DR. ESTHER.(The Talk of the Town)

Twenty-odd couples, plus a handful of stags, out for a few hours on a summer evening. At going rates, that's nine hundred dollars' worth of babysitting, which is presumably about what it would cost for three hour-long sessions with Dr. Esther Perel, the SoHo psychotherapist whom they had all come to see at Mo Pitkin's, a bar on Avenue A. Normally, Perel--a motormouthed cosmopolite with twinkly eyes and a crooked smile--is the moderator of the Downtown Salon, a series of curated conversations put on by a progressive Jewish congregation that calls itself the New Schul. On a recent Thursday, however, she herself was holding forth. Tucking a piece of streaked hair back into bob formation, she began, "I'm resistant to number crunching--'How many times do we have sex in a month?' It's less about 'more' than about 'better.'"

Perel's speciality is culture and sexuality, and her forthcoming book, "Mating in Captivity," takes a hard line against one of the most time-honored, if not otherwise celebrated, institutions in human history: the sexless marriage. According to its jacket copy, the treatise "examines the conflict"--or the "existential dilemma," as Perel regards it--"between domesticity and sexual desire and explains what it takes to get lust back"; it reads like a cross between the works of Jacques Lacan and "French Women Don't Get Fat." For all those bored husbands and their overscheduled wives in flannel nightgowns, Perel's message is this: Democracy in the bedroom is erotically deadening. Stop talking about why you have bad sex (in fact, stop talking so much, period). Dabble, if you wish, in light bondage, and cultivate "a sense of ruthlessness." To her patient Dominick, whose well-meaning seduction routine with his boyfriend involved preparing an osso-buco dinner, she asks, "Can you make a meal out of Raoul?" (Just hold the garlic.)

Back at the salon, the audience members listened raptly, clutching glasses of pinot grigio. "Parenthood is the fatal erotic blow," Perel said, as a woman rummaged for the cell phone that had erupted into a klezmer ring tone. "So you must blast the spontaneity myth, or the big-bang theory of sex," she continued. "You can't just leave it to the devices of chemistry." Invoking the scene in "Fiddler on the Roof" where Tevye asks his wife if she loves him, Perel ...