Private Practices: The Story of a Sex Surrogate
Have you ever heard about a SEX SURROGATE and wondered what it was?
Fox News recently wrote an article about it, and summed it up with this:
“…some sex therapists turn to surrogate partners – people who help patients with intimacy issues using a hands-on approach. This can include having sex with the patient.”
What? You mean to say that there are doctors who can prescribe sex to their patients, and there’s an actual service those patients can turn to that will have sex with them “for medical reasons”?
It sounds like it’s borderline prostitution, but where there is a medical need, what other choice does one have?
Which is why you should take a look at the IPSA – the INTERNATIONAL PROFESSIONAL SURROGATES ASSOCIATION and read through their code of ethics. There is the usual doctor-patient confidentiality line items, along with a few bullet points about protecting the health of the patient with regards to what the doctor would or wouldn’t recommend for treatment.
But it’s not often that a medical code of ethics contains a line:
- Surrogates shall be responsible for adequate precautionary measures against the transmission of communicable diseases and infections.
Okay, that could have some medical reason to exist, rubber gloves and face masks serve similar purposes.
- It is the surrogate’s responsibility to ensure protection against conception
And there you go — that’s what one typically doesn’t see in other businesses.
But surrogates do serve a purpose — there can be any number of reasons why a medically-sound recommendation for the use of a sex surrogate makes absolute legitimate sense. One example in the Fox News article was about a woman in her mid-40’s who had been abused as a child and became afraid of men. After sex therapy, she ended up getting married.
The typical surrogate session begins with working on communication skills and self-confidence. They then work towards more physical contact, such as holding hands or other personal touching. Intercourse – if it occurs – is often towards the end of the therapy timeframe (usually about three to six months).
So now that we know what sex surrogates are, the bigger question that is asked is whether it’s legal. According to ABC News, “legality issues have not been problematic, mostly because surrogates don’t advertise their skills and are usually referred by licensed therapists.”