Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence

When we first met I bought him a briefcase for his birthday—something he saw in a store window and loved—and it had two tickets to Paris inside. This year I gave him a DVD and we celebrated with a couple of friends by eating a meat loaf his mother had made.

holding the lens squarely on the physical act of sex—sex as a performance—is a decidedly unerotic approach. It is too narrow an angle. To me, it seems that James is overwhelmed by the whole prospect of being sexual with his wife: claiming desire, eroticizing her, feeling free to express the bawdiness of his lust with her.

But a healthy sense of entitlement is a prerequisite for erotic intimacy.”

A healthy sense of erotic entitlement is built on a relaxed, generous, and unencumbered attitude toward the pleasures of the body—something our puritan culture continues to grapple with.

It’s hard to feel attracted to someone who has abandoned her sense of autonomy. Maybe he can love her, but it’s clearly much harder for him to desire her. There’s no tension.

You become so focused on the incessant demands of daily life that you short-circuit any electric charge between you.

The body often contains emotional truths that words can too easily gloss over.

As often happens in a public discussion, the most complex issues tend to polarize in a flash, and nuance is replaced with caricature.

Faced with the irrefutable otherness of our partner, we can respond with fear or with curiosity.