The Age of the 30-Minute Orgasm

If i Weren't a compulsive reader, I'd have missed the announcement. It came in my morning mail as part of a catalog of traveling weekend workshops for health-science professionals sponsored by the Proseminar Institute, a San Francisco outfit. I'm on the mailing list, I suppose, because I write about science and medicine.

I opened the catalog and found an interesting headline:

"Expanding Sexual Potentialities for Optimum Health"

I might have stopped there, but the subhead caught my attention: "New Methods and Procedures for Achieving and Extending Sexual Orgasm." Why not? I read on.

The program rationale explained that we live in a society in which reducing pain is acceptable but deliberately seeking pleasure is not. It said that sex therapy so far has emphasized fixing problems rather than increasing potential. Some surprising new information has recently come to light, it said, that "males and females are capable of orgasmic functioning vastly beyond what has been traditionally known or reported by Masters and Johnson." (I thought of Masters and Johnson. I had interviewed them back in the late Sixties. I remembered asking them about their Midwestern origins, noting that it surprised me that prominent sex researchers--Kinsey was another--would emerge in the Bible Belt. It gives us credibility, virginia Johnson said. If we were Californians, she said, people would say, "Oh, well." Here were Californians writing about "orgasmic functioning vastly beyond. . . ." Maybe.)

it's the result of an idea that's been, well, a long time coming--sex research not to cure dysfunction but to maximize pleasure

The program description filled two columns. It offered nothing out of the ordinary until Sunday afternoon, the second day of the workshop. Then this:

Clinical video feature: Demonstration of 30 minutes of continuous female orgasm by a sex-researcher physician on his wife.

I showed that brief, stunning paragraph to any number of male friends. Strange reactions. Some blushes, a few grins. Mostly shrugs: What about it? Since I couldn't believe they weren't interested, I had to assume they didn't know how long female orgasm has been officially clocked to go on. Seymour Fisher, in The Female Orgasm, his 1973 study of several hundred women, gives an average of six to ten seconds, with "a few extreme cases" extending "more than 20 seconds." Before Fisher, Masters and Johnson reported basically the same thing but discovered among their population of patients a few remarkable women capable of orgasm so unusual that they isolated it with a Latin name, as if it were a new species: status orgasmus, an orgasm that continues for as long as a full minute.

Yet in my mail one summer day, someone named Alan Brauer, M.D., Diplomate of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, was purporting to offer video-taped proof that a woman's orgasm could continue for as long as 30 minutes. I looked carefully at Dr. Brauer's photograph in the upper-left corner of the catalog page. A young man--full head of curly dark hair, full mustache, shirt and tie, clinician's white coat, directly and pleasantly confronting the camera. But something else: one eyebrow slightly arched, one side of his face shadowed; impeccable credentials, but the man had an antic look in his eye.

I thought then that I'd better sign up for the workshop. When my wife, Mary, came home from work and heard about it, she thought we'd both better sign up.

•

Friday afternoon. A chain hotel in a major American city. Lines of people checking in and out. I would learn by the end of the weekend that there were always lines of people checking in and out. That the computer was always broken down. That there was always a 45-minute (continued on page 180) 30-Minute Orgasm (continued from page 130) wait for room service. What else is new? Our cities don't work. Our machines don't work. Good reason to turn back to the delights of simple flesh, if flesh is simple.

The night before the workshop, I saw Brauer in the elevator. He was slim. He looked like his photograph. There really was an antic look in his eye, an echo of the Mad Hatter in Tenniel's classic illustrations for Alice in Wonderland. With him was an attractive woman, a tall, willowy champagne blonde. I didn't ask. He was hurrying up to inspect the slide projectors and the video monitors he'd ordered. I thought I'd wait to be introduced.

Saturday, 8:45 A.M. Many floors above the street, a long and narrow walnutpaneled hotel meeting room. A platform at the front of the room, to one side, with a table and chairs for our hosts: a projection screen at front center; rows of three-chair worktables, already set with water pitchers and glasses, lined up along each side of a central aisle all the way to the distant rear, where coffee brewed. Mary and I registered, picked up name tags, chose a table in the middle. We weren't shy. Maybe a little tentative. I didn't want to descend to rebirth in a tepid-water bath or even name my most secret fantasy aloud. This looked like it would be easier. Most of it was.

Our fellow seminarians arrived. A slim, elderly gentleman with a white goatee. Couples, harmonious and dissonant, in every size and shape and in several colors. Two young single guys. A priest (a priest!)--gray hair, glasses, a Humphrey Bogart hat, a bulky black briefcase covered with stickers, one of which read, Have you hugged your kid today? More men than women, and only two women without partners. Maybe 40 people in all--suits to jeans, young to old, skinny to fat: a mixed bag.

The doctor introduced himself. The willowy lady was his wife, Donna. After medical school at the University of Michigan and internship at Bellevue in New York. Brauer had migrated to the golden West. Donna had been born there and looked it. Languid Donna. Slow blink rate, long lashes, half-closed eyes. Alan explained that his wife worked with him at their private clinic in Palo Alto. He said he liked her to travel with him to balance the teaching and because she was lovely to look at. That woke the sleepers. Titters rippled from the back of the room.

People are embarrassed to talk about sex. Alan began. Body-contact sports, yes. We talk about them all the time. But to talk about physical contact that is pleasurable, said Alan, is taboo.

I thought of food. The body needs nutrients. We tear up parts of plants. cut up parts of animals we have killed. mix them with flavoring agents, treat them with heat, crush them with our teeth, after them with oral secretions, swallow them. A bodily function. Sex isn't different in kind if you reduce it to its mechanics, except that the body can get along without it, more or less. But food we elaborate into a glory, a personal pleasure about which we educate ourselves and a feast we share. We meet with friends and even with strangers to try something new. We exchange recipes; look at photographs and salivate: recall nostalgically at a party a dish we've eaten or a wine we've drunk. Sex. even among the enlightened, we hardly discuss: sometimes, a man to a man: sometimes, a woman to a woman: too often, not even a partner to a partner. If we devise any great sexual recipes, we devise them on our own. Among the first tapes the Brauers showed were casual documentary catalogs of genitalia, because unless people have looked at sexually explicit magazines or films, as most of our fellow seminarians probably had not. few of them even know how various are the human race's genitals in stimulation and in repose.

Is my point obvious? On Saturday morning of that Brauer weekend. I assumed it would be. I had thought genital anatomy was obvious, but it wasn't even comfortable to some of the men and women in that classroom, though most of them were counselors--ministers, gynecologists, social workers, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, operators of crisis hotlines. The course proposed to teach enhancement, but when Alan asked how many of us were there to study enhancement as opposed to dysfunction, only Mary and I and the two young guys in the forward end of the room raised our hands (I didn't look behind me), and my claim, at least, was suspect, since I was also there as a reporter. The Brauers knew the odds before they came: they'd designed their seminar to begin with the basics, if only to desensitize the sensitive before the video-taped demonstration of extended orgasm that we would see on Sunday afternoon.

"When I first learned about these techniques for extending male and female pleasure," Alan mentioned later. when the seminar was over, "I told many of my patients about them, even the ones who came in for help quitting smoking. I was excited. I wanted them to know. That went on for a while and then I began wondering why I was losing so many patients. They'd come for one appointment and not come back. It took me a few weeks. I didn't realize I was scaring them off." Donna's laughter. quiet and warm. Alan: "You have to approach the subject very, very slowly. Work up to it. That's why we structure the workshop the way we do."

Coffee break. Seminarians surreptitiously checking one another out. The unspoken, childish accusation: Serious person or sex fiend? We who had raised our hands to Alan's inquiry into motive had already declared ourselves.

We watched a tape of Wardell Pomeroy. Kinsey's associate, taking a sex history the Kinsey way. The woman he was interviewing worked in sex counseling and he led her only slowly from easy questions to intimate ones, yet she squirmed with discomfort and couldn't light her cigarette. Still, she surprised the old master, late in the interview, by announcing that her parents had been nudists. He hadn't realized. "Oh!" Pomeroy exclaimed, involuntarily lifting an eyebrow. Everyone's sex life is a surprise. Kinsey and Pomeroy once drove from Indiana all the way into the Southwest to collect the history of a man who had kept careful records. He was a college graduate with a responsible Government job. His grandmother had taken his heterosexual virginity, his father his homosexual virginity, and he had had sex with 17 of his 33 family members. His sexual relations extended to some 200 preadolescent lemales, 600 preadolescent males and many species of animals. He told the two researchers that he could masturbate from flaccidity to ejaculation in ten seconds. They didn't believe him. Calmly, he demonstrated. He was 63 years old. Who knows what our neighbors do?

The Brauers asked us to pair off with strangers to exchange a brief history: what you learned about sex from your parents and what you wish you had learned; your first sexual experience with another person: your best sexual experience: your most embarrassing sexual experience. One of the seminarians, a woman, said that her first experience with another person had been with her husband on her wedding night, and her best experience was with her husband when she had become a mother and was nursing. Another seminarian, a man, said with embarrassment that he was a husband and a father, happily married, but had strong homosexual desires and thought they might not have arisen to burden him if his parents had told him anything at all about sex. What Mary and I said. I'll spare you here. As a 14-year-old. I learned a lot. including humility, from a ram at ramming time: When we turned the ewes into his lot at the end of the day, the ram would mate, quickly and eagerly, four of five times before he picked up his evening news-paper. We painted his belly with iron oxide: in a few weeks, there were red-rumped ewes everywhere.

"If you need a reason for sexual self-improvement." Alan was saying. "health is a reason. Most of the body's systems change profoundly during sexual arousal. They're stimulated. I find that many emotional and physical complaints seem to be helped by a prescription of an orgasm a day." Some of the seminarians squirmed. Alan nodded. "An orgasm a day. It meets with a lot of resistance. 'My God. are you kidding?'"

Donna: "We have to start our sex-therapy patients slowly and encourage them to work up to it. Once a week or twice a week, then three times. four, and so on. And work with their partners, who may be enraged, especially if they've bottled up years of anger about their sexual lives."

They presented a lesson in advanced anatomy, for review and to prepare us. I do the same here for you. Female orgasm involves contractions not only of the muscles in the outer third of the vagina and the anus but also of the muscles of the uterus. Male orgasm proceeds in two stages: a stage of intense sensation, when the male feels that ejaculation is approaching, and the stage of ejaculation itself. A series of video tapes made in Germany demonstrated the several signs of female sexual response. Then we went to lunch.

Saturday afternoon. Before function, there was dysfunction. The Brauers hate the word, a badly chosen one coined by their colleagues in St. Louis. What's good in sex? What's bad? For a Catholic priest, the best sexual function is no sexual function, not even wet dreams. For the man who ejaculates before he wants to, good is a plateau stage longer sustained. For a woman who is preorgasmic (the Brauers' word, a nice one; it used to be "frigid"), good is orgasm. Subjectivity, as with food; someone likes steak and baked potato, someone else likes puréed kohlrabi, another likes eel. The Brauers' definition of sexual dysfunction: "the gap between a person's expectations and his experience." That's subjective enough, a prescription for comedy. Where sex is concerned, sooner or later we're all clowns, our feet tangled in our pants, a boil discovered on our bottom, something hidden in a closet, baby talk, a collapsing bed. That's one of its purposes, to relieve us of our sometimes murderous dignity.

The Brauers close the gap with an array of technologies--masturbation training, biofeedback training, hypnosis, relaxation techniques and more. Hearing their list, I realized I'd slept through an entire generation of sex-therapy development. When I visited Masters and Johnson, the work had just begun: they improvised as they went along. Now therapists such as the Brauers have access to every sort of technology right off the shelf. Donna later made the process clear with a casual remark: "So we hooked him up to the biofeedback," she said, telling the story of a patient whose only satisfaction had come when he hung from a chinning bar and slapped his erection against a doorframe. The biofeedback was to help him relax. The Brauers break down problems into discrete bits of behavior and plug in every kind of machine--whatever works. Not only hardware but the conceptual machinery of behavioral modification as well. If a deeply inhibited patient can't masturbate, can he at least caress himself? If he can't caress himself, can he at least look at himself nude in a mirror? If he can't look at himself nude in a mirror, can he at least look at himself in a mirror partially clothed? If not partially clothed, then fully clothed, his hands and his face? They start with hands and face, then, and work forward. Eventually, the clothes come off.

"Just like phobia treatment." I said to Mary.

"They're dealing with phobias," she said. Dumb of me. Of course they are.

Do not imagine that the workshop proceeded smoothly. Our seminarians stirred. "Why all this emphasis on masturbation?" someone asked hostilely, though not the priest. A tall man with a red, angry face spewed intellectual jargon and announced twice, the first day, that he was watching to see if he got his money's worth. It developed that he was alone and had been alone for months or years. He barricaded his lone-liness with anger and dared the Brauers to break through.

Outside the curtained windows of our classroom, an air show roared across the afternoon sky. The Brauers ignored the jets and led us onward. I learned something new, at least to me: new, perhaps, to you: A man can maintain ejaculatory control with a good, firm tug on his scrotum, high up. drawing the testicles down. He can learn the technique by himself or with a partner and his partner can use it during intercourse. on signal, to extend his response. Alan and Donna proposed the technique as a superior alternative to the squeeze method of ejaculatory control that Masters and Johnson pioneered.

To end the first day of the weekend, we watched a tape of a nude couple conducting a sexual inventory, taking turns exploring each other's bodies, asking about likes and dislikes: then. the Brauers assigned us homework in kind. Assigned the couples, that is: the singles they asked to imagine that they would be visited that evening by a very important person--themselves. "Take a long, soaking bath," Donna told them. "Explore your own bodies. look for what gives you pleasure." Orgasm was optional, as it was for the couples. Mary nudged me and pointed to the priest. The priest was studying TV Guide.

Mary and I spent the evening taking inventory. We've been together for eight years and we know each other well, but we found we both had more to learn. Later, we went to dinner, a new restaurant high above the city, and learned something more of that pleasure, too.

Complaints began Sunday morning. The intellectual denounced the Brauers' approach as oversimplistic. He didn't have to attend a seminar to be told to pleasure himself, he said; he'd been doing that for years. If he'd had a partner last night, he might feel different. Alan said, simply, wait and see. A business consultant in attendance, a specialist in seminars, proposed that the workshop was organized to build up to "an ah-ha! experience"--the video tape scheduled for that afternoon--and Alan said, simply, wait and see.

We weren't finished with review. Alan recited a list of masturbation myths. He mentioned Onan. whose sin, he said was spilling his seed on the ground. The priest spoke up to clarify. Onan's fault was moral, the priest said: it was not that he had spilled his seed on the ground but that he had refused to service his brother's wife. Warming to the explanation, the priest went on to say that Jesus Christ never discussed those issus, that what was appropriate in a time of scant population is no longer appropriate.

Surprising sentiments from a Roman Catholic priest on a Sunday morning. They reminded me of the politics of sex just as Alan was approaching the same territory, talking about modifying the Puritan ethic, though he hardly spent time there, intending only a briefing before passing on to technique.

But the great unspoken secret of sex, in our society and in every other, is how rigorously it has been turned to political ends--more rigorously than any other bodily system. What we eat, how we cook our food, is political, defining who we are and with whom our sensibilities mesh--you are still a suspect soul in American society if you eat beef or fish raw, and a taste for puppy is monstrous--but not nearly so profoundly political as sex. It isn't only a matter of taboos; it's a matter of using the body itself to define the boundaries of a culture. We don't formally tattoo ourselves to indicate our tribe, nor do many of us practice elaborate rituals of circumcision, but oral sex is French, not American, and anal sex is Greek, not American, and sex with animals is bestial and homosexuality is still beyond the pale. Each exclusion progressively defines us; each exclusion. with many more, has been written into punitive laws that only now begin to be relaxed and that remain on the books almost everywhere in America as implicit threats that can easily be made explicit if circumstances warrant. No wonder there are undercurrents of hostility and more than a whiff of fear in this pleasant seminar room; no wonder some of Alan's patients, when he first announced his discovery, dove for the windows, never to return.

"It's astonishing to me how many people masturbate without using lubricatnts." I heard Alan say and was astonished with him, having even tried Vicks Vaporub once, to my acutely mentholated discomfort. We watched a film of men masturbating. They reminisced: I realized that we remember our first climaxes as vividly as we remember where we were when John Kennedy was shot Think of the potential of the human body for pleasure: think of how thoroughly that potential is unattended, abandoned, controlled. This century's swing of the pendulum would move us away from overcontrol, at least, but even the Brauers, still shifting from a focus on pain to a focus on pleasure, speak of limits, as if sexuality had no limits inherent in its metrics of nerve and pulse and blood. That's the fear of our inhibited culture--that sex may devour, that it may turn us away from unthinking love of God and blind love of country. Maybe. if all goes well, it will.

"We prefer," Alan began the ah-ha! afternoon, the jets renewing their acrobatics beyond the wall, "to look at sex as something that can get better and better. It's very seldom looked at this way. It was bad enough, a lot of people thought, to look at dysfunction, much less at how to make sex better. But it can be made better, much better." He cited the official duration of orgasm, concluding, "and one full minute for what Masters and Johnson called status orgasmus."

Donna smiled. "Would you believe four hours?" she asked. Eyes widened in a wave back through the classroom and Alan nodded enthusiastic confirmation.

He then wheeled out a portable blackboard and diagramed a single standard orgasm for us:

"The most important basis for change," Alan explained, standing beside his graph, "is knowing that change is possible. Masters and Johnson did a disservice by defining orgasm as limited. The vaginal contractions of female orgasm seem to fit those findings, but we have seen a longer response based on uterine contractions. These turn up in women in trusting states with a partner. We find that women can continue to higher and higher states of arousal. with continuous contractions that are obvious and externally visible and that can be felt through the lower abdominal wall. These are involuntary reflexes, and the woman always reports she's not doing anything, simply allowing something to happen." So. said Alan, erasing the board and rechalking it, instead of multiple orgasm......women who have learned to achieve an extended orgasmic state build upward from orgasm itself to a state the Brauers call extended sexual orgasm--E.S.O.:

"When we say this," Donna commented then, "the first question is almost always 'Won't I get exhausted?' The answer is no. Once you've learned how to achieve E.S.O., it requires no effort. It's easy."

Alan: "In fact, about two minutes into E.S.O., physiological responses--respiration, blood pressure and so on--go down. Not to base line but down. The woman still reports orgasmic sensation, but she doesn't have to work to sustain it."

Graphs are interesting, but they don't convince. We went then to the video-taped demonstration. Lights out. curtains drawn against the encroaching jets, we leaned forward to watch.

A gynecological examining table draped with a white sheet. A row of observers--students--in folding chairs to one side. Background voices. A slim man in a tank top and jeans leads a young woman into view. She's tanned, naked, pretty. The man is a doctor. His name is Marc. The woman, Susan, is his wife. Marc helps Susan onto the table. She sits looking toward the camera while he points out the normal pink color of her eyelids, a reference point he asks us to note for the changes we will see.

Susan lies down on her back. Marc begins playing lightly with one of her nipples and she begins . . . pulsing. Slight involuntary movements of her arms. her hands, her belly, her legs. It's obvious that she's in orgasm. Her husband grazes the hair on her mons with his finger tips. "Hair is an extension of the epidermis," he says, "and the epidermis is a sense organ." Susan's pulsing increases and we see.

Marc sits down beside his wife on a stool, lacing the camera. Susan sets her feet into the stirrups of the examining table and her thighs open before us. Her husband lubricates the thumb and the index finger of his right hand with petroleum jelly. He opens Susan's labia, takes time to identify the structures of labia majora and labia minora, vaginal introitus, urinary meatus, clitoris and clitoral hood and begins gently, slowly, stroking her clitoris. She pulses more intensely and begins to moan.

An offcamera voice asks if anyone doubts that Susan is in extended orgasm. One of the observers on the tape, a young woman, says, "I can see she's turned on, but I don't know."

Marc invites the young woman up to see. "Touch her thigh." he says. "Go ahead. It's OK." The young woman does. feels the muscular contractions there, sees the bright flush of color in the vagina that signals the orgasmic state. She returns to her chair convinced, shaking her head.

Marc takes Susan up to highs at which she moans and involuntarily moves to flex her entire body. He restrains her gently with the arm and the elbow of his caressing hand. With the index finger of his other hand, he sweeps the inner wall of his wife's vagina, stopping at the loci of major nerve plexuses as he goes. She reacts with ecstasy to the sweeping finger. Her hands flutter into the air and her feet curl downward in reflex.

I discovered that there were tears in my eyes. So did Mary. For 30 minutes. we watched a human being experiencing intense pleasure. pleasure shared with someone she trusted and loved.

The technique for extending female orgasm is physically simple, though learning it takes attention, persistence and trust. The man lightly and directly stimulates the woman's clitors with his well-lubricated finger and thumb, maintaining a slow, steady platform of stimulation at a rate of about one stroke per second. When the woman achieves orgasm, the man lets up clitoral stimulation and, with his other hand, stimulates her vaginal interior, paying special attention to the area known as the Grafenberg spot. on the bodyward wall just behind the public bone. As orgasm extends to E.S.O., the man alternates stimulation between clitoris and vagina. The woman guides him--by telling him what she needs by directing his hand with her own, by moving her genitals toward or away from his stimulating hand. He attends carefully to her signs of arousal and feels for the rhythm that will sustain and increase that arousal.

During the learning process, the man has to feel each and every one of the woman's resistances, but the primary responsibility for overcoming her resistances ("he's getting tired": "he's looking at me": "I don't deserve this"; "we're wasting time") is the woman's. She must talk herself through. She may choose to relax through a breathing process or use fantasy. She may choose to talk to her partner. She will find arousal where it is appropriate for her: she will find her way into extended orgasm eventually (in weeks or months of regular practice) if, knowing it is possible, both partners pay attention and allow themselves a full measure of private time--but less time, usually, than men and women routinely commit to sports or to social activities. Or to TV.

Finally. Susan sits up. Marc points out her eyelids. They are colored so intensely they look bruised. "They're engorged," Marc says. "That's what eye shadow is all about." His wife looks deeply peaceful. She is still slightly orgasmic. He kisses her and they walk away together, holding hands.

Alan and Donna Brauer turned on the lights in our classroom to silence. We were stunned. I saw grins, but I saw anger as well. Not much comment or many questions; one comment, from a doctor, helped explain the anger on the faces of some of the men. "If you give the woman this," he called out in a Spanish accent. "she will be wanting it all the time, and you know no man can handle that." We had watched a man handling it. but this intelligent, articulate doctor didn't yet believe his eyes.

To balance what we had seen, the Brauers quickly went on to discuss male E.S.O. They had no film to show: they are currently producing one. The techniques they teach have been reported before, but their training methods are their own.

"It's easier for women to learn to extend their orgasms than it is for men," Alan explained. "Men of every age can learn to have several orgasms in a row, but that's a separate skill from extending the orgasmic state itself. If you conceive of every man, regardless of his sexual endurance, as being essentially an early ejaculator, you can see how we proceed in our training. He participates passively, much as the woman does: you have two attentions on one nervous system. just as we saw with Susan in the film. A man can't be quite as passive as a woman, because he has to monitor where he is in order to avoid going over the edge and ejaculating. What happens is this: The woman, using a combination of manual and oral stimulation. takes the man up to a point near ejaculation--to the emission stage, where he's secreting clear fluid--and then stops or uses scrotal traction to allow his level of arousal to drop slightly. Then she takes him up again. She does that three to nine times in a given session over a period of one to three months. Within that time period, a man can learn better control, how to stay in the highly pleasurable stage next to ejaculation. Once he learns that control, he'll find his arousal level going up so that he can accept even more stimulation before ejaculation. The closer he can get to the point of ejaculation without actual release, the better it feels."

Donna: "He'll be in an almost continuous state of emission, producing clear fluid. He may well produce a cup or more of fluid during one extended session. While they're learning how to achieve E.S.O., I ought to add, they take turns pleasuring each other. Our rule is the woman first. That's because she usually has more resistances to overcome. She has to do a lot of self-talk along the way, talking herself through."

Ultimately, the Brauers said, both partners reach a point at which they can experience E.S.O. during intercourse. each shifting subtly from active to passive as they go. "It becomes a kind of dance." Donna summarized. At least once a week, the couple returns to the training stage of oral and manual stimulation to maintain levels of skill.

I asked the Braurs afterward how they had learned that extended female orgasm was possible. They had learned it from the couple who demonstrated it on the video tape. That couple, in turn. had learned it by trial and error.

Alan and Donna have developed techniques for teaching E.S.O. to men and women. They've successfully trained more than 40 couples--the number is rapidly growing as the news spreads--and have organized a small group of volunteers willing to be studied for purposes of scientific reporting. Their training success demonstrates convincingly that E.S.O. can be learned, even by patients who start with problems of erectile inadequacy or preorgasmia. Since the seminar I attended, the Brauers have written a detailed guide to E.S.O. training. The book, designed for self-teaching, will be published early in 1983. You'll hear about it.

What the Brauers have discovered and the techniques they are learning to teach will change the way most of us make love and the way all of us think about sex. There will be a full measure of resistance to those lessons in pleasure: pleasure in America is still suspect. as the Brauers discover even in professional seminars. Their work is the front line of sex research today, beyond the repair of dysfunction. Significantly, the Brauers teach sexual enhancement to couples during two-week vacations in Palo Alto. much as Masters and Johnson counseled couples in two-week sessions of intensive therapy in St. Louis. Up to a point, the training is even similar: the difference, an important difference, is in emphasis; on pleasure rather than on relieving pain. For the significant minority of Americans who are happy with their sexual relationships, that difference defines a potential of extraordinary promise.

"I didn't want to descend to rebirth in a tepid-water bath or even name my most secret fantasy aloud."