“Cosmo’s Guide to Red Hot Sex” is a hardcover, full-color book published by Hearst Books (the publishers of Cosmo and Redbook). The book is 240 pages long and divided into five different sections. The book is very picture-centric. This book is also very large and very heavy. The book looks like a coffee-table book, and it’s about ten square inches. The book is about an inch thick with the pages as well. It was published in 2008. The book has a book jacket that doesn’t stay on very well, but it can be removed if you’d like. The book includes a section on PrePlay, Foreplay, The Main Event, Afterplay, and Red-Hot Reads.
Basically consider this a book of articles. If you enjoy the “how to sex your man” articles in Cosmo, this book is just a large collection of them. While the articles are lumped into general categories, each one is very separate from one another. For example, you go from “Wet and Wild Fun” to “Become a Penis Genius”. A lot of the articles follow the Cosmo-style of having lists in them. If you enjoy reading those articles in Cosmo, this is just a larger collection of all of those articles in one place. The articles vary in length. A good portion of them are just two pages long, but some of them can be longer. However, they don’t seem to be long based upon the importance of the topic. For example, “Safe Sex” is only four pages long, and the chapter on Sex Toys is only 2 pages long.
This book is unapologetically made for heterosexual women. The majority of the book is written in a way that teaches you how to turn him on (I found it odd, then, that the chapters about how to turn him on all came before “How to Teach a Guy to Please You”). The book has little segments once in awhile called “Show This To Your Guy!” where it was two-pages written towards the male-half of the relationship. The book is obviously made for those who are in their twenties who are in a relationship but who aren’t married. All of the pictures are very young, attractive people, so it may alienate an older audience, and honestly, unless you are older and enjoy reading Cosmo, I don’t think you’d find too much interesting information in this book.
If you like pictures with your education, this book has you covered. There is at least one picture on every two-page spread. For most pages, there are two or more. There are sometimes captions included with the pictures though you don’t miss things if you don’t read the captions. The captions are really corny, and on a picture of two people kissing, it says “His knees are buckling now”. A good chunk of the book is pictures, and the text is pretty spread out as well, so while this book may appear huge, it only takes about two hours to read.
The biggest part where this book annoys me is the lack of any knowledge. It follows the “I’ll give you six paragraphs describing, step-by-step, what to do” philosophy instead of telling you *why* you’re doing it. That’s totally cool if you want to memorize a bunch of lists on how to turn on your guy, but I don’t really consider that sexual education; it’s just a scenario to follow. A lot of their different articles just give you a long list of things to try instead of actually explaining some of the risks/pleasures of it. Of course, all of the suggestions also focus on the male of the couple as well.
There is a short sex position chapter in this book. This is one area where it’s obvious that this book was made for young adults. Most of the sex positions requier a large amount of flexibility. There are 21 sex positions (twenty are supposed to be ones everyone can do while one is supposed to be “advanced only”) and almost all of them are pretty advanced. For example, one of the positions is to have the woman sit on his lap, with her arms around his body and with her legs up on his shoulders. I don’t know about you, but there’s no way I could that. I could do it while laying back, maybe, but there’s no way it could be done while I was still hugging his body. Another has the guy standing, holding the woman’s hips while she puts her arms on the bed/floor facedown and supporting her weight with her arms. Again, not very practical for most people.
The book has the five different sections. PrePlay is a section about everything you do before foreplay including articles on anticipation, an erotic massage, decoding your sex dreams, and make-up and scents to make him desire you. Foreplay is all about the foreplay including having bathtub fun, mastering his “M Zone” (which just happens to be his thighs and penis, y’know), sex toys, how to do 69, sexy things to do with your clothes, your “secret” sex cycle, and safe sex. The Main Event is all about intercourse itself including having orgasms during intercourse, 7 kinds of sex all couples need, taking sex to a deeper level, 21 sex positions, and secrets to maximizing his climax. AfterPlay is all about things you do after the sex itself and includes how to stay connected and what to do to have a second round. Red-Hot Reads is just a collection 6 or so stories of erotica that are only about 200 words each and read like something you’d find out of a romance novel.
As a short note, the book is definitely really heavy, and with one read-through, the book-portion actually fell out of the spine. I’m not hard on my books either. So while the pages look pretty, the book itself did not last.
Who would I recommend this book for? If you really love Cosmo magazine, this is probably going to be a good choice for you. If you’re part of the younger generation, this will be okay for you as well. Finally, if you have a hard time making it through other sex-ed books because they just don’t capture your attention, this book is definitely better than reading nothing at all. Believe me, I went through this book with a fine-tooth comb, and while not all of the suggestions are all that creative or helpful, there are no glaring or obvious errors or misinformation.
The book isn’t a horrible choice, but it isn’t one of the better choices out there either. If you enjoy Cosmo magazine, you’ll probably enjoy reading through this book a lot more than I did. I like the colors and appreciate the colorful layout quite a bit, but I just wish the book was a lot more helpful.
