Get It On!

O: What drives one to get into this line of work?

Paul: Revenge. Revenge for eight years of strict religious schooling in California's San Joaquin Valley. Also, one doesn't become a psychoanalyst from the happiest of upbringings. My parents were both from San Francisco, and my father moved them to this farm town. To say that my mother was angry at him for the next 50 years is to put it mildly.

O: Credentials, credentials...

Paul: When I got to Berkeley in the 1970s, I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. But I vowed that hell would freeze over before I ever went to graduate school. I ended up going for ten years.

O: Ten years! You must have a PhD.

Paul: You would think. I've supervised doctoral students and I'm a graduate psychoanalyst, which means I can be the training psychoanalyst for psychoanalytic candidates, but instead of writing a dissertation on some hideous psychoanalytic concept such as "An Epistemological Comparison of Projective Identification in the Semiotic Narratives and Intersubjectivity of the Pretraumatized Borderline Patient"—seriously—I wanted to practice and do other things.

O: What other things?

Paul: I was in Los Angeles and involved in some of the first research on PCP babies; I was also working with teenage prostitutes and gang members. I'd started writing a textbook for kids on the "chemistry of bikinis, skateboard wheels, and surfboards"—that was the title—thinking it was a good way to get them excited about science. I was going to do a whole series, including a textbook down the line on sex. But then I was suddenly so broke, I thought, "I'll go ahead and knock out the sex guide."

O: Dr. Ruth meets Dr. Drew?

Paul: After working on it for months and months, I give it to a friend, a playwright. This is, oh, probably about when the Jurassic phase was coming to a close [early '80s]. She reads it and hands it back to me. "You know," she says—and I'm sitting there thinking, "Wow, she's only highlighted about three sentences in the whole thing, so I guess she really liked it"—"as women, we're really sick and tired of the great white doctor telling us what does and doesn't work for us. And that's the tone you've got in this dog. Those three sentences I highlighted? That's the tone you need to have."

O: So how long did it take to finish the book?

Paul: Seven years. And then no publisher would touch it. Nobody. Finally, one company was interested. And I looked at their catalog and the list included The Anarchist Cookbook. It was hard, but I just couldn't be with the same publisher that put out books on how to make bombs. My poor agent was bleeding from the ears. So I borrowed money and started my own publishing company. Now the guide, in its fifth edition, is doing really well. Barnes & Noble is probably our biggest customer, and it's assigned reading in a bunch of college courses; it's even in some medical schools. Right now this is my full-time gig. I haven't seen patients in three or four years.

O: Got to ask: What's the best sex tip ever?

Paul: It's such a horrible cliché, but the best sex tip in the world is to listen to each other.