Innovative tutorial sessions give teen girls hands-on experience

By Laura Stepp Sessions
Washington Post Staff Writer

The scene looks like any other tutoring session for a bright, focused suburban high school girl. The mentor doles out advice while the young charge carefully takes notes.

But this particular session isn’t about algebra or history; it’s all about sex. And in the bedroom of her parents house in a leafy Montgomery County suburb, 17-year-old Emily Neiman is getting real-time, hands-on schooling on the finer points of what conservatives used to call “carnal knowledge.”

Neiman’s parents have hired The School for Sex, a tutoring service designed to educate upwardly-mobile, fast-track teenage girls in sexual techniques and etiquette.

The service, which has been approved by The Academy of Sexual Sciences, has become the rage amongst upper middle class families.

According to University of Virginia psychiatrist Anita H. Clayton, an expert on women’s sexuality and mental health, many women have mediocre sex lives and are in need of some sort help.

“Women can change their level of satisfaction,” she has said. “We need to change the belief systems that are holding us back.”

Changing the belief system

The School for Sex represents a bold, innovative way for young women to change that belief system.

Watching a School lesson in action, it’s easy to see why it has become such a success story.

Up in her bedroom, the raven-haired Neiman watches raptly as a pair of tutors engages in “a standard heterosexual sex act” on her bed, which still boasts a Disney bedspread she had as a kid. Soon, Neiman is being coached in the ways of oral sex and being coaxed into participating.

“It’s always difficult the first time,” offers sexual health educator Stephanie Towers, the female half of the couple. “Just try it and if it doesn’t work for you we’ll stop.”

Sex coaches for girls are now more important than ever. According to Clayton, 43 percent of women are unhappy with their sex lives, “which doesn’t seem bad unless you believe, as I do, that the other 57 percent were lying.”

A Lust for Learning

Upstairs in the Neiman household, Emily’s parents Ben and Joanne sit in their well-appointed living room and discuss their decision to get their daughter schooled in the art of sex.

“It’s not something any parent likes to think about,” admits Ben, who works by day as a lobbyist. “But the world is a cut-throat place. A young woman cannot expect anymore to embark on a professional or personal life without proper sexual skills.”

Mother Joanne concurs.

“When I was in college,” she explains, “I had an embarrassing ‘first time’ experience. Not only did the guy I was with laugh and walk out on me, but he took all my Styx albums and didn’t return them.”

“I had an Ivy League education,” she explains. “I was an ace when it came to the classroom but a failure when it came to the bedroom. I was as backward as David Duke in a roomful of progressive New York intellectuals.”

Dad Ben says that his daughter might be enrolled in advance placement courses in high school and wants her sexual education to be “just as rigorous.

“If she learns wrong techniques from some high school dolt, she won’t be able to unlearn them, and then could cost her down the road,” he notes.

Carnal Comprehension

The School for Sex boasts several branches in the mid-Atlantic region, although they prefer to keep their whereabouts secret because of “complaints from judgmental religious types,” says Towers, who co-founded the company. She says she started the company with a college classmate after holding several “listening sessions” with the parents of teenage girls. The biggest concern of parents, she says, is that their daughters were being coached in one of life’s most important subjects by boys who “barely knew how to handle video game joysticks, much less a real live girl

“The girls can either learn this stuff on the street,” she says, motioning towards her spacious office window. “Or they can learn it in the safety of their own bedrooms with professionals. To any parent, this should be a no-brainer.”

The company has made inroads into the mainstream by being endorsed by such pop culture stalwarts as Dr. Ruth Westheimer and adult film superstar Jenna Jameson who is rumored to be opening a competing company called “Daring Discoveries.”

But despite its burgeoning popularity, The School for Sex has its detractors.

One of its most vocal critics has been conservative firebrand Ann Coulter; but several sources say Coulter has secretly served as a guest lecturer in the program.

Yet another conservative critic of the school is Michael Medved, a former film critic who now works as a right-leaning radio talk show host.

“This is not a good family value in any sense of the phrase,” opines Medved. “Parents are spending their hard-earned money on a service that countless older men would be willing to provide free of charge.”

The Big Finish

A few weeks after our first encounter, I meet up again with Emily Neiman in her bedroom once again.

Unlike the shy, reticent girl I encountered on my first visit, Neiman now seems a fully-blossomed woman, discussing Chaucer and Shakespeare as her latest sex session wraps up.

“Girls from Montgomery County have a confidence about them which is extremely sexy,” she opines. “They know exactly what they want and how to get it.”

Neiman has reason to be confident: Her instructors say that over the past few weeks she’s become “their prize pupil,” mastering a multitude of sex acts. The atmosphere in the room is celebratory as mom, dad and the sexual coaches gather around their young scholar as she basks in post-orgasmic bliss. In fact, Neiman says she “so ecstatic” she’d like a post-coital cigarette. All of a sudden the mood in the room darkens.

Smoking is morally wrong and is something we absolutely do not condone,” warns Towers. “You need to learn good values now so they’ll stay with you for the rest of your life.”

Laura Sessions Stepp’s new book, Unhooked, was released today to much acclaim.