The New Male Sexuality, Revised Edition

Rating:
Summary: Straightforward and useful compendium of ideas
Review: This book is unmatched in its straightforwardness, casual tone, and careful mix of do-at-home exercises and author's ideas. It is more sociological than most other sex advice books as well, providing the necessary social context for men's sexualities. "It's Two Feet Long and Hard as Steel" is a great chapter.

Rating:
Summary: Great on what he knows; weak on what he thinks
Review: This is a great book as long as the author stays in his field and deals with what he knows. It gets shaky when he strays into sociology and history where his knowledge is too superficial and obviously influenced by the spirit of the age. He depicts men as being sad, hollow creatures unable to connect with others in meaningful relationships and striving anxiously to perform up to others' expectations. He then spends most of the rest of the book telling us how to perform so we can live up to women's expectations and thereby enter in meaningful face-to-face as opposed to empty side-by-side relationships. It never seems to occur to him that men (and perhaps many women) may not want the degree of control and lack of privacy inherent in face-to-face relationships. Perhaps men are satisfied with a much lower level of intimacy. Like most psychiatric professionals, the author appears to think that the generally unhappy people he meets in his practice are representative. He seems to have unconsciously adopted the patriarchal and now feminist attitude that everything that goes wrong for men is their own fault. All the problems in male/female relationships are male in origin. Men have to change (perform?). While finding this all-too-familiar litany distressing, I found a great deal of useful information in this book about what the author clearly does know about: male sexuality. He seems to understand how and why we are the way we are sexually. The practical suggestions on how to solve functional problems could be very helpful.