Recommended Sex Coaching Books
The Top 5 Sex Coaching Books we recommend to anyone wanting to more deeply understand themselves as a sexual person are our own Coming Together, Making Love Real and Cockfidence — as well as The Erotic Mind by Jack Morin and Mating in Captivity by Ester Perel (see reviews below). If you read nothing else, read these!
Coming Together
By Danielle Harel, PhD, and Celeste Hirschman, M.A.
Coming Together walks you down the path of finding your unique needs, and through that, enhance your compatibility with your partner. Fast-paced, full of real-life examples, inspiring and educational, this book invites you to discover and accept who you are as a sexual person. Best of all – you get the tools to teach your partner what you want to feel from sex, as well as what you want to do during sex. Take the leap and start your intimate journey to the profound sexual connection you’ve always dreamed of today. Read more
Making Love Real
By Danielle Harel, PhD, and Celeste Hirschman, M.A.
Making Love Real will help you take both your sex life and relationship to the next level. This guide offers a comprehensive view of emotional and sexual relationship dynamics as well as practical tools for lasting transformation. Making Love Real goes beyond hot tips and tricks to help you address your foundational human needs so that you can create a deeply trusting, passionate and sustainable relationship. Read more
Cockfidence
By Celeste Hirschman, M.A. and Danielle Harel, PhD
Whether you are single, dating or in a relationship this book will show you how to attract sexual desire from women and bring them to the heights of their erotic and orgasmic potential. You will find your personal power, clarify who you are and what you want in your life, and have mind-blowing sex and passionate connections with women. Read more.
Books about Female Sexuality
Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sexy Life
By Emily Nagoski, Ph.D
Nagoski offers an in depth look at the social messages as well as the science around women’s sexuality. Nagoski gives women permission and a wealth of information foundational to the exploration of their own sexual desires and physiological responses.
Sex for One: The Joy of Selfloving
By Betty Dodson
Betty Dodson, the godmother of masturbation, was one of the first writers to ever take on this truly taboo topic with such joyful and enthusiastic verve. In Sex for One, she talks about her women’s masturbation circles and all of the power and well-being that can come from it. She teaches techniques on how to become orgasmic through clitoral stimulation and we have incorporated many of her teachings into our coaching practice.
Our Bodies, Ourselves: A New Edition for a New Era
By Boston Women’s Health Book Collective
This feminist treatise on women’s bodies and sexuality is a must for any woman who wants to truly know and love her body. This encyclopedia-like book covers everything from puberty to childbirth, from sexual trauma to sexual healing. We love it!
Female Ejaculation and the G-Spot: Not Your Mother’s Orgasm Book! (Positively Sexual)
By Deborah Sundahl
Of all of the books out there on Female Ejaculation and the G-Spot we feel that this is the most comprehensive and detailed. It not only covers practical topics such as anatomy and technique, it also covers emotional aspects and the benefits that can be gained by getting in touch with your G-Spot.
Women’s Anatomy of Arousal
By Sheri Winston
For a scientifically sound look at women’s sexual arousal and response, look no further. In Women’s Anatomy of Arousal, Sheri Winston untangles the complexity of women’s sexual composition and offers in-depth info and techniques for women to have heightened pleasure and fantastic orgasms.
Embody: Learning to Love Your Unique Body (and quiet that critical voice!)
By Connie Sobczak and Elizabeth Scott
A powerful book with lots of practical tools that offer a healthy approach on how to love your body the way it is now. It offers 5 competencies that can benefit all of us, and the focus on self-love is powerful and profound. While they don’t talk directly about sex, issues around body image often get in the way of sexual satisfaction. Connie and Elizabeth take on our critical voice that tells us we cannot be lovable, attractive, or enjoy ourselves unless we modify our body and offers practical tools to develop self love and body acceptance. From there, pleasure is just around the corner.
Mama Gena’s School of Womanly Arts: Using the Power of Pleasure to Have Your Way with the World (How to Use the Power of Pleasure)
By Regena Thomashauer
As pleasure activists, this is one of our favorite books. Mama Gena reminds all women to get back to their deepest desires, to have fun and play with life again, both for their own satisfaction and because nothing is hotter than a woman who loves pleasure.
Books about Male Sexuality
Cockfidence: The Definitive Guide to Being the Man You Want to Be and Driving Women Wild
By Celeste Hirschman and Danielle Harel
Whether you are single, dating or in a relationship, this book will show you how to attract sexual desire from women and bring them to the heights of their erotic and orgasmic potential. You will find your personal power, clarify who you are and what you want in your life, and have mind-blowing sex and passionate connections with women. Read more.
The New Male Sexuality: The Truth About Men, Sex and Pleasure
By Bernie Zilbergeld
Zilbergeld’s book offers a fresh look at men’s sexuality, helping men understand their sexuality and relationships. He includes exercises that you can do alone and others that require a partner.
Books about the Psychology of Sex and Relationship
Making Love Real: The Intelligent Couple’s Guide to Lasting Intimacy and Passion
By Danielle Harel Ph.D and Celeste Hirschman M.A.
Making Love Real will help you take both your sex life and relationship to the next level. This guide offers a comprehensive view of emotional and sexual relationship dynamics as well as practical tools for lasting transformation. Making Love Real goes beyond hot tips and tricks to help you address your foundational human needs so that you can create a deeply trusting, passionate and sustainable relationship. Read more.
The Erotic Mind: Unlocking the Inner Sources of Passion and Fulfillment
By Jack Morin
Jack Morin presents a pleasure-focused, non-judgmental approach to understanding our deepest turn-ons and fantasies. Morin helps us all to uncover and understand our “core erotic theme”, one of the surest pathways we have found to deeply knowing exactly what you are looking for from sex and intimacy, from there you can learn how to communicate about it and share it with a partner or partners.
The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity
By Esther Perel
Finally, a book on affairs that deals with them in an adult manner. In the State of Affairs Esther Perel points out that affairs have always been a part of the social fabric. However, they are such a charged issue, we never take the time to look under the surface of condemnation to see the human complexity of why people have affairs and how people feel who have been betrayed. She also gives many suggestions for how to face them, heal from them, and, sometimes even have stronger relationships as a result.
The Course of Love
By Alain de Botton
Alain de Botton shares the story of a couple who take the journey from idealized romanticism and the hope of perfect fulfillment to the realities of love in long-term marriage. His writing is an amazing combination of a fictional story and a teaching manual. Read it closely and you will learn how to empathize across differences, share and listen to feelings, and understand the inner workings of the erotic mind.
Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence
By Esther Perel
Perel talks about the inherent tension in long-term relationships between domesticity and passion. While commitment, trust, closeness and excellent communication are the foundations of sharing a life, home, and children with another, passion needs distance, barriers, a synapse over which to jump in order for relationships to stay hot and exciting.
Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love
By Sue Johnson
In Hold Me Tight, Sue Johnson offers couples a new way to see the negative patterns that are replayed over and over again in relationships and how they are related to our feelings of attachment. She presents the key tools of her highly effective Emotionally Focused Therapy techniques for you to practice at home.
Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life
By Marshall B. Rosenberg
If you want to make your relationship better overnight, begin using the communication techniques offered in this book. When you learn how to really listen to each other, to take responsibility for your feelings and needs and for communicating them and when you learn to truly empathize with your partner, everything becomes easier!
Your Brain on Sex: How Smarter Sex Can Change Your Life
by Stanley Siegel
Siegal draws on a history of understanding how our brain works sexually to help individuals and couples understand themselves and each other sexually. The book takes you through a process he calls “Intelligent Lust” and helps you clarify, communicate and evaluate compatibility around your sexual desires.
Books about Sexual Technique
The Multi-Orgasmic Couple: Sexual Secrets Every Couple Should Know
By Mantak Chia
The Multi-Orgasmic Couple summarizes and synthesizes much of the information in the Multi-Orgasmic Man and Multi-Orgasmic Woman. While the focus on Eastern spiritual teachings may make this less accessible to the general reader, the information contained in it may be helpful to men and women who want to learn the art of multi-orgasm.
Guide to Getting It On, 5th Edition
By Paul Joannides
If you are looking for a fun, hip, and detailed guide to pleasure for men, women and couples, look no further. The Guide to Getting it On has it all. It is a must-have for every household who is interested in keeping their sex life hot.
Anal Pleasure & Health: A Guide for Men and Women
By Jack Morin
A list of resources would never be complete without a book on the joys of anal pleasure. The anus has long been a source of shame, but has so much potential as a place of pleasure and relaxation. Morin takes a straightforward and thorough look at this important topic. “
The Ultimate Guide to Prostate Pleasure: Erotic Exploration for Men and Their Partners
By Charlie Glickman and Aislinn Emirzian
Everything you ever wanted to know about anal play and prostate pleasure for men in a very concise and lovingly-written guide. We know Charlie and Aislinn personally and know we would never want your butt to be in anyone else’s hands!
Books about Open Relationship
The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships & Other Adventures
By Dossie Easton
The Ethical Slut is the groundbreaking manifesto for all those interested in non-traditional sexual relationships. In a slut-shaming world, these powerful women buck the system of sexual repression and reclaim and revision the word “slut” to represent a new sexual world full of positivity, freedom and self-realization.
Opening Up: A Guide To Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships
By Tristan Taormino
For couples considering some form of non-monogamous relationship, Tristan Taramino has put together a very practical, straightforward guide on styles of non-monogamy, as well as ideas about how you negotiate your relationship needs, desires and boundaries.
Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships
By Christopher Ryan
Have you ever wondered if humans were meant to be monogamous? In this fascinating read, Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha make a research-based case for how our prehistoric beginnings set us up to live a more non-monogamous life. If you are interested in exploring different relationship styles this book is for you.
Books about Trauma, Addiction and Shame
Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story
By Mac McClelland
For a highly illuminating look at one women’s embodied journey of healing from trauma, check out Irritable Hearts. Journalist Mac McClelland uses her sharp, investigative eye to take a look at her own experience of debilitation, love and recovery. This book also does a great job of showing how trauma, sexual or otherwise, can have tremendously negative effects of people’s sexual desire and expression.
The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
By Bessel van der Kolk M.D
In The Body Keeps the Score van der Kolk offers an important window into the embodied experience of trauma, offering us empathy and a deeper understanding of trauma’s devastating effects. As an insider in the world of psychiatry, he challenges medicalized and cognitive approaches to trauma treatment and offers an important guide to those treatments that help traumatized clients reconnect with freedom and safety in their bodies.
Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma
By Peter A. Levine
While animals generally have the ability to shake out their experiences of trauma and return to their lives largely unscathed, humans who do not directly address their trauma may hold it in their body throughout their lives In Waking the Tiger, Levine catalogues shows how held trauma can negatively impact people’s lives and shares his somatically-based approaches to help people release it from the body.
In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
By Gabor Mate
Gabor Mate offers a revolutionary way of understanding and approaching addiction that gets right to the heart of the matter – the heart. He convincingly shows us how a lack of loving connection and attachment combined with trauma and abuse lead to addiction and that simply abstaining does not heal the deeper wounds at play. A brilliant, holistic and phenomenally well-written treatise that shows us why the war on drugs is such an enormous failure and why only a compassionate approach will ever address the personal and societal problem of addiction.
I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn’t): Making the Journey from “What Will People Think?” to “I Am Enough”
By Brené Brown
Shame is a powerful yet hidden force in our society and we all experience shame much more often than we think we do. The feeling of shame creates isolation and disconnection and makes us feel small and undeserving. It also restricts our sense of freedom and makes us question our inherent goodness. This is a great read to understand shame and Brene Brown explains how we can all develop shame-resilience. While her research was done on women, this book applies to all.
Men, Women and Worthiness: The Experience of Shame and the Power of Being Enough
By Brené Brown
With continued bravery and tenacity, Brene Brown takes us on another journey to help us face one of our most challenging human emotions, Shame. She helps us understand the difference in the ways that shame arises for men and women, and helps us learn the 4 steps to shame resilience so we can move beyond shame’s crippling repression to a more joyful, expressive and pleasurable life.
Unwinding the Belly: Healing with Gentle Touch
By Allison Post
This book reminds us that “All healing is self-healing”. Post offers a simple, self-directed way of approaching the healing our bellies which includes breath and hands-on practices. It is a wonderful guide to self-health, and holds many similarities to the ways that we approach healing and expansion around sexuality.
* As an Amazon Associates we earn from qualifying purchases