Customer Reviews

Sex, Intimacy and Lying About Love: 5,000 Men Go to Bed and Tell the Truth

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The concept for this book was promising: interviews with more than 5,000 men about their most intimate concerns and interests -- a total of 313 questions about everything from favorite cologne to greatest turnoff, from special sexual talents to worst experience with drugs and sex.

Unfortunately, the execution trivializes all this great information. Imagine trying to choose three -- rarely as much as five -- answers to represent everything these 5,000-plus men had to say in response to each of the 313 questions. Do you choose the most representative answer? The wittiest? The funniest? Most thoughtful? Most shocking?

In many cases, it is obvious the authors have chosen one or two of the latter ... but how is a reader to know which answers best represent the majority of the male sex? As a man, I found some of the vitriol and caricaturing of the male sex indulged in by some of the interviewees to be as bad (and inaccurate) as anything I've ever heard a woman say about men. What does this do for us?

The information in this book has all the titillation -- and corresponding weightlessness -- of secrets shared by an utter stranger at a cocktail party. There's no context for the content; it's of no earthly use to the reader beyond a fleeting instant of entertainment. The book is rather like a greatly extended version of a typical women's magazine article for which the reporter has chatted with three to five friends and thereupon uses the conversations either to construct a portrait of the sexes whole cloth, or merely to confirm her own preexisting conception of how the sexes relate and play.