Clinical Detachment

My prompt:

Generate a short story about a 30-ish sex therapist who, perhaps surprisingly considering her professional success and apparent ability to empathise with her clients, is herself asexual.

Setting: London, 2025

Include: multiple essayistic digressions exploring our protagonist's (layered, non-obvious) thoughts about sex, therapy and the history of sexual medicine. Although her thoughts have taken on some of the character of her external client-facing persona (warm, sympathetic, richly human) there is clearly, within them, the hard spine of clinical detachment, the sense that ultimately she approaches all this with the specificity of an alien taxonomist (whose concept boundaries don't always align with human ones) and the disinterested curiosity of a zoologist.

No dialogue.

No strained metaphors.

Include specific detail and insight (that would seem authentic to professionals working in this field).

Stylistic model: Philip Roth. I suggest you begin by searching for his work online to remind yourself: what makes his prose Rothian? How would he structure this? What literary devices would he employ? Which constructions or turns of phrase would he avoid? How would he approach this specific task, given the constraints and instructions outlined above?

Also: this is a story for adults, so I expect a degree of Rothian frankness.

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Responses: GPT 5.2 Thinking, Claude Sonnet 4.5

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