Sex manual comes up short on advice

"Sex: Our Bodies, Our Junk” falls short on humor and helpful sexual information.

There are certain things people should not do in public, and reading the Association for the Betterment of Sex’s book “Sex: Our Bodies, Our Junk” is one of those things. Places you may not want to read the book include your daily commute on SEPTA, your work-study job and your parents’ living room.

Then again, you might not want to read it anywhere unless you are one of the Neanderthals in the 2007 movie “Knocked Up” – who, in the film, say a woman can’t get pregnant if she’s on top – as this book was clearly intended for them. On us upright-walking people, the joke is lost.

Here’s a little about the ABS: It’s a self-professed think tank based in Washington, D.C., comprised of five former and current writers for “The Daily Show,” “Late Night with Conan O’Brien,” Vanity Fair and the Onion. They are Scott Jacobson, Todd Levin, Jason Roeder, Michael Sacks and Ted Travelstead.

Proposed to give the reader a “radical new understanding of sex and intimacy,” the book fails to actually inform the reader of anything sex-related. The handful of tips that aren’t a health risk or a bad joke are things you learned in health class. The whole book reads like a monologue from a misinformed health teacher with a tragic need to be liked by his or her students.

Although ABS’s book was supposedly “exhaustively researched,” it is filled with tidbits quite clearly figments of the imagination. There are some that almost sound truthful, such as “a scant 18 percent of men successfully roll a condom onto their penis in the first try,” until you read, “A man who ejaculates forcefully enough can impregnate the cosmos.”


Read the rest of this 660-word book review for The Temple News here.