5 Must Reads to Revitalize Your Sex Life

EXTRA EXTRA, READ ALL ABOUT IT:  Sex IS the number one thing in a relationship.  Don’t fool yourself or forget:  if your lover’s spark of electricity needs to be jumpstarted, you have to reach for the jumper cables!  The sexual revolution began in the Sixties, kiddies, and you can sit back and learn (or re-learn) with your choice of these classics: 

1. The Joy of Sex by Alex Comfort published in 1972 can be a primer for the uninitiated or unimaginative.  There’s even a 30-year-anniversary reissue somewhere out there.  The bearded guy in the original edition is updated in the newer one.  Isn’t that so modern-times that the old lover is replaced by a new one?  But there are still something like 20 full-color illustrations and 80 line drawings so that you know exactly what it is the author is recommending.  Alex Comfort died in 2000, but not for lack of, well, comfort (groan).

2. Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask by David Reuben is also still out there.  This also comes in a 30-year-anniversary edition published in 1999 that presumably addresses some of the sexually transmittable diseases the flower children didn’t face.  In case you think of this only as the Woody Allen movie with Gene Wilder drinking the Woolite®, this is the book that helped everyone deal with their primal fears.

3. Most people associate the names “Masters and Johnson” with human sexuality but don’t know much more about it.  Literally, William Masters and Virginia Johnson wrote the textbook on human sexual technique.  Their renown eclipsed that of primary author Robert Kolodny.  The original college textbook that became so famous in 1982, Human Sexuality, was updated in 1997’s Masters and Johnson on Sex and Human Loving authored by the same trio, much more than just a manual for sex.

4. Do you know the name “Helen Gurley Brown?”  She originated Cosmopolitan.   Before that, she authored a couple of books that, albeit outdated, are still worth a look.  First in the early Sixties she authored Sex and the Single Girl.  This book was not just about sex; it was The Bible for all young women who weren’t planning on marrying by the age of 25.  This particular book was reissued in a 2003 paperback.  Also, still lots of fun, is Gurley Brown’s Having It All.  It discourses on everything, from nowadays-useless stuff like how to keep your lover from seeing you without makeup, to timeless advice such as her essay on “Scorn Not the Street Compliment.” 

5. You and your lover might benefit from some good old-fashioned erotic literature, so much more satisfying that cheap pornographic magazines or movie.  Your library probably does not have Delta of Venus by Anais Nin, but you can still find it at your bookseller or online. Nin imagined these exotic characters and penned their adventures for pittance pay in the 1940s; the stores were assembled and published in book form in 1969.  This is one book that I made certain my children never found.

All of these books are available either at your local library or online, if not your local bookseller.  Good luck and good reading!