The Guide to Getting It On! is often considered to be the Bible of Human Sexuality. This is not hyperbole; everything you need or want to know about sex, it’s in here. At over 800 pages, nothing is left unexplored, almost putting most sex books to shame. The reason: frankly, most sex books are fucking boring, but the Guide is unbelievably amusing in how it’s written and presented. It has a fresh and fun outlook on sexuality while giving you chunk loads of valuable information from not just sexperts, but from real people with many similar and different sexual outlooks and viewpoints.

The bulk of the book is on “How to & Then Some,” which delves into romance, kissing, the penis, what’s inside a girl, handjobs, balls, oral sex, and anal, to name a few. The first few chapters are fairly basic, but once you get into masturbation, handjobs, blowjobs, balls, the prostate, the foreskin, and the male and female anatomy, that’s when you actually learn a great deal of understated information that most people don’t know but should know. Those chapters are particularly my favorite; I’d highly recommend that you bookmark them! Remember this: take what you learn on the “how to” section with a grain of salt. At the end, it is very worth it if you use some of the handjob, blowjob, and cunnilingus tips to your advantage; your partner might absolutely love you for it.

The rest of the Guide explores virginity, technology and culture, orientation and gender, sexual diseases, beyond vanilla (the “Kinky Corner” chapter was a blast!), pregnancy, “below the belt” (sex during your period, shaving, etc.), and sex in history and popular culture, by far the most interesting chapter of them all. Throughout the book there are entertaining comic book-like drawn pictures that somehow add this very humorous element (main clue: notice how many cats you will find hidden in almost every picture), and also useful technical photos of the human anatomy that aren’t necessarily perfectly drawn, but you get the point. You will probably have more fun looking at them than the kind you’ll find at the doctor’s office. I even found the glossary of vocabulary terms to be highly useful and fun to read (when does that EVER happen?).

I believe that The Guide is THE sex book of all sex books. It explores dimensions of sexuality---the physical, the sexual, and the emotional ---that many if not most people just take for granted. It’s not going to work miracles in your sex life, but it sure makes reading about sex as much fun and enjoyable as having sex, which is quite a rarity as far as sex books go. It’s also one of those rare sex books where you wouldn’t be embarrassed to show to your friends; instead you’d want to buy a copy for your friends! It even goes as far as being the perfect gift that you would want to give to your teenager, but disguising it as “this is a present from Uncle Harry.” Seriously, it’s that damn good!