"Chocolate" and sex

About two weeks ago when I first mentioned Joan Sewell's I'd Rather Eat Chocolate: Learning to Love My Low Libido I said I was really enjoying it but that I wanted to finish it before recommending it.

I finally had a chance to finish it and...

It's a wonderful book. I highly recommend it.

I've practically blackened the margins of almost every page with notes -- some saying only "yes, yes" and others "no, no!"

I have some quibbles with her analysis, but since I strongly believe them to be threshold faults rather blind ones I'll stand on that threshold and defend her even as I try persuading her to step on through.

Asexuality, like bisexuality and others, is a sexual orientation, only instead of feeling sexual around one or both genders asexual don't feel sexual towards anyone. In word and deed Sewell seems perfectly asexual. As she says "I'd rather eat chocolate." Or, as she also says, "Not even the Holy Grail of orgasm was enough to muscle up my libido" and, later, "did I come this time? I don't have the heart to tell him, I don't care, I'm to exhausted to think about it. [emphasis hers --fl]

Ok, so here's the thing. Just as bisexuality doesn't mean you fall in love with every man and woman you meet, asexuality doesn't mean you never fall in love at all. Like every other orientation asexuals are perfectly capable of enduring romantic love, enjoy long walks and backrubs, snuggles and sleeping side by side with someone they feel strongly for. They just feel no impulse to have sex.

Which brings us to Sewell's problem in her marriage. She went along with sex with her boyfriend, and naturally consummated their marriage (a good thing considering both church and common law) but since she didn't enjoy it for it's own sake, and *certainly* didn't enjoy it out of a sense of obligation (eww! obligation sex!) she put it off as often as possible.

Her analysis of various strategies for putting off sex, and her narrative of her process for alternately justifying and rationalizing it, are excellent. And thorough.

The book really gets started, though, when her partner finally calls her on it.

Though slightly flawed her analysis of the common expectation that men will positively *explode* without sex, and that rather than face visits from wary TSA representatives they'll quickly leave and/or find it somewhere else is detailed and poignant. (The flaw being that she keeps considering and then discarding the possibility that men want *more* than sex in a relationship, rather than *only* sex.)

The book really begins, as I said, when her partner finally confronts her because, hoping to find a "cure" for her orientation (how's that going Exodus International?), she undertakes a survey of the major pop-psychology theories of sexual self-improvement.

I could devastate virtual forests and buckets of cyber ink recounting her... um... account. But you should just go buy the book and read it yourself. It's worth it (and no, I don't get a commission on sales. Darn it.) Capsule summary, though? Most sections end with a variation of "...but if my *husband* doesn't need this, or that, or the other set of conditions to be met then why would I need it?" Which, when you think about it, is a pretty useful (not to mention devastating) question to ask any ostensible sex expert.

After completing this excellent review, which includes not only authors but a sex therapist, numerous friends, and a couple of comedians and talk-show hosts, she concludes that since she's an asexual woman all women must be asexual. Or at least far, far closer to it than all men are.

And that introduces my biggest beef with her book. Counterexample #1 being the tens of millions of men who are no more excited about sex than Sewell is, or at least less excited by it than their partners are. Counterexample #2 being the millions of women who are partners of men in category #1. Women in category #2 are often (usually?) overlooked. Or were till blogs came along anyway. But if Category #2 women are overlooked (Sewell overlooks them immediately after mentioning them in a section about Berman & Berman), Category #1 men are outright invisible. Or were, anyway, until their partners started blogging about them.

The last section of the book recounts first her rejection of her sexual preference (he prefers sex), then her resentment of it, and then, finally, her reconciliation with it -- which *at he partner's suggestion* she undertakes *under her own terms!* Which is a very big deal! For any of us.

The crux for her is her strong (she says nature-based, I insist it's nature) sense that sex is not undertaken in women's term or for women's benefit but for men's. As she puts it

More often than I like to admit, I treat sex as if I'm catering a party. No, I'm not a doormat; I'm a welcome mat. In hostess mode, I can't enjoy the party; I"m to worried about how the guests are doing. I go into hostess mode because, usually, sex is to please him. It's analogous to serving snacks during a football game. If you're not into football itself, you'll just spend time worrying if everyone else is enjoying themselves. And often, having sex is not to please me.

I wouldn't be giving away the ending to say that by learning (maybe even *agreeing!*) to have sex on her own terms Sewell, while still never particularly enjoying sex, manages to enjoy *herself.* Which, for people in any kind of libido-imbalanced relationship, is a pretty important place to be.

And watching this "mysterious stranger" to sex explore the alien landscape of contemporary American sexuality she found herself thrust into, seeing how she tries to understand it, to survive it, to make accommodations to it, and -- reluctantly -- to settle into it, is extraordinarily illuminating to those of us who are native to it.

Which is, again, why I think it's a wonderful, instructive, sometimes scary, often funny work. And why I'm recommending it.

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Earlier I mentioned the flaws in her book: her implication (I won't say assumption) that her level of libido is representative of all women; her implication that men always have higher libidos than women. I also mentioned that I saw them as threshold flaws rather than fatal ones. By threshold I meant that I belive that she's assembled all the materials from our current world view about libido differences and, having come to her conclusion she's ready to open up a new, more actual world view wherein women *and* men of an asexual orientation can be acknowledged and accepted, and wherein *every* couples of every combination of the GLBTSA alphabet have tools for negotiating their differences in libido minus the (largely moral) rhetoric of gender and tradition.

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Quick aside about that "hostess mode/welcome mat" quote: what distinguished what's called 3rd Wave Feminists from both their predecessors, their alleged 4th-Wave, Post-feminist, and Girls-gone-wild women that came after, and anti-feminists in general is that they expressly located their partner's enjoyment next to or perhaps behind their own, instead of putting it before or instead of theirs.