In a letter to the noted writer and psychoanalyst Princess Marie Bonaparte in 1925, Sigmund Freud said, “The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’”

Freud’s rhetorical question was as much an enigma to the princess, who spent a good portion of her adult life on a quest for an orgasm, even undergoing clitoral surgery to move her clitoris closer to her vagina in a failed attempt to cure her own inability to have them.

They both should have had this book!

Kenneth Play has crafted an eminently readable, engaging, and masterful course of sexual exploration for both men and women in a book that is as much about women’s sexual discovery as it is about men’s nuanced understanding of sexual technique, attitude, part- nership, and - near and dear to my heart - complementary sexual anatomy and neurophysiology. Kenneth relates his personal experiences as a young, cis-gendered, heterosexual male overcoming low sexual self-esteem and his physical and spiritual growth as a bodybuilder and personal trainer who then discovered an under- ground sex-positive subculture. And Kenneth did what so many do not: he wisely threw away the typical sexual scripts that encumber heterosexual men into thinking that sex begins and ends with an erect penis, that bigger is better, that all women are the same but impossible to understand, and that porn is somehow real and “optimal.” He discovered that, as he mastered his own sexual abilities and techniques in a manner much like martial arts training, he was more and more able to give women erotic sensory experiences that were transformational, perhaps as much for him as they were for the women. He realized that great sex doesn’t come from a huge penis alone, but rather stems from the ebb and flow of erotic feelings between partners, reactions to reactions, and from discovering his partners’ unique sexual landscapes, fertile ground for play and flow, and for the discovery of new abilities and sensations. In his ten thousand hours with over one thousand partners, Kenneth has become a sexual virtuoso.

As a sex researcher and behavioral neuroscientist, I have observed young rats at play - honing each separate movement that their brains will eventually string together as sexual behavior in a sophisticated dance of synchrony with sex partners. I have studied how female rats initiate and pace their sexual interactions with males, controlling the males to provide the kind of clitoral and vaginocervical stimulation they want when they want it. I have studied how male rats respect female desire and adjust their own sexual behaviors to suit the desires of the particular female they are with. In rats and other animal species this is natural. But in humans, culture has constrained our natural sexual desires and responses into proscribed “norms” that fit almost no one. We ask how many times a week we have sex, not how many times a week we enjoy it.

Kenneth seeks to make sex play an art that you can learn and practice and transform into any kind of experience you wish, from a simple song to a symphony. And he relates the science of sex - from genitals and autonomic function to nerves and brain and back again - in a way that is elegantly simple, accurate, and informative. This book will teach you about real sexual arousal and desire, and the exquisite forms of sexual pleasure and orgasm that you can give and take and experience to the fullest in every cubic millimeter of your erotic body and soul. This is your guide to a great sexual awakening.