Street-Corner Sex Clinics

Anyone can call himself a sexologist, or expert in human sexuality. These days more and more unqualified men and women are doing just that. In hundreds of "sex clinics" across the nation, they are dispensing advice to the sexually troubled. More often than not, their services not only fail to help but actually cause serious emotional harm. Currently waging an active campaign to get the issue on the agenda of the American Medical Association's June convention, Sex Expert William Masters charges that "these street-corner clinics frequently have no trained personnel; they operate at low professional standards or no standards at all. They are, in fact, more business ventures than therapy centers."

Paradoxically, it was Physician Masters and his wife Virginia Johnson who initiated the concept of sex clinics. In 14 years of investigation at their Reproductive Biology Research Foundation in St. Louis, they demonstrated that "sexual dysfunction" is treatable and gave sex counseling a respectability it had never before enjoyed. Now, however, Masters and Johnson find themselves treating not only first-time patients but also psychological casualties of other, irresponsible clinics.

Misguided or unprincipled therapists harm their patients in a variety of ways. An exploitative "expert" may induce them to have sex with him, insisting that this is part of the treatment. Voyeuristic therapists sometimes ask couples to perform under observation, a practice that Masters considers acceptable only for research purposes, and then only when the participants are sexually untroubled. Otherwise, what often happens is that already disturbed couples find they cannot function sexually when watched. That upsets them further, and their performance in private becomes even more unsatisfying. In some clinics, clients are even filmed engaged in both homosexual and heterosexual acts--thus becoming vulnerable to blackmail.

Not all clinics are guilty of such abuses; many are run by skilled professionals. Masters and Johnson have themselves trained seven man-woman pairs of co-therapists who now run clinics on their own. Other respected programs are operated by professionals with no tie to Masters and Johnson, though most use some of the techniques devised by the St. Louis experts. For instance, at Forest Hospital, a private psychiatric institution in the Chicago suburb of Des Plaines, a psychiatrist and a gynecologist treat patients with a combination of the St. Louis method and psychoanalytic therapy.

To minimize the chance of falling into the hands of charlatans, Masters suggests, would-be patients should be sure that any therapist they plan to consult has some professional qualifications--for instance, that he is a reputable physician, psychologist or marriage counselor. The patient should also verify that the clinic has a good reputation, that treatment will be confidential, and that no unrealistic promises of cure are made. He also advises patients to shun clinics advertising in the yellow pages or in cheap magazines. But the only real solution, he points out, is to shut down the street-corner clinics. That goal, he admits, could hardly be accomplished through lawsuits by injured clients. "Who would want to testify that he was impotent?" Masters asks.

Instead, he believes that the A.M.A. should call for a national seminar of doctors, psychologists and other professionals to set clinic standards and work toward a licensing law. Otherwise, the whole concept of treatment for sexual problems may be discredited. "The disenchantment and public outcry are coming in six months or a year," Masters warns, "and all this will be wonderful ammunition for the puritans."

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