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Sex manuals are books which explain how to perform sexual intercourse and other sexual practices. They often also feature advice on birth control, as well as advice on sexual relationships.
Ancient sex manuals
Ovid's Ars Amatoria was written around 3 BC, and is part sex manual, and part burlesque on the art of love.
The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana, believed to have been written in the 1st to 6th centuries, has a notorious reputation as a sex manual, although only a small part of its text is devoted to sex.
Other ancient sex manuals include the lost works of Elephantis; Ananga Ranga, a 12th century collection of Hindu erotic works; and The Perfumed Garden for the Soul's Recreation, a 16th century Arabian work by Sheikh Nefzaoui.
Modern sex manuals In spite of the existence of ancient sex manuals in other cultures, sex manuals were banned in Western culture for many years. What sexual information was available was generally only available in the form of illicit pornography or medical books, which generally discussed either sexual physiology or sexual disorders. The authors of medical works went so far as to write the most sexually explicit parts of their texts in Latin, so as to make them inaccessible to the general public. (See Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis as an example).
A few translations of the ancient works were circulated privately, such as Sir Richard Burton's translations of the Ananga Ranga and The Perfumed Garden.
Married Love by Marie Stopes, published in 1918, was a ground-breaking sex manual, although it was limited in the detail in which it could discuss sex acts.
David Reuben, M. D.'s book Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), published in 1969 was one of the first sex manuals that entered mainstream culture in the 1960s. Although it did not feature explicit images of sex acts, its descriptions of sex acts were unprecedentedly detailed.
The Joy of Sex by Dr. Alex Comfort was the first sexually explicit sex manual to be widely published. Its publication in the 1970s opened the way to the widespread publication of sex manuals in the West. As a result, hundreds of sex manuals are now available in print.
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