Sex instruction

Sex manuals are books which explain how to perform sexual practices; they also commonly feature advice on birth control, and sometimes on safe sex and sexual relationships. Sex manuals are books which explain how to perform sexual practices; they also commonly feature advice on birth control, and sometimes on safe sex and sexual relationships. In the Graeco-Roman era, a sex manual was written byPhilaenis of Samos, possibly a hetaira (courtesan) of the Hellenistic period (3rd–1st century BC). Preserved by a series of fragmentary papyruses which attest its popularity, it served as a source of inspiration for Ovid's Ars Amatoria, written around 3 BC, which is partially a sex manual, and partially a 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. It was compiled by the Indian sage Vatsyayana sometime between the second and fourth centuries CE. His work was based on earlier Kamashastras or Rules of Love going back to at least the seventh century BCE, and is a compendium of the social norms and love-customs of patriarchal Northern India around the time he lived. Vatsyayana's Kama Sutra is valuable today for his psychological insights into the interactions and scenarios of love, and for his structured approach to the many diverse situations he describes. He defines different types of men and women, matching what he terms 'equal' unions, and gives detailed descriptions of many love-postures. The Kama Sutra was written for the wealthy male city-dweller. It is not, and was never intended to be, a lover's guide for the masses, nor is it a 'Tantric love-manual'. About three hundred years after the Kama Sutra became popular, some of the love-making positions described in it were reinterpreted in a Tantric way. Since Tantra is an all-encompassing sensual science, love-making positions are relevant to spiritual practice. The earliest East Asian sex manual is the Su Nü Jing. Probably written during the Chinese Han dynasty (206 BC-220 AD), the work was long lost in China itself, but preserved in Japan as part of the medical anthology Ishinpō (984). It is a Daoist text purporting to describe how one might achieve long life and immortality by manipulating the yin and yang forces of the body through sexual techniques, which are described in some detail. Medieval sex manuals include the lost works of Elephantis, by Constantine the African; Ananga Ranga, a 12th-century collection of Hindu erotic works; and The Perfumed Garden for the Soul's Recreation, a 16th-century Arabic work by Sheikh Nefzaoui. The fifteenth-century Speculum al foderi (The Mirror of Coitus) is the first medieval European work to discuss sexual positions. Constantine the African also penned a medical treatise on sexuality, known as Liber de coitu. The medieval Jewish physician and writer Maimonides is author of a Treatise on Cohabitation. Despite 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 The Perfumed Garden…. In the late 19th Century, Ida Craddock wrote many serious instructional tracts on human sexuality and appropriate, respectful sexual relations between married couples. Among her works were The Wedding Night and Right Marital Living. In 1918 Marie Stopes published Married Love, considered groundbreaking despite its limitations in details used to discuss sex acts.