Sometimes while perusing the filthy shelves and bins of that '70s-book purgatory known as Goodwill -- dismissively paying no mind to the umpteenth copy of Alvin Toffler's Future Shock or Erma Bombeck's The Grass is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank or the gazillion tree-killer copies of Sometimes God Has a Kid's Face -- my eye catches the rare gem. Pulling The Sensuous Man (1971, courtesy of Dell, that once reliable purveyor of mass market sleaze) off the shelf and opening randomly to this: "You lean back with your hands on the floor and raise your pelvis to plunge into her for a few moments, and then she should take over the action by moving her pelvic area up and down on your penis--faster and faster. The Sliding Pond is an exciting way to come. When you do explode you'll find yourself in each other's arms--exhausted, wet, beautiful--a total state of A.F.O.--all fucked out..." -- I knew that Goodwill was going to gain another 50 cents to apply toward job training and their other worthy pursuits. It does my heart good to know that someone out there will be learning a useful skill toward gainful employment because I bought a book about how to pick up, sweet talk and fuck a whole lot of women.
The Sensuous Man is a how-to book not about being a Don Juan/Lothario/jock jerk, but about being a sensitive and considerate male heterosexual lover, and as such attempts to shatter various myths and fallacies about what is best to do and say to a woman as an equal partner in love and life. The book was written in the wake of the popular, The Sensuous Woman and is highly conscious of the then- emergent Women's Liberation movement and is an enlightening and mostly enlightened artifact from the age of the new sexual revolution. To give you a quick idea of what's inside it, here are the chapter headings: "Becoming the Sensuous Man,"Let's Bury the Myths" (including about penis size), "Laying the Foundation" (including pelvic and tongue exercises!), "Getting It Up and Keeping it Up--Farewell to Premature Ejaculation, Inability to Ejaculate, and Impotence", "The Ins and Outs of Masturbation", "Where to Meet Women" (which includes some of the hilariously worst pick-up lines and scenarios I've ever seen), "The Search for the Ideal Woman", "How to Drive a Woman to Ecstasy" (with a rundown of the erogenous zones), "Sexual Ethics", "What Turns a Woman Off", "What to Talk about in Bed, and When to Laugh," "The Women's Liberation Movement--and You," "Party Sex", and "Orgasm" (yours and hers).
The second to last-chapter, "Love as an Aphrodisiac," is quite lovely, and includes this passage:
"I want you, I want you, I want you is the battle cry. And I will do anything to make you happy. It’s glorious. Don’t be a fool. Take advantage of it in every way, shape, and form. It doesn’t come that often. Perhaps just once in a lifetime. You can love many times, but rarely are you “in love.”
It is a time of erotic feeling beyond the limits of imagination. Her eyes are stars, her lips are petals. Her neck is swanlike, her breasts are mounds of pure alabaster pliant to your touch, her waist is a wisp of flesh warm and smooth, her buttocks are solid to the pressure of your hands, and her cunt is the altar at which you pray. It is the ultimate area of her totality as a woman to which you are inescapably drawn and, as your tongue and your lips bring forth from it a hot torrent of love juices, the tears of joy to tell you she loves you, you join her, thrusting deeply into the fountain, twisting, pushing, holding, kissing, until the world moves far away and only two spent, happily ecstatic lovers are left alone floating somewhere on a cloud.
I love all women, but there is only one love."
Despite the book's overall enlightenment, there are still some instances of dated, un-PC suggestions that should be, at best, taken into historical context. "Fag" is used rather casually to refer to gay men, for instance. The subchapter on "Sexual Blackmail" forwards one way of putting a stop to women bartering for sex that borders on rape (calling her a bitch, telling her to shut up, suddenly stripping off her clothes, throwing her to the floor and fucking "the ass off her".) However, your mileage may vary, as this might be a turn-on in some cases.
Some other amusing, mostly un-PC passages include: (on orgies) "...don't worry about pregnancy. If an orgyette does get knocked up, she'll have a hard time proving which one of the nine guys did it to her;" (on sex with married women) "Don't fuck her in her own home unless she says it really turns her on;" (on how to handle a woman who uses crying to get what she wants) ""Still another shock technique for handling the hysterical crier is to throw water in her face;" (on the myth of abstaining from sex before sports) "Intercourse does not physically weaken a man. I play tennis every Sunday morning with one of those guys who won't go near a gal two day before a match. I usually come to the courts right from my girl's bedroom--and I beat him almost every time."
It's a pre-AIDS book, so VD is of course the worst thing one can expect...
The book seems to contain some contradictory advice (dismissing acrobatic sex earlier in the book but embracing it in a later chapter; advising men to stay away from married women but then offering advice on how to handle the situation if you do go there, etc.)
M, the anonymous author, to his credit realizes his apparent inconsistencies and justifies them thusly:
"My moods are mercurial, I know. I mock one moment, preach another, and rhapsodize the next. But I don't apologize for it. That's what sex is like--warm, ecstatic, ludicrous, unfathomable, and exciting. Sex is the original paradox, utterly trivial or the only thing in life that matters..."
I'd say about 90 percent of this book still has practical value, and when it doesn't it is still an interesting read purely for its raw, plain language, humor, and retro funkiness. It retains relevance for heterosexual men today, whether they be insensitive louts who need to change their ways, or sensitive, well-attund men looking for reminders or pointers on how to please themselves and their mates in ways that are mutually beneficial and above board.
The book is also a great American success story; M is the Horatio Alger of fucking, the Charles Atlas of shagging; the sorry loser who, with the help of patient women lovers, listened and learned and became the all-wise and successful "Sensuous Man." Such an inspiration...
And I agree with M's statement in the last chapter, that "every book should have an orgasm."