Modern Sex Manuals
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.
Theodoor Hendrik van de Velde's book Het volkomen huwelijk (The Perfect Marriage), published in 1926, was well known in Netherlands, Germany, Sweden and Estonia. In Germany, Die vollkommene Ehe reached its 42nd printing in 1932 despite its being placed on the list of forbidden books, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, by the Roman Catholic Church. In Sweden, Det fulländade äktenskapet was widely known although regarded as pornographic and unsuitable for young readers long into the 1960s. In English, Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique has 42 printings in its original 1930 edition, and was republished in new editions in 1965 and 2000.
David Reuben, M. D.'s book Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), published in 1969, was one of the first sex manuals that entered mainstream culture in the 1960s. Although it did not feature explicit images of sex acts, its descriptions of sex acts were unprecedentedly detailed, addressing common questions and misunderstandings Reuben had heard from his own patients. Most notably, Reuben dismissed popular medical-psychiatric notions of "vaginal" vs. "clitoral" orgasm, explaining exactly how female physiology works.
The Joy of Sex by Dr. Alex Comfort was the first visually explicit sex manual to be published by a mainstream publisher. Its appearance in public bookstores in the 1970s opened the way to the widespread publication of sex manuals in the West. As a result, hundreds of sex manuals are now available in print.
One of the currently most well known in America is The Guide to Getting it On by Paul Joannides. Now in its sixth edition, it has won several prestigious awards and been translated into 12 foreign languages since appearing in 1996.
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