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Holy Sex!: A Catholic Guide to Toe-Curling, Mind-Blowing, Infallible Loving Paperback – April 1, 2008
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Common wisdom portrays sex and church to be at odds, yet studies show that Catholics have better sex, and more often. This witty, frank, and refreshingly orthodox book draws from the beautiful truths of Catholic teaching to show people of all faiths about rich and satisfying sexuality. Hailed by Christians across the spectrum from Christopher West and Janet E. Smith to John L. Allen, Jr., Holy Sex! includes dozens of questionnaires, quizzes, and valuable lessons from real-life stories.
- Print length352 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPublishDrive
- Publication dateApril 1, 2008
- Dimensions6 x 0.88 x 9 inches
- ISBN-100824524713
- ISBN-13978-0824524715
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"Some books are worth reading because they make an important point, others for the sheer delight of the writing. Greg Popcak's Holy Sex! is both. Wherever one stands on the fine points of Catholic teaching about sex, Popcak reveals its deeply sensual core, debunking popular stereotypes of Catholicism as somehow anti-erotic. Think of this book as Thomas Aquinas meets Dr. Ruth, and enjoy!"
- John L. Allen Jr., Senior Correspondent for National Catholic Reporter "Looking at contemporary popular culture, one finds that sex is overrated and undervalued. Greg Popcak helps to set things straight on both counts. He explains with intelligence and humor what some have learned only through painful experience, and many have still not learned--namely, that the joy of sex is not to be found in `liberation' from moral principles, but in its unique power to unite a man and woman as faithful partners in the love-building and life-giving union that marriage is."
- Robert P. George, Professor, Princeton University
"Dynamic, faithful, funny, and informative, [Popcak] demonstrates how the Truth will set you free. Combining practical wisdom with the wisdom of the ages, Popcak leads men and women to the love they long for."
- Christopher West, Fellow, Theology of the Body Institute
"It is no surprise to see Dr. Popcak treat marital sex as a truly joyful thing. And why not? He clearly points out, God designed man and woman to communicate his love in their spiritual and physical union. If married couples could actually experience their love-making as an expression of God's creative, joyous, and renewing love, wow!"
- Most Rev. R. Daniel Conlon, Bishop of Steubenville
"Clearly, Dr. Popcak is a chaste, faithful, learned Catholic man with mountains of experience working with couples. I am confident that spouses who follow his advice will become holier and better partners. Those who are holier are certainly better lovers and thanks to Holy Sex! we now know the many ways this is true."
- Janet E. Smith, Father Michael J. McGivney Chair of Life Ethics Sacred Heart Major Seminary
"In the last four decades, too many Americans have been led astray by self-styled experts promising sexual liberation and happiness, only to end up with broken hearts and broken bodies. By combining theological insight and psychological wisdom, Dr. Gregory Popcak offers a different path to men and women looking for a way to find happiness and virtue in their sexual lives... [Holy Sex! is a] powerful guide for navigating the joys and sorrows of sex."
- W. Bradford Wilcox, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Virginia
"Popcak does a great service by practically developing the last chapter of Karol Wojtyla's (John Paul II) Love and Responsibility. Marriage is work... an invaluable resource for all married and engaged couples."
- Pia de Solenni, Feminist Theologian, Winner: Pontifical Prize of the Academies
"Greg Popcak is a wise and funny guy. He combines the ancient wisdom of the Faith with the best that contemporary science and compassionate human understanding have to offer in warm, generous, and practical insights that have already been invaluable to thousands."
- Mark P. Shea, Senior Content Editor, CatholicExchange.com
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Holy Sex!
A Catholic Guide to Toe-Curling, Mind-Blowing, Infallible Loving
By Gregory K. PopcakThe Crossroad Publishing Company
Copyright © 2008 Gregory K. Popcak, Ph.D.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8245-2471-5
Contents
PART ONE CHRISTIANITY'S BEST-KEPT SECRET,1. Sex, Lies, and the Real Thing,
2. Fool's Gold: Holy Sex or Eroticism,
3. What Are Infallible Lovers Made Of?,
4. Climbing Higher: The Sexuality Continuum,
PART TWO THE FIVE GREAT POWERS OF HOLY SEX,
5. Sex Makes Us Holy,
6. Sex Is Sacramental,
7. Sex Is a Sign of God's Love,
8. Sex Unites,
9. Sex Creates,
PART THREE THE SCHOOL OF LOVE,
10. Questions about Natural Family Planning (NFP),
11. The Infallible Lover's Guide to Pleasure,
12. The Anatomy of Infallible Loving: Setting the Stage,
13. The Anatomy of Infallible Loving: The Good Stuff,
PART FOUR OVERCOMING COMMON PROBLEMS,
14. Is There Sex after Kids?,
15. When NFP Is Too Hard,
16. You've Lost That Loving Feeling,
17. Common Sexual Problems for Women,
18. Common Sexual Problems for Men,
19. Overcoming Infertility,
20. Infidelity,
21. Masturbation and Pornography,
22. When to Seek Help (and from Whom),
23. Holy Sex Is Your Inheritance,
CHAPTER 1
SEX, LIES, AND THE REAL THING
God who created man out of love also calls him to love — the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being. For man is created in the image and likeness of God who is himself love. Since God created him man and woman, their mutual love becomes an image of the absolute and unfailing love with which God loves man. It is good, very good, in the Creator's eyes.
— Catechism of the Catholic Church no. 1604; emphasis added
Walk into any bookstore and you'll find its shelves are positively pregnant with books about sex. Thanks to texts on tantric sex, karmic sex, kosher sex, sex for one, sex for several, and sexy sex for sex's sake, our culture has advanced to the point where you can do it on a plane, you can do it on a train, you can do it here, or there. Yes, my friends, you can do it anywhere — with confidence, impunity, and even, if you are so inclined, with malice aforethought.
But in the midst of the sea of information about sex, the unanswered question is "Can you do it ...as a Christian?" To which the cynic responds, "Of course not!" And this goes double if you happen to be a Catholic Christian, in which case, the cynic would answer, "Not only can you not do it, you should be ashamed of yourself for even thinking about it."
The cynics are wrong.
Uber-preacher Bishop Fulton Sheen once observed that "millions of people hate the Church for what they think she teaches. But there aren't ten people who hate the Church for what she really teaches." This is never truer than when the topic of Catholic sexuality is raised. By now you've all seen the widely distributed press release from the office for the National Association of Conventional Wisdom on All Things Catholic (NACWATC). For those of you who aren't in the loop, here's a copy of that famous document:
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
TWO FALSE IDEAS ATTRIBUTED TO THE CHURCH
Memos aside, I suspect the majority of people would be truly surprised to discover that most of what they think of as official Catholic teaching about sex has actually been officially denounced as a heresy by the Catholic Church at one point or another. This is especially true of the two predominant categories into which most people believe Catholic sexuality breaks down: The Keep God Out of My Bedroom School and Aunt McGillicuddy's Antique Urn School.
THE MEDITERRANEAN APPROACH
The Keep God Out of My Bedroom School of Sexuality has a very impressive alumni mailing list. Think of it as the more Mediterranean, Must Leave Morning Mass Early So I Can Have Breakfast with My Mistress school of thought. People who hold this view of sex tend to believe that "as long as I am a basically good person, occupy my mind with spiritual thoughts, let Father dip into my wallet whenever he asks, and don't miss Mass on Sundays and Holy Days, I can do whatever I want with my body, because, after all, God doesn't really care about what happens with those dangly bits as long as I shake them only at consenting adults behind closed doors."
Although many Catholics past and present do hold to this way of thinking about sex, there is nothing Catholic about it. In fact, it isn't remotely Christian — even in the broadest sense of the word. This school of thought has much more to do with a kind of low church gnosticism than it does with anything Christian.
Think of gnosticism as the RonCo knock-off of Christianity. It is to Christianity what GLH2000 — "spray-on hair-in-a-can" — is to real hair: a diverse group of religious movements that grew up alongside Christianity. Although looking like the name-brand product, they are cheap and shiny, making up in marketing what they lack in substance. This, of course, is exactly why people can't get enough of them even to this day. One of the common themes uniting the various gnostic movements is the idea that the body is largely irrelevant and even undesirable. According to the gnostics, man is primarily a spiritual being, inconveniently weighed down by a slab of meat (commonly referred to as "a body") that it is our great misfortune to lug about.
The less popular, high church gnostics dealt with this dim view of the body by punishing it with extreme fasting, strict abstinence, and harsh sexual continence. And sometimes castration and suicide.
These people weren't invited to a lot of parties.
By contrast, the people who threw the best parties, what I call the "low church gnostics," were a lot like our modern-day Keep God Out of My Bedroom Schoolers. They believed that since God only really cares about our spirits, we could do almost anything we wanted with our body, especially if it involved other people's bodies. After all, since our bodies are bad anyway, why not let them do the bad things they were made to do? Although there aren't a lot of high church gnostics around these days, the low church kind are in abundance. In the contemporary world, low church gnostics are the helpful folks who argue that the Catholic Church — and really, all Christendom — would be much better off if it would just stop obsessing about sex and be what God intended it to be: a glorified social service agency that stinks of incense and good intentions.
Despite its staying power, gnosticism in all its forms has been denounced as either outright paganism or a heresy since the second century A.D. by such prominent Christian writers as Melito of Sardis (died 190 A.D.), Irenaeus of Lyons (130–202 A.D.), and Tertullian (160–222 A.D.). In fact, in an intriguing discussion between Anglican archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and John Paul II biographer George Weigel in 2007, low church gnosticism was fingered as Christianity's public enemy number one in the new millennium, for its ability both to seem Christian and to exhibit Christian piety all while undermining everything Christianity stands for as far as the body and relationship goes.
These prominent historical and contemporary Christians attacked gnosticism because, above all, Christianity is all about the body. The Christian knows that God doesn't love us just for our minds. He wants all of us. In fact, God loves us so much that he sent his Son to become one of us — body and all! For the Christian, the scandal of the Incarnation is not that it reveals our bodies to be bad, but that it shows how incredibly good our bodies are and were always meant to be (see Gen. 1:31). As the Eastern Fathers of the Church put it, the incarnation divinized Human Nature (see CCC no. 460).
Therefore, gnosticism, especially the low church variety, fails in the light of Christianity because, for all its corporeal pessimism, it treats the body too lightly. To put it in colloquial terms, there's a reason nightclubs and singles bars are often called "meat markets" — even by the people who frequent them. Rather than thinking of the body as a creation of God deserving respect, latter-day gnostics treat their bodies as bags of meat, obsolete appendages — spiritual tonsils if you will — that have no bearing at all on their dignity as a human person or their eternal life. Therefore, the body can be treated with incredible irreverence and disregard — because, after all, it's worthless.
And yet, as the old saying goes, "God don't make junk." Catholic Christians know that matter (physical creation) matters to God. God took time out of the busiest schedule in the universe to make the body and pronounce it good (Genesis 1). Then, after the fall and by means of Christ's incarnation, passion, death, and resurrection, God went through a great deal of trouble to redeem us and our bodies. Salvation history is chock full of evidence that God is virtually obsessed with our bodiliness. In fact, both the Apostles' and the Nicene Creeds (if you don't profess 'em, you ain't Christian) emphasize the Christian belief in the resurrection of the body, meaning not only that our spirits will be raised to glory, but also that at the end of the world we will be reunited with our glorified bodies (just like Christ after the resurrection), spending our eternity as embodied beings (just like Christ now).
Considering how much time and attention God has given to the creation and redemption of our bodies, there should be no question that God cares a great deal about what we do with our bodies and how we treat others' bodies as well. The body is of quintessential importance because, as John Paul the Great said in his groundbreaking reflections on the theology of the body, "The body, in fact, and it alone is capable of making visible what is invisible — the spiritual and the divine. It was created to transfer into the visible reality of the world the mystery hidden since time immemorial in God and thus to be a sign of it."
Catholicism asserts that God cares about the body because his fingerprints are all over it. By prayerfully contemplating exactly how fearfully and wonderfully our physical bodies are made (Ps. 139:14), we can learn an immense amount about the nature of God himself, about God's plan for us and God's plan for harmonious and joyful human relationships. Understanding these things is essential to our happiness because if God is our maker and we are made in his image (Gen. 1:27), then our happiness depends upon our functioning according to our design. If you use a toaster in a manner that is inconsistent with its design, say, to pound nails, you don't end up with a happy toaster. In the same way, if we remain ignorant of the plan for a happy life and relationships that God encoded into the very fabric of our physical being, then we'll be doomed to function in a manner that leads to sickness, alienation, and misery rather than health, intimacy, and abundant joy.
Though God does care a great deal about our bodies and what we do with them, that does not mean that he doesn't want us to have fun with our bodies, or even enjoy the fullness of sexual pleasure. That's where the second heresy comes into play.
GETTING YER IRISH UP
Standing in contrast to the more Mediterranean, Keep God Out of My Bedroom School, Aunt McGillicuddy's Antique Urn School of Sexuality holds a more Anglo-Irish view. It grudgingly admits that sex is beautiful — in a grotesque, overdone, gothic sort of way — but above all, sex is holy and therefore, a little like Aunt McGillicuddy's antique urn, must be approached delicately, cautiously, and (ideally) infrequently. That is, "We oonly tooch it if we have to dust it, and then, only once a month er soo."
As far as the Church is concerned, the problem with this school of thought is twofold: it completely misconstrues the concept of holiness, and it overemphasizes the danger of sin hiding out behind every good thing. In the first instance, Aunt McGillicuddy-ites take Old Testament holiness and put a Jansenistic spin on it. Let me explain. In the Old Testament, holiness was something entirely "other" and "out there." God was Elohim, "God of the Mountain." He was so holy that you couldn't even say or write out his name. The holiest part of the Temple, the Holy of Holies, was so sacred that only the high priest could enter it, and then only once a year. In fact, this journey to the inner sanctum sanctorum was thought to be so dangerous that before the high priest could enter the Holy of Holies, his fellow priests would tie a rope around his waist so that if God decided to zap him while he was making his annual visit, his priestly colleagues could haul what was left of his toasted carcass out for something resembling a decent burial.
But in the New Testament, the Christian sense of holiness is radically different. In the person of Jesus Christ, true God became true Man. The "out there" became "right here." The utterly transcendent "I AM" became the immanent Emmanuel, "God with us." According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC), "the Word became flesh to be our model of holiness." Or, as St. Thomas Aquinas expresses it, "The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods" (CCC no. 460).
For the Catholic Christian, sex is holy, but not in the "touch it and die" sense of holiness. It is holy in the sense that it is the most complete and intimate way one divinized human person can give himself or herself to another divinized human person. Sex is holy because you are holy. God came to make it so. "You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation. ... Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people!" (1 Pet. 2:9–10). In the words of Pope John Paul the Great, sex is a "selfgift." It is the sharing of all the holiness you are with all the holiness of another.
But if this was the only problem, then the McGillicuddy-ite's sense of holiness would simply be Judaic, not heretical. Where the Aunt McGilli-cuddy School really goes wrong is that it lumps a Jansenistic sense of sin on top of its Old Testament sense of holiness. In the early 1600s Cornelius Otto Jansen, a Scripture scholar and later Catholic bishop, asserted that human persons were so corrupted by original sin that we could not actually choose anything that was good. This teaching of the radical corruption of the human person essentially denied the saving power of baptism, which Catholics believe washes away original sin. Bishop Jansen wrote a controversial three-volume treatise on the theology of St. Augustine, which essentially distorted Augustine's teachings in the service of Jansen's radically morally corrupt view of the person (which, incidentally, is most likely the source of Augustine's oppressive sexual rep in today's conventional wisdom). Eventually, after a bitter dispute with the Holy See, Jansen's teachings became a heresy so un-Catholic it had to be denounced twice: it was formally condemned by Pope Urban VIII in 1643 and again by Pope Innocent X in 1653. In his famous work Enthusiasm, Msgr. Ronald Knox summarizes the Catholic problem with Jansenism by saying, "Jansenism never learned to smile. Its adherents forget, after all, to believe in grace, so hag-ridden are they by their sense of the need for it."
In other words, rightly recognizing that the potential for abuse exists when a person encounters any good thing, Jansenists assumed that people are utterly powerless to resist the temptation to abuse good things and therefore, all good things (and for the purposes of our discussion, especially sex) should be viewed with deep suspicion and avoided if possible.
Unfortunately, then, as now, people didn't just hop-to because the pope said so. Though the Church did what it could to institutionally rout out the scourge of Jansenism, the heresy had taken hold among the people and the clergy of France. In the 1600s Ireland was sending the vast majority of its seminarians to France for training. So Jansenism spread with a vengeance to Ireland and, following the mass emigration of Irish Catholics during the potato famine, it came to America, where it became easily accepted as the Official Catholic teaching on sex by our nation of apostate Puritans. (As a side note, many contemporary American Keep God Out of My Bedroom Schoolers are simply in reaction-formation to their Aunt McGillicuddy upbringing.)
Largely because of the lingering Jansenist impulses of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Catholic America, Catholics and non-Catholics alike came to believe that "Catholics fear sex." But nothing could be further from the truth. Catholicism is the faith of celebration. It is the faith that invented holidays (literally, "Holy Days"). It is the faith about which the poet Hilaire Belloc famously wrote, "Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine / There is laughter, and music, and good red wine!" Catholicism is the faith that recognizes the holiness of all creation because of the miracle of Christ's incarnation. It is the faith of St. Francis of Assisi, who, when asked by his disciples whether to fast or feast when Christmas (the Feast of the Incarnation) fell on a Friday (traditionally a fast day) reportedly said, "It is my wish that on a day such as this even the walls should be smeared with meat so they may feast!" Only Catholic Christianity could hate a heresy because it "couldn't smile." And so while the world believes that Catholics hate and fear sex, the truth is even more scandalous. The truth is that the Catholic Church celebrates and esteems sex more than any other faith. By exploring what authentic Catholic tradition holds about human sexuality, any husband and wife can experience sex as God intended it to be experienced — an eye-popping, toe-curling, life-giving, profoundly sacred, and deeply spiritual union of one divinized human person with another.
(Continues...)Excerpted from Holy Sex! by Gregory K. Popcak. Copyright © 2008 Gregory K. Popcak, Ph.D.. Excerpted by permission of The Crossroad Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- Publisher : PublishDrive; 41099th edition (April 1, 2008)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 352 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0824524713
- ISBN-13 : 978-0824524715
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 0.88 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #52,668 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #32 in Gender & Sexuality in Religious Studies (Books)
- #141 in Sex & Sexuality
- #252 in Christian Marriage (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Dr. Gregory Popcak (POP-chak) is the Founder and Executive Director of the Pastoral Solutions Institute, an organization dedicated to helping Catholics find faith-filled solutions to tough marriage, family, and personal problems. He is an internationally recognized expert on the practical applications of St John Paul II's Theology of the Body to marriage, family, and personal issues.
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: PASTORAL SOLUTIONS INSTITUTE:
Through the Pastoral Solutions Institute, he directs a group pastoral tele-counseling practice that provides over 10,000 hours/year of ongoing pastoral psychotherapy services to Catholic couples, individuals, and families around the world.
AUTHOR:
Dr. Popcak is the author of almost 20 popular books & programs integrating solid Catholic theology and counseling psychology (including; Just Married: The Catholic Guide for Surviving & Thriving in the First 5 years of Marriage, For Better...FOREVER!, Holy Sex!, Parenting with
Grace, Beyond the Birds and the Bees). His work has been translated into Spanish, Polish, Chinese, and Lithuanian among others.
RADIO HOST:
Since 2001, he and his wife and co-author, Lisa Popcak, have hosted several nationally-syndicated, call-in radio advice programs including Heart, Mind and Strength (Ave Maria Radio), Fully Alive! (Sirius/XM-The Catholic Channel), and most recently, More2Life (Ave Maria Radio--Airing M-F, Noon-1pm Eastern).
TELEVISION AND OTHER MEDIA:
Dr. Greg and his wife have also hosted two television series for EWTN (For Better...FOREVER! & God Help Me!).
In addition to hosting Faith on the Couch, a popular faith and psychology blog on Patheos.com, Dr. Popcak's articles appear regularly in periodicals such as Catholic Digest, Family Foundations, Tender Tidings, Columbia, and others.
Additionally, his work has been featured on FoxNews, NPR's Here and Now, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Ladies Home Journal, and The National Enquirer.
PUBLIC SPEAKING:
Dr. Greg Popcak and Lisa Popcak are sought after public speakers and trainers and have been honored to address audiences across North America, as well as Australia, and Hong Kong. They are featured speakers at the 2015 World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia, an event which was the occasion of Pope Francis' first Apostolic trip to the US.
ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS:
In addition to his ministry work, Dr. Popcak serves on the adjunct faculty of both the undergraduate psychology and graduate theology departments at Franciscan University of Steubenville where he teaches Spirituality and the Helping Professions and Pastoral and Spiritual Direction respectively.
He also serves on the doctoral faculty of the Harold Abel School of Behavioral Health in the department of clinical social work at Capella University where he teaches Epistemology of Clinical Practice.
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After tons of reading, I came across this volume. I am not a psychologist, I am a teacher with interests in music, theology, and history. As such I have recognized that while many people write and argue about the nuances of Catholic teaching vis a vis the immorality of contraception, very few write complete books that address not just the moral theology, but also the psychological ramifications of implementing the teaching in our lives.
This book has the best and most complete introductory section on the Church's teaching I have ever read. But more than that, this book addresses the common problems married couples will encounter when giving their lives to this teaching. While those who practice NFP enjoy a divorce rate of around 5% (FAR lower than the general population) that does NOT mean that practicing NFP is without its risks. As a practicing family therapist, Dr. Popcak has seen it all. He addresses these topics with charity and love that enable couples to see that they are not alone in struggling to implement this teaching. When we "sell" this teaching in pre-cana far to often the couples who do the teaching are very passionate and want to convince. Therefore they undersell the potential difficulties that couples will deal with in implementing the teaching. Therefore, couple who throw away their contraceptives may feel that something is "wrong" with them if they encounter problems. This book is the absolute best at handling this very difficult situation.
The section on sex itself is absolutely steamy. This honesty from the likes of Popcak and West has lead to some criticizing their work as overly romantic. A look at the generational differences quickly shows that these critics are usually much older and of a generation that grew up in a VERY different environment regarding sex and sexuality than Generation X and younger Catholics did. This book (and West's work) meet the young couples where they are. That is important. You do not have to give up your excellent sex life to be a good Catholic. A good sex life is psychologically healthy (so long as you are married and having sex with just your spouse, and are not using artificial contraception, and only abstain for purposes of preventing a pregnancy for serious reason).
I strongly recommend this book. It is the most friendly, most clearly written, and most complete introduction to the topic. A must read for every young Catholic couple, and every Catholic couple contemplating marriage.
Three years of marriage, a pregnancy and birth, and miscarriage later, my husband and I had really hit a brick wall with our intimacy. While other aspects of our married life were fulfilling and we were happy with each other, I did not look forward to sharing myself with my husband. I was raised in a home where sex was taboo - necessary but gross and something only loose women enjoyed. Even though I trusted and loved my husband, I was unwilling to really let myself let my guard down with him.
I pulled this book out of my dresser with the intent to lend to a friend, but instead started to read through it myself, and boy howdy, I am so glad I did. I will absolutely agree that I was shocked at how descriptive and explicit Dr Popcak was with some of his case studies, but I totally appreciated it. Thinking clearly about sex is difficult for me, so I really benefited by the frank descriptions and lack of euphemisms. Please be aware, though, that those are only in a few parts of the book. Most of the book addresses attitudes many people have concerning what sex is or should be, and discusses certain problems and how to resolve them before it ever introduces "sex tips".
My husband read the book with me, and we took time to discuss issues and questions. With a bit of time and prayer, I realized it's actually quite alright for a wife to enjoy sex with her husband (I knew intellectually, but did not behave accordingly), and I really started to be able to finally enjoy that part of my relationship with my husband. It hasn't been long since I read it, but our relations have been more fulfilling, enjoyable, and certainly spicier since we read this book.