Kansas in Heat: No more bad advice

Thursday, August 20, 2009

The opinions of this columnist do not necessarily reflect the views of Jayplay. Kansas in Heat is not to be considered as a substitute for professional help.

When it comes to sex and relationships, there’s a lot of bad advice out there.

“It is often the blind leading the blind,” sexual expert Michael Castleman once wrote.

Popular relationship books such as How to Succeed with Women, among others, are often filled with half-truths, vague language, over generalizations and flat-out bad advice.

For example, authors Ron Louis and David Copeland write in their aforementioned book, “Men that worry about hurting women don’t have the sense of freedom or the confidence they need to be successful with women … you will be happier and get more sex if you concentrate more on how you are like other men than on how you are different.”

Not exactly advice for the enlightened age.

Popular magazines tailored to sexual issues, such as GQ and Cosmopolitan, are unfortunately filled with a lot of the same, leading to an over-abundance of bad advice. For a lot of people, the local bookstore self-help section, chock full of these kinds of books and magazines, is where they get their information. One of the studies I have done asked people where they get their information on sex and relationships. I discovered that people turn to either this type of relationship literature, pornography or their closest friends and relatives. Unfortunately, pornography often depicts poor sexual habits and our friends and relatives are often relying upon the same misinformation and myths from a lot of popular literature.

You might be reading this and think that I don’t believe anyone to be good at sexual relationships or anyone to be any good at giving advice. I don’t think that at all. I believe there are a lot of people out there who have strong romantic relationships and are extremely sexually satisfied. But still, there are a lot of people who aren’t. The purpose of this column will be to help both of these types of people. My goal is to help everyone reading this article to have healthier romantic relationships and to have the best sex of their lives by giving the best advice I know of through my experience as a relationship researcher (and an avid reader).

I’ll aim to dispel myths from popular literature and bring in the best ideas from not only good relationship and sex books, but also academic research from the areas of psychology, sociology and communication studies.

I’ve read everything from pick-up books such as The Game and the Mystery Method, to scholarly research such as The Journal of Sexual Research and the archives of Sexual Behavior. I’m that guy you see at Borders sitting down in the self-help section reading books about sex. And what I’ve learned from all of these readings and from the research studies that I’ve conducted is this: Relationships might be as individual as snowflakes, but like snowflakes, all share similar properties. Relationships have similar patterns of development, problem areas and breakdowns in communication.

Each week I plan to tackle new and old relational and sexual issues such as relational dialectics, small talk, total body sensuality, kegels and g-spots. Each time I hope to give you a piece of advice that will either help initiate a relationship, enhance a relationship or maintain a relationship.

But to better help you, I want to know what you would like to know. If you have a question about sex and/or romantic relationships, please e-mail me at kansasinheat@yahoo.com.

I look forward to helping you heat up your love lives.

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