Men's Health Has Really Awful Sex Advice

“Sex Tips to Outperform Her Vibrator?” Seriously?

Jan 28, 2013 at 5:30pm | Leave a comment


Now, we all know that Cosmopolitan has notoriously terrible sex advice, but it would be sexist to assume that that’s exclusive to women’s magazines. Not when we’ve got Men’s Health. My favorite so far is an article called, I swear to god, “Sex Tips to Outperform Her Vibrator.

This is confusing to me on several levels.

I mean, who thinks that a woman’s vibrator and her boyfriend are doing the same job, and thus in competition with each other? I mean, yes, both involve orgasms, but nobody talks about a woman being in competition with a guy’s own hand. (If anyone does talk about that, please don’t tell me. I’m happier not knowing.) Vibrators are for masturbation, and boyfriends are for sex, with the moving and the hands and the human connection and the kissing and so on. Relax, dude, you are better at kissing than her vibrator. Or, if you’re not, you’re past the point where a magazine article is going to help you.

The larger problem is that, if you actually follow this advice, the vibrator’s going to start looking more like marriage material by comparison.

Their first piece of advice is that it’s nice to manually stimulate a woman’s G-spot, a piece of insight on par with “When flying an airplane, it’s best to remain above sea level” but in and of itself harmless. Except that their advice is “Use your thumb to press on her G-spot, as if you were making a thumbprint on her vaginal wall.”

After pondering it for a while, I worked out that if a woman is lying on her side, and you’re slightly behind her at waist level, and if she raises one leg straight up, then you might be able to get your thumbprint on her G-spot, but at this point I’m wondering who installed biometric security in her pussy in the first place, never mind why they configured it so badly.

Their second suggestion is confusingly phrased. Titled “Hold your tongue,” it sounds a bit like they’re saying you should lay your tongue flat on her general bikini zone and just hold it motionless, like getting an uncomfortably long hug from a manta ray. Except it also sounds a bit like they’re saying you should push your tongue into her pussy and then hold that absolutely still, which sounds like a confused fifth-grader explaining to a classmate how lesbians work.

The fact that those are the two possibilities suggests that it’s not worth figuring out which.

Their third suggestion just amazes me: “During missionary-position sex, hold her legs close together instead of spreading them apart.” Their sex expert suggests that this makes it easier for her to come, which makes me wonder what kind of sex expert has only ever done it with one person.

In my world, the extremely wide range of orgasmic response patterns is part of what makes sleeping with women so fun, but I guess there’s no variation where their guy comes from, maybe? Not to mention that how close together her legs are during missionary is going to be controlled not so much by magazine advice as by how far apart they have to be to get you between them. Or does missionary mean something else that I haven’t heard about?

Their fourth suggestion for outperforming her vibrator is to use a vibrator, which suggests that this article is so dumb the person writing it actually gave up three-fifths of the way through. I wonder how we could test that theory? Well, we could look at the fifth tip.

5. Or just leave her alone.Embrace a lady’s love of toys; they can improve your shared sex life.

…you know, I think I like this article now. I mean, it’s still stupid as hell, but now I sympathize with it. Some poor staffer got stuck with writing an article about five ways to outperform her vibrator, and he fought back ennui and disappointment long enough to get through three tips with the help of whatever oracular mummified head they’re billing as a sex expert.

Then, after three, he just ran out. He stared numbly at the blinking cursor as the head shrieked glossolalia into its Victorian bell jar, and he realized that all he had left to say was No.

“No,” he wrote, “I will not come up with two more ways for our imaginary ideal reader to outperform his imaginary girlfriend’s imaginary vibrator. I reject the entire stupid premise of this article, I reject its false dichotomies and chimeric competition, I reject its hideously reductionist view of both male and female sexuality. Most of all, I reject the idea that I can be compelled to write it. I am a human being, a living creature with dreams and imagination, and not even the blind idiot god of late-stage capitalism can force me to finish two more goddamn tips about outperforming a fucking vibrator, as though that’s a thing anyone has thought about ever. You want two more tips? Here’s two goddamn tips. Use a vibrator if you both want to, or she can use one herself if she feels like it. There, five fucking sex tips. I quit.”

That, at any rate, is what I take to be the subtext.

 Reprinted with permission from The Good Men Project. Want more?

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