Stoya Recommends: Sex Ed For GrownUps

Sex is awesome and smart is awesome. If you'd like to be smart about sex, I have a range of textual aids:

Geoffrey Miller's The Mating Mind: Why are personalities and creative ability so attractive? In a evolutionary race for survival, how did human quirks like art and moral integrity even happen, much less become as valued as they are? It all comes down to a mental version of the peacock's tail. (Did I mention that my first costume for this evening is peacock themed?)

· Buy The Mating Mind (amazon.com)

Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam's A Billion Wicked Thoughts: The last really intensive survey of what people do when they're havingsex was the Kinsey Reports. Kinsey's data was self-reported by thestudy participants, and honestly evaluating one's self is a difficult task. Ogas and Gaddam took all the available search engine histories for millions of people and used it to show what people are actually searching for when they look for sex. I wonder if the guy who googles sexy boobs, sexy butts, shemale galleries, and sexy bikini babes realizes how frequently he looks for transexual content, and whether he would have reported the greatness of his interest. While very hetero-normative, A Billion Wicked Thoughts is still a fascinating window into what people are really looking for and why.

· Buy A Billion Wicked Thoughts (amazon.com)

Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha's Sex At Dawn: People like sexual variety. I see this proven anecdotally at least once a week. Sex At Dawn gives well thought out hypotheses for our need to have diversity in our beds, and does so in an engaging and personable way. Engaging and personable is rare for a book written by people with MD and PhDs.

· Buy Sex At Dawn (amazon.com)

Mary Roach's Bonk: Mary Roach put her vagina where her mouth is. While researching an on-going study on the correlation between distance from clitoris to vaginal opening and ease of orgasms, she participated in the study and measured herself. She convinced her husband to have sex with her in an MRI, again for the purposes of participating in a study she was studying. Her willingness to actually do the things she's writing about demands respect, and she provides an entertaining crash-course in the science of sex.

· Buy Bonk (amazon.com)

Dr Eramus St Jude Croom's Curious Pleasures: An adorable, well illustrated lexicon of kink presented as a retro British field guide. The cunning thing about this book is it's so cute and joke-y that the sexually inexperienced don't usually realize they're reading a primer on sexual deviance until they're thinking about how one act or another actually sounds kind of hot. For the seasoned sexual adventurer, it's a nice break from all of those polysyllabic terms that those of us without science degrees have to stop and look up every five minutes.

· Buy Curious Pleasures (amazon.com)

[This post is a part of Fleshbot's Stoya Week. Photo of Stoya courtesy of Digital Playground.]