Book review: Mating in captivity : sex, lies and domestic bliss

Ether Perel takes on these tough questions, grappling with the obstacles and anxieties that arise when our quest for secure love conflicts with our pursuit of passion. She invites us to explore the paradoxical union of domesticity and sexual desire, and explains what it takes to bring lust home. Whether or not you are single or in a relationship, the paradox of modern love is reviewed and set alight by her provocative ideas and suggestions.

Through case studies and lively discussion drawn from her twenty years experience as a psychotherapist, Esther Perel puts forward the premise that sexual excitement thrives a lot on what is politically incorrect i.e. power plays, unfair advantages, role reversals, imperious demands, ambiguity in gesture and words, seductive manipulations, and subtle cruelties. In effect, Perel unwraps cultural attitudues towards erotic sex through the titles she chooses for the eleven chapters that make up the book:

1. From adventure to captivity: Why the quest for security saps erotic vitality
2. More intimacy, less sex: Love seeks closeness, but desire needs distance
3. The pitfalls of modern intimacy: Talk is not the only avenue to closeness
4. Democracy versus hot sex: Desire and egalitarianism don't play by the same rules
5. Can do! The Protestant work ethic takes on the degradation of desire
6. Sex is dirty: save it for someone you love: When puritanism and hedonism collide
7. Erotic blueprints: Tell me how you were loved, and I'll tell you how to make love
8. Parenthood: Why three threatens two
9. Of flesh and fantasy: In the sanctuary of the erotic mind, we find a direct route to pleasure
10. The shadow of the third: Rethinking fidelity
11. Putting the X back into sex: Bringing the erotic home

So, according to Perel, the first step to bringing excitement back into your sex life is to leave political correctness out of your bedroom.

"There is no such thing as safe sex," Perel writes. Sex requires mystery, excitement, uncertainty. Which means not knowing everything about your partner. If you find that threatening, she suggests, you would find it less threatening so if you stopped equating intimacy with sex.

This book is not a how to book of exercises to rekindle passion. Rather, it centres on fantasy, play and surrender to the unknown as the path to sexual excitement. It talks about developing an erotic intelligence that balances serious intimacy and sexual play, and that can actually deepen commitment at the same time.

You can buy the book from the Australian online bookstore, HolsiticPage. Simply click on the link and type in the title, Mating in captivity. It's a book that will challenge and perhaps change your ideas of sex and the way you play.