Our interviews on sex and sexuality cover everything from sex education to sperm. Relationship coach and agony aunt Susan Quilliam chooses her best books on sex, including the 1972 The Joy of Sex by Alex Comfort and Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life by Emily Nagoski. The Joy of Sex, she argues, is a classic, but suffers from the limitations of its time, including “a lot on the man as the active person”. Quilliam’s new edition of the book has changed all this and removed the regular references to group sex and the suggestion of having sex on a moving motorbike. Nagoski’s book, Quilliam argues, needs no editing, and is “one of the best books ever written . . . for guiding women in particular through the minefield of their sexuality in today’s world.”
Eric Berkowitz—journalist, author and lawyer and author of Sex and Punishment: 4,000 years of Judging Desire—talks about sex and society. He chooses works of literature, including The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee as well as history (Roman Sexualities, edited by Judith P Hallett and Marilyn B Skinner). His own book ends at the end of the 19th century, because if he’d continued, he argued, the last chapter “would have been 450 pages long”. Faramerz Dabhoiwala looks at the 18th century sexual revolution. He chooses, amongst others, Clarissa by Samuel Richardson and Letters to the Women of England by Mary Robinson, arguing these books illustrate the nature of that revolution and the extent to which women were relatively disadvantaged by it.
Jonathan Zimmerman, Professor of Education and History at New York University explores the minefield of sex education and argues that any attempt to find a value-free way of teaching the subject “is a fool’s errand”. Kate Figes talks about sex and marriage; she also chooses Comfort's The Joy of Sex. Her other choices include Married Love by Marie Stopes and Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. Evan Zimroth, the poet and novelist, chooses her best books on adultery. Fittingly, she breaks our rules and chooses six books.
Edmund White chooses his best works of gay fiction, including titles by Jean Genet, Christopher Isherwood, Alan Hollinghurst and E M Forster. Finally, to sex and sexuality in the animal kingdom as a whole: Tim Birkhead talks about sperm, how testes size among primates correlates very closely with promiscuity in a given species and how hens can reject the sperm of inferior cockerels, amongst other fascinating insights. Humans, he tells us, “are at the lower end of the [primate] scale, we’re not as exciting as chimpanzees [every male in the troupe copulates with every female every day], but not as dull as gorillas [silverbacks have no competition and so don’t need much sperm].”
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1
Ars Amatoria, or The Art of Love
by Ovid, translated by Rolfe Humphries -
2
From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America
by Beth L. Bailey -
3
Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity — What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves
by Christian Rudder -
4
Modern Romance: An Investigation
by Aziz Ansari -
5
The Curious History of Dating: From Jane Austen to Tinder
by Nichi Hodgson
The best books on Dating, recommended by Mia Levitin
The best books on Dating, recommended by Mia Levitin
“Love,” wrote Ovid, “is no assignment for cowards.” Cultural critic Mia Levitin talks us through the history of seduction from the Classical era, through ballroom dancing, calling cards and into the present age of swiping on our mobile phones. Here she recommends five of the best books for those braving the modern dating scene.
The best books on Sex, recommended by Susan Quilliam
Sex: it’s all around us, but many of us still have questions. Relationship coach and author Susan Quilliam, who updated the 1970s classic, The Joy of Sex, talks us through the best sex guides and also some of the groundbreaking books that broke taboos and paved the way to more open-minded sexual attitudes.
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1
Biologische Untersuchungen (Die Spermien der Vogel)
by Gustaf Retzius -
2
Behavioural Ecology
by J.R. Krebs (Editor), N.B. Davies (Editor) -
3
Sperm Competition and the Evolution of Animal Mating Systems
by Robert L. Smith (Editor) -
4
Female Control
by William Eberhard -
5
Sperm Competition and its Evolutionary Consequences in the Insects
by Leigh W. Simmons