How to Think More About Sex
How to Think More About Sex
by Alain de Botton
Picador, December 2012
192 pages / $16 Buy from Picador or Amazon
In the middle of Michel Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles, the narrator makes one of many comparisons between sex and the free market:
“Sexual desire is preoccupied with youth, and the progressive influx of ever-younger girls onto the field of seduction was simply a return to the norm; a restoration of the true nature of desire, comparable to the return of stock prices to their true value after a run on the exchange.”
While Houellebecq has been derided by some as misogynistic and bleak, it is clear that upon reading Alain de Botton’s How to Think More About Sex, a slim volume that should have been titled How to Think More About Heteronormative Sex, the two would be in agreement about at least one thing: as those with partners age, both in their relationships and biology, individual desire for sex decreases until finally, death. In one of the more interesting sections of the book (the other being on pornography,) one of the first in Picador’s “The School of Life” series, de Botton repudiates the assertion first made by the Masters & Johnson study that states in order for a marriage to be successful, sex should be a constant. Ignoring this trend that was later capitalized upon by sex therapists and then pharmaceutical companies, de Botton argues that a decrease in our sex drive and the quality and quantity of sex is purely normal and is a “necessary comprise of long-term love.”
3 Comments
March 15th, 2013 / 12:00 pm
March 15th, 2013 / 12:00 pm
I’ll tell you what you can do with your review, buddy
Alain de Botton, sardonic author of How Proust Can Change Your Life and, more recently, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, positively flipped his shit when the NYT Book Review made some unglowing remarks about his latest book. The line “I will hate you until the day I die” was used. Take that, brainless critic! We need more hate in publishing, far as I’m concerned. Who wants to take a Louisville Slugger to James Frey? Anyone?