sex manuals

This is one of those posts that might skirt very close to becoming Too Much Information, so I will try to stay as far this side of the line as I can. But there’s something that cracked me up that I really want to write about.

I’ve been reading Good Vibrations Complete Guide to Sex because… well heck, it’s a book about sex, that’s a good enough reason, isn’t it? This book bills itself as “the most complete manual on sex ever written.” I’m not exactly an expert on sex manuals, but it seems complete to me, so I guess I can’t dispute that claim. I thought I knew pretty much everything one could know about sex without actually participating in any of the outlandish stuff. Turns out there are some quite useful, non-outlandish things in this book that I was unaware of, so I’m glad I picked it up.

But on to my topic.

There’s a chapter in the book on sexual fantasies, and one of the sections of that chapter is about fantasies about celebrities, where people surveyed wrote down their favorite erotic daydreams about famous figures. This section is really funny, more than anything. Part of them are funny because you can actually picture the celebrity in question doing whatever it is that the person is writing about, and they look really silly doing it. The other part of these fantasies are funny because it’s pretty obvious to me that there’s no way in hell that Gwyneth Paltrow would ever do anything like that.

Most of the fantasies are quite long, wherein people write detailed sentences, paragraphs, potential rough drafts of novels, in which they wax lyrical about what they’d do with and to their favorite movie star or sports figure. One fantasy, though, was short, succinct and intriguing:

“I fantasize about mild S/M with five women, and one of them must be Cher.”

Note: This is not a fantasy that I would ever have (I think of Cher as someone’s mom and S/M is NOT my thing) but it’s intriguing because I am consumed by questions about this, starting with: “one of the must be Cher”? Who are the other four women? Are they other celebrities, or anonymous women? If they’re famous, do they change regularly, with Cher being the only constant? Is Cher in charge? Does she tell the others what to do?

And why is only one of them Cher? If she’s important enough to be mandatory, why not make all five women be Cher? It is a fantasy, after all. You could have late 60’s Cher, 70’s Variety Show Cher, 80’s “Straddling the big cannon” Cher, 90’s “believe in life after love” Cher, and New Millenium Cher. The possibilities are dazzling, really. As are the Bob Mackie outfits.

And then I had some other questions… like: why five women? Why not three or seven? Maybe I lack imagination, but really can’t imagine what you’d be doing that would require five people other than oneself. Surely someone would be standing around bored, wouldn’t they? I know it’s a fantasy and all, but isn’t five a bit greedy and big-headed?

I’m not even going to go into the combination of “mild S/M” and Cher. My brain stubbornly refuses to see it.

I’m guessing this is why they didn’t identify any of the people to whom these fantasies belong; I’d be tracking them down to grill them with questions.