Becoming cliterate Why orgasm equality matters--and how to get it

If you, like me, are a believer in the precept "Follow the money," then you understand there is no one better to consult about your sex life than a bunch of economists. According to a 2004 study of 16,000 participants published in The Scandinavian Journal of Economics, increasing frequency of intercourse from once a month to once a week generates the same amount of happiness as an additional $50,000 a year in income. (To my Scottish husband, this fact constitutes foreplay.) Sex and relationship self-help books are here to boost our bedroom profits or, at the very least, offer one or two sales tricks you may have never considered before - if not a particular act, then a way of connecting with each other. So let's get busy. Laurie Mintz, a professor of psychology at the University of Florida, wins this year's award for best book title, pun division, with BECOMING CLITERATE: Why Orgasm Equality Matters - and How to Get It (HarperOne, $26.99). Books teaching women about orgasms have been popular since the 1970 s, and I was skeptical of the need for this one. Don't our bodies tell us all we need to know, without an instruction manual? Well, maybe not. Mintz begins by arguing that our culture conspires to deprive us of satisfaction, since both men and women now take their cues from pornography. Pornography is a happy land of unicorns and rainbows and women's achieving ecstasy via intercourse alone. She also points out that while Freud was full of many excellent observations about human behavior, women's sexual needs were not one of them. Once women hit puberty, Freud wrote, "the clitoris should wholly or in part hand over its sensitivity, and at the same time its importance, to the vagina." (In terms of great advice, this ranks right up there with "You J should take up smoking - it'll help you lose weight.") At any rate, once we are set straight about the primacy of the clitoris in orgasms, we are told various ways to work it: fingers, vibrators (though curiously, she forgets Ryan Gosling). We are also told to hand over a copy of this book to any willing and interested men, whom Mintz sets straight on everything from the need for a warm-up to the fact that sex toys will not replace them. I do wish, however, that someone had told Mintz to cut! down! on! the! exclamations! Also, while I admire her enthusiasm, I could have done with a little less adorableness. At one point she suggests we come up with a new name for the clitoris, to make us more comfortable talking about it among ourselves. Her suggestions, "Cleo" and "Tori," mean that to avoid cringing every time I see them, I now have friends I will be referring to as Cleopatra and Victoria. I like the idea behind the psychotherapist Winifred M. Reilly's IT TAKES ONE TO TANGO: How I Rescued My Marriage With (Almost) No Help From My Spouse - and How You Can Too (Touchstone, $24.99). The book takes very seriously the notion that, as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, "We must be our own before we can be another's." Reilly writes that just as there are stages of development for the individual, there are stages for couples : symbiosis, differentiation, exploration, rapprochement, synergy. The transition from the first two stages - going from "We are as one!" to "Wait, we aren't as one?" - is usually where the trouble starts. How we navigate individuation within a relationship can determine whether that guy sleeping next to you is your husband, or your First Husband. What distinguishes Reilly's book is that she says a warring couple don't have to agree on the goal of staying together; it takes one person changing, not both, to make a marriage work. I'm not sure whether I buy this argument or not. I do know that since Reilly uses this book to endlessly dissect her own not-really-all-that-horrible relationship, the reader may occasionally feel she's stuck in a marriage even more tedious than her own. While Reilly takes the hopeful but dubious tack that a relationship can be fixed because people can change, Michael Bennett and Sarah Bennett are under no such illusion. In _LOVE: One Shrink's Sensible Advice for Finding a Lasting Relationship (Touchstone, $19.99), this very funny and sensible father-daughter team urge the reader to look at himself less as a lonely guy and more as a corporation : You are the C.E.O. of your life, and you need to watch the bottom line. Your choices can either help you reap a lifetime of profits or run the Business of You into the ground. So the Bennetts go through the traits we are all drawn to and help us gauge their relative importance in the long haul. They map the different levels of need or commitment involved in making every relationship decision. On whether to get married, for example, the authors urge you to examine your own mind-set: Decide if you are making marriage a top priority for good reasons, a medium priority because you are ambivalent, or you can't even consider this question rationally because you are in a state of existential panic: "You need to lock someone down now so you won't have to worry about the years when you're so fat, old and bald or as hairy as a Market Street bear that your genitals will fall off from disuse." The book is so amusing that you won't mind that you are essentially being scolded all the time. For instance, in a list titled "Ten Questions to Which the Answer Is Always No," they ask: "As an adult, can I still use the 'he/she started it' excuse?" and "Is it valid to break up with someone using just the emojis of a broken heart, a crying cat and a beeper?" The cheeky title notwithstanding, this is more a relationship book than a sex book, so the fact that it's written by a father-daughter team is less creepy than you might think. I was sure that Wendy Strgar's sex that works: An intimate Guide to Awakening Your Erotic Life (Sounds True, paper, $16.95), forthcoming in June, would have me rolling my eyes. After all, the cover is Hallmark-card treacly (poppies in soft focus), the publisher is known for its woo-woo titles, and the author, who calls herself a "loveologist," is also in the business of selling personal lubricants. Instead, "Sex That Works" is thoughtful, well written and dare I say, a little inspirational. Strgar's premise is that many of us spend our lives self-medicating - with drugs, drink, food, shopping - to escape our true selves. Yet if we want to experience real pleasure, we also need to be willing to feel pain. Not, like, "Fifty Shades of Grey" pain, though that kind is discussed. Rather, the kind of discomfort that comes from being honest with others, and with ourselves. Sounds simple, but anyone who has been faking pleasure for years knows that it's not. According to Strgar, the rate of anorgasmie women is three times higher in the United States than in Europe, which she attributes to our culture of denial and I attribute to fantasy football. Strgar makes very good points - about how we confuse sexual freedom with sexual license, resulting in a hookup culture V^rv that has us faking orgasms like porn stars. Authentic sexual freedom, she writes, means "taking responsibility for our own sexual needs." The book shows us how to do just that. She talks about how to achieve a state of mental abandonment, how to appreciate small sensual moments, how to love without always worrying every second about being loved back - and how asking for sexual satisfaction even requires a certain level of courage. Along the way, Strgar, now in her 50s, explains how she brought her own sex life with her husband of more than 30 years back from the brink of ruin. She argues persuasively that sexual pleasure, however you define it, is not a luxury but a necessity. I might add that the love oils she sells on her site smell really good. Though thus far I haven't convinced my husband that sex, as Strgar writes, can be "a gourmet meal of many courses and flavors." "I like steak," he says. ? JUDITH NEWMAN'S "To Siri With Love: A Mother, Her Autistic Son, and the Kindness of Machines" will be published in August.