SENTIMENTAL RE-EDUCATION.(books on sex)(Bibliography)

When I typed the phrase "self-help/relationships" into the Amazon search engine recently, eighty-four thousand six hundred and forty-three titles surfaced, treating every imaginable facet of the subject (and then some), from reincarnation to cunnilingus. Not long thereafter, I spent a flight from Los Angeles to Newark with a new entry to the lists: Helen Fisher's "Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love" (Henry Holt; $25), a work that mixes dumbed-down evolutionary psychology and neuroscience with advice for "making romance last." At least six female passengers in my vicinity were engrossed in printed matter of a similar gestalt. A frowning matron across the aisle was taking notes in the margins of "Why Men Don't Listen and Women Can't Read Maps." The twins behind me, whom I had mistaken, in the departure lounge, for elderly nuns, had burrowed into Danielle Steel novels. Reading over the tattooed shoulder of my neighbor in the window seat, a blonde in her twenties returning, she confided, from a wild weekend on the beach at Malibu, I could see that she was trying to focus bloodshot eyes on the dating advice--"Male 'turn-ons' that aren't"--in Glamour. All around us, meanwhile, members of the opposite sex were intent on video games that taught a different set of relationship skills: those which sustain the polygamous marriage--happy since time immemorial--of a man and his guns.

Dr. Fisher, who boasts, in a footnote, of having coined the term "sexual intelligence," is a research anthropologist at Rutgers University who was formerly connected with the American Museum of Natural History. Her credentials command attention, and so does the title of her book--partly, I think, because it scans so smartly, its triad of monosyllables mimicking the assurance of a firm knock on the door, and one feels obliged to open it up. Such imprudence can be fatal, and in this case it is. One isn't uninterested to learn that chimps French-kiss; that seminal fluid "alleviates depressive symptoms" in the human female; and that there is apparently a gene for monogamy (though I hear he lives in Cleveland). It is also mildly comforting to be reassured that one's myopia, neediness, stupidity, naivete, short legs, crossed stars, high expectations, low self-esteem, only childhood, and weakness of character were not, over the years, solely responsible for various romantic debacles--they were precipitated by the surging or ebbing of the dopamine ("and/or norepinephrine") in one's inferior tegmentum, give or take a little serotonin, testosterone, and Sara Lee. But Fisher's erudition has been so watered down by condescension to a reader who, she imagines, is enlightened to discover that "sex is good for you, if . . . you enjoy this form of exercise and self-expression" that her science is as cartoonish as her advice is insipid and her prose tasteless. If you really want to know why we love--without any false promises that the knowledge will improve your muscle tone or your chances for lasting bliss--skip the lame experiments with a "Love-o-meter" and speculations on the courtship habits of Homo habilis (was he really, "two million years ago," humming "sexy tunes" to his "special girls"?). Read Colette.

Simon Blackburn, a professor of philosophy at Cambridge and the author of books on ethics and language, was invited not long ago by the New York Public Library to deliver a lecture on lust--though hardly to address a problem common to students of both sexes in a less secure era, that of furtive old goats in raincoats trying to pinch one's knees under a table in the Reading Room. Blackburn was one of the guest eminences participating in a series of "meditations" on the Seven Deadly Sins. His talk grew into a novella-length essay, "Lust" (New York Public Library/Oxford; $17.95), that will probably not be sold in quantity at airport newsstands, although the publisher proposes it as an "amusing and provocative" gift for Valentine's Day.

Anyone who has been hoping for a little something from the Pleasure Chest will be disappointed. Blackburn is ...