The Etherized Wife

Abstract

The Etherized Wife provides a comprehensive examination of the evolution of sex therapy through the prism of gender. The book makes the argument that in sex therapy, like other domains of life in which men set the standard of normality, women have been judged normal to the degree they match men’s expectations. What is particularly striking about this bias is that it contradicts therapists’ overt identification with feminism and the battle against women’s inequality. To support these claims, Leslie Margolin maps a series of case studies drawn from the discipline’s own literature—the articles and books that have been, and continue to be, treated as exemplars of the discipline’s collective consciousness. Through examination of case studies that focus on discrepancies in sexual desire, where the man wants more sex and the woman less, the book shows how therapists have favored the man’s side. The Etherized Wife shows how the sex therapy discipline has unintentionally enshrined male sexuality as the model of normal, healthy sexuality.