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 In Treatment on HBO didn't leave us with much faith that couples therapy can actually work. Even the therapist's therapist, Dianne Wiest, finally gave in and told Gabriel Byrne to go ahead and sleep with his hot'n'horny 30-year-old patient, despite the fact that he was married to the most awesome woman ever. And studies of couples therapy aren't any cheerier: the research out there indicates that two years after ending counseling, 25 percent of couples are worse off than when they started, and after four years, 38 percent are divorced. For a sunnier perspective, we thought we'd chat with Dr. Sue Johnson, director of the Ottawa Couple and Family Institute and author of the new book Hold Me Tight, about an approach she helped develop called emotionally focused therapy. Studies have shown that even years after this kind of counseling, almost three-quarters of the couples are doing better-- it's one of the few forms of couples therapy with empirical data showing that it helps. Johnson was recently recruited by the U.S. army for a pilot program to help army couples deal with Iraq war-induced marital stress... 
 We know we say this all the time, but Ian Kerner, author of the bestselling book She Comes First, really is one of the nicest--and cheeriest--people in the biz (as well as master of catchy quotes and puns, as you'll see). He took time out of his busy sex therapy schedule to tell us about his new book, Sex Detox. Em & Lo: What does it mean to go on a sex detox? Ian Kerner: As the original Coca-Cola commercials said, "Enjoy the pause that refreshes." Or think of it as re-discovering the thrill of the chaste. When it comes to sex and relationships, sometimes we get in so deep the only way out is to start over again. For many of us--whether we're in a relationship or actively dating--our sex lives have become a source of toxicity, rather than one of sustenance and renewal. And just a like a food fast detoxifies one's body, I really believe it's possible to detoxify your love life...
 We have a total author crush on Mary Roach after reading her latest book, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex. (Perhaps she got sick of being asked if her best-selling book Stiff was about bonking. It's about death, if you've been living under a rock.) She's the kind of sex writer we'd like to be when we grow up: hilarious, smart, and completely acceptable on your grandmother's coffee table. There's a lot of dubious sex research out there--we're as guilty as the next sex blogger of disseminating it sometimes--and Roach waded knee-deep into it to find some real answers. (Actually, if you check out this video, she went way further than knee-deep.) Here are ten fun facts (yay facts!) she unearthed along the way... 10 Facts About Bonking from "Bonk" 1. The typical session of intercourse lasts from two to five minutes and consists, on the part of the man, of 100 to 500 thrusts. 2. According to the latest laboratory study, a woman's orgasm lasts an average of 26 seconds...
 A few years ago we were on a panel about sex writers with our recent Bedpost Interviewee, Tristan Taormino, where she said she never writes about anything she's never tried herself. (We, of course, don't hold ourselves to the same high journalistic standards.) Well, she's got a new book coming out called Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships -- so you know she's probably got a pretty good idea from first-hand experience of what works and what doesn't. (Unlike us, who just like to point and oooh and aaaah at the rarely seen beast that is the successful long-term open relationship, and who then get spanked by seasoned practitioners for such un-evolved behavior.) To preempt the book's publication, Taormino's just launched the new community site, OpeningUp.net:
It is totally true that I have judged other people on the basis of
their reading habits--if I see someone on the train reading a book I
love, I want to be their friend; if it is an attractive stranger, I
want to be a friend of their erogenous zones. It is possible for me to
become interested in people because their reading material makes me
think they are smart, make good decisions, that they and I have so much
in common because oh my god I like that author too let's totally make out, woo!
In early conversations with the object of flirtation--before you get
naked--it is undoubtedly thrilling to learn that they like, say,
Russian literature or Latin American magical realism, or they are as
totally into lengthy, elaborately plotted fantasy series as you are. Or
is that last part supposed to be a turn-off?
There's this article, in The New York Times, where people are talking about how totally off-putting it is, romantically, when someone's reading taste is not to their own taste. Which I can understand: if you love romance novels, and all your potential lover seems to read is manga, maybe that is a sign that there is something lacking, when it comes to an overlap of interests. It could be a deal breaker, if it is just one more straw, a beleaguered camel with a backache. Read more at ElasticWaist.com>>
 We recently had a chance to talk with Glamour contributor and MSNBC's Sexploration columnist Brian Alexander about his new book America Unzipped, which chronicles his cross-country travels measuring the tension between the sexual extremes of experimentation and repression. We also talked about his too-tight PVC pants. Em & Lo: In your travels across the country, what was...the most shocking thing you witnessed? Brian Alexander: If shocking means "surprising," it was the love, sex and marriage seminar given by Joe Beam, former Church of Christ preacher and frequent radio guest of fundamentalist firebrand James Dobson. Those of us who are not evangelicals have a stereotyped view of the beliefs about sex that exist among many Christian believers. I wasn't expecting a vivid lesson on 69, but I got it. Now, not every fundamentalist thinks the way Joe Beam does; some think he is a heretic. But there is a much more liberal view of married heterosexual sex within evangelical Christianity than the rest of us generally think. ...the most hilarious moment?
 Photo via Splash You've heard it before: "Men are hardwired to be skirt-chasing, commitment-phobic, aggressive brutes...There's no arguing with science: it's just in a guy's genes." Well, Professor Martha McCaughey is arguing. In her recent book, The Caveman Mystique: Pop-Darwinism and the Debates Over Sex, Violence, and Science, this Director of Women's Studies at Appalachian State University in North Carolina proproses that evolutionary psychology is not much more than a pseudo-science adopted by a lazy pop culture to defend the bad behavior of boys. We talked with McCaughey about lad mags, Mitchum men, and the appeal of the Geico ads. It's a decent-sized interview, but well worth your read--she's got some fascinating ideas that are sure to make for heated debate at your next dinner party. Em & Lo: So, can you give us the CliffsNotes version of your book's thesis? Martha McCaughey: Over the past two decades an increasingly popular story about men has emerged: that because of evolutionary pressures on their forefathers, modern men carry in their brains the desires that their cavemen ancestors evolved to have. Some of the typical and even offensive behaviors of the harrier sex (wanderlust, an obsession with breasts, and an inability to be monogamous for any length of time) can thus be explained. The relatively new field of evolutionary psychology offers evolutionary answers to familiar battle-of-the-sexes questions. I argue that the caveman narrative caught on not because it's so compelling scientifically--in fact, some would not consider it science at all because it is so speculative--but because it came along just when great economic and political changes began affecting men's identities. American men's work and earning opportunities have drastically changed, and not for the better. Moreover, men have been criticized by liberals and conservatives alike for antisocial behavior in general and sexual violence in particular. Men have felt squeezed and bashed. American women in the 1950s were supposed to take comfort and pride in their feminine figures and Tupperware collections. Today American men, who for better or worse have lost the opportunities to provide for families, to do productive work that helped make America run, and who have been taken to task for sexual assault and other forms of violence against women, have been offered a way to think of themselves as powerful, productive, and even aggressive. Because the new economic and political climate of the past 20 years has offered few real opportunities for men to be rewarded for such traits (indeed, masculinity is increasingly "service-sector" and "metrosexualized"), the idea that men are rugged cavemen has become increasingly popular. But just as 1950s women suffered what Betty Friedan famously called the "feminine mystique," American men today who buy into the discourse that they are really innately powerful and aggressive are embracing an ultimately empty fiction of their masculinity that I call the caveman mystique. E&L: Why do you think it's so appealing for men to think of themselves as cavemen?
 Nancy Redd is a former Miss Virginia, a former cheerleading captain--and also a Women's Studies Harvard graduate and author of the uplifting and hilarious book Body Drama: Real Girls, Real Bodies, Real Issues, Real Answers. (See? We told you not to judge ex-cheerleaders.) The book features a vulva centerfold that would make Hugh Hefner turn in his grave (oh wait, that's right, he's not dead yet, just irrelevant), and is pretty much guaranteed to make you feel better about your least favorite body part, whichever part that may be. We decided to chat to Nancy about one of her favorite crusading topics, pubic hair. (Actually, it's one of ours, too...come on, Nair for pre-teens?!) E&L: New York mag accused your book of having a bit of an anti-waxing slant, though we actually thought you presented all the pubic hair styling options fairly evenly. Why do you think we're so obsessed with manicuring our hair down there these days? NR: First and foremost, I don't care what you do as long as you do it for you and not because you think future sexual partners will think you're gross if you don't get rid of your body hair. Bikini waxing is big business with a huge profit margin. A few marketing geniuses in the 1990s started touting it as the newest, coolest, modern and sexy thing to do, and we believed them. In 1999, as I struggled to fit in with my classmates my frosh year at Harvard, getting my first Brazilian was like a rite of passage, right up there with buying a pair of Tiffany earrings, a Bobbi Brown lipstick, and a Coach handbag. Having only ever wielded a razor down there with not-so-hot results, the smooth feeling afterwards, as well as the powerful feeling of maturity, got me hooked. That Christmas break, when I asked an esthetician in my hometown in southern Virginia for a "touch up," she looked at me like I was crazy. No one outside of big cities was doing them then. T | ||
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