Sex 101: Schools offer couples lessons in love

Brian Alexander • E-mail

I don’t know about you, but my college course descriptions did not include Advanced Hand Job and Genital Play, The Art of Feminine Dominance, or Sex Toys 101.

But these are the names of some of the courses offered by “sex schools” — workshops, seminars and private coaching — that teach sex techniques. Think of them as your high-school driver’s ed course except with different hand motions.

The idea that you have to go to school to learn how to do what human beings have been doing for 4 million years or so might seem strange. I mean, there are a lot of people on the planet so clearly we’ve figured out the basics. But we live in an era of enormous sexual anxiety.

I am not referring to moral outrage, sexually transmitted diseases, or gossip about the sex lives of politicians and pop-culture disposables like Paris Hilton. I am referring to the anxiety we so often feel about how everyone else seems to know more about sex than we do, is having far hotter sex and having it more often.

So, in our self-improvement society, the natural thing to do is to sign up for a class — and we are increasingly willing to pay for lessons. After all, how else are the average Joe and Jane going to learn the fine art of “cock-and-ball play"?

“Our demographic is all over the map,” says Ellen Barnard, president and manager of A Woman’s Touch, a sex-toy store and educational facility in Madison, Wis. The people who attend classes there, she says, “are distinctly middle-aged, heterosexual couples. They are in long-term relationships and want to keep them alive. They want their sex lives to be fun and interesting and they are not willing to just have them fade away.”

No euphemisms allowed
And so they come for explicit how-to's. No euphemisms allowed. “We are very concrete,” Barnard says.

Classes in such schools typically begin by talking about the basics. Anatomically correct and lifelike models are used. There is discussion of what the various parts do. Teachers then might show a video to demonstrate what the action looks like in real life. For instance, Barnard uses a video called “Bend Over Boyfriend” to demonstrate anal-sex techniques to women who wish to use a “strap on” for their male lovers.

Toronto’s Laila McDaniels takes this concept one step further. In her classes, for, say, “couples erotic massage,” several couples will gather in one room. McDaniels talks them through techniques and may demonstrate on her fully-clothed self.

“Then I put each couple together in a curtained room and they can undress and practice. If they feel they need additional coaching, I am invited in and I will coach them ... The goal is to create a safe environment where they can explore sexuality without judgment.”

If being naked in a room with your wife and a sex version of Pat Riley doesn’t sound all that erotic, that’s fine with McDaniels. “Keep in mind that people are not here to have sex. The goal is not titillation, not to get somebody erect. If he does, that’s fine but his lover is not here to finish him off. You need to take that home.”

Despite that warning, she acknowledges that the sexual tension can become thick. “I did a class on foreplay a couple of years ago and after the end of class, I was walking to my car and saw a couple in theirs. The windows were all fogged up.”

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