Books

Put What Where?John Naish,Harper Element: Never fool around sexually with a hoover. Such thrusting advicehas never before reached my bookshelf. Put What Where? is a book for all ages, apart from children, older generations, and in fact anyone who doesn’t have a sexually macabre humour. Not itself a sex manual, it gives itself up to a dutiful history of sex advice manuals; the practical adviceitself is given generously, though. By trawling through the original texts of many sex manuals, Naish has compileda book of advice from pretty much everyone: “Medieval women-haters, Victorian adventurers, astral travellers, gay sandal-makers…” The list continues. All of the advice given is as hilarious as it is useless. One Victorian text warns you sternly “not to exceed, in the frequency of your indulgences, the number of months in the year” and a twelfth century Indian poet suggests “Ddon’t kill me!” as a mid-coital exclamation.One of the highlights of the book is the potted history of Sir Richard Burton,the explorer who translated the Karma Sutra into Eenglish, and then sold it back to the Indian population. I don’t know whether that says more about the Indian or the British.The book covers over 2000 years, creating a canon of sex literature from scratch. Ddon’t be fooled by the tongue-in-cheek style: a quick glance at the bibliography confirms that it’s an astoundingly well-researched text, and it genuinely is informative. It gives a chapter-by-chapter account, from “Mankind’s first manuals” to “Saucy Sixties” and beyond, stopping off at key points in mankind’s rather drawn out sexual awakening. As well as the clearly ridiculous sexual advice that is given to each new generation of prospective lovers, you realise that there are some truths which were universally acknowledged many centuriesago. For instance, one medieval writer stated that “women are so full of venom at their time of menstruationthat they poison animals at a glance”.The attention span asked of the reader is minimal – short chapters are broken up with a few pages of facts and points taken straight from the original sex books. Thanks to Put What Where? I now know not to have sex in front of a priest.ARCHIVE: 5th week MT 2005