A new spate of sex self-help books reveals a vigorous interest (at least on the part of authors) in mechanics. The last year or so has seen the publication of his-and-her texts like Blow Him Away: How to Give Him Mind-Blowing Oral Sex [1]; The Low Down on Going Down: How to Give Her Mind-Blowing Oral Sex [2]; She Comes First: The Thinking Man’s Guide to Pleasuring a Woman [3]; and Tickle His Pickle: Your Hands-On Guide to Penis Pleasing [4]. As a former sex columnist, I’m all for people enlightening themselves about bodies––their own and their partners’––and delving into pleasure with an academic’s zeal and a healthy sense of humor. But this avalanche of genital-centric manuals is intriguing and just a little bit dismaying. Is it a delayed response to I-did-not-have-sex-with-that-woman titillation? An overdue Sex and the City-inspired celebration? Or is it a disembodied race for sexual perfection?

It is at least undeniably a public rallying cry for a certain kind of Goddess worship. “When it comes to pleasuring women and conversing in the language of love,” writes clinical sexologist Ian Kerner in She Comes First: The Thinking Man’s Guide to Pleasuring a Woman [5], “cunnilingus should be every man’s native tongue.” A review by Publisher’s Weekly lauds Kerner for teaching readers that “the clitoris has 18 distinct parts, and more nerve fibers than any other part of the human body,” plus revealing that “studies show the average woman takes about 20 minutes to reach her first orgasm during a typical sex session, while men take a mere four minutes.”

Perhaps this new barrage isn’t so odd. A few years ago, publishers released a bunch of simultaneous books about orgasms (faster, bigger, better, more). At least this current batch lingers on the process of pleasure rather than the product. Whatever the reasons, as long as we remember that those joy centers are only part of a whole body-mind erogenous zone, this library seems like a constructive (and fun) way to co-hibernate this winter.