This is a necessary correction if you googled my name and got this listing:
                                "Not this year, dear"
...
         On Being Grievously Misquoted By Salon.com

                                           INTRODUCTORY

This file requires some explaining. It is not intended primarily for the reader of this site, but rather to snag the Googlebot and other web crawlers as they make their way around the Web—to have them log in “Salon.com.” It’s an attempt to offset the effect of a story that appeared there that included quotes attributed to me and that not only have nothing in common with anything I said, but perpetuate some unfortunate notions of the author’s, Marty Nemko, writing under the pseudonym “Sandy Morris,” about sexual dysfunction. 

It is not unusual to be misquoted. I was once quoted on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle as declaring that “People ruin sex.” This as how the journalist took my joke that “Sex is beautiful; it’s just that people ruin it.” (I had a lot to learn about the perils of irony.) Mortifying though that was, it has by now passed into history and hopefully I’m the only one that remembers it. But the awful thing about something published on line is that it stays in the public arena forever, or at least as long as Salon pays the rent on its site. 

I immediately sent a letter-to-the-editor with corrections. Since it was not published, I followed it with a letter to one of the editors, but got no response. I soon discovered that the offending quote followed me around the Web, often turning up on the first screen when I was entered into a search engine. I figured I was just going to have to swallow the bitter brew and left it at that for some time. But suddenly it hit me that if I put my case on my own site, the Salon cue will get snagged by the roaming bots and with luck will show up close to my Nemko nemesis. So that is what this is all about.

                                   THE STORY, CORRECTED

The story is about low sexual desire and what, if anything can be done about it. The conclusions are Nemko’s and are entirely at odds with my own.

The quotes are utterly fabricated, hard though that may be hard to believe. Not only the content but the tone is painful. He has me using words like "babe," and in general sounding callow, callous, and flip—the smirking tone that seems to be obligatory for journalists writing about sex. Much worse than this kind of slander, he's got people thinking that I find low sexual desire to be a hopeless condition, which is as far from the case as it is possible to get. I am quoted to the effect that "the best solution is to 'accept it'." 

I was not the only one misquoted. Masters and Johnson most decidedly did not find that "low sexual desire has the lowest cure rate of all sexual dysfunctions." Quite the opposite, they found it to be among the easiest to treat (I had training at their Institute). Bill Masters even said (in a personal comment) that it is only sexual dysfunction that can be cured with an idea. I’m not sure if anyone but me knew exactly what he meant, but he at least did not mean it was difficult to treat, let alone the most difficult. There certainly are sex therapists who think this, but I believe that is only because the standard approach pushes for performance, and you can’t treat desire problems that way. In other words, desire problems expose weaknesses in the standard approach.

In the interview Marty used the example of a married couple. (Using his peudonym, in the Salon piece he spoke in the first person.) The husband told him: "I would rather clean out the basement than make love," and "I have more interest in anything than in sex." This is sex with his wife of 25 years, with whom, according to Marty, he clearly has a close relationship. This is unmistakable evidence of performance anxiety. How so?

If he just was not sexually aroused he could still enjoy cuddling, making out, hanging out in bed. But when someone has to escape the feeling of failure they head for the basement. Marty argued that, "This may sound like performance anxiety is creating low sex drive, but for him it is the reverse. His lack of enthusiasm creates bad performance, which, of course, must make him terribly self-conscious." 

That's always how it seems. After all, why would he have performance anxiety in the first place if he was not performing badly? Answer: it is performance anxiety that generates the idea that there is such a thing as performing badly. It creates the experience of sex as a performance that you can fail at. Then when things don't go happily, it becomes an event.

Of course, once this point is made, it sounds like all you have to do is to realize that there is no such thing as performance failure. This is the inference people inevitably draw. But that only leads to performance anxiety about having performance anxiety, which is what locks in performance anxiety in the first place (see Vignettes). Shame about feeling ashamed, being self-critical about being self-critical, is inevitable.

Like almost everyone else, Marty entirely misunderstands performance anxiety, which is not at all surprising since it is a deceptively subtle phenomenon (as I point out in "What the Sex Therapies Tell Us About Sex," the lead-off article in Brunner/Routledge's New Directions in Sex Therapy; see  Bibliography for details.)

Bernard Apfelbaum, PhD