Lust for Love

Book excerpt: An unlikely pair of voices-the world's most recognizable beauty icon and "America's rabbi"-comes together to diagnose how meaningful, passionate sex is on the decline in Western culture, and what is necessary to save it. Sex is dying in America. Inundated with sex and starved for it, obsessed with it yet clueless about it, we are slowly forgetting how to make love. The crisis of modern sexuality is seen in high divorce rates, in the degradation of sexuality through pornography, and tasteless displays of empty, counterfeit erotica. Most of all, it's seen in sexless marriages and platonic relationships where cybersex has become more addictive than the real thing. Sex has become so trivialized, coarsened, and vulgarized that couples no longer feel its pull. The once powerful and irresistible magnetism of sex is being diluted and drained. The authors propose replacing the 1960s' sexual revolution with a new sensual revolution, a rediscovery of intimacy that encourages and ennobles human relationships, elevates healthy lust, and gets us from looking up from the glowing screens of our smartphones to the people around us, most especially the people we love the most. Lust for Love embraces the idea that what our most important relationships need most is lust. It is necessary to rediscover what's sexy again, how to bring back romance, and to understand that in addition to love, we need lust to repair our unfulfilling sex lives and broken relationships. Lust for Love proposes a return to what lovemaking was always meant to be: a desire to know and experience another person in the deepest possible way.