I interviewed a courtesan for my podcast, Rebecca Deos, and it got me thinking about why people hire courtesans, escorts, and the like.  What could be worth so much money (hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars)?  I know some of it is about sex without fear of rejection, yet every escort I know, and I happen to know more than a few, tell me stories about customers who were hiring something much more than uncomplicated coupling.

My friend and mentor, the late Stan Dale lived in a geisha house for the better part of a year about 50 years ago.  He told me: “Living in the geisha house was the single most important event in my [then] twenty-seven years.  [Before I lived there ] I thought I knew everything about sex. [But at the Geisha house] there was no ’sex,’ intercourse…What I learned was sense and reverence…when I got back from Japan, I had learned to look at life in a whole new way, and had learned about reverence, which is how a high geisha treats her clients.”

I dream of a world where every human being was trained in the arts of the Geisha, the courtesan, the high-priced escort. A world where we would learn to look at each other with eyes that see each others’ wisdom, beauty, sexiness, creativity.  A world where we could learn about our bodies and our sexuality, learn to celebrate our senses, free ourselves from shame and fear, and learn to integrate love and intimacy into our sexuality.

As Stan once said “When people get a chance to touch heart, body, and soul, it’s an opening to feel the magic of their humanity.”

1. My older brother and I haven’t talked in years. As far as I know this is not from any particular reason, we haven’t fought or exchanged unpleasantness, we just don’t talk. He doesn’t even respond to the occasional emails I send.
2. Sometimes I think I’m a great workshop leader, other times I’m convinced that I’m totally unsuited for the job and I suck.
3. I live on a diet and often hate it.
4. I’m very sensitive. My feelings are easily hurt.
5. I don’t like being alone.
6. When I look at my life I feel very lucky.
7. I didn’t attend my Dad’s funeral.
8. I’m a Barry Manilow fan.
9. I love to laugh. I think life is mostly funny, when I can get some objectivity.
10. I really like “subtext” in plays and movies.
11. When I read “Born to Kvetch” I had some deep aha’s about the cultural (Eastern European Jewish) underpinnings to some of my behaviors.
12. I love to flirt.
13. I find it nearly impossible to root for any team from Florida or Texas.
14. I started skiing about 5 years ago and I love it.
15. I often contemplate getting a tattoo and/or shaving my head.
16. I like my 40’s and 50’s better than any other time in my life.

I was a one-year-old in 1954 when the Supreme Court ruled against segregation in public schools in Brown vs The Board of Education.  When I was 2 years old, in December of 1955 Rosa Parks, a seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a city bus. The bus driver had her arrested.  After a 381 day boycott of public transportation, the US Supreme Court ruled that segregation of public transportation was unconstitutional.

Just after my 4th birthday the “Little Rock Nine” required federal troops to escort them to high school.  I was almost 7 when four black students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College begin a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter.  The following year was the time of the “freedom riders“, student volunteers harassed and beaten for taking bus trips through the South to test out new laws that prohibited segregation in interstate travel facilities.

When I was ten, in 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. was jailed in Birmingham, Mississippi’s NAACP field secretary, 37-year-old Medgar Evers, was murdered outside his home, Martin Luther King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, Four young girls (Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins) attending Sunday school were killed when a bomb explodes at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, a popular location for civil rights meetings, and JFK was gunned down in Dallas Texas.
I was twelve in 1965 when Malcolm X was murdered.  That was the year that we watched on television when Blacks begin a march to Montgomery in support of voting rights and were stopped at the Pettus Bridge by a police blockade. Fifty marchers were hospitalized after police used tear gas, whips, and clubs against them.

In 1968, when I was almost 15 years old, Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered in Memphis Tennessee and Bobby Kennedy was murdered in LA.  I grew up in a violent, racist, frightened nation, when Black Americans were routinely treated as less-than human.

Last night I cried listening to Barrack Hussein Obama’s acceptance speech.  While I know Obama’s election does not automatically end racism and bigotry in the US.  As Winston Churchill said in another context, “…this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”  I am filled with hope.

I saw Dave Wilcox in concert recently. Dave’s a singer/songwriter/storyteller that I really like. His “concerts” are like an evening-long journey into the highs and lows of the human heart. While he’s tuning his guitar he tells stories of his life and friends and lovers and the stories morph into songs and truth gets said and sung. I laugh. I cry. I’m moved. Nothing sounds preachy or fake, there’s no lecture. And from a technical point of view the songs and musicianship are astounding.

Things Dave said that got me thinking (I’ll need to paraphrase because I wasn’t taking notes, I was enjoying a show):

- A heart needs to break for us to know it really works.

- All our paths get shorter at the end, because we only have so many steps, only so much time…so we have to choose, we have to trust.

- What if we went into a relationship fearless? We could tell the truth because we weren’t afraid it would end. (Probably wouldn’t end if we told the truth…)

-It’s human nature to be dissatisfied. If, by some miracle, we all woke up tomorrow with the ability to jump into the air and just fly, unaided, to just soar, we’d be happy…for about a week. Then we’d start to think “I’m not so special, everyone can fly, I really can’t do anything, I’m just ordinary…”

- So let’s say you’re arguing with your lover and it’s taking her a really long time to realize you’re right…

- We have hearts that can hold a tremendous amount of fullness, which is great if there’s a tremendous amount of fullness in our lives, but it leaves us a lot of room for empty. This isn’t bad design, there’s a lot of fullness to find. Maybe it’s only the empty that would keep us looking to find the fullness?

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Forty years ago, on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King was assasinated. He was just 39 years old. I was 15. To me, a Jewish kid from the Bronx who was a hippie wannabe, MLK was perhaps the bravest, most compassionate and loving man I had ever heard of. He still is. Here are some of his words:

Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.

It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.

Let no man pull you low enough to hate him.

Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man’s sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.

Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars… Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.

Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time; the need for mankind to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence. Mankind must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

Here’s some data on extramarital sex from Jared Diamond, UCLA professor, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and winner of the National Medal of Science:

“People have many reasons to lie when asked whether they have committed adultery. That’s why it is notoriously difficult to get accurate scientific information about this important subject. One of the few existing sets of hard facts emerged as a totally unexpected by-product of a medical study, performed nearly a half a century ago for a different reason. That study’s findings have never been revealed until now.

“I recently learned those facts from the distinguished medical scientist who ran the study. (Since he does not wish to be identified in this connection, I shall refer to him as Dr. X.) In the 1940s Dr. X was studying the genetics of human blood groups, which are molecules we acquire only by inheritance. … The study’s research plan was straightforward: go to the obstetrics ward of a highly respectable U.S. hospital; collect blood samples from one thousand newborn babies and their mothers and fathers; identify the blood groups in all the samples; and then use standard genetic reasoning to deduce the inheritance patterns.

“To Dr. X’s shock, the blood groups revealed that nearly 10 percent of those babies to be the fruits of adultery! … There could be no question of mistaken maternity: the blood samples were drawn from an infant and its mother soon after the infant emerged from its mother. A blood group present in a baby but absent from its undoubted mother could only have come from its father. Absence of the blood group from the mother’s husband as well showed conclusively that the baby had been sired by some other man, extramaritally. The true incidence of extramarital sex must have been considerably higher than 10 percent … since most bouts of intercourse do not result in conception.

“At the time Dr. X made his discovery, research on American sexual habits was virtually taboo. He decided to maintain a prudent silence, never publishing his findings, and it was only with difficulty that I got his permission to mention his results without betraying his name. However, his results were later confirmed by several similar genetic studies whose results did get published. Those studies variously showed between 5 and 30 percent of American and British babies to have been adulterously conceived. Again, the proportion of the tested couples of whom at least the wife had practiced adultery must have been higher, for the same … reasons as in Dr. X’s study.”

Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee, Harper Perennial, Copyright 1992 by Jared Diamond, pp. 85-86.

Interviewing Linda Marks, author of “Healing the War Between the Genders” I came away wondering about our notions of gender. For many of us the idea of “male” and “female” seems innate - it feels like we were born one or the other, have always known it, recognize it in others, experience humans as two flavors: Male or Female.

Yet many of us have experiences that challenge this belief in gender polarity - perhaps as a boy-child we preferred playing with dolls to playing with trucks, perhaps as a girl-child we liked football a lot more than dancing - but most of us just ignore these experiences to persist in the belief that one is either male or female.

And science has abundant examples of people born with chromosomes that are neither xx or xy, but xxy and xyy (sometimes called “intersexed”). Throughout all of recorded history there have always been homosexual humans. And, as far as I can tell, there have always existed “transgendered” people - cross-dressers, female personalities “trapped” in male bodies and vice versa, etc.
I read somewhere (but can’t find a citation on the internet) that some Native American tribes believed that humans came in seven genders - hetero male, hetero female, gay male, lesbian female, shaman, transsexual, and dancer. Also, that in the Bantu language there are seven genders.

Andrea Dworkin, an author known for her controversial beliefs about sexual politics, once wrote that “the system of gender polarity is real but not true.” I think in generations to come we will look back at this idea of only two genders as the kind of misinformation and prejudice that had us once believe that the color of a person’s skin determined their character.

It all reminds me of a song by Peter Alsop I used to sing a lot:

As soon as you’re born, grownups check were you pee
And then they decide just how you’re s’posed to be
Girls pink and quiet, boys noisy and blue
seems like a dumb way to choose what you’ll do

Well it’s only a wee wee, so what’s the big deal?
It’s only a wee wee, so what’s all the fuss?
It’s only a wee wee and everyone’s got one
There’s better things to discuss

Human beings, that is to say you and me, are born wanting and needing intimate loving touch. And we never outgrow those needs. Sadly, most of the adults that I meet, and I meet about 1,000 each year, have precious few resources for getting their need for loving touch met.

Too often, when we feel lonely or sad or depressed, we wind up having sex with people to get our touch needs met. Sometimes the sex is good, sometimes not so good. Sometimes we feel good after the sex, lots of times we feel empty, sad, confused.

I believe there are better choices. Recently, I interviewed Dr. Karen Gail Lewis. She’s the author of “With or Without a Man: Single Women Taking Control of Their Lives”, a terrific book filled with all sorts of great ideas for filling one’s life with love and intimacy, with or without a partner. Chapters 4 through 12 describe nine tasks for living a satisfying single life — ignoring the societal bias. Weaving through each of these nine tasks is the basic human need for a deep connection with others. This comes from loving and being loved, neither of which is limited to romantic love alone.

In the “Love, Intimacy & Sexuality” Workshops that I lead, singles and couples learn to connect and open our hearts to others in an intimate and loving way, without necessarily involving our genitals. In a safe, supportive environment a person can uncover their passion for living, their natural self-appreciation and self-acceptance and feed their need for loving touch.

What does it mean to be a man in the 21st century? Are we men disposable? Are we, as some Darwinian feminists have held, the imperfect beta version of what ultimately evolved into the “more perfect” female?

I meet quite a few men in my workshops who seem to be struggling to find a model for manhood that fits the circumstances of the world we live in. I’m not needed as the “provider”, my wife earns more than I do. I’m not needed as the protector, that’s really more in the line of police work. I could join the armed services and train to be a warrior, but so can she. I’m not a hunter, and my local supermarket is so much easier and more convenient than hunting ever could be. Heck, given her 3 days a week at the gym, I’m not even certain I’m stronger than she is.

Interviewing Alison Armstrong, creator of the Celebrating Men, Satisfying Women workshops, I heard a message of men’s essential value and worth. Then interviewing Michael Gilbert, author of “The Disposable Male“, he seemed to imply the opposite. And it’s all really got me thinking.

I think part of the problem is that, given a level playing field, the difference between men and women is relatively subtle, while the similarities are so obvious we sometimes “can’t see the forest for looking at the trees.” Any woman who likes men will tell you that sometimes what makes a guy really sexy and attractive is the sense of his untapped power and assertiveness. At the same time, what makes a guy really sexy and attractive is his empathy and sensitivity.

I don’t have one simple model for being a man. Sometimes I want to seem like James Bond, sometimes more like James Dean, sometimes more like Jimmy Stewart, sometimes more like Jimmy Neutron. Sigh. I guess I’ll just keep being myself and hope that’s enough.

“The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.” - Albert Ellis

This week Dr. Albert Ellis died. You may never have heard of him or met him, but Dr. Ellis most certainly changed your life. In the 1950’s Dr. Ellis broke away from traditional pschology practices and created what became known as Cognitive (CBT) or Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT). In other words, Dr. Ellis championed the practice of using your thoughts to “heal” your mental habits, your internal rules, that create depression, and other “mental illness”.

Simplistically, Dr. Ellis believed that we are taught certain ways of thinking that don’t serve us very well as adults, that we develop an internal set of rules. We create unrealistic expectations for ourselves - an internal catalog of “shoulds” and “musts” that ultimately hurts our self-esteem. He used to tell people to “stop shoulding on yourself” and to stop “musterbating“. He once said that “neurosis is just a high-class word for whining.”
Some common ways that we can tell if we’re driving ourselves crazy, include:

1. Awfulising: using words like ‘awful’, ‘terrible’, ‘horrible’, ‘catastrophic’ to describe something - e.g. ‘It would be terrible if …’, ‘It’s the worst thing that could happen’, ‘That would be the end of the world’.
2. Cant-stand-it-itis: viewing an event or experience as unbearable - e.g. ‘I can’t stand it’, ‘It’s absolutely unbearable’, I’ll die if I get rejected’.
3. Demanding: using ’shoulds’ (moralising) or ‘musts’ (musturbating) - e.g. ‘I should not have done that, ‘I must not fail’, ‘I need to be loved’, ‘I have to have a drink’.

4. People-rating: labelling or rating your total self (or someone else’s) - e.g. ‘I’m stupid/hopeless /useless /worthless.’

The path out of this irrational negativity was to change your thoughts, to see things as they really are, accepting or tolerating frustration and discomfort, accepting “badness” for what it is. Ellis helped people be more realistic, more “real world”, more fact-based, avoiding exaggeration. He helped people focus on the near-term, what was happening now, and to choose the thoughts that helped them find a way to a better now.

Every time you come to a “personal growth workshop“, every time your therapist suggests choosing a new thought, every time you watch Dr. Phil or listen to Dr. Terri Orbuch (the Love Doctor), et. al., you are seeing the legacy of Dr. Albert Ellis. Every time you do an exercise at the end of one of my podcasts, somewhere Dr. Ellis is smiling.