http://www.vocativ.com/culture/society/the-sex-therapists-of-silicon-valley/
“Dan” seems at first to perfectly embody that popular object of scorn these days in San Francisco: the privileged tech worker. He’s a developer-turned-manager at a thriving startup, the type of guy you would expect to see dodging protesters at a Google bus stop or evicting low-income tenants in order to build his dream condo. But beyond that veneer of untouchable privilege, there is a soft underbelly. He’s a 40-year-old virgin, and his troubles with women are bad enough that he’s sought out a sex therapist for help.
While being a virgin at 40 may be extreme, Dan is one of many tech guys who are driving business for the sex therapists of the San Francisco Bay Area. The counselors I’ve spoken with say that anywhere between 50 to 90 percent of their clientele are tech workers, and the vast majority of them are heterosexual men. (Tech employees were estimated in 2011 to account for only 12 percent of workers in the Bay Area.)
This is in part a result of techies’ higher-than-average salaries, which allow them to pay for therapy, particularly when it comes to non-traditional counseling that isn’t covered by insurance. There’s something else at play here, though: In general, tech workers are more vulnerable to issues around love and intimacy, according to several local sex therapists I’ve interviewed. The reasons for this are wide-ranging, but in Dan’s particular case, it resulted from being tagged as a prodigy at a young age. He excelled in science and was encouraged to pursue it to the exclusion of all else.
“These are the tropes of tech development,” says Elizabeth McGrath, his sex therapist, who shared his story with me. (McGrath did not give me her patient’s name, and asked me to use a pseudonym when writing about him.) “To his mind, and his processing, there was no desire to prioritize anything other than that.” She spends much of their sessions trying to teach him the very basics of talking to women.
That’s a frequent focus for the sex therapists in Silicon Valley and surrounding areas. “[These men] often spend their time in environments that are mostly male, like in school and tech offices,” explains another therapist, Celeste Hirschman. “So they don’t have a lot of practice just relating to women, period, let alone learning how to meet, pickup, seduce, touch.” Hirschman follows a less-traditional therapy method known as Somatica, which is “body-based” and allows for non-genital touch between the counselor and client, the idea being that there are things that can’t be learned through talk alone. For example, she will wrestle with clients just to get them out of their heads and into their bodies.
Another common issue that these therapists encounter with tech clients is they treat sex like a line of broken code in need of debugging, or a mathematical equation. “That’s the crux of trying to interact with a human, though: there isn’t a formula,” says McGrath. “Human connection is not formulaic. Does it have statistics, can you look at data, can you research it and quantify it? Sure. But in one-to-one, it is always variable. That’s where those things fail.” This isn’t entirely unique to programmers — a look at glossy magazine headlines or popular self-help books suggests that many people are interested in finding a magic key to unlock good sex — but she says, “For people in tech, it’s just a little bit harder.”
Vanessa Marin, a psychotherapist who specializes in sex therapy, says her tech clients are too much in their own heads. “A lot of what I hear from my clients is they’re sitting doing a code all day long and then you get home and it’s trying to make that transition into being with another human being and trying to connect with someone on an emotional level and be present with them,” she said. “It just feels a little jarring. They don’t have the time to ease back into being back at home — or they might still be on their computers, checking work email from their phone.” Of course, people in general find it hard to unplug these days, but she says, “It’s definitely more common in the tech industry.”
“Dan” seems at first to perfectly embody that popular object of scorn these days in San Francisco: the privileged tech worker. He’s a developer-turned-manager at a thriving startup, the type of guy you would expect to see dodging protesters at a Google bus stop or evicting low-income tenants in order to build his dream condo. But beyond that veneer of untouchable privilege, there is a soft underbelly. He’s a 40-year-old virgin, and his troubles with women are bad enough that he’s sought out a sex therapist for help.
While being a virgin at 40 may be extreme, Dan is one of many tech guys who are driving business for the sex therapists of the San Francisco Bay Area. The counselors I’ve spoken with say that anywhere between 50 to 90 percent of their clientele are tech workers, and the vast majority of them are heterosexual men. (Tech employees were estimated in 2011 to account for only 12 percent of workers in the Bay Area.)
This is in part a result of techies’ higher-than-average salaries, which allow them to pay for therapy, particularly when it comes to non-traditional counseling that isn’t covered by insurance. There’s something else at play here, though: In general, tech workers are more vulnerable to issues around love and intimacy, according to several local sex therapists I’ve interviewed. The reasons for this are wide-ranging, but in Dan’s particular case, it resulted from being tagged as a prodigy at a young age. He excelled in science and was encouraged to pursue it to the exclusion of all else.
“These are the tropes of tech development,” says Elizabeth McGrath, his sex therapist, who shared his story with me. (McGrath did not give me her patient’s name, and asked me to use a pseudonym when writing about him.) “To his mind, and his processing, there was no desire to prioritize anything other than that.” She spends much of their sessions trying to teach him the very basics of talking to women.
That’s a frequent focus for the sex therapists in Silicon Valley and surrounding areas. “[These men] often spend their time in environments that are mostly male, like in school and tech offices,” explains another therapist, Celeste Hirschman. “So they don’t have a lot of practice just relating to women, period, let alone learning how to meet, pickup, seduce, touch.” Hirschman follows a less-traditional therapy method known as Somatica, which is “body-based” and allows for non-genital touch between the counselor and client, the idea being that there are things that can’t be learned through talk alone. For example, she will wrestle with clients just to get them out of their heads and into their bodies.
Another common issue that these therapists encounter with tech clients is they treat sex like a line of broken code in need of debugging, or a mathematical equation. “That’s the crux of trying to interact with a human, though: there isn’t a formula,” says McGrath. “Human connection is not formulaic. Does it have statistics, can you look at data, can you research it and quantify it? Sure. But in one-to-one, it is always variable. That’s where those things fail.” This isn’t entirely unique to programmers — a look at glossy magazine headlines or popular self-help books suggests that many people are interested in finding a magic key to unlock good sex — but she says, “For people in tech, it’s just a little bit harder.”
Vanessa Marin, a psychotherapist who specializes in sex therapy, says her tech clients are too much in their own heads. “A lot of what I hear from my clients is they’re sitting doing a code all day long and then you get home and it’s trying to make that transition into being with another human being and trying to connect with someone on an emotional level and be present with them,” she said. “It just feels a little jarring. They don’t have the time to ease back into being back at home — or they might still be on their computers, checking work email from their phone.” Of course, people in general find it hard to unplug these days, but she says, “It’s definitely more common in the tech industry.”
