Oversimplifying sexuality
• Amorous Pop Culture
Slate has reviews of a couple of self-help books.
She Comes First: The Thinking Man's Guide to Pleasuring a Woman:
You look up from this book with a weird revised sense of intellectual history. The thought of Karl Marx performing cunnilingus is somehow particularly nauseating. But, as with most self-help literature, the idea is that one somehow joins a rarified coterie by adhering to the principles here. Kerner's aims are not just motivational, they're aspirational—by the logic of syllogism. Aristotle was a great thinker; Aristotle performed cunnilingus; if I perform cunnilingus, I'm a great thinker, too. Or something like that.
Dan Chiasson, The Thinking Man's Guide to Sex
O: The Intimate History of the Orgasm:
It is not a physiological event that attracted Antony to Cleopatra, Edward VIII to Mrs. Simpson, or Prince Charles to a woman who is said to look like a horse rather than "to one of the most desired women in the world," three of Margolis' examples of how orgasm altered the course of history.
Thomas W. Laqueur, A history of the orgasm completely misses the point