took this as further evidence of his fundamental homosexuality.

  Twice, after he settled in New York and began working as a commercial artist, he became involved in dating relationships with women. One was a woman several years older than him whom he met through his work. They attended concerts together, occasionally dined together. The relationship was completely asexual. Paul assumed the woman was a lesbian, and assumed she knew he was homosexual himself, but this aspect of their lives was never discussed between them.

  Later, he began seeing a girl his own age. As he perceived it she fell overwhelmingly in love with him largely because he never attempted to have sex with her. He wanted very much to have a sexual relationship with her but was afraid of failure. Ultimately they did go to bed together, apparently at the girl’s suggestion, and Paul was predictably impotent. In an emotional scene he confessed that he was homosexual, whereupon the girl wept and announced that she always seemed to be forming relationships with male homosexuals. They agreed that they would continue to be friends, but from that point on he found her company extremely unsettling. Subsequently the news that she was going to be married helped to precipitate his suicide attempt.

  It was quite clear to me that Paul was not homosexual but was merely participating in homosexual acts and failing to participate in heterosexual acts. He did not find men sexually attractive but sought their sexual companionship because it was not threatening, he had no fears of failure, and he found sex as such attractive. He was not impotent in homosexual encounters for much the same reason that he was not impotent in masturbation—there was no threat, no danger of failure, no pressure to perform.

  In a sense, Paul’s problem was not so much impotence as frigidity. He was uneasy with women, afraid of them, unable to relate to them, and saw them as posing an impossible challenge to him. And it seemed to me that the most important aspect of “curing” him simply involved curing the problem of sexual dysfunction. If Paul was heterosexual at root, as I had come to conclude, the best possible course of therapy lay in supplying him with a physically and emotionally satisfying heterosexual experience.

  Group therapy played an important role in readying him for such an experience. In the group situation, he was for the first time in his life really talking about himself and really hearing other people talk about themselves. More to the point, he was being placed in a situation where he had to relate to women—and where he could do so in perfect safety. He had always held himself back in all conversations, and particularly in conversations with women. By this I don’t mean that he stuttered, or avoided talking to women at all, or was shy to the point of silence. Actually he was capable of a great deal of charm. But it was never really Paul talking. He had become completely guarded.

  In the course of the group sessions, and through some supportive individual discussions, Paul’s perception of himself began to change. He came to see himself less as a homosexual and more as a sexually inadequate heterosexual—and one whose inadequacy could be ultimately dealt with. He found his homosexual contacts increasingly unsatisfying and unpleasant. Before long he realized that the compulsive drive to seek out these contacts was virtually gone, that his occasional cruising had become more a matter of habit than desire. Once he saw this, he stopped homosexual relations entirely.

  At the same time, I encouraged him to masturbate, and to give free rein to his fantasies during masturbation. I further encouraged him to employ pornography, both written and visual. I had him purchase a female mannequin and an artificial vagina, and instructed him to make love to the mannequin.

  I was unsure at the time whether this last technique was really a good one. My idea was that such exercises would help to prepare him to be at ease with a female body. By stroking the mannequin at such times when he was himself sexually excited, I hoped to make him familiar with the idea of making love to a woman. Because, you see, he had never really made love to anyone in his life. He had never touched a body, male or female, with the idea of giving it pleasure or getting pleasure from the act.

  He began dating casually. His state of mind had improved by now, and he had again secured a position in advertising art. He started going out with girls, seeing them socially, but not making an attempt to have sexual relations. I specifically instructed him not to have sex with any of them for the time being, even if he felt they would be agreeable. The knowledge that he was required to refrain from sex freed him from fears over his performance, or fears of rejection, and made it easier for him to enjoy being in female company in a social situation.

  The next stage, actual sexual therapy with a partner, involved some deliberate deception on my part. I told Paul that a female patient of mine suffered from frigidity as a result of trauma experienced when she was raped as a child. She wanted very much to enjoy sex but became impossibly anxious when in a sexual situation. I said that my therapeutic prescription was a very gentle course of sexual intimacy with an anonymous stranger, and that it had occurred to me that it would be very valuable for him if he played this role in her treatment.

  As it happens, the girl was a call girl who was a patient of mine at the time. I didn’t tell Paul this partially because I felt the idea of sex with a paid performer would have a negative effect on him, and also because it seemed important that he play an aggressive and assertive role, that he feel he was acting for this other person’s benefit, that he not even realize all of this was being performed exclusively on his behalf.

  He used the back room of my office. The girl was waiting there at the appointed time, and as instructed he seated himself on the couch beside her and began touching her body through her clothing. She remained entirely passive throughout, and neither of them spoke.

  On the following day he undressed her and himself, and again she lay passive while he caressed her. While I had told him that it was only necessary that she learn to relax when he did this, of course he assumed that the mark of success would be if he excited her into a genuine sexual response.

  Thus, you see, he was making love to her, he was trying not to excite himself—which is a difficult thing to order oneself to do—but to excite her, his partner. The girl had been well-coached, and now would occasionally make appreciative sounds or tell him that a certain caress felt good.

  Amusingly, at the conclusion of that session he confessed to me that he’d had a rather urgent erection for a portion of the time; and had been worried that she might notice it and find it frightening.

  On the third day she took a more active role. She touched his body while he petted her, handled his penis. They kissed one another. He manipulated her clitoris, and she let herself become passionately aroused. She’s a good actress; she would have to be in her line of work, and as a matter of fact she’s acted professionally on occasion. I believe she’s done some television work.

  She got very excited and told him she had almost had an orgasm. He touched her again, and this time she did have an orgasm, or pretended she had. She told him over and over how much pleasure he had brought her and insisted she wanted to bring him pleasure in return. She got him to show her how to bring him to orgasm with her hands.

  Before their next meeting, Paul had sexual relations with one of the girls he had been dating. While I had purposely advised against this, I had done so with the hope that he would ultimately see fit to ignore my advice. In recounting the episode to me, he stressed that it had not been his intention to go that far with her. However, he recalled the intimacy and warmth of mutual masturbation with his presumed patient, and wanted to
have similar warmth and intimacy with this girl he was dating, whom he found attractive and of whom he was quite fond. He only planned to pet for a while, but one thing led to another as will happen at such times, and the two wound up copulating. He had no trouble getting an erection and evidently acquitted himself quite well.

  I had him meet four or five more times with the call girl. On each occasion he made slow, gentle love to her, culminating each time in coitus. He did not have the slightest difficulty in performing adequately.

  The results in this case are very dramatic, as you can see. In an extremely short period of time Paul was functioning quite competently and happily as a heterosexual. He seems to have no inclination to resume homosexual relations to any extent whatsoever.

  • • •

  JWW: Lester took pains to stress that Paul’s case, while serving as an ideal illustration of his therapeutic technique, could not properly be described as typical. Few of the persons he has treated have so perfectly exemplified the homosexual-in-spite-of-himself as Paul. However, many of his patients have had histories similar to Paul’s in many respects, are ill at ease in homosexual acts and derive little satisfaction from their performance, and respond in much the same fashion to a similar therapeutic regimen.

  Another type of patient Lester has dealt with is the homosexual who wants not to be “cured” so much as to be able to function bisexually.

  • • •

  LESTER: With a man who wants to become bisexual, assisting him is rarely a difficult matter. Generally speaking, his own motivation is at least half the battle in and of itself. Some men in this category are capable of fulfilling homosexual relationships. They may want the greater stability possible in a heterosexual marriage or they may want the improved self-image which bisexuality can afford them.

  In some cases, I have done little more than furnish supportive therapy to reinforce in their minds the idea that their sexual enjoyment of males does not preclude their enjoying females as well, that they are not less manly or less likely to satisfy a woman than men who are exclusively heterosexual.

  I saw a fellow recently who had a long history of homosexuality. He had met a young woman, fell in love with her and wanted to marry her. They were having a sexual relationship. He was able to perform more than adequately and found relations with her extremely enjoyable. And he had told her about his homosexuality, and she seemed able to accept it.

  Nevertheless, he came to me because he was hesitant to marry the girl, fearful that his homosexual desires would make such a marriage a difficult proposition for both of them. Although he had been sexually faithful to his girl since the onset of their relationship, he still found males attractive and still found himself strongly drawn to the idea of homosexual contacts. He was anxious that, if he married the girl, he would either ultimately yield to temptation or find exclusive heterosexuality increasingly a source of frustration.

  I insisted on meeting with him and with his girl, both separately and together. The position I took with them was that bisexuality was a legitimate sexual life style, that there was no hard and fast either/or line between heterosexuality and homosexuality. It was to be expected that, however satisfying his relationship with this girl and however genuine his love for her, he would continue to find the prospect of homosexual relations attractive. By the same token, an exclusively heterosexual male does not perforce lose the desire for sexual relations with other attractive women simply because he is married and loves his wife. He may make the decision to forego extramarital affairs, or he may engage in them without it reflecting adversely on his feelings for his wife. The course he takes will be very much a personal matter dependent upon any number of individual variables.

  For a genuinely bisexual male, however, the likelihood of strict fidelity seems slimmer, perhaps because homosexual partners can offer a kind of sexual relations unavailable to him with his wife. At the same time, I pointed out, such a man’s affairs with male partners seem to constitute somewhat less of a threat to his marriage than would the affairs of a heterosexual male. There is far less chance of his falling in love in a way that would compete with his marriage, for example. Furthermore, it is often easier for a wife to regard with equanimity her husband’s sexual relations with other men—perhaps because she feels less threatened for some of the reasons already cited, perhaps because such extramarital ventures seem to be less of a rejection of her and more a pure expression of a need for sexual variety.

  In this instance, the girl had very little difficulty in accepting the possibility that her future husband would have occasional sex with male partners. The fact that she knew of his homosexuality and accepted it early on in their own relationship had suggested to me that this would likely be the case. In the course of a three-way discussion of their situation, the man confided that he had for some time fantasized a sexual threesome involving himself, his girl, and another bisexual male. He had been fearful of confiding this fantasy to her previously, and was surprised to discover that it was by no means without appeal for her. The life style they ultimately evolve may well be an unorthodox one, but I see no reason why they should fail to have a viable marriage.

  • • •

  JWW: I asked Lester if he had had comparable experiences with lesbians. He replied that he had not had a single case of a woman coming to him to be cured of homosexuality, although a certain number of women with homosexual histories had sought his help in enabling them to respond more completely to male sexual partners. None of them had felt the need to root out lesbian impulses in order to function heterosexually. He added that he did not know whether this indicated a basic distinction between attitudes pertaining to male and female homosexuality, or whether it was merely coincidental; the size of his practice was not such as to facilitate conclusions on this point.

  Swinging as Therapy

  Over the years, I seem to have written more about swinging than anyone ought to have to read, let alone write. At one point I defined swinging as “consensual mutual adultery for recreational purposes.” While that’s not the sort of phrase-making I expect to find immortalized in the next edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, it seems concise enough, and it does the job.

  Note the word “recreational.” Swingers exchange mates, or engage in group sex, because it’s fun. There may be an additional motive for getting into swinging in the first place, to be sure. A great many wives indisputably start swinging because they’re tired of refusing an activity which seems of such paramount importance to their husbands. A great many couples turn to swinging after having made the presumably disheartening discovery that a certain amount of novelty goes out of a monogamous sexual relationship after a certain number of years. And other couples become swingers in order to preserve their marriages—though most swingers will argue that swinging cannot preserve a relationship that is determined to deteriorate, any more than it can impair one which was viable in the first place.

  These initial motives notwithstanding, those persons who continue to participate in swinging or some form of group sex for a considerable period of time do so because they enjoy it. It gives them pleasure. It makes them feel good. It somehow fulfills them.

  Consider, then, a couple whose approach to swinging was somewhat different, a couple for whom it was consciously embraced in the hope that it would have a sexually therapeutic effect.

  Consider Bruce and Joanne.

  They are in their early thirties, suburban, college-educated, fashionably dressed. Bruce does something involving computers; his sideburns extend to the bottoms of his ear lobes, and he periodically considers growing a beard. Joanne takes adult-education courses sporadically, investigating such topics as gourmet cooking, Far Eastern philosophy, and air pollution. She also reads thick forbidding books on child development and psychology; in spite of this, their three children seem reasonably well-adjusted. If the couple has one outstanding characteristic, it is probably their sincerity, which might be described as painful.

  I me
t Bruce and Joanne in connection with another book, one dealing with group sex and swinging in general. At the time this present volume had not even been conceived. My conversations with the two of them, while generally illuminating, did not lead me to incorporate their specific experiences in what I was writing at the time. More recently, when I began investigating the various aspects of sexual therapy, I remembered Bruce and Joanne, and it occurred to me that their approach to swinging had been fundamentally therapeutic, not in the more usual sense of aiding a sexual relationship which had gone stale, but with the aim of making them, both individually and as a couple, more sexually proficient.

  I referred to my notes, then got in touch with them and interviewed them more fully in this context. Further thought has led me to the suspicion that what was a conscious primary motive for them may well be an unconscious or secondary motive for a great many other couples who turn to swinging.

  But did this sort of case constitute sexual therapy as it is understood in this present book? It seems to me that therapy is no less therapy for having been designed and undertaken by the patient without outside assistance.

  But let’s hear from Bruce.

  • • •

  BRUCE: We were both virgins when we got married.

  I suppose this is absolutely unheard of now. It seems as though all young couples live together before they get married. I would certainly hope my own children will do so. In fact, I hope I’ll have enough sense to advise them to do just that. Fifteen years ago, it was a lot less common for unmarried couples actually to live together. It was likely that they would have intercourse, but without living together it’s hard to have a really intense sexual relationship. Especially if you’re young and live with your parents and have a problem finding privacy, so that your premarital experience is limited to parked cars.