From Nerve: “I started browsing the personal ads, hoping to find something like “Hot, nurturing, extremely patient woman seeks obese, self-loathing virgin who masturbates too much.” Instead, I found an ad for the Institute for Sexual Surrogate Therapy.” Same diff?
Here’s the deal: two guys, both virgins in their 20s, decide to use a “sexual surrogate.” What is this? Well, it’s the sort of gray-area that Nerve often covers – in this case, losing one’s virginity under the auspices of a therapist – for pay. Sex surrogacy was invented in 1970, by the Masters and Johnson sex research team, as a means of treating sexual dysfunction, but has largely fallen out of favor.
In a profile of a sex surrogate, New York Magazine described her work thusly:
Rita Bell is a sex surrogate, which means men pay her to have sex with them as a way of resolving their sexual problems. Though she doesn’t have actual intercourse with every client, there is usually some form of sexual contact, since the men come to her with specific difficulties, like erectile dysfunction, premature ejaculation, or its opposite, “retarded ejaculation.” There are several differences between her work and prostitution: She talks to her clients at length about their dysfunctions, and she looks less like Julia Roberts than like a zaftig hippie aunt. But she advertises in the same publications prostitutes do, and her married clients never tell their wives.
In a recent interview, one venerable sex-surrogate, Linda Poelzl, expresses pride in her work but also describes the confidentiality agreement that all clients are required to sign:
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