Book Review: The Erotic Mind

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It is much better than you’d expect from the Men Are From Mars guy’s approval.

I don’t know if The Erotic Mind describes sexuality in a way that makes sense for most people. It sure as hell describes me though, and I hope it’ll describe enough other people to be worth a summary.

Dr. Jack Morin was a sex therapist from San Francisco.¹ He noticed that a lot of people studied bad sex, but no one studied sex that was phenomenally good. So he spent a couple of years talking to anyone who would sit still long enough and trying to get them to fill out a survey where they described their peak sexual experiences and favorite sexual fantasies. This data is not exactly great, because it consists entirely of people who want to describe their sex lives in detail to a sex therapist in San Francisco; in fact, a lot of this sample was current and trainee sex therapists. They’re a weird sample. But we don’t ever have non-weird data in sexology, so we endure. At least they aren’t sex offenders.

People have sexual scripts. There are cultural scripts: heterosexual sex begins with flirtation, continues to kissing, then caressing and undressing, maybe some oral sex, and then PIV until the man orgasms and both partners cuddle. There are interpersonal scripts: maybe your partner always kisses your neck in a specific way, or you tend to signal that you want sex by giving them a shoulder rub. And there are personal scripts: the way that sex works inside of an individual’s head.

A key part of personal scripts is your core erotic themes. This is the thread that connects all of your turnons. Maybe you like the feeling of being exposed and vulnerable, or the thought of bringing the unrestrained animal out of a shy reserved person, or being forced into sex so it isn’t your fault, or a wild and free and passionate partner who frees you from your inhibitions, or winning over someone who was originally ambivalent about you. Most people only have one core erotic theme, but some people have more than one.

Every core erotic theme is as unique as a thumbprint. But there are common threads that recur again and again in people’s core erotic themes, peak encounters, and sexual fantasies: