“The Cosmo Kama Sutra” book is a softcover book with 175 pages. The book is written by the editors of the popular magazine “Cosmo” and is sold by Funwares sex toys. All of the inner pages are full-color which makes for a very entertaining read. The book isn’t split into any sort of specific chapters. The pages are of a high-quality photo-type of paper, but it isn’t glossy; it’s pretty matte-feeling. Because of the content/pictures in this book, this isn’t a discreet book to be read in public. The book includes 77 different sex positions.
The front cover is really, really neat with the title “The Cosmo Kama Sutra” on it. However, there’s a pull tab on the top of the book. When you pull the pull tab, an illustrated picture of a couple having sex then shows on the cover. It’s neat and is probably one of the more unique things I’ve seen on a book like this before.
I’ve been curious about this sex book for awhile now. I remember seeing this book back when I was underage on a field trip. It was the old edition that was hardcover, and it looked so “naughty” to be flipping through it at the time. My friends and I had a giggle. Now, this is a new edition that has been modified and has a new cover. It just made me remember when I had seen it before.
As some people might know, I’m not fond of Cosmo magazine. I’ll pick it up and look through it to giggle at things, but their sex advice is usually completely messed up. There’s never really any mention of safe sex, and the “tips” they give are usually so out-of-it that they’re hilarious. However, it’s a book of sex positions. It’s kinda hard to mess that up – even for Cosmo. Plus, I like the illustration/format style they use for their sex books.
What I like is that every sex position actually includes illustrations about the position. They aren’t amazingly detailed, but instead, it’s just illustrated dolls shown in the positions that the book describes. Since it isn’t pictures or anything, there isn’t any nudity or bare anything. There are outlines of breasts/butts/faces, but you don’t see anything. This is good if you are a bit worried about seeing naked people, but at the same time, they don’t illustrate things as well as they could be illustrated if real photos were used.
Each sex position includes three main parts on two pages. The left-hand page is a full-page illustration of the position while the right-hand page is always the text. The text includes “Erotic Instructions” which are basically well-written instructions for the two of you to get into the position, and the text also includes the “Why You’ll Love It” which is a paragraph of text telling the receiver why she’ll love that certain position. The instructions are helpful, but pictures are always more helpful. However, most of the positions could be figured out just from the text. The “Why You’ll Love It” works okay, but it’s not phenomenal either. The most common reasons are enjoying the view, enjoying shallow penetration, or g-spot stimulation.
There are two “extra” features as well as these regular ones. One of them is the “Carnal Challenge” at the corner of each page, there is a 1-5 flame level that tells you how difficult the position is going to be. One is easy, five is hard. This makes it easy to tell whether you think you could attempt that position or not. It’s worth mentioning that there’s no way to “filter” the book for just the 3-stars or the 4-stars, so you just have to flip through until you find things.
Along with this, the other extra is the “Cosmo Hint” which is basically a small way to spice up the sex position listed. It’s usually small things like “Use a sex toy“, “Feel free to scratch his back” or other small things like that. If you both enjoy a pretty open sex life, those hints are usually pretty useless, but if you want an idea of extra things to do, it works out for that.
If you couldn’t guess, this sex book for couples is extremely heteronormative. It’s meant to be used between a woman and a man in a bonded relationship. (As in, not a one-night-stand but maybe a friends-with-benefits type of thing.) The positions could be used for homosexual use or for anal sex use as well, but all of the positions in this book do assume vaginal sex. If height/weight issues are problems for your sex positions, this book does not make mention of either of them.
There is zero mention of pegging positions either.
Cosmo did a decent job of including mini, one-page articles on different sexual education topics in the book. They are listed on the table of contents to find them easily. They include things like finding your g-spot, differences between lubes, stretches to do before hard positions, how to find the perfect position, how to fix your worst sex mistakes among about 8 others. The articles are very short, and as far as I can tell, include pretty decent information. The “Hot or Not” type article is a bit stupid (Nurse = Hot, Nun = Hot), but aside from that, the rest seem pretty informative.
The book includes a decent variety of positions. I won’t claim that it’s perfect or amazingly unique, but the positions it includes are ones that you might not have thought of. The Carnal Challenge scale is pretty accurate. Most of the 4 and 5 star ones are positions that I look at and go “nuh uh; no way I can do that”. Most of 3 star ones look like they’d take a bit of time to figure out, and most of the 2 and 1 star ones are pretty easy to get into. Sometimes I feel like I wish there were some step-by-step instructions on some of these positions though. Most of the positions are easy to figure out, but a couple just left me wondering how we were ever going to manage it. Most of the 4 and 5 star ones were just too athletic for us to be able to do.
Did Cosmo do a good job on this book? Yes, they did. If you want to have 77 different sex positions at your fingertips for inspiration, it works well. I think it would have worked better if Cosmo had included pictures of real couples, but some people also want an option that doesn’t have naked bodies, and Cosmo did a great job of covering that aspect of it. A kinky game would be to flip through and pick out positions, together, that the two of you would like to try, then try it.
