moominmuppet

So in my post about sexual history and books, I mentioned The Sensuous Woman, by J.

I hadn't read it since my early teens; I just got the book again when Mom and Dad were paring down their library, and it's been on my shelf for a few months. The previous post made me curious, so I reread it last night, and it was a rather fascinating experience. First of all, the gender politics are atrocious. Shocker, I know. Setting that aside, though, the actual sexual advice is remarkably spot-on, even 40 years later. I only pegged one truly inaccurate bit of info (a recommendation of vaseline as a possible appropriate lube for girlbits), and a lot of it was quite ahead of its time (the section on anal sex not only talks positively about it, it also talks about men enjoying being on the receiving side sometimes, too). And it gives great and specific advice about masturbation.

And I found where I must've gotten a lot of ideas. Her suggestions on masturbation and exploration include specifically taking off the shower head and laying in the tub with your clit under the water stream from the spout I specifically did that as a teen (I first read this when I was 13 or so, I'd guess). I took a wrench to the damn thing to loosen it the first time. Kept it finger-tight from then on, and it's always been a family joke how long all us kids spent in the bathrooms as teens. And the oral sex instructions... I remember reading those. And I remember using them, with great success, my first time performing it. Weird to reread again after so many years and be reminded of all this.

Overall, it's a remarkably sex-positive book in some very cool ways, especially for the time period in which it was written. I'd expected it to be a worse experience to reread (although the gender stuff did have me groaning every few paragraphs). I honestly don't know how much of what feels familiar about it is stuff that I truly did learn from reading it and then take into my sex life, and how much is simply stuff that I've rediscovered on my own over the years, but wow, it all _feels_ familiar. And I certainly recognize large elements of my overall sexual style in it. It's sure not like I didn't have plenty of hangups when I was a teen and young adult, but I wonder how much easier having this as background made dealing with them?