Reviews: Three Guides to Sensual Massage and Manual and Oral Sex

If you're looking for an illustrated how-to manual, but you get turned off by porn and explicit nudity, I have three suggestion for you this month.

I get a fair number of requests for instructional videos and books on three related subjects: erotic massage, hand jobs, and oral sex.  There seems to be something about all three that makes people insecure about just winging it, and in all three cases, there are a lot of tips and tricks that many people never discover on their own that can make their partners' experiences much more enjoyable.

We're at a peculiar stage as a society where it is actually much easier to find porn, which is widely available for free if you are willing to search for it, than it is to find good non-pornographic visual materials to recommend.  However, there are still many people who aren't comfortable with porn, or indeed anything too explicit, and there is much less in the way of good material for this group.

By coincidence, I have received two items in the last couple of months that should appeal to this underserved audience.  The first is a tasteful and beautifully produced massage book, Erotic Massage for Couples: Head to Toe Techniques to Arouse and Gratify Your Partner, by Sylvia Patterson.  And the second is an instructional DVD, Blow Him Away! by Dr. Sayaka Adachi, that provides a detailed guide to manual and oral techniques that you can use during lingam massage.

That makes this also a good time to review another book, Ian Kerner's She Comes First: The Thinking Man's Guide to Pleasuring a Woman, which is devoted to manual and oral techniques that you can use while giving a yoni massage.

Erotic Massage for Couples

To begin with, there's no such thing as the "best" book on this kind of topic.  The best book for you might seem bland and boring to some people and still be too explicit or advanced for others.  So this is less about "best" in the abstract than it is about you and your own comfort level and your own level of knowledge.

This book is for comparative beginners who have not studied other serious massage books.  Also, it's visually beautiful, but rather tame.  Bare breasts and buttocks are shown, but no genitals or even pubic hair.  If that fits your degree of experience and your comfort level, this could be perfect choice.

The photography is sensual without being at all pornographic and the angles are well-chosen for illustrating the various massage techniques.  If you want to learn massage at a professional level, this book won't help, but it's an excellent starting point if you simply want to learn some basic techniques that you can incorporate into your tantric massages.

The first 33 pages are a paean to the delights and the power of human touch – something I've discussed at length here on EP – as well as a simple program for self-exploration. This is followed by about 120 pages of sensual massage techniques and variations that you can learn and play with.  Two short sections are tacked onto the end, one dealing with supposedly "aphrodisiac" recipes – more accurately, some sensual taste treats - and a somewhat misleading section on oils that mixes up massage oils with aromatic oils and "essential" oils.

On the last point, many products sold as aromatic and essential oils contain ingredients that can irritate the skin, especially the genitals, something I think should have been emphasized.  My recommendation would be to stick either to pure vegetable oils or to lubes that are marked as being safe for sex.

Coconut, almond, and walnut oil all taste and smell good and are safe even for most people with super-sensitive skin, as long as neither person has nut allergies.  However, it is ALWAYS a good idea to do a small patch test on the inside of your forearm and your partner's forearm at least 24 hours before slathering your body with something new, whether it's massage oil, sex lube, or just a new brand of body soap!

Blow Him Away!

How do you do an instructional video for lingam massage techniques without offending those who are too prim for porn?  Here's one way:  take a cute, vivacious Japanese-American sexologist and have her conduct a living room "seminar" with four housewives, using some zucchini and a few fairly abstract dildos.  There are a lot of jokes and laughs, but Dr. Sayaka Adachi does an admirable job of covering the basic hand job and BJ techniques, plus many more-advanced ones, without ever being crude about it.

Dr. Adachi demonstrates many of the moves I described in the seven-part series that starts here, including many two-handed maneuvers and the combined hand-and-mouth technique I recommend for oral if you are not a veteran deep-throater.  Altogether, this is a very thorough guide to the most effective techniques for both oral and manual lingam massage.  It's highly recommended even if you aren't too shy to look for porn, and of course it is doubly recommended if porn turns you off.

She Comes First

Ian Kerner's She Comes First: The Thinking Man's Guide to Pleasuring a Woman isn't a video, but it is one of the clearest and most complete books available on effective techniques for oral and manual yoni massage.  Like Dr. Adachi, Dr. Kerner emphasizes the importance of an overall approach that is enthusiastic, playful, and joyfully giving, which is essential for successful tantric couples.

As always, no book or video is perfect for everyone, so I recommend that you read the other reviews on Amazon to see if this is going to be a good fit for you.  But for most people who are relatively new to extended "yoni worship" this is a treasure house of ideas and a source of inspiration.  Your partner will be glad you got it!

Other resources

If you have favorite books, videos, websites, or other sources, please tell me about them and I will pass along your recommendations to other tantric explorers!