Dr. Glenda Corwin’s new book
BY YANA TALLON-HICKS
Curve
Dr. Glenda Corwin wants you to (consciously) heat up your romance. Dr. Corwin tells us that it’s time to start rethinking the whole subject of what we do together in bed. In her new book, Dr. Corwin, a sexual intimacy psychologist, busts common myths and describes ways to overcome the common hurdles to lasting lesbian loving (hello: body image issues, age, stress!). Dr. Corwin shows us not only how to resuscitate our dying lesbian bed, but also how we can keep it alive and well for years to come.
Too often, Dr. Corwin says, we women complacently sit around waiting for spontaneous desire to strike, when, as women in a same-sex relationship, sexual spontaneity is simply against our nature. She discusses the difference between the “spontaneous desire” model–a male-centric pattern of arousal that puts a certain body part first and the brain second–and the female-centric “responsive desire” model. “We may joke about which part of the body is leading the charge, but in reality, for us, it’s usually the brain,” she writes. We’ve been conditioned to believe that all our sex lives should follow the male-centric pattern of spontaneity to such a point that when it doesn’t happen this way, many of us passively accept it as the inevitable lesbian bed death. Turns out, Pepper Schwartz had it all wrong–our sex lives are not paltrier than those of gay men or heterosexual couples, they simply look different.
