May 17

Back to a.m. blogging interspersed with searches on Vanuatu and forays into The Complete Book of Sexual Love, which we found in the rubbish that people had put out for council cleanup in Dee Why (along with Where do I come from and The Hunt for the Red October). Somebody has taken their perusal seriously and underlined relevant sections in green highlighter.
eg:
'Orgasm in males is of course essential to procreation, as climax brings about the release of sperm. In women this is not so.'
and
'It is said that many married men who also use prostitutes do so because of frustrated 'fellation libido'..............Provided that the man is scrupulously clean and has washed his penis thoroughly, the practice is in no way unhygienic.'

Being a high quality book which doesn't stint on colour photographs, there can be found within its pages a catalogue of codpieces and cartoons, erect satyrs and women in garters, pictures of Leda succumbing to the swan and statues of Priapus, and a discussion of the medical problems of Akhenaten, king of Egypt from 1379 to 1362 BC, who 'suffered from an endocrine deficiency. His statues show a very unmanly body with heavy hips, breasts and a pronounced stoop. Surprisingly, he was not infertile and fathered six daughters.' Venus of Willendorf, faceless and fertile, rubs up against purse-lipped 1920s pinups rendered breathless by whalebone and photographs of medieval chastity belts. It's far more comprehensive than the other sex manual we found with it, which was more clearly a product of its times (the seventies) and featured misty shots of hairy sepia couples in the throes of coitus and looked like The Joy of Sex without the rose-coloured tinting.