I’m not sure why people publish sex manuals. Do we really need books to tell us how to do it? Either you can or you can’t and if you have to interrupt the act of physical love to refer to Chapter 7, Subsection 6, then you’re talking about a real mood killer.
Still . . . where, uh, would young folks be without these books?
I was a kid when David Reuben’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex was published. That was a sex manual that got people hot. It was written foreplay. Then came The Joy of Sex by Alex Comfort, complete with watercolors of coitus. (“Watercolors of Coitus” – good album title?)
So when Sex is Fun (Avery, $20) arrived in the mail, it didn’t seem at first to break new ground. But leafing through it, you see that the authors (text by Kidder Kaper, illustrations by Josh Lynch) have used the graphic-novel approach to get the message across.
Far from the academicizing of sex by Alfred Kinsey or the clinical descriptions of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, Sex is Fun presents its topics in cartoon format – with graphic illustrations of what goes where and what happens when Tab A is inserted to Tab B.
There’s not much that revolutionary about the sequence of the chapters – how to get started, arouse the mind first, here’s how and where to touch – but the presentation is unique.
Whereas the text is strictly instructional, almost like those translated-from-Taiwanese instructions on how to assemble Junior’s new Transformer toy, the cartoon balloons that go with them (“I love the feel of your cum on my tits!”) offset the clinical nature of the prose.
This article appears in May 20-26, 2010.