Bad Places to Get Sex Advice

Apparently men's magazines are obsessed with the question of why women cheat, which would be offensive except that women's magazines are obsessed with how to find out whether your man is one of the millions who are, in fact, already cheating.

So, another dispatch in the adultery wars from the magazine Details, which found (through some means or other) that 41% of women who cheat think the person they're cheating with is sexier than their primary partner.

Their question is: 41% of women think their primary partner isn't sexy? My question is: What the hell motivates the other 59%?

On another (only tangentially related) note, I recently found a book of book recommendations titled "Book Lust" in a giftstore. It's gimmicky, but how many times have I picked up a book, read the first two hundred pages, and realized that it's not going to get good. I am, in fact, reading a bad book. Can I describe the pain of realizing I spent good money and time on what will, in effect, always be a mediocre experience? It's almost unAmerican.

So I understand the point of books like "Book Lust." I was flipping through it when I came across a section titled Sex and the Single Reader. The title says it all, but on the short list that followed I came across "Lady Chatterley's Lover."

I have a long history with this book. It started in fourth grade, when my Mom told me that it (along with the Bible and Gone With the Wind!) was on a short list of books I was still too young to read. Obviously, I had to read it right away. But, being 8, I had to wait for a good opportunity. When I was 10 I finally got it. I was in India for my cousin's wedding, and my cousin had a dog-eared copy lying around (along with the many Mills & Boon romance novels she kept for rainy days). With her eventual permission, I snuck the book around in my bag for a week and a half. When I did start reading it, I found the opening boring and verbose. I flipped through for good parts, realized there were none, and put it back on her shelf. Maybe they only print a censored copy in India, I thought, wondering why it had been banned in my house.

I forgot all about it for two years, until I saw the movie "Pleasantville." In this film, everyone in a black-and-white TV town gains their colors when they break out of their cherished routines. The main character's sister doesn't get her colors until she reads her first book. What does she choose? D.H. Lawrence, because "it seems sexy." "It is," says her brother (Was that Tobey Maguire?)

Anyway, the movie rekindled my interest. I'd only read about 30 pages of the book before, I thought I'd give it another shot. I bought a used copy (probably a bad move with erotic fiction) but didn't crack it open until this summer. I settled down, expecting a steamy, enthralling read. The back of the book called it an "ode to spiritual regeneration through sexual love" which sounds like something I would enjoy.

Sadly, it was not. After years of building up my expectations, I found myself mired in a predictable and irritating romance between two predictable and irritating characters. Sure, there are long descriptions of sexual idylls, useful for anyone who wants to talk dirty in turn-of-the-century English. There are occasional portions where Mellors, one of the lovers, enthuses about the joys of "fucking" (Lawrence's word, not mine, I should attribute it since it almost sent his publishers to jail) but my tolerance finally broke when he went on a long rant about the four types of women in the world.

According to Mellors, all women fall into several distressing sexual categories. 1) Women who hate sex. 2) Women who love it and want to be in charge (which he finds an insult to his masculinity. He says this) 3) Lesbians (all women who require clitoral stimulation to get off. The unfortunate Mellors has slept with a lot of "lesbians") and 4) Black women, who are "a little bit like mud."

How am I supposed to have any sympathy for this misogynistic, racist ball of crap? Did I mention he doesn't like children, not even his own daughter? Meanwhile, his so-called "lover" is a bored Madame Bovary-type whose disabled husband can no longer get it up. Frustration drives her into the arms of the gamekeeper (gamekeeper is an old-fashioned way of saying 'gardener') which makes this story (minus the Freudian sexual psychoanalysis) feel like a Desperate Housewives rerun.

According to Wikipedia (bastion of great literary minds), Lady Chatterley's Lover follows a relationship based on "tenderness, physical passion and mutual respect." Lady Chatterley "learns that sex is more than a shameful and disappointing act" and Mellors "learns about the spiritual challenges that come from physical love."

I don't think anyone on Wikipedia has read this novel. Basically, it's a collection of mangled class criticisms and sexual stereotypes that, much like the Freudian theories about female orgasm (which appear throughout!) may once have been intriguing but now just seem dated.