Books
Books
When Sex Hurts — And We Don’t Mean Heartbreak

photo by mistress_f We’ve been writing about sex for more than ten years, and when we started out, the topic that our female readers wanted to hear about most was orgasms — how to have them, either solo watching toonsex xxx or with a partner, how to have them more often, how to have different […]

Pop Culture
The Wisdom and Wit of Snooki

Somehow in the post-holidays hangover, we missed the fact that Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi — a.k.a. the Jersey Shore star with a pouf — made her debut as a novelist earlier this month, with A Shore Thing. Yep, she’s the one who once admitted she’d only read two books, Twilight and Dear John. (Which might explain […]

Pop Culture
Love & Sex in YA Lit: THE COMPLICATED

Our friends, Em & Nora (who we like to call “Em & No”), recently launched a site for grown-ups about young adult literature called LoveYALit.com*, since (according to the New York Times) more and more people 18-and-over are enjoying books originally intended for the 18-and-under set. Of course, books about teens, the most hormonal among […]

Pop Culture
Love & Sex in YA Lit: THE BAD

Our friends, Em & Nora (who we like to call “Em & No”), recently launched a site for grown-ups about young adult literature called LoveYALit.com*, since (according to the New York Times) more and more people 18-and-over are enjoying books originally intended for the 18-and-under set. Of course, books about teens, the most hormonal among […]

Pop Culture
Sex Books for People You're Not Sleeping With

Books make awesome holiday gifts: They can be mailed directly from Amazon et al if you remember someone at the very last minute; they won’t cause weight gain or allergy attacks; they show more thought and insight than a gift certificate; and they’re easy as anything to wrap (ever try gift-wrapping a cactus plant?). We’d […]

Pop Culture
Love & Sex in YA Lit: THE GOOD

Our friends, Em & Nora (who we like to call “Em & No”), recently launched a site for grown-ups about young adult literature called LoveYALit.com*, since (according to the New York Times) more and more people 18-and-over are enjoying books originally intended for the 18-and-under set. Of course, books about teens, the most hormonal among […]

Pop Culture
Books: How to Become a Scandal

Laura Kipnis is the kind of writer we’d like to be if we weren’t so fond of making poop jokes and cheesy ’80s references (but, hey, there’s still time to grow up, right?). She writes smart books about topics close to our hearts, like love, sex, pornography, and — most recently — scandal. Her new […]

Pop Culture
The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences

One of our biggest pet peeves is our society’s automatic acceptance — the giddy embrace, even — of the theory that men are from Mars and women are from Venus, with nary a space shuttle between them. We’ve written before on the lazy scientists who are suckers for a sexy headline about the “innate” differences […]

Pop Culture
Five Phrases to Memorize If You Want to Fight Less

We’re the first people to say that avoiding fights completely in a relationship is not a realistic — nor a particularly healthy — goal. In fact, studies have found that couples who can fight passionately but civilly tend to have stronger romantic connections, i.e. their relationships don’t turn platonic as quickly. In other words, it’s […]

Pop Culture
Books – Affection: A Memoir About Sex Addiction and Monogamy

Affection: An Erotic Memoir by Krissy Kneen is a story of compulsive sexual exploration, sex addiction — and, ultimately, blissful, married monogamy. Australian author Kneen was raised by a group of protective and eccentric women who forbade any and every expression of sexuality… and we all know where that leads. We chatted to Kneen about […]

Pop Culture
Books: Our Bodies, Our Junk

You wait your whole life for a book making fun of hippie seventies sex manuals and then, boom, two come along in a month — what are the odds? But only one of them includes the top five pastry-related euphemisms for female genitalia, and only one of them includes a suggested list of effective safe […]

Pop Culture
Books: How to Find Good Porn

scene from Five Hot Stories by Erika Lust We’ll admit it: we know very little about porn. In theory we know that there’s better porn out there than the crap our male hallmates used to watch in college with their doors “accidentally” left open. Especially now there are many online websites such as hdpornvideo that […]

Pop Culture
Bad Sex Advice at the Local Car Wash

photo by jcestnik Normally we don’t bother covering books that we think are terrible, but every now and then we can’t resist. There’s a book available for sale at a car wash (seriously) in L.A. called WTF? How to Survive 101 of Life’s Worst F-ing Situations. (That’s the name of the book, not the car […]

Pop Culture
The Sexy Book of Sexy Sex

We’ve been a fan of Kristen Schaal’s since she played super-fan Mel on the awesomely genius show Flight of the Conchords. (If you’ve never seen it, stop reading this post immediately and add it to your Netflix queue. But come back!) She’s now a correspondent on The Daily Show, where her boyfriend Rich Blomquist is […]

Pop Culture
Dating Advice for The Giving Tree's Abusive Relationship

How did we manage to miss this totally awesome quote from Ryan Gosling? In an interview with New York magazine about his upcoming movie BLUE VALENTINE (opening later this year, it’s a portrait of a marriage, co-starring Michelle Williams), he’s asked about his character’s tattoo of Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree on his arm, and […]

Celebrities
Sex Degrees of Separation

We, Em & Lo, worked with and are friends with (and Lo was apt-mates with) Jessica Baumgardner, who married Irad Eyal, which is our connection to the new book “Sex Degrees of Separation.” Irad has just turned his unhealthy obsession with celebrity hook-ups into an exhaustive encyclopedia that combines the idea of “six degrees of […]