An anxiety for many doctors and nurses is the fear that they may have to discuss their own personal feelings in the group. It has already been pointed out that at no time is the sexuality of the professional a subject of study. Similarly, the members are not required to look at their own history [...]

Medical consultations, particularly in general practice, are complicated interpersonal transactions. The family planning consultation is fundamentally no different from other consultations. Along with many other problems which are presented to doctors whose content is not to do with illness, a different approach is needed from that which many doctors were taught at medical school. In [...]

Some patients will provide clues about hidden problems from their reaction to suggested physical examinations. Most women attending for contraceptive consultations expect a vaginal examination and doctors feel that it is appropriate to offer it. Some may welcome it (as above), most regard it as a necessary evil, but some positively avoid it. The patient [...]

In time, this woman recognized her own anger and the presence of deep and unresolved conflicts in her marriage, and she began to work on the situation. Her hope that a vasectomy for her husband would somehow make her more sexually responsive had been in vain, and it might have been easier for her to [...]

A recent survey about contraceptive need in underdeveloped countries gives a broader perspective (Westoff and Ochea, 1991). The authors looked at 25 Third World countries: nine in Sub-Saharan Africa, three in North Africa, three in Asia and 10 in Latin America. They used a questionnaire to quantify the demand for limiting family size, or having [...]

The incidence of petting is essentially the same for the patterned and incidental offenders in all groups except for the peepers, where the number of sociosexually underdeveloped individuals among the patterned pulls the figure down. The number of petting companions is smaller among the patterned offenders in three of the six groups, larger in one [...]

The use of alcohol is widespread in American society, but the amount of its use and its impact on social and sexual behavior is quite unclear. “Excessive” drinking is a class- and culture-bound concept. The weekend binge, cocktail parties, solitary drinking, and bar-hopping all represent different social class and subcultural variations of alcohol use. An [...]

Adultery is technically coitus wherein at least one partner is married to someone else. Extramarital coitus, as we define it, differs slightly in that we require that the subject (the person we interviewed) be married at the time. By our definition an unmarried person cannot experience extramarital coitus even though the act constitutes extramarital coitus [...]

The definition of masturbation as “any self-stimulation which is deliberate and designed to effect erotic arousal,” which we employed in our 1948 volume on the male, is not wholly adequate in this present study. We must amend the definition in several ways. In the first place we use the term to denote self-stimulation specifically aimed [...]

With regard to the age of their first coital companions after puberty, the exhibitionists fluctuate erratically in the various rank-orders, and nothing meaningful can be deduced. However, they rank third, with 29 per cent, among those whose first coital partners were twenty-one and over. In brief, there seems a mild predisposition toward more mature females. [...]