Book picks similar to
Sex: A User's Guide by Stephen Arnott


non-fiction
nonfiction
personal-library
sex

The Dance of Intimacy: A Woman's Guide to Courageous Acts of Change in Key Relationships


Harriet Lerner - 1989
    Taking a careful look at those relationships where intimacy is most challenged--by distance, intensity, or pain--she teaches us about the specific changes we can make to achieve a more solid sense of self and a more intimate connectedness with others. Combining clear advice with vivid case examples, Dr. Lerner offers us the most solid, helpful book on intimate relationships that both women and men may ever encounter.

Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic


Esther Perel - 2006
    She invites us to explore the paradoxical union of domesticity and sexual desire, and explains what it takes to bring lust home.In her 20 years of clinical experience, Perel has treated hundreds of couples whose home lives are empty of passion. They describe relationships that are open and loving, yet sexually dull. What is going on?In this explosively original book, Perel explains that our cultural penchant for equality, togetherness, and absolute candor is antithetical to erotic desire for both men and women. Sexual excitement doesn't always play by the rules of good citizenship. It is politically incorrect. It thrives on power plays, unfair advantages, and the space between self and other. More exciting, playful, even poetic sex is possible, but first we must kick egalitarian ideals and emotional housekeeping out of our bedrooms.While Mating in Captivity shows why the domestic realm can feel like a cage, Perel's take on bedroom dynamics promises to liberate, enchant, and provoke. Flinging the doors open on erotic life and domesticity, she invites us to put the "X" back in sex.©2006 Esther Perel (P)2006 HarperCollins Publishers

Notes to My Future Husband: A Bitch's Guide to Our Happily Ever After


The Coquette - 2012
    It's a picture of an ideal relationship for a new generation of married couples: alternately grotesque, sexy, silly, and sexually permissive, but above all, built on mutual respect and honesty: •I promise: to never comment on your bad breath, as long as you don't come near me with bad breath. •We're going to make a lot of parenting mistakes: Let's not make putting leashes on our children when we go to the mall one of them.•Your job: I know I'm the 'free spirited one', but you're not allowed to be doing something that makes you miserable. Sorry. We'll f**'in live in a box, it's fine.

Reader's Digest


Reader's Digest Association - 2000
    You'll discover original profiles of inspiring people, real-life dramas, insightful essays, and news roundups that get you up-to-date fast on the issues you care about. All the features and departments from the print edition are here, including the jokes and funny true stories, along with our famous Word Power column-now with automatic scoring and audio pronunciations. Each issue is enhanced with exclusive cartoons, videos, slide shows, animations, and useful Web links-all in a well-designed, easy-to-navigate interface.

Sex and The Single Girl


Helen Gurley Brown - 1962
    Provides single women with advice on such topics as dealing with men, sex, career success, becoming sexy, making money, and staying healthy.

The Evolution Of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating


David M. Buss - 1994
    Based on the most massive study of human mating ever undertaken, encompassing more than 10,000 people of all ages from thirty-seven cultures worldwide, The Evolution of Desire is the first book to present a unified theory of human mating behavior.Now in an updated edition with two new chapters by the author, The Evolution of Desire presents the latest research in the field, including starting new discoveries about the evolutionary advantages of infidelity, orgasm, and physical attractiveness.

The Erotic Silence of the American Wife


Dalma Heyn - 1992
    Something had changed during marriage--they experienced an inexplicable silencing of their inner and sexual selves--and so despite the moral codes against it, they committed adultery. "Dalma Heyn shows us a new reality and a tantalizing hint of the future--and neither women nor marriage will ever be the same."--Gloria Steinem.

Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy


Mark Regnerus - 2017
    Coupled sexual activity has become more widely available than ever. Cheap sex has been made possible by two technologies that have little to do with each other - the Pill and high-quality pornography - and its distribution made more efficient by a third technological innovation, online dating. Together, they drive down the cost of real sex, and in turn slow the development of love, make fidelity more challenging, sexual malleability more common, and have even taken a toll on men's marriageability.Cheap Sex takes readers on an extended tour inside the American mating market, and highlights key patterns that characterize young adults' experience today, including the timing of first sex in relationships, overlapping partners, frustrating returns on their relational investments, and a failure tolink future goals like marriage with how they navigate their current relationships. Drawing upon several large nationally-representative surveys, in-person interviews with 100 men and women, and the assertions of scholars ranging from evolutionary psychologists to gender theorists, what emerges is astory about social change, technological breakthroughs, and unintended consequences. Men and women have not fundamentally changed, but their unions have. No longer playing a supporting role in relationships, sex has emerged as a central priority in relationship development and continuation. Butunravel the layers, and it is obvious that the emergence of industrial sex is far more a reflection of men's interests than women's.

How to Avoid Marrying a Jerk: The Foolproof Way to Follow Your Heart Without Losing Your Mind


John Van Epp - 2006
    He provides a proven program for following your heart without losing your sanity.

Falling Forward: A Man's Memoir of Divorce (Kindle Single)


Chris Easterly - 2014
    When Hollywood screenwriter Chris Easterly's wife came clean about her affair, his mind went blank. And so began the long, unimaginably difficult reconstruction of his life after marriage. Relentlessly honest and profoundly moving, 'Falling Forward' explores the emotional journey of one man's divorce, from his wife's affair to the seemingly bottomless grief that followed to his eventual healing and the realization that he would survive." -- Amazon synopsis

Doing Things Right in Matters of the Heart


John Ensor - 2007
    Doing Things Right in Matters of the Heart presents a bold plan for escaping the swift currents of contemporary patterns of hooking up, shacking up, and breaking up. It draws a compelling vision of complementarity between the sexes. It instructs men on what to do and informs women on what to look for in their mutual pursuit of a healthy, tender, long-term relationship.

The Chemistry Between Us: Love, Sex, and the Science of Attraction


Larry Young - 2012
    All that mystery, all that poetry, all those complex behaviors sur­rounding human bonding leading to the most life-changing decisions we’ll ever make, are unconsciously driven by a few molecules in our brain. How does love begin? How can two strangers come to the conclusion that it would not only be pleasant to share their lives, but that they must share them? How can a man say he loves his wife, yet still cheat on her? Why do others stay in relationships even after the ro­mance fades? How is it possible to fall in love with the “wrong” person? How do people come to have a “type”? Physical attraction, jealousy, infidelity, mother-infant bonding—all the behaviors that so often leave us befuddled—are now being teased out of the fog of mystery thanks to today’s social neuroscience. Larry Young, one of the world’s leading experts in the field, and journalist Brian Alexander explain how those findings apply to you. Drawing on real human stories and research from labs around the world, The Chemistry Between Us is a bold attempt to create a “grand unified theory” of love. Some of the mind-blowing insights include:Love can get such a grip on us because it is, literally, an addiction. To a woman falling in love, a man is like her baby. Why it’s false to say society makes gender, and how it’s possible to have the body of one gender and the brain of another.Why some people are more likely to cheat than others. Why we sometimes truly can’t resist temptation.  Young and Alexander place their revelations into historical, political, and social contexts. In the pro­cess, they touch on everything from gay marriage to why single-mother households might not be good for society. The Chemistry Between Us offers powerful in­sights into love, sex, gender, sexual orientation, and family life that will prove to be enlightening, contro­versial, and thought provoking.

Matrimony, Inc.: From Personal Ads to Swiping Right, a Story of America Looking for Love


Francesca Beauman - 2020
     Amazingly, America’s first personal ad appeared in the Boston Evening Post as early as 1759. A “person who flatters himself that he shall not be thought disagreeable” was in search of a “young lady, between the age of eighteen and twenty-three, of a middling stature, brown hair, of good Morals…” As family-arranged marriages fell out of fashion, "Husband Wanted" or "Seeking Wife" ads were soon to be found in every state in the nation. From the woman in a Wisconsin newspaper who wanted “no brainless dandy or foppish fool” to the man with a glass eye who placed an ad in the New York Times hoping to meet a woman with a glass eye, the many hundreds of personal ads that author Francesca Beauman has uncovered offer an extraordinary glimpse into the history of our hearts’ desires, as well as a unique insight into American life as the frontier was settled and the cities grew. Personal ads played a surprisingly vital role in the West: couple by couple, shy smile by shy smile, letter by letter from a dusty, exhausted miner in California to a bored, frustrated seamstress in Ohio. Get ready for a new perspective on the making of modern America, a hundred words of typesetter’s blurry black ink at a time. “So anxious are our settlers for wives that they never ask a single lady her age. All they require is teeth,” declared the Dubuque Iowa News in 1838 in a state where men outnumbered women three to one. While the dating pools of 21st century New York, Chicago or San Francisco might not be quite so dentally-fixated, Matrimony Inc. will put idly swiping right on Tinder into fascinating and vividly fresh historical context. What do women look for in a man? What do men look for in a woman? And how has this changed over the past 250 years?

Tickle His Pickle!: Your Hands-On Guide to Penis Pleasing


Sadie Allison - 2004
    The penis is every guy's pleasure center, yet no woman has ever received the instruction manual until now. Includes more than 50 hand and oral love-making techniques with 100 titillating illustrations to guide your learning process. Empowers women to embrace their sexuality by learning new tricks for pleasing their partners.

Masters of Sex: The Life and Times of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the Couple Who Taught America How to Love


Thomas Maier - 2009
    This critically acclaimed biography offers an unprecedented look at William Masters and Virginia Johnson, their pioneering studies on intimacy, and their lasting impact on the love lives of today's men and women.