Sex, Marriage, and War

How important is sex in marriage and other romantic relationships? What happens when all the women in a New Jersey town find themselves under a spell that makes them averse to sex? In “The Uncoupling” (Riverhead, 2011), by Meg Wolitzer, the local high school puts on the ancient Aristophanes play, “Lysistrata,” about how the Greek women stopped having sex, hoping to pressure their men to end the war through a kind of sex strike. Somehow this classic play precipitates a current real life echo in the town of Stellar Plains. Especially affected are the formerly “ideal couple,” two popular teachers at the high school married to each other, Dory and Robby; this couple always thought their love and sexual life would last forever. Their teenaged daughter Willa (yes, named for the writer!), in the midst of her very first romance, is also affected by the spell. The novel is light and amusing, but also explores serious issues about sex, love, marriage, relationships, family, and more. It also resonates, without dwelling too heavily on this aspect, on the level of people wanting to do something, anything, to end the wars the U.S. is currently engaged in. Hmmm....could such a strike work today? (I know, I know...this requires all sorts of sexist assumptions about who is for war and who is against it, which I do not want to promulgate....but just for the sake of speculation....)