Folio-ID.comAdvertisement - Continue Reading BelowSo this is it, I think as I'm led into what looks like a guest room. Three windows, shutters partially closed, face the backyard; a queen-size bed sits center stage. It's pretty unremarkable as beds go, with white-and-beige plaid sheets, a pair of pale blankets, and a dream catcher hanging overhead. It isn't exactly what I'd expected, but then, I really didn't know what to expect. This is the bedroom that Cheryl Cohen Greene shares with her husband—and hundreds of other men. Call it her home office.
More From ELLECohen Greene isn't a prostitute. She's a sexual surrogate, someone paid to teach men—late-in-life virgins, the disabled, abuse or trauma victims, and those with erectile dysfunction, Asperger's syndrome, self-esteem issues, phobias, or crippling performance anxiety—to get it up and get it on, first with her and then, in theory, in relationships with real partners. Cohen Greene is a certified sexologist with a doctorate in human sexuality (DHS) from the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco; for 19 years, she was a member of the San Francisco Sex Information training staff, which provides sex info free of charge through its website and hotline. As a surrogate, her technique is more show than tell: Part lov­er, part wife, part shrink, part confidante, she guides men through relaxation techniques and eventually through their and her erogenous zones, teaching them how to communicate, how to touch, how to be touched.
"I like to call myself a surrogate partner therapist," Cohen Greene says, in a thick Boston accent that flattens her a's and eliminates her r's. "Because that's what I am, a temporary partner." It's an accent that Helen Hunt nailed in last fall's The Sessions—the Oscar-bait film that has put Cohen Greene at the forefront of her little-known field. The movie was based on a 1990 article by poet Mark O'Brien (played by the excellent John Hawkes), a polio survivor mostly confined to an iron lung since childhood, who, in his late thirties, became valiantly determined to lose his virginity—with Cohen Greene's help. The film takes artistic license with some aspects of surrogacy; it downplays, for instance, the role usually performed by sex therapists, who form a sort of trinity with surrogate and client. But it accurately depicts Cohen Greene's unpretentious warmth, her sometimes hilarious matter-of-factness, and her unusual career skills: utter open-mindedness, intuition, and a deep well of tenderness.
In one scene, when we watch Cohen Greene kneel over a bed and gently kiss O'Brien on his bare chest, the gesture tells us more than any speech could. "The only other times he'd been touched were when he was handled by an aide or given a medical procedure," recalls the real Cohen Greene, tears welling in her eyes. "I don't know where that kiss came from. He was so frail, and I was so afraid to hurt him. I had no idea it would be so profound."
Cohen Greene and I meet at her Monday morning Pilates class in Berkeley, California. While 40 years of nonstop sex with some 900 partners (by her estimate) appears to be an excellent anti-ager—at 68, she has glowing skin, and there's a slink to her step, a certain sparkle in her eye that reads as sensual—Cohen Greene's body is square shouldered, maternal looking. "I'm no porn star," she says right off the bat. "I've had my breast removed. I've had reconstruction. I had my nipple removed. It looks like somebody came at me with a saber here [she lifts her shirt to reveal a scar], and I've had my hip replaced." She's also a survivor of lymphoma, which nearly killed her. "I never did get a fake nipple put on. I don't make a big deal about it to clients," she says. "I mention it as we're getting undressed the first time. Then we move on and explore our bodies."
There's a reason many of us had never heard of sex surrogacy until The Sessions came along: In the world of mainstream therapy, it's widely considered to be an experiment better left behind in the freewheeling '70s—at best unorthodox and at worst irresponsible or even unethical.
"People discount so much of what I do: Oh, she has sex for money," says Cohen Greene. "But really, there is so little sex in the end." In her work with clients—"not patients," she's quick to correct, "because they're not sick"—it usually takes more than a month of sessions before the individual is ready to advance to any kind of sexual touching. "Think of a prostitute as a restaurant. I'm more like culinary school. I teach them the tools, so they can move on. I don't want repeat business." Intercourse is not necessarily the endgame, and sometimes it's not even on the menu.
Proponents of sexual surrogacy believe it picks up where conventional sex therapy leaves off. "No therapist is going down to that root level," says Cohen Greene, "to see them, their bodies, to talk to them while they're naked." The practice was in part pioneered by renegade researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson in the late '50s, as an in-clinic experiment to treat problems of erectile dysfunction, premature ejaculation, and anorgasmia (in women, the inability to orgasm). The initial work showed promise—primarily, that the men were able to achieve erections and sustain them through intercourse—and they expanded their research in the '60s to include surrogate partners for single subjects. Though Masters and Johnson had what they considered fantastic success with the approach—the clients who worked with surrogates showed about as much progress as those who worked with their spouses or partners—the duo stopped referring patients to surrogates after the husband of one threatened to embroil them in a divorce-related complaint. Masters may have regretted the decision. "Without surrogates," he told Time in 1974, "we now have a failure rate of 70 to 75 percent" for single men suffering from impotence.
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