Coy title.
When I go to the mall or the Boardwalk, I like to get a chocolate-dipped banana. It’s a treat that tastes like dessert, but underneath that thin layer of candy coating it’s actually food, with real live food-type benefits like nutrients and enzymes.
The sex book that landed on my desk last week,Great In Bed: Thrill the body… blow the mind (DK Publishing, $21.95), is like that chocolate-dipped banana. In the banana corner is Dr. Debby Herbenick, Kinsey Institute scholar and unimpeachable source of information on everything sexish, from the proper names of body parts and pathology of STIs to technical descriptions of positions like “Standing Wheelbarrow.” Representing chocolate is Men’s Health contributing editor Grant Stoddard, whose casual and disarmingly candid prose keeps things entertaining. The result is a highly readable, encyclopedic guide to the mating ritual that offers a grown-up take on sexuality, which is to say you should know yourself, you should take care of your partner and kink’s OK.
Great In Bed leaves nothing to chance. The first 30 pages concern things like the importance of being a good listener on a first date, feathering the love nest (how about washing those sheets, cowboy?), dressing for easy undressing and being a good guest, which is not the same as sneaking out before dawn.
After that it’s straight into body parts (identification of and neurosis concerning) and an introduction to the Spots: G, P, F and AFE. Yep, that’s four. You can double, even triple your knowledge in just a few minutes of reading!
But where Great In Bed really proves its mettle is in the how-to chapters. A disclaimer: this is pretty much a book for hetero couples. But specific instructions on oral and manual technique, using toys, anal sex and threesomes, not to mention plain old vanilla copulation, are awe-inspiring in their casual grooviness. Is there shame in reading up on something called the Tug of War or the Piledriver? No, there is not! Especially when the instructions come with lines like this: “You just MacGyvered him an auxiliary vagina! How clever.”
In fact, one of the best things about Great In Bed is the way it models openness—the fun kind, not the cloying, too-earnest kind—about a subject that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. No doubt this attractive soft-cover book with the groovy graphic illustrations could improve lots of sex lives if it took up residence on nightstands across the nation. But it could go even further than that. It might have the strange power to improve human communication across other channels. Imagine that.
