The Sex Diaries: Why Women Go Off Sex and Other Bedroom Battles

Front Cover
Melbourne Univ. Publishing, 2009 - Family & Relationships - 318 pages
'From the time I started working as a sex therapist back in the early 1970s, people have been talking to me about their sex lives. What I hear about most is the business of negotiating the sex supply. How do couples deal with the strain of the man wishing and hoping while all she longs for is the bliss of uninterrupted sleep?' In The Sex Diaries Australia's leading sex therapist, Bettina Arndt, uncovers the night-time drama being played out in bedrooms everywhere the creeping hand and feigning of sleep, the staying up late in the hope that he will doze off. It is one of the great inconvenient truths of relationships that after the first blissful years together, most men want more sex than their female partners. Bettina Arndt recruited ninety-eight couples to keep diaries, revealing their intimate negotiations over sex. Who feels like having sex? Who doesn't? And how do couples cope if one person wants it more than the other? She draws on her thirty-five years of experience as a sex therapist and psychologist to provide a provocative analysis that challenges our basic assumptions about sex. With her characteristic humour and insight, Bettina Arndt proposes a new approach to how couples can enjoy regular sex and sustain loving relationships.
 

Contents

Shifting the Sprinkler and Other Green Square Days
15
Where Has She Gone This Lover I Married?
33
The Search for the Elusive Pink Viagra
48
Just Do It
75
Juicy Tomatoes and the Celery Stick Men
97
The Worlds Most Boring Affair
127
Two Pounds of Liver and a Cabbage
154
Laundry Gets You Laid?
172
Get That Thing Away from Me
187
Blind Man in the Dark Trying to Find a Black Cat
204
Its in His Kiss Thats Where It Is
227
Bad Health Thinking It Is Silly and No Bicycle
258
The Desire to Desire
276
Notes
296
Index
312
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