Introduction

Based on Zam’s essay in The New York Times’ Modern Love, The Pleasure Plan is a memoir and sexual healing guide.

In her forties, Laura married the man of her dreams?after a life-long search. Everything was picture-perfect, except . . . the author’s “hooha hang-ups” included chronic low libido and physical pain. She suffered silently, ashamed of feeling “bedroom broken.”

Determined to finally fix her sensual self, Laura embarked on a wild odyssey?30 pleasure-enhancing methods, including Tantra, hypnosis, and brazen trauma recovery.

The Pleasure Plan empowers women to speak up, seek help, and take charge of their own erotic potential.

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Excerpt

Prologue

Every Hooha Hang-Up in the DSM

August 2011

"Maybe you’re just not a very sexual person,” says Dr. Fay in a slow Southern drawl. I have come to this office to save my

new marriage. After thirty years of searching, I’ve found a man I love who loves me back—at forty-eight. I never had reciprocity before, meaning a real relationship. But now I do. With Kurt, my miracle husband.

Kurt doesn’t know the extent of my damage.

“What if I’m just broken?” I ask, my voice a shaky vibrato. I have never talked openly about the problems plaguing me since I was seven- teen: low libido, orgasm challenges, and pelvic pain. I always assumed my obstacles were permanent. Is that true? “If my sexuality is broken,” I venture, sitting taller on the maroon leather couch I’m sticking to, “I can fix it. Can’t I?”

“Not if you have no libido,” says Dr. Fay, an attractive marriage and family therapist specializing in hypnosis. “Look, it’s fine to have no libido. You know that, right?”

I nod, thinking of grandmas, and nuns, and those that make asexual a lifestyle. But Fay’s outfit—strange for a mental health professional, especially one who’s middle-aged—puts notions in my head. A ques- tion pulls like thread from her gold metallic miniskirt. It sheds from her short-sleeved mohair sweater. She looks like an unwashed lover might come by right after I leave here. So I ask: “Can Eros be taught?” The hypnotist chuckles, assuming I’m joking. I’m not. She tucks brown hair behind her ears and widens her pale green eyes. We have the same coloring, except I’m obviously nothing like her. “Would you like to hear about others in your situation?” she inquires. Without waiting for a response, she stands and begins pacing. “Now one client,

she’d rather be waterboarded than sleep with her husband.”

I know I should interrupt, revealing what I haven’t shared yet—the experiment. Two weeks ago I implemented a strategy to finally heal, after thirty years. It started with no longer believing that pleasure is out of reach, or that it’s dangerous. To hell with fragility. More feeling than fact, it seems like if I pressed on a thigh or clavicle, I could dis- lodge something, puncturing a vital organ.

Loneliness has done this to me.

I think of Kurt, and one night in particular. It was a summer eve- ning, weeks after we met, and he was pushing me on a swing. Within seconds, I was up in the trees, all because of his force. Not bad for fifty-one. I let this overall impression of him—capable arms, uplifted cheeks when we’d stumbled upon the playground, our instantaneous agreement I must go on the swing—replace my imagined breakabil- ity. He’s incredible, I thought, up in the sky and coming back down. A million neurons fired while I squealed, “Harder. Push harder.”

As Dr. Fay regales me with tales of lacking lust, I force myself to think about why my bedroom is nothing like the swing. I know the

reason, and she does too. I need to get this visit back on track. “I understand what you’re telling me,” I say in the middle of another depressing story. “But do you think we can talk about my trauma?”

I watch her hands find their way to her hips. Her pose makes me think she’s forgotten what I disclosed in our previous telephone intake.

“That happened a loooong time ago,” she says finally with a wave of pink manicure.

“I think it’s related,” I insist because how could my issues not be

related to trauma? I explain that every therapist I’ve seen—six of them, spread out over geography and time—agreed there’s a connection. My carnal health is surely tangled up in these sheets.

Silently, Dr. Fay strolls back to her purple velvet chair, which she commands like a throne. She crosses her toned bare legs and peers at me.

What if she’s right about my past? These events did happen a long time ago. As for my therapists of yore, childhood was all they dwelled upon. Never what I should do with grown-up maladies I was left with, or how to improve mechanics, or how to navigate my pain. Not one shrink had knowledge of my full array of conditions. Even my gyne- cologist was stumped. Since I started my experiment, I’ve learned official names, in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Dis- orders, or DSM, which is the mental health bible: hypoactive sexual desire disorder, female sexual arousal disorder, female orgasmic disorder, sexual aversion disorder, dyspareunia, vaginismus. I have every hooha hang-up in the DSM.

Crucially, the DSM said hypnosis could help many of my chal- lenges. It’s my rationale for coming here. I cross my legs in my own miniskirt, black and longer than Dr. Fay’s. My voice is almost robust:

“Okay, say the past isn’t relevant? What about hypnosis to rewire me, you know, erotically? You said on the phone we could try hypnosis.” “I know,” she sighs. “I know I did. But honestly? I don’t think it’ll help. I’d love it if it did help. But if you have no libido to begin with . . .” “So I should just accept—this?” I am gesturing up and down my

body.

“Yes!” says Dr. Fay. “Accept that you’re not a sexual person. Stop putting so much pressure on yourself.”

To argue with her assessment, I’d have to come up with a time before my dysfunctions began. All my wits can register is how my flaccid interest in lovemaking has ruined every relationship I’ve ever had. The last time Kurt and I argued about intimacy, he lay in our bed with tears rolling down his temples: “Why do you keep rejecting me?” I didn’t have an answer for him. At the very least, I can get an answer. In my backpack is a journal. I had meant to take notes.

“So what do I do with my husband?” I ask, fishing for a pen I can’t locate.

“Just have sex,” Fay answers with a shrug. “What do you mean?”

“Just. Have. Sex.” “When?”

“Whenever. Say your husband wants to get physical twice a week and you don’t want to, you could just have sex. You don’t have to like working out to go to the gym, do you?”

“I guess not.”

“Of course you don’t.” Slowly, she leans forward till her forearms rest on her gold skirt. I can see a bit of cleavage. “I mean, you like being married, don’t you?”

I blink. A lot. Not because what she’s saying is shocking, but

because I don’t know why I’m pretending I’m shocked. It’s how I always bedroom-existed until I got it into my skull I might mend myself. So what if her suggestion spits in the face of trauma recovery and consent and feminism? On the wall behind Dr. Fay’s chair, I can see her license as someone whose expertise is wedlock.

“I love being married,” I utter, with trembling again in my voice, in my bones.

“Good,” says the dazzling female in front of me.

Dr. Fay’s big light eyes make their way to a digital clock on her desk. “Well, we’re just about out of time. Is there anything else?”

I gather my bag, my cardigan, the journal I took out but didn’t write in. “No. That’s it.” I feel like she’d like me to pack up faster. “Thank you for seeing me.” I rise from her blood red sofa.

“It was my pleasure,” she says with glossy lips spread ear to ear. She believes she has solved my problem.

I suppose she has.

My curative project has been killed. The way I conceived of it, hypnosis— or at least faith — would plow a path for adventurous, multidimensional repair. I named this endeavor The Pleasure Plan.

On my feet, my mouth involuntarily mirrors hers, but my smile is fake. Then I remember something genuinely wonderful—Burger King. I noticed it in a shopping plaza down the road, right before I made a left into this office park. Suddenly, I can’t wait to get out of there so I can order a chicken sandwich, crispy not grilled, with an order of fries—large, even though I’m a yoga teacher. I’ll lick the grease off every finger until I’m sated and sleepy. Just the way I like it. I’ll drive to my house half-asleep.

Taking a last glance around the office and at the hypnotist, who walks me into the (empty) waiting room, I say to myself: She has got to be the worst therapist on the entire planet. Consequently, I open the door to the hallway. It looks like a long tan tunnel. It is. A portal taking me back to my delicate life. I swing around.

“I want to try hypnosis,” I announce. “I know you don’t think it will help, but I want to do it anyway.”

I have to start somewhere.

If I leave here without some implementation of my plan, I don’t trust myself to seek out another hypnotist, or to advance. Perhaps my experiment has already stirred up desire—not for greasy things, but for its own freedom. And what I desire now is autosuggestion on a red leather couch with a therapist who may or may not be incompetent. I want her to change her mind about me.

“I’d like to schedule another appointment,” I say, taking out my planner.

Reluctantly, she agrees.

Driving home to my husband, forgoing fast food, I try to imagine what lies beyond this day.

I can’t see it, not yet, what it will take to ultimately, fully heal— fifteen kinds of practitioners, thirty pleasure-enhancing techniques. I never could have predicted the struggles Kurt and I would encounter. Or the aliveness that would permeate our lives.

I have no idea what’s in store for me. All I know is that whatever happens, this visit has already altered my future—it has strengthened my body, my being, for hope. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1. In The Pleasure Plan, Laura tells a story, from her twenties, about wanting to be sexy versus wanting to have sex. She explores how these desires intersect throughout the book. What is your understanding of sexiness? What is your under- standing of sexual desire?

2. In Chapter 9, Laura visits the house where she was sexually abused as a four-year-old. Was this a wise move? Have you ever done anything daring, or unusual, to face your own demons?

3. In Chapter 10, Laura sees a trauma therapist who tells her that as long as she has agency (a sense of personal empowerment) she doesn’t have any significant trauma residue. Do you agree with this assessment?

4. In Chapter 17, Laura learns that she has vaginal atrophy. Is atro- phy (or GSM) something you were aware of ? Is it an issue you speak about with your friends, family, or others in your circle?

5. Laura’s mother plays a crucial role in this book. Would you have enjoyed having a mom like Harriet, Laura’s mom? Why? Why not?

6. Laura explores two naked treatments toward the end of the book: a private Tantra session and Betty Dodson’s Body- sex workshop. Did you find these adventures intriguing? Extreme? Could you see yourself doing something similar? Why? Why not?

7. In Chapter 19, Laura invites her sexual problems into bed with her, in order to understand what they all require. Do you think
this was a wise move? Could you see yourself doing something similar?

8. Laura takes a circuitous route to healing and does not always follow through with treatments. Did you find this frustrating at times? If you were her friend, what would you have said to her during this journey?

9. Which curative adventure do you think helped Laura the most, in terms of healing? What about in terms of her relationship?

10. What is your biggest take away from The Pleasure Plan?

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