Sex as a shock factor

Gurdjieff frequently used sex as a kind of shock-factor in dealing with individuals, I remember the case of one young woman, a dancer, whose principal attraction to Gurdjieff's work was that she was allowed to teach his dances to newcomers because she was a good dancer and a reasonably good teacher. Her interest in his work did not, however, seem to go beyond this pleasure in having a position of some
authority. When she once challenged some statement he had made during the course of a lecture, he told her that he would have to give her a personal answer to the questions she was raising and would arrange for someone to give her a definite appointment to see him alone.
That night, after the lecture, he told me to go to her and invite her to come to his room at three o'clock in the morning—alone. He also told me to tell her that he would show her some wonderful things—things that she could not even imagine. When I gave her the message, she listened scornfully and with a show of a good deal of righteous shock and anger told me to tell him that she recognized a "proposition" when she heard one and that not only would she not come to his room but that she would no longer have anything to do with his work.
He was very amused when I relayed this reply to him and said that she had made an unfortunate, for her, but good, for him, choice. He said that her preoccupation with sex was such that she was no longer a good teacher of his dances and that he had chosen this means—face-saving for her—of dismissing her as a teacher. He added, however, that there were times when he was not above "diverting" himself in the
current American fashion and that they might both have been rewarded had she agreed to visit him. Then he went on to say that it was just as well since he did not really have the time to deal with the reverberations that would undoubtedly have followed had she accepted his "proposition". He also said that her refusal would serve her as a topic of conversation and imaginative thought for the rest of her life. On the one hand, she could say that she had "rejected" the great Gurdjieff's advances, and on the other hand she could spend her life wondering what it would have been like had she accepted.
I remember the reaction of one female group member on learning—from the dancer herself, of course, who lost no time in spreading the story—of the incident. With a pained look on her face, she said to me: "If it had only been me! What an opportunity! Can't you get me an appointment?" I suggested that she might approach him directly and let him know of her availability but, again sadly, she had to admit that she "didn't have the nerve".

Fritz Peters - My Journey with a Mystic p.232-233