Sex Therapist’s Couch

In my 20 years as a sex therapist, people continue to ask me one question more than any other. The most common sexual question is “Am I normal?”
Americans are concerned — virtually obsessed — with the normality of their sexual fantasies, preferences, responses, frequency, secrets, turn-offs, problems, and bodies. The fear of being sexually abnormal interferes with and even prevents pleasure and intimacy.

If convicted mass murderer Ted Bundy had said that watching Bill Cosby reruns motivated his awful crimes, he would have been dismissed as a deranged sociopath. Instead, Bundy has said his pornography addiction made him do it–which many people treated as the conclusion of a thoughtful social scientist. Why?

I’m a sex therapist. I spend most of my time in the private worlds of 25 patients a week. I treat undependable penises and vaginas, desires that trouble partners, orgasms that don’t please, and fantasies that frighten. Hour after hour in a comfortable chair listening to uncomfortable people, I sit in a sunlit room bearing witness to the darkest parts of people’s lives.

Sex has no intrinsic Meaning. Almost everyone wishes it did.
The desire to give sex meaning is an understandable, important enterprise. Honestly approached, it can be a valuable exercise; disguised as the righteous desire to simply appreciate the meaning sex has, or as the pursuit of restoring sex’s “true” meaning, it is a common source of conflict for both individuals and society.