Sex manual

In the Graeco-Roman era, a sex manual was written by Philaenis of Samos, possibly a hetaira (courtesan) of the Hellenistic period (3rd–1st century BC).

His work was based on earlier Kamashastras or Rules of Love going back to at least the seventh century BCE, and is a compendium of the social norms and love-customs of patriarchal Northern India around the time he lived.

Vatsyayana's Kama Sutra is valuable today for his psychological insights into the interactions and scenarios of love, and for his structured approach to the many diverse situations he describes.

Probably written during the Chinese Han dynasty (206 BC – 220 AD), the work was long lost in China itself, but preserved in Japan as part of the medical anthology Ishinpō (984).

The authors of medical works went so far as to write the most sexually explicit parts of their texts in Latin, so as to make them inaccessible to the general public (see Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis as an example).

Theodoor Hendrik van de Velde's book Het volkomen huwelijk (The Perfect Marriage), published in 1926, was well known in Netherlands, Germany, Sweden and Estonia.

In Germany, Die vollkommene Ehe reached its 42nd printing in 1932 despite its being placed on the list of forbidden books, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, by the Roman Catholic Church.

Most notably, Reuben dismissed popular medical-psychiatric notions of "vaginal" vs. "clitoral" orgasm, explaining exactly how female physiology works.

[6] Most notably, the book The Act of Marriage by Christian Baptist authors Tim and Beverly LaHaye has sold over 2.5 million copies.

[6] They suggested role play, experimentation with sex devices, masturbation to ensure climax and many other practices that were considered taboo up until the 1970s in Protestant bedrooms.