The Jan/Feb issue of The Atlantic Monthly has this well-written essay on books about sex in marriage: The Wifely Duty: Marriage used to provide access to sex. Now it provides access to celibacy by Caitlin Flanagan.
American adults under the age of fifty tend to know more about sex and its many delightful permutations than did streetwalkers of an earlier century… But let these inebriates of nooky enter marriage, a state in which ongoing sexuality often has as much to do with old-fashioned notions of obligation and commitment as it does with the immediate satisfaction of intense physical desire, and they grow as cool and limp as yesterday’s Cobb salad.