The Sterling Men Of Woodstock: A Series (Part II)
Cigars and cold consequences: Revelations of Sterling-shattered relationships
Woodstock Times/August 15, 2002
By Paul Smart
Susan B. has asked that we meet at a bar/restaurant on the rural fringe of town. After years of embarrassment and trepidation, she wants to come clean about her relations with the Sterling Institute of Relationships and its local manifestation in bonafide and maverick men's teams and women's groups.
"One of the worst things this group has done is kill a lot of women's trust in dating," Susan B's saying. She's nervous and explains why. "That man over there's Sterling. All his friends have done the Men's Weekend. I can't really go out in this town without running into them, and they all seem to have a smugness, a narcissism, even, that makes it hard to go out. When I went out with one for about a year I'd find things I'd told him privately were passing around the local gossip chain within a day or two." I stop her mid-sentence and ask how that can be. Just that morning I'd been talking to K., the man who brought me to a local men's team meeting. He'd told me how much I'd hurt the men of Woodstock by breaking the sense of confidentiality that feeds the group's sense of trust and intimacy. Hadn't I understood that I was allowed to visit the team based on an implicit promise that I wouldn't discuss what I saw and heard around its firepit, not even with my wife? I could take away my feelings, but nothing more.
But, I asked him, hadn't I made it understood that I was a reporter? "I thought what was said around the fire didn't leave that space," I tell Susan B. She laughs bitterly. Just then another woman who has actually been through a Sterling weekend for women comes in. We move to a table.
Mary W. talks about the Women's Weekend she went through several years earlier. A single mother whose kids are now grown, she says she found herself drawn into plunking down $600 when an old friend suggested she try it.
"What can I say? I was vulnerable," she now recalls. "What bothered me most about the whole thing was that no one warned me what I was in for. We all gather and get taken to this large hall with a stage and then left there for hours in what looks like complete chaos. There are 200 women present. Anytime someone wants to leave the room to go to the bathroom you have to explain yourself to these cop-like women at the doors. No phone calls. Lots of papers to sign. No leaving once you're in and all this talk about confidentiality."
I tell Mary W. that as with all sources in this story, names will be juggled. We don't want to inhibit, or initiate retribution. After all, we're working with community here. "You know what freaked me out? This whole thing comes down to this one guy who's a master at what he does," Mary W. continues. "There are all these tenets, these things presented over and over again as facts that you're not supposed to write down. Finally, when everyone's getting a little crazy because it's been hours that they've been waiting for something to happen, with plants screaming that it's all just like something their husbands would do, you hear Sterling's voice booming out of speakers like the Wizard of Oz. Then he appears and starts engaging everybody's anger. Turns out he's been watching everything on hidden cameras. He got me going about the idea of committed relationships, turning everything I said around to fit what he wanted to say. Before I knew it, I was up on stage with him, crying, and everyone was thinking I was a plant."
Mary W. looks shaken by her memories. Susan B. touches her hand. Wanting to break the tension, I bring up a bit of research I did in which I discovered equal mentions, in a Yahoo search, for two other Justin Sterlings: one, a Dungeons and Dragons character, the other a renowned porn director best known for his dirty masterpiece, New Age Hookers. It breaks the discomfort of revelation.
"I've always considered these men's groups as sort of an evil thing, insidious because they mask themselves as something they're not," says Susan B. "I got to know a man who was involved. Then it turns out this man I was dating, who was kind of vulnerable to anything New Age, went to the Men's Weekend. The result was that he was never quite in the relationship and always on the phone to his teammates, doing some sort of phone tree thing and pretending he wasn't. And everything I told him in private seemed to end up in Woodstock's gossip circles before I knew it." When Susan B. takes a step further and starts calling the men she dated who had done Men's Weekends as narcissistic and misogynist, Mary W. perks up again.
"I had to eventually cut off all my friendships with these people, it creeped me out so much," she says. "I don't want to be looked at as an enemy, just as I refuse to believe or support their basic credo that the differences between the sexes need reinforcing. I believe men and women really can be friends." She pauses, gathering courage, then confides another element learned from her Women's Weekend.
"You're taught that it's the job of women to set the timing for sex, and men's role to say how the sex takes place," Susan B. says. "One of the rules is that women should wear a 'when' costume whenever they're open to having sex - something provocative. Then the men get to choose method, be it through objectification of the woman or position."
Mary W. involuntarily shudders at her own memory of such antics. "Thank God people phase out of it," she says with a throwaway laugh. "It's a cult, as far as I can tell. It's definitely a cult."
I'm talking to Bill M. about other matters when he suddenly grabs my hand and says enough's enough, he wants to thank me for writing about Sterling. It's a subject he's wanted to talk about for some time now, but his trust in fellow men has eroded. Bill M., it turns out, was once a high up in local men's team circles. He brought countless men into the Men's Weekends. He even served as Justin Sterling's driver for a spell.
"It was the stupidest thing I've done in my life," he tells me. "If the general purpose of life is to be a sensitive and thinking individual doing stuff for yourself, your family and your community, then what's the purpose of subordinating one's will to not only a group, but a group of men who have all been brainwashed by one man's cynical views of how life should be. It was all about putting money into Sterling's pocket. Think about it: $600 a person, 200 people a workshop, 30 or so workshops a year. The guy's a millionaire!"
Bill M., a successful business owner in his own right, says that he eventually had to undergo several months of therapy with a cult deprogrammer to get the bad habits he learned from Sterling out of his system. He had found himself getting ever-more aggressive. A marriage was ruined. He made bad business decisions. Worst of all, the amount of time he found himself spending with Men's team work hampered the time he was spending with his kids.
"Was there mind control involved?" Bill M. asks himself. "When you're in it, not at all. As soon as you start to pull away and realize how hard it is to separate one's thinking from all the rote pieces you've learned in the group" yes, definitely. It took me a long time to get through all that this stuff brought up in me. I guess I was vulnerable when I joined, wanting to better all aspects of my life as quickly as possible. And the men who were in it were all respectable. Now they won't talk to me. That, in itself, was hard to deal with. In my mind, there's little difference between what I saw here and what I learned when I visited Dachau a while back and talked to the kids of Nazis. They all thought they were right, too."
Before I can stop him, he's talking about the brainwashing methodology of the infamous weekends. "I went with someone who knows this field well, who books New Age speakers, and he said he's never seen anyone as good as Sterling," he says. "The way things work, you're up to 2 a.m. the first night, asked to leave your analytical mind behind. Then you're back up at 6 doing all these exercises. For long spells you have to listen to Sterling's right-hand-man, a real bore of a guy. Eventually, around 3 a.m. on the final stretch, Sterling says something to the tune of, 'If we're really going to talk about relationships we're going to have to talk about sex,' and he hands out like 200 cigars and three guys get chosen out of the audience and led onstage to discuss the best sex of their lives in full detail. Sterling starts talking about how, if a woman really loves a man, she shows him so through blow jobs."
Bill M. turns me on to Jerry L., another stalwart of the local scene who I'd met at a number of Woodstock parties over the years. He tells me how scared he got at his weekend, with Sterling asking if anyone had questions. Those who raised their hands had glow-in-the-dark nooses put around their necks and were led away into a basement.
"After about two hours, we were led upstairs, again in single file, left hand to left shoulder," Bill M. says to me. "The door opened and I saw 188 naked men in war paint dancing crazily in manmade fog, their leader banging a ram-headed scepter rhythmically against the floor. Someone wordlessly indicated that we were to strip and enter the gauntlet line, which Sterling described as a rebirth canal, where everyone struck me as I passed beneath. One man in war paint jumped into the 'tunnel' and fiercely growled at me. For the first time in my life, I punched someone."
Both Jerry L. and Bill M. describe the aftermath of the weekend as traumatic. For Jerry L, there were weeks of anonymous calls from men calling him "pussy" and talking about "consequences."
For Bill M., the first days following the weekend seemed to verify Sterling's prediction that he would henceforth have great sex because of what he'd learned. So he started applying Sterling rules to his life: spending a half-hour listening to his wife each day without interrupting her; finding a simple thing to do for her to let her know he loved her. Yet along with the good rules came others: daily phone calls to buddies and team captains, meetings, the writing of chain letters, recruitment.
"If you were late for anything, if you missed protocol, there were always consequences," Bill M. says. "If you didn't make the grade you were thrown off the team. Within a year, the turnover was pretty total. Within a year I started to wonder what I was doing wasting all my time doing this stuff. All this talk of loyalty and they're kicking people out. All this talk of confidentiality and they're telling you how to think, then talking about you behind your back. Once I left the group none of these men would speak to me again. I'd joined because I respected them. They were important people in Woodstock. I look at it all as evil now, as pure and utter evil."
"The final straw for my marriage was when he took the kids off for one of his men's retreats," says Joan F., who's chosen to meet me in another bar/restaurant on the rural fringes of town. She, too, has pointed out men she knows who have been through Sterling. None acknowledge her presence. So she talks.
"I didn't know what was up until the boys came back and wouldn't look me in the eye when I asked them how things had gone with their father," she continues. "They're under ten, mind you. Finally, the youngest breaks into tears and tells me how they were taken in a car to some place far away, and not to their dad's friend's house. They were told they weren't to play with girls. Girls weren't allowed. Turns out the whole weekend was spent with the dads telling their sons what being a man was like. The kids were sworn to secrecy but they were scared because their father and the other men were all swearing a lot and shouting. The littlest told me he was told specifically not to tell me anything. Need I say how angry this made me?"
We are joined at our table by Agnes L., who's given up on dating Woodstock men because of her run-ins with Sterling graduates. I tell them about Susan B. and Mary W. Everyone laughs, talking about the lines they've heard, the similarity of approaches from those in the teams.
"I knew I was being discussed in these teams every time I went out with one of these guys," Agnes L. says, tossing her hair back defiantly when someone catches her eye from the bar. "And I mean discussed in infinite detail. And these guys included health professionals I had to go to in the community, business owners."
"You want creepy," Joan F. chirps in. "When I suggested we go to couple's therapy he had to check with his men's group first. They said it would be okay but then he refused to talk about any of that side of his life in the sessions and believe me, it was taking up a good 40 percent of his time by then."
"You know they do garage sales for the groups?" Agnes L. counters. "Everything had this sinister yet totally mundane feel to it. Everything they say and do is so damned important. What happens in the group stays in the group, like, and yet what's said in our relationship or your marriage is open game to make it through half the male population of Woodstock or New Paltz without a second thought."
Joan F. looks serious a moment and then starts talking. "Sure, there's a lot of narcissism in this town, maybe from the recording scene, maybe the art," she says. "But to separate sexes? It's infantile. If there's anything in our world we can take for granted and not work on it's the fact that men and women are different. Why base a cult on that? There are so many more important things we can work on in our relationships and our communities. We learn this in high school and college. We gain hobbies and interests and political beliefs. Now to flatten it all with this stuff?"
"It's cowardice," replies Agnes B. "But it's also sad, really. It's a cry for help."
I think back to my talk with K. after the first installment of this series came out.
"What you did was absolutely not in line," he said, as angry as he said he was hurt. "You were to honor our confidentiality. Now, a lot of men in this town have been hurt. You've mixed up definitions of confidentiality and secrecy and broken these men's sense of trust. If we had known what you were going to do we would have asked you to leave."
I told K. I had been straight about my being a journalist, through and through. I don't leave my analytical mind behind. Anywhere. And more than confidentiality, I'm a proponent of openness. And I love my wife. She's my best friend.
"You let your fellow men down," K. continued. "I've gotten calls from some very prominent men in this community. You've hurt them."
He asked me if I'd come to explain myself to the Sterling Men of Woodstock. I said I would, in time. First I had things to do with my wife and community. I had a series to finish, I told K. But I'd be back to explain myself. I'd definitely be back.
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