Have Sexier Sex to Save Marriage, with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach | Big Think

Well, marriage seems to be a crumbling institution. In the 1950s, 75% of the population was married. Today, uh, you have a majority of people who are single. Which is astonishing when you think about it, because it means that in a free country, people are choosing to be by themselves because they don't find marriage compelling. In places like Western Europe, it's far worse. Countries like Iceland have a 20% marriage population. Uh, France and Russia, these are all seeing a decline in marriage. A significant decline, which is leading to the significant decline of the population. Uh, they're experiencing negative population growth. If not for um, immigration, uh, these are countries that might soon disappear. And they're actually worried about it.

That's why in places like Russia, you have national love day, where you're given a paid day to go home and make a baby. Because marriage is losing its passion. And in an adrenaline-fueled, 24-hour economy, I think people are going to make choices that give them excitement and give them adventure. They don't feel that marriage is giving that to them. Now, coupled with that is something that we never expected, and that is the sexual famine that is to be discovered in marriage. Some statistics have the monogamous marriage at about one in three here in America.

Uh, even those who disagree say that it's about one in five. Now think about that: you could be a couple in your 20s, a married couple in your 20s or 30s, and every night you go to sleep together, sharing a bed, man and woman, no clothes on, and absolutely nothing happens. That's astonishing. And I think the ones who are really paying the price are the wives. I think in our culture, we suppress and deny a woman's true erotic nature. We seem to believe that men are the really sexual ones, and women kind of, uh, put up with sex in order to get romantic love.

It's summed up in one of those, uh, humorous quotations where, uh, marriage is the price that men pay for sex, and sex is the price that women pay for marriage. Um, there is no truth to this. There's no truth to the stereotype of the husband saying to his wife, "How about some sex tonight, honey?" And she turns back and says, "Not tonight, I have a headache." And yet the husband can have an axe lodged in his head and he's still ready to go.

Uh, precisely the opposite is true. Women are much more sexual than men. Men are uni-orgasmic; women are multi-orgasmic. Women have a much more deeply, uh, erotic nature. Um, think about it: women seem to have their emotions deeply connected with their sexuality, which makes it like rocket fuel. And the suppression, the denial of a woman's erotic nature, of a woman's sensual nature, is something that is depressing the heck out of a lot of women.

Which is why we're suddenly discovering the emergence of this genre of bestselling books like, uh, "50 Shades of Gray." No one can explain why women in a liberated feminist age are reading a trilogy about a guy who takes a liberated college student and gets her to agree to be submissive to his dominance. In fact, Newsweek magazine did a cover story about this. And why are women reading this?

And the only solution they came up with, which just shows you how shallow we are in our approach to the erotic mind, they said people are reading "50 Shades of Gray" because women are so overscheduled today with a job at work and then the domestic chores at home, that they love the novel because they wanted to give up choice. They like the fact that Anastasia allows Christian Gray to make all her decisions for her, in order to, uh, so that she's less scheduled.

So I said to myself, gosh, I'll sell more books by writing a book about a woman who has a phenomenal housekeeper who does all her work. For the reason why women are reading "50 Shades of Gray" is that for many women, for many American wives, that book is about the only time they've witnessed raw lust incarnate. They're not thinking in their marriages. Women today are loved, but they're not lusted after. They're appreciated, but they're not desired.

Uh, they're complimented, but their husbands aren't ripping their clothes off. And we need to...