Sex in the Forbidden Zone, by Peter Rutter, M.D.
I was a little anxious about reading this book, actually. It’s hard to explain exactly why; it comes down to what I wrote about earlier, about the road not taken many years ago, before my marriage, when I was infatuated with a Catholic seminarian, and not being sure I really wanted to see the darker version of that story, the one where certain lines get crossed that didn’t get crossed in my case. Some friendships you really don’t want to picture turned all wrong.
It turned out, though, that I didn’t have at all the reaction to the book that I’d feared. Instead, I found it fascinating to read. On the one hand, it resonated with a lot of my gut feelings about things I have seen and heard about; on the other hand, it showed me angles I hadn’t looked at before.
First, what is “sex in the forbidden zone”? Peter Rutter, a psychiatrist, started out inquiring into why psychiatrists and other doctors and therapists have sex with their patients. As he started interviewing people, he expanded into a broader version of the same question: “sex in the forbidden zone” involves the abuse of a relationship of authority and trust, by sexualizing it, when clergy, lawyers, teachers, doctors, therapists, and workplace mentors have sex with their patients, clients, parishioners, students, and proteges. (In principle, like sexual harrassment, this could involve any combination of sexes, but Rutter focuses on men sexually exploiting women, which, given the distribution of power and authority by sex, is what most of these cases wind up being.)
What resonated with me, in this book? First, the seriousness of the harm that can be caused by “good people.” Peter Rutter, a psychiatrist, writes about his initial naivete:
The only doctors and therapists who had sexual relations with patients were, I was sure, confined to the criminal or lunatic fringe, such as the surgeon who sexually assaulted his female patients after placing them under anesthesia, or the occasional therapist who would establish a “therapeutic” commune conveniently populated by women willing to be his sexual partners.
This naivete was shattered by two experiences, one where he himself was strongly tempted to have sex with a patient, and another where he discovered that a man he and others had greatly respected as a professional mentor had sex repeatedly with female patients, and came to realize that he and others had taken way too long to act on the man’s misconduct.
The result is a book that doesn’t flinch either from recounting either the lasting harm done by sexual exploitation, or the degree to which ordinary, and sometimes highly respected people can be drawn either to carry it out themselves, or to silently collude in others’ misconduct.
And there was another thing that resonated with me. Rutter doesn’t just show the destructiveness of these relationships gone wrong; he also takes pains to explain why part of the harm done is the loss of something of value, or, as he calls it, “relationships of immeasurable value”: how the healing, mentoring, and teaching that may have gone on, perhaps inspiring a woman’s mind, opening to her new opportunities at work, healing past injuries, etc., gets lost when the relationship gets turned to serving the more powerful man’s sexual needs. I guess a good thing spoiled can cause some of the worst pain.
Finally, I liked how the stories of things gone wrong were paralleled with advice on how people headed for trouble can stop themselves. The book closes with the story of a “healing moment” in which a man who is boss and mentor to a woman at work decides to resist the temptation to exploit his protege.
What was new to me? Mainly, the man’s perspective. Rutter alternates chapters analyzing things from the woman’s and the man’s point of view, describing what things can leave each side vulnerable to this kind of relationship, how the crossing of the boundary looks from each side, and what can be done on each side to guard the boundary (though he places more responsibility for the latter on the man, given that he’s specifically talking about situations where the man is the more powerful party).
This discussion naturally involves showing the differences in perception between the sexes. Some of which is given just as everyone traditionally describes it: the men are avidly pursuing sex, and the women trading sex for something else: connection, being special in the eyes of some powerful man, or some basically nonsexual gain from the relationship. My first reaction was to resist this portrayal: hey, some of the women you’ve described are acting rather seductive, and apparently fantasizing about the man in question. Might they not, after all, also be interested in sex? But then I considered the whole situation he’s dealing with: powerful men, who are basically driving the relationships in question according to their own agenda. And with a lot of the women saying that they weren’t all that interested in having things turn sexual, and most of the more seductive women being seriously troubled psychiatric patients. Yes, I suppose it’s reasonable, under those circumstances, to say that many of the women are in those relationships out of other than sexual motives.
In fact, the causes of the sexual differences Rutter describes come across as mixed. I get the impression that Rutter does see men and women as to some extent naturally different (but with the Jungian caveat that men have their inner feminine and women their inner masculine), but he also sees social dynamics heavily driving the differences: both the differences in roles (e.g. psychiatrist or patient), and also the different ways that men and women have been raised.
One point that I found particularly interesting was the way Rutter described the difference between the men’s and women’s perception of the sexual boundary; according to Rutter, men have learned to be keenly aware of it at all times, while women have been trained to deny their own intuition about what’s happening at the boundary, at least if that intuition might lead them to be critical of a man who has power or authority over them.
The sexual boundary is very easy to see once one has accepted its existence. At the moment of acceptance, it is as if a special light has gone on that illuminates previously invisible particles and projectiles crashing into a thin, flexible barrier. What is maddeningly unfair is that men, whenever they are around women, see this boundary with a compelling clarity, which is one way that they exert their power. A man locates the sexual boundary between himself and a woman with an instinctual ease. Then, if he wishes, he can play with the boundary as if it were the net in an especially interesting tennis game.
Meanwhile, the women, evidently, are often busy convincing themselves not to see the boundary with clarity:
Sometimes a woman will feel nothing more than a free-floating suspicion, or inner knowing, that something is wrong. Too often her response to this kind of perception is to try hard to be reasonable about it, and if she can’t find a piece of outer reality to support it, to set aside the messages.
I’m reminded of my own reaction, way back when I was in high school, when a friend of mine who had a job as a babysitter described what in hindsight were pretty blatant sexual approaches by the father of the children for whom she was babysitting. My friend saw what was going on, but I, though I didn’t contradict her when she told me, didn’t want to believe her. Surely there had to be some misunderstanding. Surely the man couldn’t really mean this. I had had my own encounters: the weird obscene phone call when I was a young teenager, the creepy man I had gotten a ride from, mistaking him for someone from my church, when I was maybe fifteen or sixteen (and somehow talked into bringing me safely home). But these had been strangers. I wasn’t ready to acknowledge the same thing in a man who was in a category I was used to thinking of as “safe.”
Soon we learn that people who aren’t strangers can also be unsafe. But to learn that about people in those jobs you most need to trust can be a difficult lesson even for adults.
November 10th, 2005 at 10:57 am
Hmm. Two important points in this post, Lynn.
Earlier this week another blogger said she couldn’t imagine being attracted to someone she wasn’t sure was attracted to her. This was regarding a photograph of an anonymous man sent to her by a friend. While it made perfect sense to me it also stunned me in the sense that this is so alien to the standard man’s experience where, typically, he’s expected to… well… be a suitor… to plead suit before learning whether she’s attracted to him.
In this context I can partially accept Rutter’s assertion that “A man locates the sexual boundary between himself and a woman with an instinctual ease.” I’d suggest rather that men *learn* to discern the boundary — typically with multiple missteps, I might add — rather than know this instinctively. And as far as I can tell men *must* learn it or fail utterly not only in finding sex, yes, but also an enduring relationship.
I ardently disagree with his assertion that “Then, if he wishes, he can play with the boundary as if it were the net in an especially interesting tennis game.” While there are no doubt many Vicomte Sébastien de Valmonts in the world who can play with women this way (and as many Marquise Isabelle de Merteuils who can volly back with equal ferocity) I think Rutter’s dreaming if he thinks this is the common experience for men. I’m perfectly prepared to believe most women feel powerless in relationship to men when it comes to courtship but, Rutter not withstanding, most men feel equally powerless in relationships with women.
—
Another point in your post illuminates a huge exception: Steep power gradients between authorities and subordinates.
I’m aware how unpopular Freud is but I’ve always found his transferrence theory of psychotherapy helpful for explaining the dynamics of power relationships. The extreme nutshell/crayon version of Freudian psychotherapy would be that the therapist coaxes the patient to establish an imbalanced power relationship with the therapist, to project or transfer their (non-somatic) neuroses to the therapist. Having established such a dynamic the therapist then works to detach the neurosis from the patient, leaving them, in the end, free both of their neuroses *and* their power imbalance. Freud was extremely clear that at the height of transferrence the patient will often develop a transitory but intensely sexual attraction to the therapist but he also strongly warns that succumbing to the patient’s attraction will destroy the theraputic relationship and, worse, further entrench the patient’s neuroses. (I read his early work as implicit documentation of his direct experience with this form of failure and I believe that experience accounts for his insistance that it’s catastrophic to have sex with patients in therapy.)
The point is that Freud wasn’t proposing a new form of relationship. Instead he was attempting to make use of a pre-existing behavior between people of high and low relative power. From my own very limited experiences as a very minor musican, as a co-councellor, and as a manager — and, of course, as an employee, a fellow student, etc., I’ve seen something very much like what Freud describes happen over and over and yes, in those circumstances the person on the high end of the power exchange can play his or her low-power counterpart like a tennis ball in a closed court.
To do so, however, is either naive or predatory whether it’s between patients and doctors, employees and employers, prisoners and guards, adults and children, entertainers and fans, and *certainly — above all!* between therapists and patients.
Both these points — that so many people each believe that the other gender holds all the cards and that people on the high-end of power dynamics can see what’s going on much better than those on the low end — need to be much better understood, explained, and commonly acknowledged before we can make much more progress in gender relations.
Thanks again, as usual, Lynn.
figleaf
November 10th, 2005 at 7:50 pm
There’s a lot in Freud that I have my doubts about. My own psychology degree – just undergraduate – came from a department with an experimental and cognitive behavioral orientation, so that’s where I tend to lean. But I do think he was on target about transference. Transference is, in fact, a lot of what Rutter is talking about (he even uses the word, and as a Jungian would presumably overlap a fair amount with Freudian thinking anyway).
You hit the nail on the head in the distinction you draw between gender differences and differences caused by steep power gradients. Because Rutter is talking about situations where men in power interact with subordinate women, it’s hard to tell where his analysis of gender differences ends and where his analysis of the impact of power begins; that’s the one fault I can find in the book. If I qualify “men” everywhere with “men with power and authority” and “women” with “subordinate women” (or proteges, to use his term), then I think what he says is largely true. Some of it, as you note, is considerably less true in situations where the men and women involved are peers. I think part of his point is that being in a position of power and authority tempts even ordinary men to become Vicomte Sébastien de Valmonts; in that situation, it can take conscious effort not to play with women in this way, even for men who would never have thought they’d do this, when they didn’t have the power to do so. Or so Rutter seems to feel (never having been a man in power, I can’t say I’d know how I’d react if I were one
.)
Incidentally, not being able to imagine being attracted to someone who isn’t attracted to me is alien to me, too. I’ve often been attracted to people who didn’t turn out to be attracted to me. Hmm, maybe that explains why I had such long gaps, in my single days, when I wasn’t seeing anyone. I neither actively pursued the people I was attracted to, in the way that a man would expect to do, nor found myself all that selectively attracted to people who were attracted to me. On the other hand, I can’t imagine, any more than that other blogger, being attracted to an anonymous man in a photograph. I need to interact with someone first, before I’m attracted. And it does need to be someone that I both like and who seems to like me, even if not necessarily someone who’s actually shown a romantic interest already.
November 12th, 2005 at 5:15 am
Try this idea: To ignore a sexual (or other) advance is de facto to reject it, and that’s basic enough to remain in our (human) social instincts. So when confronted with an inappropriate advance, that’s just the default response.
Of course, I feel that depending entirely on one’s instincts is no way for a human to get through modern life….
The question of “attracted to someone who’s not attracted to me” is more complicated. I note that men and women tend toward very different “targeting strategies”. Men commonly go for visual selection (“she looks hot”, see also “love at first sight”), whereas women often want to know more about the target, which requires more social interaction. This is entirely consistent with the usual courtship routines (male approaches, female tests and accepts or rejects), not to mention the pragmatic issues.
November 12th, 2005 at 9:53 pm
By coincidence another blogger, Olympia Monet of Postmodern Courtesean, a very high-priced private-list escort who used to be a high-priced stockbroker, just posted something about power gradients.
She discusses a very attractive, very successful man who, when she was a junior stockbroker was a superstar at her firm. At the time she was enthralled by him and came very, very close to sleeping with him. Then, years later, she bumped into him at a restaurant and found the tables turned — he was very attracted to her but she not so much to him. Her post is a bit of an exploration of that reversal and her struggle not to actually twist the knife for someone who, now, would be only an ordinary customer (and even then only at her discretion.)
That seques nicely into Sappo’s remarks about the difference between gender and power dynamics. (I think it’s very accurate to say that historically there have been far more opportunities for power/male -> protoge/female relationships. But we should remember Lynn’s young teaching assistant. Though she declined to exploit it the power gradient was still there.)
figleaf
November 13th, 2005 at 8:38 am
Actually, though he was indeed a very young teaching assistant (having started studying for a Ph.D. a couple of years ahead of when most people get there), I was an even younger undergraduate in the same department, so the power gradient (such as it was) was in his favor. Not enough so to prevent me from turning him down, though. You’re right, though; I’ve seen the power gradient run the other way, even though it’s rarer.
Dave, I agree with you about ignoring sexual advances. Some trouble comes in, though, when the person trying to ignore the sexual advance is also trying to be otherwise friendly, since an “I’ll try to be sort of friendly but not interested” response isn’t all that obviously distinguishable from an “I’ll try to act sort of receptive, but not be too obvious about it” response.
November 13th, 2005 at 2:29 pm
‘an “I’ll try to be sort of friendly but not interested†response isn’t all that obviously distinguishable from an “I’ll try to act sort of receptive, but not be too obvious about it†response.’
A cogent point! I’d say that this sort of thing is where “social skill” comes in. Someone (woman) who is socially well-skilled can deliver what I’ve been calling a “small rebuke” without going over the line into overt hostility. (On the flip side, a socially skilled man can “flirt” in such a manner as not to be taken as “pushy”.) There is also a major issue with personal confidence — notably, in a subordinate position, many women may be afraid that even a small rebuke may be taken awry, and an exploitative man can take advantage of that fear. (The reverse can happen, but is rarer for reasons I’ll allude to below.)
Also, I’ve since thought of a couple of more basic weakness in my argument. The briefer one is that some people’s social responses are “broken”. There are some men who — by temperament, neurology, and/or learning — just “push through” social rejections, until and unless the (now-) victim escalates their rejection beyond “simple social” responses — and some won’t.
(Warning: I’m about to wander into a more general, and uglier, discussion!)
Unfortunately, the refusal to take a “no” is hooked to a part of human psychology that most people don’t want to think about, one that’s tied closely both to the general male-dominance issue, and to nasties like sexual abuse and rape. Specifically, our social instincts are the product of evolution, which rewards “reproductive success”. Remember that contraception and abortion are both much too recent to be represented in instinct, and consider that rape can result in pregnancy….
Thus, forced sex has been kept in our instinctual repertoire as a “cheater’s path” for a male to reproduce without any of the usual hurdles or “investments”. There are also some counters to this among our instincts, including the general sense that rapists are doing something wrong. Those, however, are limited by the point that even a child of rape still carries the *mother’s* genes. The question of whether it’s “worth it” to keep a child that has your own genes but also the genes of an attacker, is apparently undecided on the evolutionary timescale. This is evidenced by the internal conflicts faced by such a mother (who historically may go either way), and even by the confused feelings of some rape victims in general. (In modern times, the latter are represented by those victims who refuse to press charges.)
On the other hand, as I commented before, we humans aren’t limited to instinct, and we also have the means to think about these things on a much faster timescale. Based on a modern understanding of these issues, my own advice would be to abort any “fetus of rape”, so as not to reward the rapist on the evolutionary level. By the same logic, I support castration as a punishment for rape. Of course, hat doesn’t stop the offender from brutalizing someone else — but it sure keeps them from passing on their genes in the process! If we could keep that up for a few centuries (millenia?), we might even be able to breed rape out of our species….
November 13th, 2005 at 5:38 pm
Looking back at my comment above, I see I seem to have wandered far afield. But my *point* was just that the patterns I was talking about mean that women don’t always have instinctual support for “defending” against unwanted sexual advances. The solution, of course, is to use intellect instead, that is by *learning* how to handle such situations.
November 14th, 2005 at 6:44 pm
Indeed, in a dominant male/subordinate female situation, there’s no particular guarantee that instinct will lead either the man or the woman in the right direction (that is, the direction where the woman doesn’t wind up harrassed or exploited). Fortunately, as you say, we can use *learning* (and appropriate social consequences for, say, errant psychiatrists), and aren’t limited to instinct.
November 15th, 2005 at 5:41 pm
“appropriate social consequences” definitely. Another issue is that these ideas of trusted relationships and “safe space” also aren’t supported by instinct — they’re developments of fairly advanced civilization. The point of punishing people who abuse such trust is precisely that, pragmatically, the victims were in a vulnerable position, where we (society) can’t expect them to defend themselves, so society has to step in and defend them.
It’s informative to compare those to situations like date rape or even frat-party rapes, where the ambivalent public attitudes toward the crime reflect a dangling question, of why they *didn’t* take steps to protect themselves. I do have sympathy for such victims, but I’ve seen cases where I just have to ask, “what the hell was she *thinking*, getting falling-down drunk in the same house as thirty drunken jocks?” But that leads back to my ramble, plus several other rants….