Women today are confronted with an ideological backlash against the gains of feminism.

According to proponents of this backlash, women aren't oppressed any more - in fact, feminism gave us "too many" choices. The mythology of the "biological clock" is pervasive. We are told that women need to have babies in order to be fulfilled as human beings; that we have to hurry up and get married so we don't "miss out".

Bettina Arndt - a clinical psychologist and sex therapist, and author of The Sex Diaries (Melbourne University Press, 2009) - personifies this trend.

The Sex Diaries is based on Arndt's study of 98 couples' diaries of their sex lives. It purports to explain why women "go off sex". What it actually does is to reinforce and encourage sexism. Arndt is as committed to heterosexual gender roles as any religious fundamentalist.

Not surprisingly she seems to have recruited the most boorish, ignorant and repulsive men in the country for her study. Here's a gem:

"I have a really crap sex life," complains Luke, aged fifty. "Wifey doesn't climax for me... I can grind away there for forty minutes or so and when I can't last any longer and climax, she gets cranky."

I'm stumped, aren't you? I can't understand how Luke's sex life could be "really crap" - the prospect of all that "grinding" must be such a turn-on.

Luke's wife Shirley writes of sex with her husband: "I have given up on telling him what I want as he goes back into the just do it his way or no way."

What's wrong with you, Shirley?! Who could resist that?

But in fact the whole book could be summarised by that sentiment: "What's wrong with women?"

Apparently, part of the problem is our innate sexual weakness in comparison to men. Arndt devotes pages to the supposed inferiority of the female libido. She describes women's sex drives as "feeble", "fragile" and "weedy". She suggests (rather disturbingly) that women are biologically programmed to have their need for sensuality satiated by caring for babies.

The conclusion she draws from all of this is that most women's sex drives will inevitably fade away, and because men will always want more sex than women, women should "Just Do It": "The right to say ‘no' needs to give way to saying ‘yes' more often."

This is a flat out apology for rape, and like most rape apologists Arndt blames women for their situation.

One diarist, Amy, "spent the first ten years of her marriage fighting about sex. ‘Every night he'd have a go... Even if I refused him I'd be so upset that I'd lie awake at night thinking, "Why did I say no?" I might as well let him have it because the next day he'd be so grumpy.'" Luckily, Amy saw that it was all her fault! She "finally realised it was the idea in her head that was the real problem - that if she could get over that stumbling block of thinking she had to want it first, she'd enjoy sex and all would be fine".

Here is Arndt's discussion of Justice Bollen's comments in 1992:

"[Bollen] suggested that ‘there is nothing wrong with a husband, faced with his wife's initial refusal to engage in intercourse, in attempting...to persuade her to change her mind, and that may involve a measure of rougher than usual handling.'... [T]he sky fell in over these unfortunate words but one suspects that even without them, Bollen would have come in for a caning for daring to suggest that men should ever try to persuade women to come across."

Arndt writes wistfully of the 1950s, when women saw it as their wifely duty to put out: "Perhaps...past generations of women considered that sex was part of their wifely duties." She suggests that sex should be a task that women take on as part of a marriage, like cooking when you don't feel like it. "It's not as if you are doing something dreadfully painful... There are plenty of women who see it as just part of the give-and-take that makes relationships work."

This reduces sex to a commodity, to be negotiated and doled out; or into a chore, something that you just have to do. These ideas are so anti-humanist that Bettina Arndt as a sex therapist is like giving Philip Ruddock a job as a trauma counsellor for refugees.

Rather than assuming that women naturally want less sex than men do, that there is something wrong with us that needs to be medicated or counselled or willed away, we need to ask what is wrong with society. What kind of society produces these horrific stories of women who lie awake dreading that their husbands will want sex? Stories like Amy's: "He'd be snoring loudly and I'd still lie there worrying that the hand was going to come creeping over."

This kind of crushing sexual oppression is not default human behaviour. This is proven by studies of sexual customs in pre-class societies. Anyone who wants to understand how oppression crushes human sexuality and poisons relationships between men and women should read Eleanor Burke Leacock's Myths of Male Dominance (Monthly Review Press, New York, 1981).

Leacock describes the pre-colonial Montagnais-Naskapi of Canada, among whom women and men alike were free to choose who they lived with and who they had sex with, inside or outside of a marriage partnership.

The collective nature of this egalitarian society meant that the family unit was much looser and relationships more fluid. Childcare was the responsibility of the whole community - men and women participated.

In these circumstances it would have been impossible for a man to think of a woman as his property, or to treat her as though she "owed" him sex.

Sexual freedoms among the Montagnais-Naskapi were curtailed as Jesuit missionaries, backed by the power of French colonialism, consolidated the ideologies and structures of Christianity and capitalism.

The oppressive social structures that emerged during this process are hardly conducive to loving, passionate relationships between men and women.

This tells us there is nothing wrong with women, biologically or otherwise.

Capitalism represses human sexuality, boxing people into stereotypical, expected gender roles of heterosexuality, monogamy and parenthood. Men don't get anything out of the situation, either: sex is transformed from something that should be mutual into something that has to be coerced or bought or begged for.

The generalised oppression of workers under capitalism compounds the stifling relationships of the nuclear family. For many of Arndt's diarists, factors affecting their sex lives were constant tiredness, stress, money and work.

The family unit is unequal in part because of the economic differences between men and women. In 2005, 82 per cent of men were in paid work, with the vast majority of this work being full-time. In contrast only 67 per cent of women were employed, with a greater proportion of this work composed of part-time and casual work. This basic inequality and the greater concentration of women's jobs in services, teaching, nursing and low-paid unskilled work means that relationships between men and women are unequal to start with.

These basic inequalities feed into our personal relationships. Men and women begin every sexual encounter not in a vacuum, but against the backdrop of an unequal society and the social conditioning of a lifetime.

So it's sexism that produces the horror stories in The Sex Diaries - it's nothing to do with biology.

The diaries themselves support this analysis. One diarist, Natalie, struggles to exert control over her sex life. The only way she can do this is to initiate sex with her husband before he harasses her for it. "When he is doing all the come on I have the walls up before we even begin. There is no chance of me enjoying myself in the slightest."

Another diarist, Antonia, writes of her husband Angus: "[Our sex life] changed when I realized my husband is determined to have sex no matter how I feel... If I don't feel like sex he ridicules me... If I say no to sex he often gets mean and nasty."

Clearly Antonia's libido is not dropping off because of her inferior female biology. Angus sounds about as appealing as a peak hour trip on the Sandringham line in 46 degree heat.

All this is not to say that we are doomed to behave how capitalism tells us to - but it is hard to see how a man who is not interested in confronting sexism could do other than accept the prevailing ideas about women and behave towards them accordingly.

Reading from an anti-sexist perspective, what takes shape most clearly in The Sex Diaries is how the structure of the nuclear family and all its ideological baggage warp our most intimate relationships.

That's why Arndt's book is so destructive. She ignores the real inequalities in the world and simply tells women to shut up and put out - it's their "wifely duty", after all.

To deal with sexual oppression we need to challenge the alienating conditions that produce it, not reinforce them with propaganda that encourages men to behave boorishly to women. We need to campaign for adequately funded and quality childcare, and for benefits for single parents so that women who leave a destructive relationship can survive. We need to call for shorter working hours and oppose unpaid overtime so that busy workers and parents can reduce their stress levels. And we still need to fight for gender equality in the workplace. It's only by understanding and confronting the causes of sexism and sexual oppression that we can hope to have half-way decent relationships.