Sex Manuals in Relationship Hell

by Leslie Strom

Perhaps you've already read my book reviews for Handbooks in Relationship Hell, The Good, The Benevolent Empires, and The Bad. Maybe you just jumped to this page to read something less informed on a juicier topic. Can't blame you. That's what I'd have done.

I chose two volumes of popularly available sex "manuals" for contrast (I got both from Amazon.com, but they're commonly available in book stores where you'll find the neighbor's 13 year old daughter seated in the relationships aisle perusing the Joy of Sex books). The Japanese Art of Love is a teeny "pillow book," the other, Anne Hooper's Kama Sutra, is a garishly large manual suitable for use by the visually impaired. Big book, big pictures, broad concepts. Hard to hide in a bookcase.

I'm assuming that these books are meant to be

  • erotic
  • instructional
  • accurate
  • inspiring
  • artistic

The contrast between Western and Eastern sexual instruction can be seen at first glance:


A

B

A couple of questions come to mind:

  • Which couple seems to be really Getting Down?
  • Which couple is better dressed in sex-having clothes?
  • Which couple is so entwined that distinguishing limbs takes some counting?
  • Which picture is more instructional?

If you guessed B for all of the above, you guessed right.

The Japanese Art of Love, HarperCollins Edition, 1994

The tiny 4"x5" Japanese book contains ancient erotic art and poetry with lots of ancient vigor. It is instructive and interesting across cultures.

There are paintings from the Floating World, a Japanese sub-culture that was dedicated to the sensual. In the margins, like Mad Magazine's Marginal Thinking cartoons gone naughty, are little ink drawings meant to be strictly instructional from wedding night manuals. Sure, contortions are easier to show than trying to get live models to do them. And on other pages the copious fluids and enormously idealized sex organs make the point all the more lucidly. So from a Brass Tacks standpoint, this little book has the advantage. The emotion, the passion, the abandon is also evident through all the trappings and style. More like real sex.

I do wonder, however, if there were Japanese couples using these illustrations for instruction and ended up just going out for dinner because they couldn't quite figure out how to swing the tab-A slot-B problem that looks so easy in the painting as performed by two-dimensional people.

***** I give this book five stars. I don't have to tell you why but it involves a crazed suitor with a candle leering at a sleeping geisha.

Anne Hooper's Kama Sutra by Anne Hooper, DK Publishing, 1994

Anne Hooper had a popular sex advice column in Penthouse magazine. Reviewers were astonished that she authored a volume so "tasteful." I suspect their astonishment came from the book's lack of explicit photographs (mainly, a focus on female genitals) that show lightly less than an x-ray that Penthouse magazine has built its empire on.

Tasteful or disappointing? This was her chance to even out the playing field, and present sex as something more than a naked Twister Game. The photographs of the tidy lovers in their various poses are rather beige and hazy, and begin looking alike after a while, even down to the choice of models, all smooth and hairless and young and perfectly formed. They have the same facial expression you would expect them to have if they were eating an especially tasty new Ben & Jerry's flavor, Vanilla Ripple Sutra. No one gets excited, sweaty, engorged, tingly, or even moist. So we're to conclude that the Kama Sutra will be more than a yawn-fest? Why not just tear one off and then go out for ice cream instead?

There are a few photographs, diminished in use as shaded backgrounds, of erotic stone carvings that are mainstream images all over India. The lovers in the carvings are mostly happy-looking. They are the most provocative things in this book and there aren't enough of them. Of the eighty or so positions shown in the book there are really only about five and then a number of minor variations. There's only so many ways to put tab A into slot B. The woman gets to do most of the contortions, the man gets to do most of the work. The ancients didn't really know much more than you or I could figure out with a little experimentation. Or if they did, Anne Hooper didn't pass it on.

*** I give this book three stars... it's instructional but all its tastefulness makes it as provocative as my 1977 Toyota Hi-Lux repair manual without the racy oil-change diagrams.