Sage Vivant

“To be honest? This type of advice, had I been exposed to the concept a long time ago, would have saved me a heck of a lot of grief. Not just in my hellish sexual relationships with others, but in my sexual understanding of myself.”

Your Erotic Personality: Identifying and Understanding Your Sexual Self

By Sage Vivant

Berkley Books

ISBN: 978-0-425-21434-3

US: $12.00 

April 2007

A tag line on the back cover of Your Erotic Personality best sums up this new sexual self-help book from Sage Vivant:

     Make someone happy, even if it’s just yourself!

As the founder of both the Erotic Book Society in the late 90s and the Erotic Authors Association in 2000, and even as the manager of the late Ralph Ginzburg’s Erotic Art Book Society back in the early 1980s, I can readily attest to the large number of sexual self-help books that have been published in English over the years. After books like the groundbreaking Joy of Sex and Everything You’ve Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), had permeated our culture in the late 60s and early 70s, it was hard to find anything new that dealt with a broad, generalized view of sex, as opposed to a specific fetish or sexual preference, that even came close to matching the thoroughness and originality of those two books.

Of course, with a sexual self-help manual, timing is key. At what point are you within your own sexual development when you encounter a given book? In 1973, at age 13, I bought and read the Joy of Sex. And the word” read” is an understatement. I knew next to nothing about sex at that point in my life and wanted to know everything about it ASAP. I pored over that book in my bedroom for hours with the door closed. I was utterly fascinated by it and even a little overwhelmed by it, since it was fully illustrated and it was my first exposure to what intercourse looked like. So much of that book is burned into my memory, that I can still recall it clearly all these decades later -- and more importantly, it served me well when I embarked on a lifetime of joyful and sometimes not so joyful sex. (And that rather harrowing bit of advice that girls should refrain from inserting bobby pins in their urethras? That has come in especially handy. Never, not once have I been tempted to make that grisly error.)

However, that book, and so many others that came after it, focused on the specific acts of men and women having sex. What sets Sage Vivant’s book apart is that it focuses more on the psychology of sex and the eroticism of it: what type of erotic personality are you? What type of behavior appeals to you most? If you can pin that down (and most of us, as Sage points out, will be a combination of types -- I’m a combination of ‘The Bottom’ and ‘The Student’ with perhaps a dash of ‘The Watcher’ thrown in), then you can practically jump start your way to more satisfying sexual experiences, and better target sexual partners who will share, enhance, or compliment your erotic interests.

To be honest? This type of advice, had I been exposed to the concept a long time ago, would have saved me a heck of a lot of grief. Not just in my hellish sexual relationships with others in my early days, but in my sexual understanding of myself. (Try being a Bottom/Student/Watcher attemping to have sex with someone who relates to nothing about these types and see if you don’t also come away from the experience feeling a little like a freak!)

Obviously, there is so much more to sex than the acts we perform. For the last eight years, Sage Vivant has been at the helm of Custom Erotica Source, an enterprise that specializes in creating stories tailored to the very specific erotic tastes of its clients. In those eight years, Sage has learned a lot about the nuances of erotic personalities and what types of adventures or encounters a specific personality will most likely appreciate. She has taken this accumulated knowledge and presented it in a non-judgmental, open-minded, and upbeat book, in an effort to help people forge more suitable sexual experiences for themselves.She includes a detailed quiz to help you pinpoint your type(s), then she explains your type in detail, why it’s okay to be the way you are, and why certain types, over others, will likely prove to be better matches for you erotically. ( I don’t know about you, gentle reader, but for me, when sex is erotic as hell and not simply a series of mechanical actions and reactions, it beats everything else on earth.)

Your Erotic Personality is a very handy, well-written book that I recommend reading if you are at all dissatisfied with, confused by, or repeatedly unfulfilled by your sexual relationships, no matter how long you’ve already been at it.

© 2007 marilynjayelewis.com