When Shai Rotem first met Katrina Marshall*, he asked if she’d like to take a seat on the futon in the corner of the room. Her initial response was no. The petite, blue-eyed blonde has severe rheumatoid arthritis, and she didn’t want the good-looking stranger to see the awkward choreography that lowering herself would require. Then she remembered how much her best friend was paying for her to be in that room with that good-looking stranger and decided to ask for help. “I knew if I didn’t open up then, it would never happen,” she says.
But when the bald, trim and olive-skinned Rotem asked if she wanted help taking off her suede knee-high boots, Marshall just couldn’t bring herself to say yes.
Marshall, who’s had 42 surgeries in her 52 years of life, has struggled to perform everyday tasks like laundry for as long as she can remember. Bending over is impossible. Even sitting hurts. And taking off a shirt is hardly sexy. “When I was a teenager I didn’t want to leave the house,” she says. As an adult, Marshall couldn’t imagine how anyone could ever be attracted to her warped body, which is why at the time she met Rotem, Marshall was a midlife virgin.
Sex surrogacy — when a client hires a licensed partner to physically overcome his or her issues around sexuality — is a provocative idea that’s gained notoriety with movies like The Sessions, in which Helen Hunt helps a disabled man lose his virginity. But it’s rarely been seen as a legitimate avenue for women, who face a range of sexual dilemmas — from midlife virginity or being inorgasmic to more nuanced intimacy inhibitors, such as lack of a sexual identity. That perception may be changing, though.
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