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Showing posts with label sexuality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sexuality. Show all posts

Monday 9 June 2014

Breaking the wall of secrecy on the sexual abuse of men by women


Our collective difficulty in understanding and addressing this taboo is tied up in our archaic conceptions of sexuality
young dark haired teenage man sitting on the floor
‘How does it happen? Alcohol is implicated in a very large proportion of accounts.’ Photograph: joefoxphoto/Alamy
"You don't feel like a person any more. You feel like a thing. Like you're subhuman. It gets to you, and you stop thinking of yourself as human. You stop thinking you deserve to be happy, or that you deserve to have friends or to be loved.
"Eventually, you stop thinking you deserve to live. Maybe you act on those feelings, maybe you don't. I did. I was hospitalised four times before I finally got help and found a therapist who took me seriously and told me it wasn't my fault."
The first-person accounts posted on Reddit last week by survivors of sexual abuse have many familiar elements. They recount post-traumatic stress and emotional damage, the sexual dysfunction and difficulties forming relationships, and – most commonly – the disbelief and victim-blaming that greet attempts to report or share the details, even with trusted friends. The only difference with the hundreds of stories shared on one remarkable, often heartbreaking thread is that all were from men, recounting their abuse by women. Many told of childhood sexual abuse, others described sexual assaults, all the way up to forced penetrative sex, committed by women on teenage or adult males.
Of course Reddit is not a verified source. Anyone can register under any name, and many of the accounts were posted under so-called throwaway monikers. But before anyone dismisses the anecdotes out of hand, consider that whenever academic researchers have asked the question, they have found astonishingly high incidence of this crime.
In 2010, the largest survey of its type in the world – the US Centre for Disease Control'sNational Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey – found that the rates of men being forced to penetrate women over the previous year were identical to the rates of women reporting being raped: 1.1%. Lifetime prevalence of the crimes were 4.8% for men and 17.8% for women. Meanwhile, men reporting sex through coercion was 1.5% over the past year (6% lifetime) compared with 2% (13% lifetime) for women.
These findings were not wildly out of step with precedent. I collated much of the previous research in a blogpost. A consensus emerged that not only do a significant minority of men report having been forced or coerced into a sexual act in their lifetime, even higher numbers of women admit to having forced or coerced a man to do so. Our collective ignorance of these issues does not arise from lack of data, but from a wilfully constructed wall of secrecy.
How does it happen? Alcohol is implicated in a very large proportion of accounts, men passing out at parties and coming around to find themselves being molested, or being assaulted by a woman. Other accounts include threats, blackmail or even brute force and violence. Not all men are bigger, stronger or more assertive than all women. There is very little understanding that not only is sexual abuse of men by women potentially damaging to the victim, it is also a criminal offence, carrying a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.
Whenever I have written on this topic, I receive a new batch of comments, emails and messages from men saying, yes, this happened to me too. Inevitably, I have received many more offering ridicule, mockery and outright denial. The most powerful response to such attitudes came in a stunning, stomach-twisting monologue by the actor and writer Andrew Bailey, which went viral a couple of months ago. Anyone who has ever reacted to this issue with words such as "lucky bastard, wish that had happened to me" should perhaps get their pocket money stopped until they have sat down and watched this brilliant little film to the end.
Just raising this issue is difficult. By talking about it, I will be accused of undermining attempts to address the rape and sexual assault of women which is, by any measure, the more extensive and harmful social phenomenon and public health crisis. There are indeed poisonous souls who use "yeah, well women are just as bad" as a vapid and vacuous response to complaints about male violence against women, and that is shameful. Such fears, however, cannot justify leaving any victims ignored, maligned and misunderstood. The only correct response to learning about the prevalence of male victims is not to treat female victims as a lower priority, but all victims as a higher priority.
Our collective difficulty in understanding and addressing the sexual abuse of men by women is tied up in our archaic and damaging conceptions of both male and female sexuality. No, boys and men are not always gagging for sex with anyone, under any circumstances. No, women are not invariably coy, chaste flowers awaiting a Romeo to sweep them off their feet. I thoroughly agree with the campaigners who call for better education of our young people on what true sexual consent really looks like. We also need to take on board that such lessons are not only needed by young men.

Saturday 6 July 2013

Women and sex: the myth-buster

Zoe Williams talks to Daniel Bergner, the American author of What Do Women Want?, an explosive new book about female desire
bananas
Men are the promiscuous, predatory, up-for-it sex, right? Wrong. Photograph: Daniel Seung Lee. Art director: Dawn Kim
I was on the Victoria line with my boyfriend, telling him about a new book by the American author Daniel Bergner, called What Do Women Want? Its headline, traffic-stopping message is that women, routinely portrayed as the monogamous sex, are actually not very well-suited to monogamy. In fact, far from being more faithful than men, we may actually be more naturally promiscuous – more bored by habituation, more voracious, more predatory, more likely to objectify a mate. The expectation upon us not to feel, still less exhibit, any of these traits causes us to bury them, Bergner argues, giving rise to two phenomena.
  1. What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire
  2. by Daniel Bergner
  1. Tell us what you think: Star-rate and review this book
First, women experience a loss of interest in sex within a marriage – commonly ascribed to low libido, but actually more a thwarted libido. Bergner interviewed a number of women in long-term relationships, many of whom elaborated on this waning desire. One woman said of her husband, "We did have sex maybe once a week, but it didn't reach me. My body would respond, but the pleasure was like the pleasure of returning library books. And the thing about being repulsed by him was, I felt my body was a room that I didn't want to mess up. Unlike that openness at the beginning, when my body was a room and I didn't mind if he came in with his shoes on."
The second, and perhaps more surprising phenomenon, is that all this thwarted sexual energy, like anything suppressed, has its power redoubled, to become something violent and alarming, if for any reason the brakes come off.
I thought I'd illustrate this to my boyfriend using two of Bergner's stories about monkeys. The first tells us that, in scientific tests, women become aroused when they watch a film of two copulating bonobos (men don't, by the way), and that they strongly deny this arousal when asked. The explanation, proffered tentatively by Bergner, is that female sexuality is as raw and bestial as male sexuality. But, unlike men, our animal urges are stoutly denied, by society and by ourselves, so that when they surface, it is not as a manageable stream, but as a rushing torrent that will sweep up everything it passes, even a pair of shagging primates. Bergner goes on to quote a 42-year-old woman named Rebecca, who had a threesome after her husband left her, and who makes an observation about the nature of female desire that is both poetic and precise. "The phrase that keeps coming into my head is that it's like a pregnancy of wanting. Pregnancy's not a good word – because it means pregnancy. It's that it's always there. Or always ready. And so much can set it off. Things you actually want and things you don't. Pregnant. Full. The pregnancy of women's desire. That's the best I can do."

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Also read
What men don't get about women

Infidelity : 'Being unfaithful keeps me happy'

Coming soon: invasion of the marauding nymphomaniacs

-----

You need only look at Fifty Shades Of Grey: at 5.3m copies, it is the biggest-selling book since UK records began. More than one in five British women owns a copy. On the basis that people lend things, let's say 10 million women have read it, or almost half Britain's adult female population.
People make arch remarks about how they wouldn't mind all the sex, if only it weren't so atrociously written. In fact, it's not badly written (the sequels are awful), but that's not the point. The story here is not the book, but the number of women who bought the book. For a period of time, when you got on a train, the carriage would be a third full of people reading erotica at 8.45 in the morning. Here were Bergner's raging waters of female sexuality that, once unstaunched, would tear everything up by the roots and sweep it along, from S&M to rape fantasies to love eggs. (Which, incidentally, nobody has got into because of the unsettling realisation – well documented on Mumsnet – that you can't tell they're there. "Is it me? Or the love egg? Should I have spent more than £7.99? Or is the problem my pelvic floor?" And so on.)
When people critique the book on literary grounds, or on the basis that it legitimises domestic abuse, they are wilfully stopping their ears to 10.6 million women's indomitable horniness. It makes them feel uncomfortable, squeamish. They could say, "Female sexuality makes me uncomfortable" but they don't. Instead, there is a snotty remark, a raised eyebrow. And this denial brings home the striking truth of Bergner's thesis: the shame that still attaches itself to female sexuality. These two hand grenades of his – that female sexuality is rigorously denied whenever it crops up; and that female sexual urges might be even more potent than men's – will not land lightly on this terrain.
To get back to Bergner's monkeys, he writes about the rhesus community at the Emory University primate observatory, studied by psychologist Kim Wallen. Bergner, a New York Times writer who has spent much of the past decade interviewing sex researchers and evaluating their work, discovered some surprising developments in the primate world. When I spoke to him, he explained how traditional theories of female passivity have been turned on their head: "With primatology, science has refused to see that females are the aggressors, the rulers, the initiators of sex. For so long, almost to a humorous extent, we have looked right past the truth; which is that the females are leaving their young, they're objectifying their mates, they're the agents of desire." He paused for a second, then added, almost exuberantly, "The psychologist had to keep getting rid of his male monkeys because the females got bored with them!"
By now we had pulled out of Stockwell station. My boyfriend was silent until we reached the next stop. "So, this piece about you wanting to have sex with a monkey – when's it running? Is it on our actual wedding day?"
"No. It is seven days before our wedding day."
A woman of 43, who has been married 10 years, told me, "Just before I married, I was reading an advice column in GQ. A guy had written in, saying, 'I'm about to get married. How do I face a lifetime of sex with the same person?' and the answer was, you'll get into panda/rabbit cycles. Sometimes you won't shag at all. Sometimes you'll shag all the time. I found the analogy depressing, as if getting married was like checking yourself into a zoo. Leaving the wilds, and choosing captivity."
I don't see marriage like that, but that's because I'm doing it in a different order. We've been together nine years and we have two children (five and three); they're the lock-in clause. I'm aware, nevertheless, of the asymmetry of expectation within a marriage, that husbands are meant to chafe at the bit, while wives are supposed not to notice it. It seems so obvious that this convention has built up to soothe male anxiety, I'm amazed by how surprised men are to find that it might not be true.
"Just a few days ago," Bergner tells me, "I had a male radio interviewer yelling at me on air. And when I finally had a finished manuscript, I gave it to a couple of married male friends, one of whom said, 'This is a cause for deep concern' and the other said, 'This scares the bejesus out of me.'" Well, yes; it is a little confronting, the idea that fidelity has no natural defender. "The level of self-delusion that we are capable of, here, especially men, is astonishing," the author laughs. I imagine it's like meeting your wife at 4am in the saloon bar of life. If you're here, who's minding the farm?
Bergner admits laconically, "There have been moments when I've looked over at my long-term girlfriend and thought, 'For how much longer am I going to be the recipient of your desire?'" Later, he paints a Woody Allenish picture of domestic neurosis. "Sure, we have conversations about it, as you can imagine. How can you not have this conversation, this exploration, constantly, with the person who's across from you at dinner and next to you in bed? But, no, I don't think she thinks of it as a threat. I think she laughs at me, because maybe she takes just a slight glimmer of pleasure in how threatened I feel."
We arrived at Pimlico and Yvette Cooper, the MP, got on and sat opposite us. We both looked at her intently, as she looked determinedly down. If you get any three women in conversation about the comprehensive spending review, they will, inevitably, arrive at the topic of whether or not they would do her husband, Ed Balls. So I was thinking the male equivalent of that line, "Behind every beautiful woman, there's a man who's bored with sleeping with her", wondering whether that's true of Cooper. Except, of course, that saying has no male equivalent. In the world in which such sayings are forged, women never get bored; only men get bored. Ergo, men have affairs and women simply lose that appetite. One of the questions Bergner poses is whether or not the search for female Viagra is really a quest for a medical solution to monogamy. Which is an amusing thought: we invent statins to counteract our fat-fuelled, sedentary lifestyles, and then aphrodisiacs to counteract our relationship choices, which, it turns out, we actually don't find very sexy.
There are obvious reasons for these choices, however: as Bergner points out, we are attached to monogamy as a way to hold families together, and women have become the main defenders of this social contract. "We are invested in women as mothers, and we value them as the backbone of our social structure. The maternal ideal is this indomitable force of stability that we can lean on. You know, it's the New York mayoral race at the moment. Anthony Weiner, who was busy a year or so ago texting naked pictures of himself to women, had his career destroyed and is now back as the true challenger. We're not threatened by his anarchic, out-of-control sexuality. We can still conceive of him as a leader. But it's hard to imagine a woman having gone through that being able to make a comeback so quickly. The comparable woman we can't be happy with, because of that idea of woman as backbone, woman as someone to lean on and, finally, woman as mother."
Women have collaborated with, even driven, this narrative. Speaking personally, femininity has never held any interest for me; I have never wanted to be restrained, or discerning, or sober, or conciliatory, or mysterious, or small. But if anyone assumed that I would put my sexual gratification before my children, that I would do any of those things that men do – leave my family and start a new one – I would be mortified. Furious.
It is not easy to take apart or let go of that central maternal idea, in which women subordinate themselves entirely to their children; you can't just fit into this picture a sexual appetite as potent and heedless and devil-may-care as a man's. You have to rip up the whole picture and start again.
The funny thing is, in every conversation I've had with friends about sex, every woman I know has said, not proudly but quizzically, "I think I'm more like a man" or some variation of this. I don't think any of them would buy for a second the idea that women need more emotional connection to have sex, or that women don't objectify people's bodies, or that women wouldn't want a one-night stand. But, on some level, we have been conditioned to believe that the "try anything once" gene – the urge to sleep with everyone, just to see what happens – doesn't exist for women. This idea of women as innately discriminating, not necessarily averse to sex with strangers, but surely too picky to choose a stranger purely for his or her unfamiliarity, this idea of the female as the gender that doesn't think about sex every seven minutes, has permeated the cultural groundwater completely. It's plainly rubbish, but it's tenacious, because women who don't conform to expectations of womanly choosiness, who are rapacious, assume they have some male trait they weren't supposed to have. It blows my mind a little bit that we never said, "Hang on, if you're like a man, and I'm like a man, is it possible that we're all just like men?"
We got off the train at King's Cross. He (my boyfriend) said, "You couldn't run it six weeks after the wedding?"
"Not really. But it's nice that you think only the wedding is jeopardised by me wanting to have sex with a monkey, and not the marriage itself."
He shrugged. "Where are you going to meet a monkey?" •

Monday 27 May 2013

Coming soon: invasion of the marauding nymphomaniacs


Thanks to 'female Viagra' and government regulation, we women can enjoy sex again – just hopefully not too much
450 naked women prepare to be photoed by artist Spencer Tunick in New York's  Grand Central Terminal
'People like sex. Sex is sexy.' Photograph: Jennifer Szymaszek/AP
We are standing on the brink of the breakdown of society. A world in which the economy grinds to a halt. Schools stand empty; there are no teachers left and the dinner ladies have found something better to do. Hospitals career towards crisis point as nurses become the uniformed sex-crazed bunnies that porn has long suspected them to be. This is the land of the marauding nymphomaniacs – hypersexed women who are hardly able to walk straight, never mind function as citizens.
This is the risk potentially posed by Lybrido, the female arousal drug (or "female Viagra"), according to some "experts" who are worried that this drug won't get past the regulators unless there are assurances that it won't lead to women becoming raptorial sex beasts. Women should like more sex, but not too much.
Of course this is another pharmaceutical attempt to cure social ills with a pill. A lower libido in both men and women may well have more to do with that screaming baby in the next room or the pending redundancy at work than anything physiological. But dealing with individuals' psychology or social circumstances is boring and hard and complex while pharmaceutical marketing is fun and easy and quick.
And this involves SEX. People like sex. Sex is sexy. Diarrhoea isn't sexy, lung disease isn't sexy and things that aren't sexy get less of our attention and investment. Female sexuality is even more dark and mysterious and feeds those odd social constructs that say women don't like sex as much as men do and therefore have to be "fixed", unless they do like sex as much as men do and so must be broken and are either mad, bad or wanton. Maybe women need a recommended daily fornication allowance.
Interestingly, the inspiration for the lady-horn enhancer was not a desire to create a louche legion of loose women, but came from one tragic man's way of getting over a broken heart. Dr Adrian Tuiten, head of the Dutch firm Emotional Brain, which developed the drug, was trying to understand why his long-term girlfriend dumped him in his 20s. Apparently "the breakup inspired a lifelong quest to comprehend female emotion through biochemistry and led to his career as a psychopharmacologist." (I'd suggest the desire to comprehend female emotion through biochemistry might actually be part of the reason for the break-up). The developers of this drug actually want it to promote monogamy, not instigate indiscriminate sex mania.
The trials completed so far on this drug have been exclusively with women in long-term, monogamous relationships where simply the spark has gone. However, increasingly evidence shows that for many women the cause of their sexual malaise appears to be monogamy itself. Evolutionary psychologists (or as I like to call them, Just So Story tellers) claim that it is innate biology that gives men a naturally higher sex drive. But ameta-analysis of studies by psychologists in 2010 shows little sex differences in the sexuality of men and women and where there were differences – such as rates of masturbation or pornography use – they were heavily influenced by culture and the gender equity of the social group studied.
It is almost impossible to separate female sexuality from culture. Depending on a variety of factors from the number of sexual partners you have had, how much flesh you show, whether you use contraception, how much you masturbate (because women do masturbate!), whether or not you "use" pornography (read it, watch it, look at it) and what kind of pornography it is ("it's a book, therefore erotica!") all variously determine whether you are a slut, whore, slag, prude, lesbian, harlot, prig or the veritable Mrs Grundy.
Society is as concerned by women who like sex as those who don't. Nymphomania was a form of mental illness or disease in the Victorian era with seemingly endless symptoms; masturbation, homosexuality, sexual dreams, or in one case the "lascivious leer of her eye and lips, the contortions of her mouth and tongue, the insanity of lust which disfigured [her]". This disease was variously "cured" with abstinence, vegetarianism, cold douches or more viciously with confinement to an asylum or even a form of female genital mutilation where the clitoris was removed.
The modern version is seemingly to attain that perfect balance between women enjoying sex more in their long-term, increasingly loveless, monogamous relationship through some kind of love potion and also resisting the ever-present lure of the strumpet within us. Only a heady combination of drugs, government regulation (through marriage, adultery laws, access to contraception) and overwhelming social pressures seem to be able to regulate female sexuality around the world. Who knows what would happen if we could discover and develop our own sexuality and properly understand how that changes and fluctuates over time and circumstance? Who knows what might have been achieved had people spent their energy on things other than regulating female sexuality? Perhaps everyone might be happier and hornier.

Sunday 3 February 2013

The truth about Mahatma Gandhi: he was a wily operator, not India’s smiling saint

Patrick French in The Telegraph

The Indian nationalist leader had an eccentric attitude to sleeping habits, food and sexuality. However, his more controversial ideas have been written out of history



This week, the National Archives here in New Delhi released a set of letters between Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and a close friend from his South African days, Hermann Kallenbach, a German Jewish architect. Cue a set of ludicrous “Gay Gandhi” headlines across the world, wondering whether the fact the Mahatma signed some letters “Sinly yours” might be a clue (seemingly unaware that “sinly” was once a common contraction of “sincerely”).
The origin of this rumour was a mischievous book review two years ago written by the historian Andrew Roberts, which speculated about the relationship between the men. On the basis of the written evidence, it seems unlikely that their friendship in the years leading up to the First World War was physical.
Gandhi is one of the best-documented figures of the pre-electronic age. He has innumerable biographies. If he managed to be gay without anyone noticing until now, it was a remarkable feat. The official record of his sayings and writings runs to more than 90 volumes, and reveals that his last words before being assassinated in 1948 were not an invocation to God, as is commonly reported, but the more prosaic: “It irks me if I am late for prayers even by a minute.”
That Gandhi had an eccentric attitude to sleeping habits, food and sexuality, regarding celibacy as the only way for a man to avoid draining his “vital fluid”, is well known. Indeed, he spoke about it at length during his sermons, once linking a “nocturnal emission” of his own to the problems in Indian society.
According to Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India’s first prime minister, Mahatma Gandhi’s pronouncements on sex were “abnormal and unnatural” and “can only lead to frustration, inhibition, neurosis, and all manner of physical and nervous ills… I do not know why he is so obsessed by this problem of sex”. 
Although some of Gandhi’s unconventional ideas were rooted in ancient Hindu philosophy, he was more tellingly a figure of the late Victorian age, both in his puritanism and in his kooky theories about health, diet and communal living. Like other epic figures from the not too distant past, such as Leo Tolstoy and Queen Victoria, he is increasingly perceived in ways that would have surprised his contemporaries. Certainly no contemporary Indian politician would dare to speak about him in the frank tone that his ally Nehru did.
Gandhi has become, in India and around the globe, a simplified version of what he was: a smiling saint who wore a white loincloth and John Lennon spectacles, who ate little and succeeded in bringing down the greatest empire the world has ever known through non-violent civil disobedience. President Obama, who kept a portrait of Gandhi hanging on the wall of his Senate office, likes to cite him.
An important origin of the myth was Richard Attenborough’s 1982 film Gandhi. Take the episode when the newly arrived Gandhi is ejected from a first-class railway carriage at Pietermaritzburg after a white passenger objects to sharing space with a “coolie” (an Indian indentured laborer). In fact, Gandhi’s demand to be allowed to travel first-class was accepted by the railway company. Rather than marking the start of a campaign against racial oppression, as legend has it, this episode was the start of a campaign to extend racial segregation in South Africa. Gandhi was adamant that “respectable Indians” should not be obliged to use the same facilities as “raw Kaffirs”. He petitioned the authorities in the port city of Durban, where he practised law, to end the indignity of making Indians use the same entrance to the post office as blacks, and counted it a victory when three doors were introduced: one for Europeans, one for Asiatics and one for Natives.
Gandhi’s genuine achievement as a political leader in India was to create a new form of protest, a mass public assertion which could, in the right circumstances, change history. It depended ultimately on a responsive government. He figured, from what he knew of British democracy, that the House of Commons would only be willing to suppress uprisings to a limited degree before conceding. If he had faced a different opponent, he would have had a different fate. When the former Viceroy of India, Lord Halifax, saw Adolf Hitler in 1938, the Führer suggested that he have Gandhi shot; and that if nationalist protests continued, members of the Indian National Congress should be killed in increments of 200.
For other Indian leaders who opposed Gandhi, he could be a fiendish opponent. His claim to represent “in his person” all the oppressed castes of India outraged the Dalit leader Dr BR Ambedkar. Gandhi even told him that they were not permitted to join his association to abolish untouchability. “You owe nothing to the debtors, and therefore, so far as this board is concerned, the initiative has to come from the debtors.” Who could argue with Gandhi the lawyer? The whole object of this proposal, Ambedkar responded angrily, “is to create a slave mentality among the Untouchables towards their Hindu masters”.
Although Gandhi may have looked like a saint, in an outfit designed to represent the poor of rural India, he was above all a wily operator and tactician. Having lived in Britain and South Africa, he was familiar with the system that he was attempting to subvert. He knew how to undermine the British, when to press an advantage and when to withdraw. Little wonder that one British provincial governor described Mr Gandhi as being as “cunning as a cartload of monkeys”.

Monday 14 January 2013

Britain's first state-certified sex coach

Unlike conventional sex therapists - who talk to clients having sexual problems and give them advice on how to overcome them - sex coaching can take place in the bedroom

Jane walked up and down the street outside what looked like a nondescript house in north London three times before she summoned up the courage to ring the doorbell. The 51-year-old was about to have her first session with Britain's - and indeed one of the world's - first state-certified sex coaches. She was overwhelmed with nerves.
Unlike conventional sex therapists - who talk to clients having sexual problems and give them advice on how to overcome them in their own homes - sex coaching can take place in the bedroom. Its benefits can include anything from achieving better orgasms to simply feeling more comfortable naked with a partner. They can use a range of techniques: talk, role-play or intimate physical approaches like touching or massage.

Until now, this sector has been largely unregulated, and understandably scepticism has run high. But experts talk of a "booming industry" that is moving out of the shadows and into the mainstream. California has become the first state worldwide to certify sex coaches, but it is Britons who are its very first graduates. Jane's instructor, Mike Lousada, is so committed to the regulation of the sector that he is launching the first professional body for the industry across Europe later this year.

Lousada, 45, moved from the corporate world into sex coaching as a way do something "more meaningful" in his life. With his own hang-ups and "shame around the body," he became trained as a counsellor, and graduated from the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality last month as a sex coach. He now charges £80 an hour for talking therapy, and £120 for physical work, which includes genital massage, but can include having intercourse with a client. This would be in very rare cases; say to overcome a situation where a woman wanted, but wasn't able to, have penetrative sex.

Lousada calls his work "sex positive," differing from sex therapy which "arises from the point of view that something's wrong that needs to be fixed." He insists his services, often used by women who have been abused in some way in the past, is "boundaried" and run with a "strict code of ethics." He added: "'I'm showing people how to connect their bodies with someone else's. We are taught at school about pregnancy and sexual disease, but not about pleasure."

There are no recorded figures for the number of sex coaches in Britain, but one of the world's pioneering sex coaches, Dr Patti Britton, found there are at least 80 worldwide, when she conducted the first international survey last year.

Namita Caen, 46, from London, is another state-certified sex coach, working in California. She says interest in her services, which focus on talk, are on the increase as they become "legitimised": "Attitudes are totally changing; People are dying to share what's happening in their relationship".

Jane agrees. She had been living an asexual life for almost thirty years when she decided to take up sessions with Lousada. She said she chose to see a sex coach over a sex therapist, because her "issues were around discovering who [she] was as a sexual woman - in relationship to another." Engaging in talk sessions and intimate massage with Lousada, she said she is now "more comfortable with men" and able to "look in the mirror and see a sexy woman" again.

She added: "I find it fascinating that in the UK 'sex coaches' generally have the unfounded reputation of being some sort of prostitutes by another name - exploiting men and women who are either bored and rich or vulnerable and stupid. Mike's work provided me with a safe supportive environment where I could explore my sexuality as a woman and address the issues and hurts of the past."

The Department of Health advises that "people visit their GP if they are experiencing a sexual health problem" and some therapists have voiced suspicion of coaches lacking their accreditation. But Lousada hopes to change this. His professional body will be launched in the next few months: "Sex coaching is becoming a new profession. We need to have a code of ethics, a disciplinary code, and standards, in order to do this work safely."

Jane's name has been changed

Monday 18 July 2011

Why are we afraid of male sexuality?


We may have gone a long way towards liberating women, but male desire is increasingly seen as a problem
  • John Major
    While older women are now widely eroticised, male equivalents such as John Major are attacked as 'old lechers'. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian
    Is there anything good to be said about male sexuality? That might seem a daft question. Apparently it brings a lot of pleasure and excitement to the lives of men and women alike, it's inspired some of the greatest art, music and literature through the ages and has played a fairly substantial role in sustaining our species and populating the planet. Nonetheless you'll need to search very, very hard to find any positive appraisal of male heterosexuality. Since the era of the permissive society and the mainstreaming of modern feminism, western society has gone a long way towards liberating women's sexuality. Younger women have, to an unprecedented extent, been encouraged to believe they can be as sexual as they like and to experience and express their desires as they wish. Even the age-old proscriptions on female promiscuity have been largely broken down, exemplified by the glorious flowering of the SlutWalk movement. Simultaneously, and perhaps not coincidentally, male sexuality has been increasingly seen as a problem. You can hear it in the gentle, dismissive mockery that says men are simple creatures who "only want one thing" or, at the extreme, outright vilification. The male gaze threatens, male desire is aggressive. Our primal instincts are pathologised with the jargon of gender studies. Righteous and necessary efforts to reduce sexual crimes have had the unwelcome effect of teaching generations of men that our sexuality can be dangerous and frightening. Don't believe me? Look back at the Bailey review into the early sexualisation of children, and the surrounding media hoo-ha. Leaving aside any concerns about the veracity and accuracy of the report itself (and I have plenty myself) it is striking that acres of print were devoted to the impacts of these social trends on girls, their self-esteem and body image; their developing sexuality; their safety and security. Barely a word was spoken about boys, beyond fears that they are being turned into beasts. Again and again the message came out: girls have problems. Boys are problems. And yet does anyone doubt that there should be concerns about how easy access to porn impacts upon boys' sexual development, their self-esteem, their body image or performance anxieties? It's not as if young men bask in perfect mental health and happiness – young men commit suicide at nearly four times the rate of young women, and sex and relationships rank high on their list of concerns. At the other end of the age range, sexually active older women are now widely eroticised (albeit often with a rather misogynistic undertone) as "cougars" or (forgive me) "Milfs" while their male equivalents are disparaged as dirty old men. Observer columnist Viv Groskop recently went further, opining about any older man who has sex outside marriage, even the mild-mannered old janitor John Major, saying "Unfortunately it's not against the law to be an old lecher. Maybe it should be. Or at the very least you shouldn't be rewarded with the highest office in the land." Perhaps the greatest concern for men and women alike should be the way male sexuality and sexual expressiveness balances on a narrow tightrope of acceptability. One step off the wire and you tumble into the realm of perversion. As feminist blogger Clarisse Thorn noted last year, any man who hits on a woman and gets it wrong risks being branded a "creep" – sometimes deservedly so, of course, but often for no greater sin than being insufficiently attractive or socially skilled, or having misread a perceived signal of invitation. I've never heard of a woman being stigmatised or disparaged for expressing an attraction to big men, rough men, geeky men or whatever. A man who expresses similar desires for women who don't conform to standard norms of beauty is a perv, a fetishist, a weirdo. All of these prejudices are rehearsed and reiterated by men and women alike, they reside in the intangible web of social norms, conventions and culture, but they can and must be challenged and changed. If we can begin to openly and joyously celebrate the positives to male sexuality, it might become easier for men to be happy and confident sexual partners, and in turn become better lovers, and sometimes better people. Male sexuality is no less diverse, complex and wonderful than women's or, for that matter, no more base, coarse and animalistic. Sure, most men might be slightly more likely to let our gaze linger on eye-catching curves, and slightly less likely to giggle about our lovers' proclivities with our friends, but in the grand picture women and men are surprisingly similar, in this respect as in so many others. Women have been entirely justified in asking that we blokes respect their rights, autonomy and wishes, that we respect them as sexual beings. It shouldn't be too much to ask for a little of the same in return.