Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic & the Domestic: Introduction

A provocative and controversial look at intimacy and sexual relationships by a seasoned clinician who examines the paradoxical relationship between domesticity and sexual desire and explains what it takes to bring lust home. In her 20 years of clinical experience, Esther Perel has treated scores of couples who complain of domestic lives devoid of eroticism. They describe loving, intimate relationships that are egalitarian and open and yet, their sex lives are passionless and dull. In her explosively original thesis, Perel explains that our cultural penchant for equality, fairness and absolute candor is antithetical to erotic desire for men and women alike. Sexual excitement, she explains, doesn't play by the rules of good citizenship. Rather, it is politically incorrect, thriving on power plays, role reversals, unfair advantages, imperious demands, ambiguity in gesture and words, seductive manipulations, and subtle cruelties. We might have exciting, playful, even poetic sex if we were less constrained in the bedroom by our emotional correctness and our emphasis on safety and respect.