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.”

Here is what else you get in the nine-chapter, 232-page book: Chapter 1, Human Sexual Anatomy, covers whether your sex organs are normal, which for men means you’ve got a mushroom-shaped member.

Chapter 2 offers “Team-Building Sexercises for the Office” including “Team Bagging,” “Co-Ed Naked Trust Falls,” “Coaxing the FedEx Courier into Anal,” and “Pull My Rope and I’ll Give You a Free Coffee Mug.” It also suggests that you “follow and observe the person for a few weeks, and then plan your ‘meet cute.’”

Foreplay, Chapter 3, almost succeeds in being a source for information on kissing, the pleasures of dry humping and oral sex, along with all its particulars.

Chapter 4, which concerns the main course, hardly satisfies anyone’s appetite with its list of “Songs to Pop Your Cherry To,” intermediate positions, which all include a man prematurely ejaculating, “Pelvic Exercises to Help Him Pump Faster” and tips for “Sex-Proofing Your Home.”

The chapter on masturbation that comes next lists ridiculous slang and techniques for the do-it-yourself act that include a plush Tasmanian Devil for guys and Matchbox cars for girls.

Fetish, Domination and Multiple Sex Partners – Chapter 6 – suggests readers test their attraction to animals, “build” their own sex room and learn the basics of domination and sex with multiple partners at one time.

The chapter on safe sex and contraception suggests that abstinent, would-be lovers engage in shadow play, warns against pubic wolves, busts pregnancy myths and offers up possible holistic methods of contraception.

ABS suggests in Chapter 8 that a guy checks his Facebook to prevent premature ejaculation. Among its other homophobic content, Chapter 9 suggests that a male cashier asking if he should put the receipt in the bag means an offer of gay sex.

For a book claiming to be a humorous sex manual, it’s missing an important part of the equation: information the reader can learn something from.

Rosella LaFevre can be reached at rosella.lafevre@temple.edu.