“The idea that women’s sex drive can match men’s is politically correct piffle, says Joan Sewell, who is 45. Her memoir, I’d Rather Eat Chocolate: Learning to Love My Low Libido, recounts one frustration after another in a buildup to an anticlimactic conclusion: she’s just not that into sex…

“Libidinous ladies parade across our television screens—in Sex and the City, for example, or Desperate Housewives—but Sewell thinks they’re faking it. Like many real women, they are conforming to an image of supposed sexual liberation as they throw down their men and play rough. Poor Sewell, then, is the deviant. She is pathologized and pitied and subjected to various futile therapies:

“I will be treated with drugs, psychoanalysis, spa-based encounter groups, warm rocks placed on my back, thong therapy, sex-toy parties, empowerment rituals, aromatherapy…. As I end up in a straitjacket in a psych ward hopping about madly, I simply can’t help noting the obvious. No one is trying to lower men’s sex drives.

“Our brave heroine has had enough. She imagines a talk show on the “problem of male sexual overdrive” in which Oprah and Dr. Phil counsel a revved-up man, Rod. Six months later he returns to the show cured. “I can’t believe that I used to cuddle with my wife and think it was not enough,” he mumbles, misty-eyed. Sewell’s husband, Kip, does not suffer quite the same fate, but the two work out a compromise, a sort of sexual contract that involves stripteases, masturbation, and, on occasion, sex. They are both satisfied. Well, sort of. Mostly they are relieved.

“Sewell worked as a punch-press operator in Cleveland before getting a master’s degree in philosophy. I’d Rather Eat Chocolate is her first book. She and Kip, who have been together for 10 years and married for eight, now live in Seattle. We spoke by phone one evening last month while Kip was at the local diner.”

Ran across this today in the current Atlantic Monthly, along with the following interview with Sewell about her new book, I’d Rather Eat Chocolate. Check it out. Maybe she’s telling the truth! What say you?

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200702u/no-sex

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