Therapy Can Be Fun

The British press calls him "Sex King Cole." The Archbishop of Canterbury once attacked his teen-age sex-education film as being antiChristian. A female M.P. has said she would like to shoot him. Undaunted, British Sexologist Martin Cole, 41, has continued his assault on British sex mores with renewed vigor. He recently expanded his Institute of Sex Education and Research in Birmingham and, this summer, rocked the nation with the news that the No. 1 teacher at the school for sex was his 25-year-old third wife Barbara.

"A quasimedical brothel," sputtered Jill Knight, Conservative M.P. for the Edgbaston constituency of Birmingham, and called for a government investigation of the institute. Cole, who is also a lecturer in genetics at Birmingham's University of Aston and operates a thriving vasectomy-and-abortion clinic, professed bewilderment at the attack. "I could keep 50 therapists busy if I had them," he said. "One in ten British men needs help with his sex life." Meanwhile, Barbara Cole and other volunteers, male and female, were busy using the Cole method to teach men and women patients how to copulate successfully. Patients at the institute are assigned to one of the volunteer therapists. After several sessions in which patient and therapist merely converse, there are four or five sessions of touching and embracing, then several more of limited genital contact and, finally, intercourse between patient and therapist.

Says Barbara Cole, who has to date logged no fewer than 50 "therapeutic" acts of coitus: "When a man of this kind, tortured and desperately unhappy, is at last able to make successful love with me, the feeling for both of us is tremendous." Her only complaint: "The life I'm leading at the moment is not conducive to having a family."

Martin Cole's academic training is in botany and zoology (he has a Ph.D. in plant genetics), but he has long had an "obsessional" concern with sexual freedom. He traces it to a crisis of guilt over masturbation that he suffered at 17. "It led me to wonder what the message of my upbringing was all about," he says. "That is why I became a rebel against arbitrary authority." That rebellion has had mixed success. Cole recommended making the Pill available to eleven-year-olds but this never really caught fire. But he was a pioneer in the fight that led to the liberalization of abortion law in Britain in 1968.

The abortions performed at Cole's clinic (126 in an average week for a fee of $ 140 apiece) have helped to swell his income to around $30,000 a year and aided him in financing his first sex movie, Growing Up, in 1971. The film endorses promiscuity and shows, among other graphic scenes, a 23-year-old teacher, Mrs. Jennifer Muscutt, in the act of masturbation. The film was banned in Birmingham, Mrs. Muscutt was briefly suspended from her job, and some local stalwarts demanded that Cole be fired from his university post.

Cole defends Growing Up as a challenge to the "basically dishonest" idea that sex can be taught only as part of a "loving relationship." Sexologists, he says, do not promote this theory to "strengthen the concept of love but to desexualize sex." Because masturbation is the major outlet for both sexes while they are growing up, he asks, "why not talk about it?"

Despite a host of professional critics, who call him a charlatan, Cole has garnered some support. Says Keith Norcross, consultant surgeon at Birmingham's Royal Orthopedic Hospital: "Dr. Cole has shown great courage. He's filling a gap left by the medical profession. The women helping Dr. Cole should be given all our praise for what they are doing. They have a generosity of spirit, compassion and understanding."

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