I can still remember the way my attic smelled (like cardboard boxes and old crinkly photo albums where the sticky stuff has worn off and turned brown) as I crept up the stairs with my best little guy friend in my childhood home. We were on a mission—to find my dad’s dusty stack of Playboy’s hidden in a tiny closet, to open up the pages and quietly giggle, to have our first visual experience of naked, overt sexuality.
I wish opening the books that DK publishing generously sent me—Sex 365: A Position for Every Day and Kama Sutra by Tracey Cox, no less—gave me that same feeling. But now I’ve lived in a pornified culture, developed my own relationship with my body and the body of a hot partner, generally grown weary of anyone trying to sell me a version of sex they think I can “benefit from.�
My cynicism is warranted. For starters, all you’ll find in these books is heterosexual couples, and in DK publishing land, apparently no one sleeps with anyone outside of their race. (For more on why I think this sucks, read my op-ed in the New York Daily News today). They also all have pretty perfect (by media standards) bodies.
Setting aside the offensively narrow definition of “sex� depicted in the book—heterosexual, monoracial, tight and toned—I can see how flipping through it could liven things up in a couples’ sex life.
I mean the positions are ridiculously bizarre and unorthodox, called things like “the hand blender� and “front drape.� This is way more work than yoga, people, requires way more flexibility than twister, and has the potential to make more sore the next day than a maniacal spinning class. This is upside down, legs splayed, jazz hands kind of sex. One position is even called “are you serious?� It’s always good to be reminded that—no matter how long you’ve been doin’ it—there are always new ways.
But truth be told, I don’t really want to have Cirque de Soleil sex. These kinds of books mostly serve to make me anxious—am I boring? Do other couples spend hours on end contorting themselves into these positions? If I don’t want to hang from rafters, does that mean I’m sexually repressed? No, a few, and no again.
So flip through the sex books if you’re into handstand sex, but please don’t let these kinds of publications—or women’s magazines or lad mags or your friend with the major TMI tendencies—make you feel like sex is supposed to be any one thing (whether that’s acrobatic, missionary, penetration etc.). You just do your thing. As my friend LL said, it’s all about “doin’ it and doin’ it and doin’ it well.�
Next week: Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation by Eboo Patel and then The Delivery Man by Joe McGinnis Jr.
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A comment on your NYT piece: Thanks for that piece. My marriage is interracial (white/black, Nigerian), my mom in an interracial marriage (white/hispanic, of which my sister was born), and she has also married interracially (hispanic/white). It is a beautifuly, eye-opening experience. There is nothing like being in an intimite relationship with a person of different race that can teach you just how little you know about another culture.
I love how very American our family is.
cheers to that, courtney. i would love to get my hands on a sex book where the images don't make me feel unattractive and the positions are actually feasible (and feel good). sigh.
your op-ed piece was frigging awesome as well. beautifully written, you made some very important and relevant points. i wanted to comment on the site as a means of deterring readers from the garbage (and totallly off-the-point) comments that are up there now, but it wouldn't let me log in.
Thanks so much for the support katiestone and Olivia. Some of those comments were CRAZY.
Am I only the person who looks at those positions and imagines couples sort of getting one-third of the way into it and then forgetting where her other leg is supposed to do and having to flip through the book while hanging upside-down trying to find the right page to figure out what goes where?
I guess I'm just extrapolating from my use of cookbooks; I always have to refer to the recipe about once every thirty seconds.
I'll echo all the thanks for the op-ed; what a nice Valentine's day read. Better than anything else I've run across today, frankly.
The sex books? Back when I worked at Barnes & Noble, "self help" and "sexuality" were my least favorite parts of the story to work in--not because I think sex information is categorically tmi, but because 99.9999~% of the books on sexuality teach us (as you point out) to feel like losers and to be insecure about or self-knowlwedge, our bodies and our relationships. YOU DON'T KNOW HOW! these books all scream: IT'S A HIGH STAKES PERFORMANCE!! they tell us--one which we (normal) people are all too likely to totally fumble. Thus dashing forever our hopes of a fulfilling relational sex life.
That is SO SAD.
I say, ditch the books--except maybe the ones that make you laugh (seriously: who knew?)
Oh, and on the question of feasibility and comfort? I immediately thought of Meg Wolitzer's novel The Position, which is about a family of children whose parents write a smash-hit 1960s sex manual. It's not really giving anything terribly important away to say that the parents "invent" this supposedly revolutionary sex position--and the publicity surrounding it haunts the children for the rest of their days :).
Courtney-first of all, I loved your op-ed. However, I just wanted to mention that representations of interracial couples are actually increasing exponentially: take a look at Grey's Anatomy and Love Actually, to name two.
Courtney-first of all, I loved your op-ed. However, I just wanted to mention that representations of interracial couples are actually increasing exponentially: take a look at Grey's Anatomy and Love Actually, to name two. Something that is especially cool about both of these gems is that they show these couples without incident. They view them as totally normal.
This is a day late, but i just wanted to chime in.
Urban Tantra, by Barbara Carrellas (Kate Bornstein's Partner) is a fabulous book.
The book talks about being able to communicate during sex, not necessarily getting into some crazy position. it talks about how to explore if you want to. how to let sex be silly, serious, fun, painful (in a good way), whatever you want. it is about being more *in the moment*. not about am i doing this right, do i look good, is this what its supposed to be, etc etc.
its a really really good, comfortable book, written very engagingly and from a very humble, human level.
and the drawings include interracial couples and homosexual couples. at no point in the book is hetero assumed to be the norm.
i love the thing. just my 2 cents.
There's another great guide out there: the Good Vibrations Guide. Both body types and couples are portrayed realistically.