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elfs"Dr. David Reuben, the new apostle of sanity in sex." That's how the back cover of the 1969 Best Seller, "Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Sex (But Were Afraid To Ask)," depicted its author. At the time, the book was not very suprising; lurid books about the sex lives of just about every sector of society had been available for several years; as a collector of bad sex manuals from the past, I have a 1958 printing of "The Teenager and Sex," a book that is as shrill as any "abstinence only" website fifty years later. Perhaps what makes Reuben's book noteworthy is it's publisher-- Bantam Press-- and its very widespread distribution in mainstream bookstores. It was followed closely by the 1970 release of his "More Things You Wanted To Know (But Still Didn't Know To Ask)."
Reuben's book is atrocious.
I can't begin to describe how awful this forty year old tome is or estimate how much damage it did to the American sexual psyche. Premature ejaculation is identified as "impotence," cunnilingus gets all of one paragraph in the entire book, and any sexual writing is condemned to the flat word, "boring." Masturbation is consigned to worthlessness, a comfort to the imprisoned, the aged, and the infirm. Oddly enough, he spends an awful lot of time describing how women masturbate, going into excrutiating detail the various kinds of exotic toys women could use. Reuben has a fetish for the foreign, consistently praising the 'inventiveness' of the Japanese or the 'freedom' of Europeans.
It is in the realm of the sexual underground the Reuben is so bad that one can't help but laugh. He proposes that gay men want to be female, that it's impossible for gay men to be monogamous because they're looking for the "man who'll make them whole when wholeness is impossible, because being whole means a man and a woman; homosexuals are on an impossible quest." He descibes anal sex in only the most painful terms as something only gay men do. Although gay men get their own chapter, Lesbians are an afterthought tacked onto the end of the chapter on prostitution. Lesbians, we are told, "are looking for love where no love is possible."
When Reuben wanders into the classifieds in his second book, he just gets even funnier. In his section on "terms," he hopelessly confuses the various nationality codes in use at the time (he has no idea what 'English' meant-- it means flagellation) and when deciphering one example ad describes "watersports" as "being sprayed from a hose." (One could take that an accurate if one is inclined to use the term 'hose' as a slang for penis-- watersports is peeing on your partner.) He describes S/M with the term "sadismasochism" (yes, all one word) and states that "nobody ever really inflicts pain on one another during these games."
Since he is a doctor, he does get things right more often than not, but when you're out to advise a country, you'd better get everything right every time. He fails. He tells us that laws outlawing homosexuality and swinging and so on should be abolished. "Leave those people alone!" he says out of one side of his mouth while telling "those people," "You're sad, you're sick, you need professional, medical help," out the other.
So, why am I dissing a "sex manual" that was out of date when it was printed forty years ago? Because, like it or not, David Reuben has published again.
The title is the same; even the cover is the same ugly color. It looks like a sixties reject. I admit to having given the book only a brief skim but I can tell you that already I hate it. While the CDC and all other sex advisors in the country tell us that used correctly and consistently a condom will prevent the spread of disease and pregnancy, Reuben tells us to forget it-- condoms, he claims, fail 1/3rd of the time. "Find someone you would trust to have sex without a condom," he writes, "and then use one anyway." This is advice?
In any event, fool me once... I've read David Reuben, and I'd rather take sex advice from Paul Reubens instead. I'd rather watch a certain Woody Allen film. And I'd rather read Susie Bright than another book as bad as his first two. On the back of the book it reads, "Avoiding any moral judgement..." I doubt he managed to pull it off this time, too.
Reuben's book is atrocious.
I can't begin to describe how awful this forty year old tome is or estimate how much damage it did to the American sexual psyche. Premature ejaculation is identified as "impotence," cunnilingus gets all of one paragraph in the entire book, and any sexual writing is condemned to the flat word, "boring." Masturbation is consigned to worthlessness, a comfort to the imprisoned, the aged, and the infirm. Oddly enough, he spends an awful lot of time describing how women masturbate, going into excrutiating detail the various kinds of exotic toys women could use. Reuben has a fetish for the foreign, consistently praising the 'inventiveness' of the Japanese or the 'freedom' of Europeans.
It is in the realm of the sexual underground the Reuben is so bad that one can't help but laugh. He proposes that gay men want to be female, that it's impossible for gay men to be monogamous because they're looking for the "man who'll make them whole when wholeness is impossible, because being whole means a man and a woman; homosexuals are on an impossible quest." He descibes anal sex in only the most painful terms as something only gay men do. Although gay men get their own chapter, Lesbians are an afterthought tacked onto the end of the chapter on prostitution. Lesbians, we are told, "are looking for love where no love is possible."
When Reuben wanders into the classifieds in his second book, he just gets even funnier. In his section on "terms," he hopelessly confuses the various nationality codes in use at the time (he has no idea what 'English' meant-- it means flagellation) and when deciphering one example ad describes "watersports" as "being sprayed from a hose." (One could take that an accurate if one is inclined to use the term 'hose' as a slang for penis-- watersports is peeing on your partner.) He describes S/M with the term "sadismasochism" (yes, all one word) and states that "nobody ever really inflicts pain on one another during these games."
Since he is a doctor, he does get things right more often than not, but when you're out to advise a country, you'd better get everything right every time. He fails. He tells us that laws outlawing homosexuality and swinging and so on should be abolished. "Leave those people alone!" he says out of one side of his mouth while telling "those people," "You're sad, you're sick, you need professional, medical help," out the other.
So, why am I dissing a "sex manual" that was out of date when it was printed forty years ago? Because, like it or not, David Reuben has published again.
The title is the same; even the cover is the same ugly color. It looks like a sixties reject. I admit to having given the book only a brief skim but I can tell you that already I hate it. While the CDC and all other sex advisors in the country tell us that used correctly and consistently a condom will prevent the spread of disease and pregnancy, Reuben tells us to forget it-- condoms, he claims, fail 1/3rd of the time. "Find someone you would trust to have sex without a condom," he writes, "and then use one anyway." This is advice?
In any event, fool me once... I've read David Reuben, and I'd rather take sex advice from Paul Reubens instead. I'd rather watch a certain Woody Allen film. And I'd rather read Susie Bright than another book as bad as his first two. On the back of the book it reads, "Avoiding any moral judgement..." I doubt he managed to pull it off this time, too.
