“Erotic Massage: The Touch of Love” is a soft-cover massage how-to book written by Kenneth Ray Stubbs and sold by Funwares Sex Toys. The book is black and white on the inside, but it does have a lot of illustrations. The book is 112 pages long and divided into nine different chapters. The book is a pretty tall book physically. It is about the height of your standard piece of paper, but the book is a bit wider. It is published by Secret Garden Publishing.
The book is intended to be a great massage technique book. I’ve read quite a few massage books, and this is one of the first books to actually show you quite a few useful techniques. Most massage books just use text to describe what little techniques that they provide. This book ends up providing a lot of techniques, and it does it in a way that’s very useful for the reader.
The illustrations are all black and white. The illustrator, Kyle Spencer, did a great great job on them. I wonder how that guy felt drawing all sorts of pictures like this. The pictures are not cartoon-like at all, and they definitely resemble a real human body. There’s no guessing with these illustrations. They look very life-like, and you will have no problem identifying what you are supposed to be doing. The drawings are usually of different body parts, and all of the illustrated bodies are nude. Bare breasts and bare genitals are shown.
One of my annoyances is all of the white space. The book includes quite a bit of open white space. There is a lot of space around the text as well as around the illustrations. I feel like the book could have been rearranged to make the book smaller in size. It’s not a huge deal though since the larger size makes it easier to get the book to prop itself open for reference during a massage. You just have to place a large object near the middle of the book, and the book will hold itself open since it’s so large.
Something worth mentioning is that the text is all lyrical. I’ve never been much for poetry, but this book is all written in a poetry-like manner. You won’t notice it after the first ten pages or so since then it all turns into the instructions on massage techniques. However, for those of us who don’t like poetry, those first ten pages on the basics of massaging can be a bit of a pain to read.
Aside from the white space and poetry wording, this book is amazing. It provides illustrations of how, exactly, to do massage techniques. The techniques vary from feet techniques, genital techniques, or back techniques. There are step-by-step pictures that makes it really easy to make sure that you are doing everything right. When movement is involved, there are little arrows showing you where the stroke should go. If you’ve always wanted to give a massage, and other books say give abstract tips which leave you confused, this book is just perfect. It gives you the “how” to every massage question you’ve ever had.
The book covers some pretty basic stuff in its text. It talks about how a massage should be consensually, and the focus should be on relaxation – not an orgasm. It talks about the items you will need for a successful massage. It talks about health concerns you should consider as well as some “rules” of giving a massage including to maintain constant contact with the skin of the partner. The first chapters also talk about where and when you should perform a massage.
Something to consider is where you are giving the massage. Each massage technique in the book seems to be given from a different angle from the giving partner. Some require the partner to be above the head while others are done at the bottom of the feet. This means you will want somewhere where your partner is easily accessible from all sides. The massage sections include beginning strokes, the back, back of legs, arms, hands, front of legs, front torso, feet, both male and female genitals, the neck and head, and the face.
In the end? If you’ve ever wanted to give good genital or body massages to your partner, this is a must-have book. It has some flaws, but it does a great job of showing you illustrations of exactly how to perform 78 different massage techniques. If you’ve ever found yourself wanting to do a massage but at a loss for what to do, this book will help you be much better at giving massages. Thanks to FunWares adult toys for sending me Erotic Massage: The Touch of Love for me to review.
