There’s a new, male sex manual… but will boys who need it, read it?
In the age of the internet, with porn on digital tap, it has become received wisdom that young straight men have reached new levels of sexual cluelessness. They know all too well what pornographic sex looks like. So when it comes to real flesh and blood women their own age, who are not performing on screen, the poor chaps find themselves stumped and anxious.
To help this muddled generation out, a new sex book for boys is hitting shelves next week to acclaim and buzz. Respect: Everything a Guy Needs to Know about Sex, Love and Consent by Inti Chavez Perez, offers invaluable “nothing is off limits” advice and information. The book teaches young men how to inhabit their own skin; how to pull off convincing, mutually pleasant moves (including how to remove a bra sleekly and without fanfare); the contours of female sexual equipage – and
how to approach it. Chapter One dives right into the morass of young male insecurity: “Is my d--- normal?” Readers are then treated to a bullet-point guide to kissing, with gems such as “try not to drench the other person’s lips with saliva as they might not like it”. This is excellent advice –
many is the face-drenching I’ve received, and many the time I’ve had to restrain myself from responding with physical combat.
Perez is perceptive about the limits of sex education. “It tells you how not to get an STI, but doesn’t give you the social skills training to actually hook up with somebody,” he writes. “A teenager would say, ‘How do I even get to the stage of choosing to use a condom or not?’”
But that question isn’t new. Nor are any of the other queries addressed. Never mind the internet: how the boys in my day could have used such a book – not only the boys, but the men. All men throughout all time, really. For the interplay of emotions, complex female anatomy and the vagaries of individual sexual response have always flummoxed some, and a certain proportion have always responded particularly badly to this complexity, deploying caricatured moves rather than relying on any innate sensuality.
Not everyone has innate sensuality, of course, and I’m sure that there have been washing machine kissers, ferocious shirt-hitchers and o’er hasty sorts all round. At least now there’s a manual for them – the question is whether those who need it most will read it.