The Lovers' Guide: Essential Collection

"The Lovers' Guide" series seems like a public service, offering frank, fact-based advice for loving couples on how to establish and maintain healthy sex lives, unhindered by restrictive ideologies or mental hang-ups, complete with explicit demonstrations of sexual techniques performed by the sort of attractive men and women—varied in age, ethnicity, and body type—who one might meet in daily life, rather than by porn-star look-alikes. The productions overall are as handsome and sincere as the performers and too purposeful and straightforward to be mistaken for porn or erotica by anyone but incurable prudes. The topics include sexual anatomy, gender-specific self- and mutual pleasuring, the universe of positions, and the emotional needs that successful lovemaking addresses.The Original Collection has the five programs that made The Lovers' Guide a best-selling groundbreaker in the UK in the 1990s, but their dated aesthetics and sappy music help make them interminable. The Essential Collection features much the same information but in an updated, more visually appealing style. On most of the discs, the sex-technique demos are performed on stripped-down sets, allowing for a sharper focus on the techniques themselves and eschewing the pretense to candor and intimacy found in The Original Collection. Note that the programs are designed for committed partners who are aware of each other's health conditions and sexual histories, that most of the techniques are performed without contraceptive devices, and that, shockingly, neither collection examines the relative risk of the transmission of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) from the activities on display.