Normal Gets You Nowhere by Kelly Cutrone (ereader for android .txt) 📕

sex life. You might as well cop to it, find someone to share it with, and get it started.

As long as were on the subject of the Kama Sutra, well here’s the Kella-Sutra: A Guide to Stabbing Sexual Taboos.

1. If you don’t know yourself and what you want, then you have no business being in bed with someone else. Shakespeare said, “To thine own self be true.” If you aren’t ready for it, don’t do it. Learn to speak up for yourself no matter who you’re with or how old you are.

2. Do not be in places where you don’t want to be, especially in states of intoxication.

3. The whole wait-two-days-before-you-call thing is a bunch of bullshit. Waiting in general is stupid; you have to be willing to reveal yourself, be vulnerable, and go for it, especially when the energy is there. They say that love is blind—this is true. Take advantage of that blindness, get on your cosmic rocket and fly into the violet outer space of your love! If there were really something to figure out, someone would have written a book called The Rules, and it would have worked. Love and relationships are as different as the two people who come together; each forms a combination the universe has never seen before. I’m not down with books like He’s Just Not That into You, which teach chicks how to score a guy. Trust me, if a guy wants to put his dick in you, he will. There is nothing to figure out here!

4. If it’s happening at the zoo, it could or should be happening for you. We can learn a lot about natural sexual behaviors by looking at our friends in the animal kingdom. Up to 75 percent of bonobos’ sexual behavior is nonreproductive (these are the power girls of the animal kingdom). Male sea horses, long upheld as monogamous pillars of ocean society and thought to mate for life, were found in 2007 to be promiscuous, flighty, and more than a little bit gay (they also give birth to the babies). Two male lions have been observed fucking each other. Dolphins are known to pleasure themselves by rubbing against the ocean floor. To me, this says that things like homosexuality and masturbation are totally natural.

5. Do not pretend things are happening for you if they are not. Women are big orgasm fakers. I would venture a guess that 95 percent of the women reading this book don’t even have real orgasms! We’re programmed to tell a guy we’re getting off even if we’re not. You need to figure out your own body. If your hand didn’t work, you’d go to a doctor for help in making it work, right? Well, your sexual health is no different. Experiment with vibrators and eroticism. Make appointments with yourself, so that you can start to get to know your body, since it’s complicated. Seek out information from varied and trusted sources.

If you love someone enough, you can occasionally choose to offer up a shag without getting any result for yourself, but I don’t recommend this as a ritual occurrence. The one thing you can’t do is lie. You can’t tell a guy he rocked you out or fake an orgasm to make him feel good. We don’t tell people who can’t carry a tune that they’re great singers, so why would we encourage bad habits and abilities in bed? The good news, I can report, is that your body awakens even more after you have a baby; after I had Ava, I felt like a pinball machine that had only just been turned on. (But don’t forget to ask for some extra stitches on your way out of the hospital to tighten your vagina and make future sex more pleasurable. Yeah, that’s right, your mom’s probably not going to tell you that either.)

6. Take no prisoners; and if you do, make sure you untie them in the morning, so they can go to work and make money. (And vice versa. I mean, let’s face it; there’s nothing worse than having to call in with the truth: “I’m late today because I’m all tied up here at home!”)

7. Lovemaking does not always have to involve a penis and a vagina (or two penises or two vaginas). Perhaps it means you rub my feet for two hours, and we feed each other. A four-hour lovemaking session isn’t necessarily what I want when I’ve worked around the clock in three cities all week. Learn to be sensual, not just sexual. It’s said that Mary Magdalene washed Jesus’s feet with her hair. Imagine waking up and loving a man so much that you literally express your love and adoration by patiently braiding his hair in floral essences. Alternatively, you could try wearing matching pajamas and eating Orville Redenbacher popcorn on the couch under a blanket while you watch your favorite TV show. These types of offerings can be beautiful and should be booked in your love calendar. (Yes, I believe we need to book our sex rituals with each other the same way we book meetings.)

Bathing, combing each other’s hair, reading favorite childhood stories to each other—there are plenty of ways to be sexy. A lot of married people I know don’t even know about tantra, a practice in which the male doesn’t come, because he wants to hold the sexual energy in his body rather than let it flow out of him. (Translation: if you’re involved in a tantric relationship, you’ll have sex for at least ten hours, but in those ten hours you might stop to have some sherbet or check your e-mail. This is a proper day of lovemaking.)

8. If you’re not getting fucked by midnight, go home. Recently, one of my friends was in Paris producing fashion shows when she met a famous French deejay. Apparently they really hit it off, because he told her he’d be coming to New York in a few weeks and asked if he