Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

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Dana Stevens of Slate.com’s The XX Factor crystalizes the problem with Philip Weiss’s “no-sex” class paradigm-cementing New York magazine article

...what Weiss tries to frame as a radical rethinking of marriage amounts to a code of conduct so familiar as to be reactionary. Hey, what if we lived in a world where, because of their struggles with monogamy, men were subject to a less restrictive set of sexual expectations than women? And what if, instead of working as, say, waitresses, young women could fashion alternate careers for themselves as professional “mistresses”? What if sloppy think-piece writers could conflate the practices of “empowered” courtesan-bloggers like Debauchette or the polyamorous authors of The Ethical Slut: A Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities with the sequestration and abuse of 14-year-old girls by the FLDS cult? Oh, wait, we’re living in that world already.

She says it here.

Pretty definitive take down. There’s really not much to add though I do have two words if you want a nice alternative answer that doesn’t really depend very much on gender and even less on sociobiology and does include space for multilateral rather than unilateral libido and agency: Esther Perel. I haven’t said enough nice things about her book lately, but her explanations for, especially, in-partnership alienation and extra-partnership infidelity are wonderfully eye-opening.