Sex therapy, first developed by Masters & Johnson in the early 1960s, can be wonderful—life-changing, cost-effective, marriage- (and therefore family-) saving.
But we can’t do everything that people want or need. Here are some things I’m asked to do periodically, which I just don’t know how to do—and I doubt that my colleagues, can, either.
With all the current media attention to drag queens, pronouns, polyamory, and a few felons with penises demanding to be jailed in women’s cellblocks, it’s easy to forget that these aren’t the central concerns of most people.
While issues like these can be fascinating (and legitimately important to a very small number of people), most people’s sexual concerns are far more pedestrian.
It’s easy to forget that the central sexual concerns of most people do NOT involve orientation or identity.
In 39 years as a sex therapist, I’ve worked with individuals and couples from every conceivable background, with every imaginable problem.
And yet this huge variety of people share a small number of recurring concerns. That’s what every sex therapist talks about, over and over, year after year.
If people would do the following eight things, most of our business would dry up overnight. Do one of these and your sexual satisfaction will almost certainly increase.
Sexual desire.
Therapists don’t understand enough about it. We know a little about what diminishes desire, even less about what enhances it.
Oh, we know one thing about how desire works in relationships: for many people, you treat them poorly and they want sex less. But with a lot of people, you treat them well and they don’t want sex more.
And someone whose sexual desire is simply turned off? We don’t know much about how to turn it on.
Good therapists know how to fix certain aspects of desire…
Most therapists get almost no training in sexuality. This means they may not know more about sex than you do, and may not know how to talk about it.
Their questions about sex are often the same as yours. Here’s how I change the questions before answering them.
The “porn addiction” movement claims that one of pornography’s biggest problems is the way it disrespects women. But the movement itself is what’s really disrespectful to women–claiming they are hysterical creatures so overwhelmed by the porn issue that they can’t negotiate like adults.