The Pleasure Gap: American Women and the Unfinished Sexual Revolution

American culture is more sexually liberal than ever. But compared to men, women's sexual pleasure has not grown: Up to 40 percent of American women experience the sexual malaise clinically known as low sexual desire. Between this low desire, muted pleasure, and experiencing sex in terms of labor rather than of lust, women by the millions are dissatisfied with their erotic lives.

For too long, this deficit has been explained in terms of women's biology, stress, and age. In The Pleasure Gap, ...