Sex: A Man’s Guide
Rodale Press, 1996, with Laurence Roy Stains; ISBN 0-87596-299-8. This book was also published in paperback by Berkley Books, a division of Penguin-Putnam (ISBN 0-425-16580-9), and in Italian.
This all-time favorite male guidebook has also sold nearly a million copies and it’s still selling. Based on interviews with sex therapists and researchers, as well as surveys, interviews and stories from over 2,500 men, many of them subscribers to Men’s Health magazine.
Five-star review on Amazon.com from Mary Hingston, of Pottstown, PA:
” I first became aware of this book when Tommy Lee, of all people, held it up on MTV and said it was his favorite book. After reading it, I know why! This is a great tome to share with the man you love — perfect Christmas stocking fodder! It will provoke endless discussions and endless … experimentations. I cannot recommend it highly enough!”
Excerpt
“The old dark male idea that marriage is actually a female plot to enslave men economically in exchange for sex will probably never die. We wonder whether monogamy is not just some social invention for somebody else’s benefit. Whether it’s even really natural (at least for men). And in a society where the divorce rate and the marriage rate are always teetering in rough balance, it’s easy to be skeptical of the notion that marriage works at all.
Not so long ago, the word we got from anthropologists and zoologists was that monogamous pair-bonds were common among animals, especially birds, like geese and swans, suggesting that it was also natural for us. Zoologist Desmond Morris argued in his 1967 book The Naked Ape that the whole point of human sexuality was “to strengthen the pair-bond and maintain the family unit.” But more recently, reports from the scientific front haven’t been quite so encouraging. It turns out that lots of birds fool around (at least 40 percent of indigo buntings get a little on the side, researchers report). And anthropologists have found that nearly 1,000 of the 1,154 past and present human societies ever studied have allowed men to have more than one wife….”
