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The 'meat' of this book is the detailed accounts of their sex life by
four women selected from a group of volunteers, called 'The Morethan-Average Housewife, The Married Lesbian, The Doctor's Wife, and The Sexual Sophisticate'. Aside from the authors' distorted view of sex, there is some question in this reader's mind if these four women represent a cross-section of the women of America, what with one being a Lesbian who hates men, and another a nymphomaniac.
In a section on Psychoanalysis and Woman's Sex Response, psychoanalysis is taken to task for its 'unrealistic expectations' regarding vaginal orgasm as a prerequisite for a 'psychosexually fully mature female'—a view that could be discussed on an objective level, but which the authors pursue on a personal level. They state: 'The only women who might qualify [as psychosexually fully mature females], we would have thought would probably be the wives of the analysts themselves'. Therefore, they selected as one of the four women whose descriptions of their sex life comprises the bulk of the book (one hundred sixty pages out of two hundred thirty-seven), the wife of a psychoanalyst.
What are we to think of a book addressed to the lay reader that leaves him with the impression that cunnilingus is the one practice giving the most pleasure to women, a book that allows the reader the thought that cunnilingus performed by a woman on a woman is preferable to the practice performed between man and woman, and a book that states in the chapter on Lesbian Love: 'We (also) are inclined to think that exclusive (Lesbian or male) homosexuality constitutes an unnecessary and possibly unhealthy limitation. However, by the same reasoning, might one not have to apply the same standard to an exclusively heterosexual orientation?' (pp. 223-224). Or what are we to think of a book whose authors, referring to Kinsey, write in the chapter on Women and Premarital Sex: '… most of the women by far who have tasted of the forbidden frui