I know that it’s beyond easy to click onto any website and get sex advice or love analysis from a whole range of writers, but sometimes you have to pull away from the screen and get into an actual book. Yeah, a book. Remember that thing? You hold in it your hands. You have to turn the pages (kind of like this newspaper.) Often times you stack them up in your home like mile markers of your educated past. And more over, you read them and learn something. Here’s some of my favorite books dealing with sex, gender and anatomy from all sorts of doctors, freaks and regular old farts.
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson by Camille Paglia (1991)
Camille Paglia is the feminist that feminists love to hate because she challenges every point they make and I adore her for that. Since her rise to fame in the 1990s (though she truly has been cutting throats since her days at Yale as a graduation student in the late ‘60s), Paglia uses art history and religion to explain gender without negating the importance of biology and politics. She is a brilliant, fast-talking woman whose style of lecture has been compared to Woody Woodpecker. Sexual Personaewas (after years of being rejected by publishers) printed in 1991 and analyzes the cultural spectrum from the Whores of Babylon to Madonna to Apollo and beyond, explaining our past as a prediction to the future. History always repeats itself.
Come As You Are: The Surprising Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life by Emily Nagoski, Ph.D. (2015)
I have so much to say about this book that it can not fit into a few sentences, let alone a few pages. I highly recommend that every single woman read this book. Scratch that. You do not need to be female to read this. Everyone should digest this brilliantly written, simplified adventure in the science of the female body. It’s mind blowing.
A Compilation on Sex by Alice A. Bailey and The Tibetan Master, Djwhal Khul (1980)
Taking a more spiritual approach to sex, this book analyzes our genitals and emotions in relation to higher beliefs. It’s a compilation of both Bailey and Khul’s thoughts on the matter swirling around with cosmic virtues. Chakras, Astrology as well as mysterious elements of sex that connect us to the earth try to uncover why we feel the way we do about love, sex, the body and ourselves. “There is much energy flowing through and to the thyroid gland, and, as yet, but little use made of it.” Get off your $40 yoga mat and read, you faux hippy.
What Do Women Want: Adventures in the Science of Female Desireby Daniel Bergner (2013)
Siting and dissecting scientific sex research done by everyone from Dr. Meredith Chivers to Jim Pfaus (both Canadian researchers) to Marta Meana and many more, this book looks at the fascinating research being done to explain the way women get off and why, for centuries, our biological and neurological complexities have gone uncovered.
Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage and Why We Stray by Helen Fisher, Ph.D. (1992)
Fisher is a neurologist who has spent her life sticking people in MRI machines to try to watch their brains react to love. She’s incredibly famous for her work and now, oddly enough, helps dating sites like Match.com. However, this book takes a simple and effective look at every species we consider stupid enough to eat in relation to our own mating tactics. She reduces our so-called civilized ways back to their primal roots and although some of her research is dated, this still provides provoking parallels in modern courtship.
