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

by Lawrence Block

  I felt I knew what an orgasm was. What it was supposed to be. At times, when I faked orgasm, when I pretended to come because men hate it when you don’t come, hate you for making them doubt their ability to satisfy you—at times I would fake it, and it was a sort of case of getting carried away with my own faking to the point where I almost was able to make myself believe I had come.

  But I never did. Afterward I was always terribly tense. I hated my husband and was disgusted with myself.

  There were periods during my marriage when I was terribly promiscuous. At the time I believed very deeply in monogamy. I felt it was awful for a husband or a wife to cheat. This feeling has changed considerably since then, perhaps because I recently had an affair with a married man which helped me to put adultery in a different perspective. But then I thought sexual fidelity was enormously important.

  Still, I went out and cheated. Partly to debase myself, to punish myself. Partly to punish my husband. And for the traditional reason that motivates the frigid nymphomaniac, the hope that sooner or later I would find the right man and he would make me capable of functioning as a woman, of enjoying sex completely, of coming.

  I was very cheap and grotty about it. I now believe that there are two types of promiscuity, decent promiscuity and indecent promiscuity. I believe that a woman has the option of sleeping with any man at any time if she happens to feel close to him, or be strongly attracted to him, or something like that. But I was not doing this. I never had love affairs. I never even had intelligent sex affairs. I just went out looking for a cock with a man attached to it. I would pick men up in bars. I remember one time when he didn’t have a room or a car, this man I met, and I wound up sucking him off in an alleyway. That was as low as I ever felt myself to be. I despised myself for that, I really did. Sucking a stranger’s cock in an alley, then spitting and going home and brushing my teeth and pretending to be a wife . . .

  After the divorce I dated a lot. I was very easy, I laid anybody who made a play for me. I still never came and I was at a point where I knew I wasn’t going to come, knew it in advance. I wasn’t entirely compulsive about sleeping around. I would go through periods where I was like a cloistered nun, and then I would start sleeping around again, like the swings of a pendulum.

  I began to notice that a large proportion of the men I was with were impotent with me. I don’t know to what extent this was my fault. The state of mind I was in, I suspect I must have had a tendency to turn men off once I was in bed with them, at the same time that I was very good at turning them on ahead of time because I gave off vibes of accessibility. I don’t know. At the time, I was always convinced that a man’s impotence was almost entirely my fault. I learned to compensate by developing all the techniques of the whore. I was told that I was wonderful in bed, especially in the department of giving head. This seemed very ironic to me, that I was thought of as good in bed when actually I was frigid. In retrospect, I can see how frigidity would be an asset. I understand a majority of prostitutes are frigid, at least with their clients. I can understand how this would help them. When your own body is not really involved it can be easier for you to concentrate on pleasing your partner.

  I was not enormously hopeful when I started therapy with Alan. I had been in therapy before. I was in group therapy during college before I was married. As far as I can tell, it had no real effect on me. Later, during my marriage, I went five days a week to a more or less orthodox Freudian analyst. He barely spoke at all in all the time I went to him. He would grunt or clear his throat and that was about the size of it. I had to remember dreams and talk about them. We never got much past that, and it was particularly frustrating because I have never tended to remember dreams in much detail. I only went for four months and quit because I felt I was making no progress at all, just wasting my husband’s money. I understand that if you go for years and years you sometimes make breakthroughs that can turn your whole life around, but I didn’t have enough faith in the whole concept to stay with it long enough for anything significant to happen.

  I had heard that Alan’s approach was different, that he was a progressive young psychotherapist who concentrated on a person’s immediate problems without bothering to investigate the past or the unconscious at great length. This appealed to me. I’ve always been basically a forward-looking person and Alan’s line of approach seemed logical to me. I know I had problems as a child, I know I have ambivalent feelings about my parents. But my parents live almost two thousand miles from me now and I see them once a year and speak to them on the phone maybe once a month. I mean, the important thing for me now is not to learn how to get along with my parents. Even if that’s the cause of all my problems—and I don’t honestly believe it’s that clear-cut—it’s more important to learn to deal with today and tomorrow than to spend five hours a week for the next five years dealing with the past.

  The first time I saw Alan, we talked for a little over a half hour. Then he frowned at me and asked me why I was here. I said I was there for help, something like that.

  “No,” he said. “Why do you need help? What in the hell is wrong with you?”

  “I can’t come,” I blurted.

  He nodded, smiling gently. “Exactly,” he said. “You don’t come. Not can’t—don’t. Well, we’ll work on that, shall we?”

  I began to see him twice a week, an hour each day. During these sessions we did a great deal of talking about sex. It was virtually all we talked about, very little conversation about dreams of parents or childhood. I did most of the talking but he very definitely participated. At one time or another I told him all of the things I had done sexually, with my husband, with the two men I had slept with before marriage, with other men both during and after my marriage. We discussed my feelings before and during and after the sex act.

  One point which Alan stressed was that it was both inaccurate and pointless. Counter-productive was a word he used a great deal. He told me frequently that nothing I had done had been either immoral or unhealthy in and of itself. He also did something which I understand is unusual, and that is that he told me about his own sex life. Not in the sense of a confession, but he would use things which he had done, things which had happened to him, as a means of illustrating a point he was trying to make.

  Through our conversations, Alan was helping me to revise my feelings about sex, my attitudes. To root out whatever inhibitions might be making it difficult for me to respond completely, not so much by finding them out as by developing new and more productive attitudes to replace them.

  I don’t know if this worked. I know, though, that it helped me in the sense of making me feel better. I enjoyed our sessions together, found myself looking forward to them. Throughout the rest of the week, I seemed to find it easier to live with myself. My job began to seem less of a burden and the quality and quantity of my work improved. I had been virtually living on tranquilizers, and without making any conscious effort discovered that I was consuming less of them. I had been interested in health foods and nutrition for some time, had done a lot of reading on the subject, but my life and mental state had been so disorganized that I had never managed to get into the thing deeply, and I was eating the standard American crap diet of refined sugar and white flour and trash foods. After a few months of therapy I found I had the discipline to work out a nutritional program for myself and stick to it.

  I even tried to quit smoking. That’s not so remarkable. I try every year or so, and I invariably fail. I’m now reaching the point where I know better than to make the attempt any more. I think I could kick heroin if I were ever on it, but I’m afraid I’ll just never be able to give up tobacco.

  • • •

  JWW: In addition to talk therapy designed to alter her sexual attitudes, Alan prescribed a variety of techniques by means of which he hoped to heighten Janice’s capacity for sexual response. The reader may find echoes here of several elements—the Masters and Johnson program, The Sensuous Woman, and various sensory awareness worksh
ops.

  • • •

  JANICE: I had smoked marijuana on perhaps a dozen occasions in the past. My husband liked to smoke and now and then I would try to get stoned with him. Either nothing happened or I got high in a way I didn’t like. Marijuana had always tended to bring out my paranoia, if it worked at all. Typically, the two of us would smoke and my husband would get very much in the mood for sex, which he insisted was infinitely better when you were stoned. For me, it got significantly worse. When I was high I didn’t want to be touched or talked to, let alone fucked. I found sex at such times distinctly uncomfortable, which is why I didn’t smoke more than perhaps a dozen times during our marriage. Instead my husband would smoke by himself, and then the two of us would make love.

  Alan recommended that I get stoned a couple times a week, but that I do so by myself. He said that marijuana was not an aphrodisiac in and of itself, but that it was an intensifier, it took you in whatever direction you were already going. Which explained why the same grass smoked at the same time could make my husband horny while it increased my frigidity. He said that I was to smoke it alone in my own apartment where I would feel safe and secure, and that all I ought to do at first was concentrate on getting high and enjoying the experience.

  He also urged me to masturbate. With all of the openness of the New Freedom, it seems as though people are more embarrassed to admit that they never masturbated than they used to be to admit that they did. Well, I had never masturbated. I gather almost all males do it, but there’s a percentage of girls who never seem to think of it, and I was one of them. I didn’t know about it during adolescence. I remember knowing that it was somehow unclean to touch your genitals, but I didn’t know that the reason for this myth was that it was distinctly pleasurable to touch them. So I never got around to it.

  According to Alan, masturbation is especially important for women because it teaches them sexual response. He said it was considerably easier to have an orgasm alone than with somebody, especially if you were a private sort of person who tended to withdraw when you were with another person. And he said that what you learned in masturbation you could more easily teach yourself to accomplish in other situations.

  I’ll tell you something—it can be very fucking difficult to go home from a therapy session resolved to masturbate. Even though you’re completely alone, you feel almost unbearably self-conscious about the whole thing. It’s not so much that I felt it was bad, evil, unnatural. I knew better than that. I just felt so damned silly about it.

  For a long time I masturbated religiously every night. (Don’t you love that choice of words—masturbated religiously, as though I stuck a votary candle up myself.) It was almost a religious thing, though. I was doing it because my therapist told me to, and I was acting on the faith I had in him that it was really going to do me some good.

  It was very difficult for me to get anywhere with it. At first I couldn’t even identify the sensations I felt as pleasurable. I was blocking all the way down the line, shutting myself off, unconsciously willing myself not to respond. Then, as playing with myself became a part of my daily ritual, something I did after brushing my teeth and before going to sleep, I began to relax and enjoy it a little. My masturbation ritual consisted essentially of moistening my finger and playing with my clitoris. I found myself enjoying it more and more simply because it felt good.

  And I began to realize—this was brought out in therapy—that I had never thought of sex in terms of something designed to feel good. It always had some other purpose for me, until my own frigidity had brought things to the point where my big purpose in sex was to be successful at it. Well, that’s self-defeating, and I began to see it, and to see what I had been missing all along. Before, even when I had enjoyed sex, even at those times when it had given me pleasure, I had not been able to relax and get into my enjoyment of it.

  I found that masturbation was particularly enjoyable when I was stoned on marijuana. The more familiar I got with grass, the easier it became for me to get high. I never got extremely high, just smoked one small joint and got a little bit of a buzz on. And instead of the paranoia trips I had had before, I generally got a nice lazy kind of high and found it very nice to sort of laze around listening to music. On the nights when I smoked, I got in the habit of doing my nightly masturbation while I was nicely stoned. I seemed to be able to make progress that way, to intensify and focus the pleasurable sensations, and this progress would then stay with me at times when I was not stoned.

  There was one morning, it was very funny, I woke up and the apartment was quite cold and it was nice to stay in my warm bed, and I was sort of half awake and half asleep, and I started playing with myself unconsciously, just touching myself and enjoying how nice it felt and how nice it made me feel. Then I realized what I was doing and stopped, and felt terribly guilty about the whole thing, like masturbation was something I was supposed to do once a night for therapeutic purposes, but it was impossibly evil of me to be doing it at unscheduled times simply because it felt good.

  When I told Alan about this, he thought it was hysterically funny. He said the whole point was for me to learn to enjoy sex for the sake of enjoyment, that it was a great sign of progress that I had started masturbating in that fashion, and that it was absolutely ridiculous for me to feel bad about it.

  There were other things he had me do when I was stoned, things that were not specifically sexual. I would close my eyes and concentrate on sounds, on exactly what I could hear. You know of course that there’s no such thing as silence in New York, but you automatically tune out most of the sounds going on around you. Instead I would tune them in, the hums of various electrical things in the building, the traffic noises, the occasional human voices in the streets outside. It’s amazing how much you can hear if you put your mind to it, and marijuana seems to intensify these perceptions, or else to make you more able to focus your attention upon them.

  Or I would close my eyes and concentrate on a part of my body, an arm or leg or hand or foot or whatever, and try to picture that part of my body in my mind, and feel all that it felt at that moment, all that was happening in it. I would be aware of the blood vessels pulsing in my arm, and the feel of the bed sheet under my arm, and the feel of air on the top of my arm, and the weight of the arm, and like that.

  During this time I was not dating anyone regularly. Once in a while I might go to a party or a meeting of some organization or other and meet somebody. Alan had said that I shouldn’t particularly try to have sex for the time being, nor should I particularly try to avoid it. I should do whatever I felt like doing in that respect, and I should not be much concerned if I did or didn’t go to bed with someone, or if I did or didn’t enjoy it. I didn’t have sex with many men, but it would happen now and then. There didn’t seem to be much difference in the act. I didn’t have orgasms—I hadn’t even begun to have them in masturbation yet, although I seemed to be on my way. Nor did I seem to be enjoying sex with men more than before. It was about the same, sometimes enjoyable and sometimes not but never wholly involving and certainly never wholly satisfying.

  Sometimes this depressed me a great deal. I had felt I was making progress, Alan had told me I was making progress, and here I was getting concrete evidence that the progress wasn’t paying off where it was supposed to. Naturally this was upsetting. But Alan made me see that this was to be expected, that the progress I was making would not be reflected in gradual changes in my relationships with men, at least not for quite some time.

  Once I realized this, sex with men became more enjoyable emotionally in the sense that I did not have this tremendous feeling of failure afterward. I realize now that this was a very important stage I was going through, although I didn’t see it as such at the time.

  You see, I was starting to get out of the habit—and you have to call it a habit, because it was a behavior pattern I had literally learned over the years—of approaching the sex act as a test. I was learning to go into these situations knowing tha
t there was going to be no magic man, no magic act, that I was going to have a limited response which would not lead to orgasm, and at the same time I knew that this didn’t matter, that a deeper response leading to orgasm would happen ultimately. So I could take the sex act for what it was, a pleasurable sharing of intimacy between two people, an act that would feel good, at least to an extent. In other words, I was starting to learn to enjoy sex for the sake of its own enjoyment, which was essentially one of the lessons I was also learning via masturbation.

  The next big step came when I began to have orgasms in masturbation. The first time it happened was one night when I was stoned. I didn’t even know it was going to happen. I wasn’t thinking about it, had stopped thinking about it a while ago, which undoubtedly had something to do with my being capable of it. I just got very much caught up in immediate sensations, my own body rhythm and sex rhythm was grooving to the rhythm of the music I was playing, and I was touching myself and feeling good and feeling better and better, and then I was just plain into it, and I came.

  I was so excited I wanted to call Alan and tell him.

  • • •

  JWW: Orgasm via masturbation did not lead directly to orgasm via intercourse. Its more immediate result was frustration—Janice now knew what an orgasm was, knew how it felt, knew the pattern of excitement her body went through en route to a climax, and still found it impossible to stay with this pattern of excitement during sexual intercourse. At the same time, various aspects of therapy had altered her sexual behavior patterns to the point where casual sex with near-strangers was no longer acceptable to her. She felt that she wanted sex only in the context of warm personal feeling, if not in a durable relationship, and there were no men in her life at the time for whom she had that sort of feeling. It was with this combination of circumstances operating that she first had sexual relations with Alan.