I began looking for a way to duplicate the Masters and Johnson program here in New York, and to resolve some of my own objections and reservations in the bargain. With couples, this was not difficult. I simply duplicated the program here, talking with husband and wife both together and separately, schooling them both in the techniques which they would employ to deal with whatever the sexual problem happened to be. I’ve had very good results this way, and incidentally have saved people the bother and expense of going to St. Louis, as well as the rather high fee of the M and J program.
For individuals, I also used elements of the M and J program, but with some variations that I felt were valuable. For single females, for example, I’ve found that a lot of the techniques outlined in The Sensuous Woman are often very useful. The problem of achieving orgasm for the female is often an educational one, and if a woman can reach orgasm herself through masturbation she can usually learn to reach it in intercourse sooner or later.
It’s different with men. Impotence is a very different thing from frigidity; most males with secondary impotence can manage erection and orgasm via masturbation, and this helps them not at all in performing with a female partner. Premature ejaculation is a great problem for males, and one for which there is no female equivalent. A man who has his climax prematurely is sexually inadequate, while a woman who comes almost immediately is considered more than adequate, and of course is capable of continuing intercourse until her partner is satisfied.
Thus some sort of sexual surrogate was necessary in cases of this sort, and I came to the conclusion that the ideal surrogate would be a professional prostitute. However, not just any prostitute would do. The girl would have to be emotionally stable. She would have to be intelligent and sensitive, with nothing specifically whorish about her.
At the time, I had several call girls as patients. A great many of them enter therapy at one time or another, as I’m sure you know. Not because they’re necessarily more disturbed than other women, I don’t think, but because their profession is such that they have the time and the money.
Of the prostitutes with whom I was professionally acquainted, Edith was the obvious choice. She was well educated, poised, intelligent, and extremely sensitive. While there was a certain ambivalence in her attitude toward men, it did not approach the love-hate syndrome which characterized several of the other girls. Also, and perhaps most important, she had a very strong social motivation, the very same drive which leads other women to choose such careers as nursing, teaching, social work, etc. As a matter of fact, her own personal discontent stemmed largely from the failure of her life at that time to resolve this undercurrent. For a variety of reasons, after her divorce she had decided to live only for herself. She was determined to live well, to earn as much money as possible and save a substantial portion of it.
This led to a conflict within her. She was suppressing the need to perform socially useful work, and as a result she was defeating herself to a degree in certain respects. For example, she tended to spend money unnecessarily. She had a closet full of expensive dresses which she never wore. She wanted to have money, but at the same time the money was a source of guilt and she had a need to divest herself of it. As I said, she was relatively well adjusted, so this need did not manifest itself to the extent it does with a compulsive gambler or a whore who turns over everything to a pimp.
It struck me that functioning as a sexual surrogate would be very much to Edith’s advantage. And this, I felt, had to be a prerequisite. I felt it would be unethical for me to recruit a sexual surrogate simply because a particular girl would be capable of fulfilling the requirements of the job. It would have to benefit her as well. And here, incidentally, was where I felt Masters and Johnson might well be making a mistake. By deliberately not using professional prostitutes, they were teaching non-prostitutes to play the whore, as it were. I, on the other hand, would be taking a prostitute and leading her to fill a less prostitutional role, which would presumably have an ego-enhancing rather than an ego-damaging effect.
Of course this is largely theoretical. What’s more to the point is that Edith has functioned admirably as a sexual surrogate, and that she seems to be a happier and better adjusted person for it.
I discussed the program with her, not during her therapy hour—which would have been unethical in quite another way, using time she paid for to recruit her for my own benefit—but after hours, at her apartment. When I made arrangements to see her, I learned afterward, she was more than a little concerned that I wanted to lay her, which was not quite how she expected her therapist to relate to her! Thus there was a certain amount of awkwardness at first, but this was soon overcome. I explained the program and the role I had in mind for her and she was interested from the start. We discussed Masters and Johnson at some length. I gave her some literature to read and got in touch with her again after she’d had a chance to go over it. We talked some more and she was enthusiastic about participating in the program. We worked out procedural details, fees, other matters.
Within a week I sent her her first patient.
• • •
EDITH: I can’t imagine how a girl who hasn’t been a hooker could possibly handle all of this. Even assuming that she’s sexually emancipated, that she’d done all sorts of things with men, that she’s free from hang-ups about the idea of having sex without emotional involvement. I would say that prostitution is necessary training, if only in terms of our own mental attitude.
I’ve read, for example, about girls who were enormously put off because they were assigned to partners whom they didn’t find sexually attractive. I can see where that would be a natural reaction. Actually, when I first started tricking, I would occasionally be put off if a man was fat or old or ugly or coarse. In short, if he wasn’t someone I would be likely to select voluntarily as a sexual partner. Well, you either get over this in a hurry or you go into some other line of work.
A prostitute is also no stranger to the whole concept of sexual inadequacy. Impotence is something she deals with day in and day out. In fact, sexual inadequacy is often what motivates men to go to prostitutes. They can’t make it with their wives, or with girls they meet, or else the worry that they can’t make it puts them off. The challenge that a call girl faces every working day is to take a man and excite him and make him have an orgasm.
There are big differences between this and sexual therapy, however. When you’re tricking, the only thing you really worry about is turning the guy on and then getting him off. You do whatever you have to do to bring this about. What this usually comes down to is fellatio. I would say that nine out of ten Johns wanted this, either as a prelude to intercourse or as an end in itself. They didn’t necessarily ask for it, mainly because they didn’t have to. Very early in the game I learned to go down on a man immediately. If he didn’t stop me, I finished him that way. If he wanted to finish via intercourse, fine.
Sometimes a man would lose his erection when he tried to have intercourse, so it would be back to sucking again. When that happened I would make sure to finish him orally. If he objected, I would explain that I had gotten carried away because it was so exciting to suck his cock. This is the sort of thing a man enjoys believing, and usually afterward I would always be allowed to fellate him to orgasm “since I liked it so much.” Often the man would basically prefer fellatio anyway, but would want to perform coitus because it meshed more with his image of masculinity.
Other cases of impotence would yield to other treatment. A vibrator is very good, for example. Used properly, a vibrator will make a man have an orgasm even if he never does get an erection. I’m sure a lot of these men came to me in the hope that they would be fantastically potent, that they would get an erection the minute they walked in the door, screw me non-stop for an hour and a half, and then have an orgasm that would leave them an inch short of cardiac arrest. But if they had any sort of an orgasm, they had gotten what they paid for, and they had no complaints. Naturally, unless I specifically disli
ked a John and didn’t want to see him again anyway, I always tried to make it as good as possible for him. But the major goal, every prostitute’s major goal, was simply to induce orgasm.
In the same way, premature ejaculation was not considered a problem. On the contrary, it was considered a blessing, in the sense that the sooner a man came, the sooner he went. So this was another attitude that was turned around completely in sexual therapy. The object was to take men who had sexual problems of one sort or another and teach them to get erections automatically and hold onto them until they were ready to come, which meant, say, ten or fifteen minutes. If a man can keep it up for fifteen minutes, he can keep it up as long as he wants to, really.
The main technique in dealing with premature ejaculation is the squeeze. This is a Masters and Johnson technique. When the man feels that he’s about to come, I grip his penis just below the head and squeeze it. At first I was very reluctant to squeeze hard enough. You really have to give it a hell of a squeeze, and I was afraid of doing some real damage to a man’s organ. It doesn’t take long to learn how much pressure to apply, though.
I also tell men to practice in urination. This they can do on their own; I don’t have to be there to help them pee. What they do is begin urinating, then they try to stop, then start and stop over and over again. The muscles you use this way are the same ones you use to keep yourself from having an orgasm, from ejaculating. Men who really practice this can reach a point where they never have an orgasm unless they want to. They can always hold it back.
At the beginning, I would see a man several times before we actually had intercourse. This was very much in line with the program developed in St. Louis.
Then Henry changed the schedule.
• • •
HENRY: When I’m dealing with a couple, I stay very close to the Masters and Johnson program. When I’m employing a sexual surrogate, however, I depart considerably from their routine. That’s because the situational aspects are so different. If I send a man to see Edith, for example, he’s leading his usual life twenty-two hours of the day and spending the other two hours with her. The rest of the time he’s doing his job, riding a commuter train, lying in bed next to his wife, whatever. He’s not controlled the way he is in a hotel room in St. Louis.
Thus I felt there were modifications that had to be introduced. It struck me that there had to be less time spent on preliminaries and more time spent on all-out screwing. It wouldn’t do to spend a couple of days on non-genital contact and non-orgasmic petting, for instance. In the first place it would be too damned frustrating. The guy would walk out of the surrogate’s apartment and go home, and he’d have a desire to screw his wife, or to assert himself sexually in one way or another, and he’d also tend to feel that here he was spending big money and he’d only managed the neat trick of spending two hours with a call girl and not getting the reward of a climax.
According to the standard program, the treatment ends when the patient is cured. When he reaches the point where he can easily attain and retain an erection, then he’s sent home to his wife. I saw almost from the beginning that this was a bad idea, because he’s no sooner attained a skill than he’s deprived of the opportunity to practice it under optimum circumstances.
This is especially true of unmarried men, who comprise a large portion of these referrals. Some are bachelors. A larger proportion are divorced. In the vast majority of cases, they have no regular sexual partner at the moment. After their discharge, they have to find someone who will go to bed with them, and while they’re looking, they have fears returning that they won’t be able to make it with anyone except Edith, or that the cure was temporary and they’ll lose the ability if they don’t keep in practice. And I suspect this last fear is often true, that if they don’t begin having regular sex in fairly short order the fear will nullify the progress they’ve made.
If they’re married, it’s still putting them under a lot of pressure to send them straight home to their wives. Suppose a man goes through a course of treatment successfully, goes home to his wife, and nothing happens. It certainly helps if he can go back to his surrogate the next day and, in non-technical language, fuck her eyes out.
As I’ve modified it, the program for impotence and premature ejaculation—and these are the complaints in the overwhelming majority of surrogate referrals—runs like this. First of all, the patient has an orgasm the first day and every day thereafter. By the end of a week of treatment, he is capable of functioning sexually, of becoming erect and maintaining the erection for a quarter hour or longer.
At this point, he has the option of discontinuing treatment. But both Edith and I will strongly recommend that he continue the program for another week. This recommendation is almost invariably accepted. We make it easy for the patient to accept because he’s told at the beginning that the course of treatment runs two weeks and costs a thousand dollars. Thus he’s prepared for this expense, and at the end of a week he’s not being asked to spend more than he planned, but is being given the opportunity for a refund while he’s being advised to pass it up.
Besides, you have to appreciate that he’s generally having a physically satisfying relationship with a woman for the first time in his life, and he’s enjoying himself no end, so he’s thus very much predisposed to continue that relationship.
The second week is designed to accomplish two things. First of all, it gives the patient the opportunity to practice his new skills to the point where he is supremely confident of himself. Secondly, it facilitates the transition from therapy with the surrogate to sexual functioning under more normal circumstances. If the man’s married or has a steady sexual partner, he’s encouraged to have sexual relations with her whenever the opportunity exists. But he’s not under tremendous pressure to perform, because he’s spending two hours a day in bed with his therapist. Perhaps largely because of this lack of pressure, most men do have satisfactory relations with their wives during this second week. Naturally, this is tremendous ego-food for them. Here you’ve got a guy who’s screwing his brains out for two hours with Edith, and then he goes home and fucks the daylights out of his wife, and he knows he’s satisfying two women when before he couldn’t satisfy one, and he has to walk around glowing with pride as a result of this accomplishment.
Still another function of the second week is educational. In other words, now that he’s able to screw, it’s time for him to learn how. And by this I mean all manner of plain and fancy sex. Fourteen hours is ample time for a man to learn a great deal about different positions and techniques. Chances are he’s had fantasies over the years, different things he’s always wanted to try, and now he has his chance. By the time the week’s up, he’s ready for a graduate certificate.
When I first began studying the Masters and Johnson surrogate program, it struck me that a man could wind up spending a great deal of time remembering the joy he had achieved in the arms of the surrogate and wishing he had a way to get in touch with her. This could have a variety of ill effects. He might wind up convinced that successful sex was only possible with her, for example. He might actually try to get in touch with her afterward, and for all their vaunted security precautions, I’m sure this wouldn’t be that difficult for a strongly motivated man to accomplish.
With the program I’ve developed, such a man can readily contact his therapist, and can in fact have sex with her. Because the girl is originally a prostitute, she’s not inclined to object. But if he wants to see Edith again, he doesn’t see her as an ordinary customer of an ordinary prostitute. Instead he goes through what’s described as a ‘booster course,’ which is to say that he pays five hundred dollars and sees her two hours a day for a week. Thus he has to be pretty strongly motivated. He can’t just decide that he wants to throw it to her once for old times sake.
• • •
JWW: I asked Henry how closely he supervised the two-week program once it was instituted. Masters and Johnson supervise their patients quite closely, with concurrent
talk therapy an important part of the regimen.
• • •
HENRY: I am considerably less involved with the patient during the two weeks of sexual therapy. Masters and Johnson have considerably more opportunity for this than I do; they’ve got the man available around the clock, while my patient is adhering to his normal routine throughout. He’s already spending two hours with his surrogate partner and would probably be hard put to spend another hour on the couch. Also, Masters and Johnson are dealing with patients whom they haven’t known prior to the therapy and probably won’t see much of after. They have to do their talking during the course of treatment. I, on the other hand, am dealing with men whom I’ve already seen over a significant period of time, and whom I will see again after the sexually active phase of therapy is completed.
I do keep in touch with them. They call me daily at a specified time and we discuss briefly their progress. I also speak to the surrogate once a day and discuss the patient or patients she has seen that day. I keep apprised of their progress but don’t function in a direct therapeutic role during the two-week process.
The Sex Therapists: What They Can Do and How They Do It (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior Book 15) Page 2