Sex Doesn’t Get Any Safer Than This Women’s Magazines Eager To Tell More Than Readers Ever Wondered About

At the doctor’s office, I riffle through the magazines on the coffee table. The covers all focus on a single subject.

Sex, sex, sex.

It is the topic du jour in women’s magazines.

Sandwiched between beauty tips and fashion trends, stories about sexual prowess (or lack of it) take front and center. Scan the cover of any magazine at the grocery checkout counter and you will conclude, as I did, that we are a society so intent on perfecting the act that we must report and write about its many aspects - again and again and again.

Even traditionally tame publications, the ones with our mothers’ spinach-dip recipes and common-sense advice about babyproofing the home, lure with the promise that you, too, can have a hotter, healthier sex life. Though the tones of the articles vary greatly, from clinical to risque, the message remains the same: Sex wizardry can be learned, and we, dear readers, are about to teach you.

Granted, for all my pretensions of condescension toward these articles, once I start reading, I can’t stop. I look furtively around the waiting room and notice everybody else is as entranced with their magazines. I doubt they’re mesmerized by the story on shortcuts to a better mood.

The truth is, sex articles can be quite entertaining, even when they don’t mean to be.

In one, the author admitted to a sexual hobby he wanted to do all the time, and I wondered: Who would admit to that in print? Must be a pseudonym.

Some pieces are informative. Really.

I found out that a roll in the hay uses 100 to 150 calories - more if you’re on top - which is about as many calories as you burn in a brisk 20-minute walk. I also read that studies suggest sexual activity may ease menstrual cramps and relieve pain from chronic conditions such as lower-back ailments.

The same article cited another study that showed men find normal-weight women sexier than thin women. (A normal-size woman, by the way, is one whose waist is 70 percent of her hip size, such as someone with a 30-inch waist and 43-inch hips. In other words, a woman like many of us.) A few are downright titillating.

Most of these are about the many facets of foreplay, from kissing, touching, licking and, as one story put it, “whatever else.” One piece concluded that men are “rabid fans of prolonged precoital activities,” and had dozens of guys recounting their experiences. All by first name, of course.

My favorites, though, are the quizzes: Are you Bashful, Bold or Bossy in Bed? Is He Your Type? Will It Last This Time? (Hey, with so much passion, how can it not?!) “Do women really read these?” a friend asked me incredulously.

Do they read them? What a question!

We study them. We take the tests. We analyze the results. We giggle with friends about them.

“Why?” he wanted to know.

I have my theories.

For one, the safest sex is the kind you read about. It is indulgence without loss of virtue, intimacy without risk.

And reading about sex is the most unobtrusive way to find out what everyone else is doing - how often, where, when and with whom. Everything you were too embarrassed to ask - and weren’t even interested in until someone wrote about it - is explored in these glossy pages.

Voyeurism, however, goes only so far. Practice, we know, makes perfect.

Considering all the words and pages devoted to this subject, wouldn’t it be better just to stop reading and … turn the page for further instructions.