Sex Toy Guidebooks for Couples

Books that explain sex toys to ordinary consumers form a small but steady corner of publishing. They sit between the clinical sex manual and the retail catalogue, and they usually aim to describe what products exist, what they are made for and how they differ.

A compact genre

Sex education titles often run to hundreds of pages on a single topic. Toy guidebooks frequently take the opposite route, presenting themselves as compact references with a light tone, stock illustrations and short chapters. Reviews of the genre in the sexuality press tend to discuss readability, humour and breadth of coverage, and they note that such books address readers across a range of experience and orientations.

Categories the books survey

Guidebooks typically cover a wide span of products. Three common areas are:

• Lubricants, which come in several formulations such as water-based and silicone-based, and which are sold for comfort and to reduce friction.
• Sex machines, motorized devices that move on their own and are generally larger and more expensive than handheld items.
• Teledildonics, a term for internet-connected devices that can be controlled remotely, sometimes by a partner in another location.

Many also address items readers may already own as well as ones they may never have encountered.

Why couples are the stated audience

Marketing for toys and related books has increasingly addressed couples as well as solo users. Publishers and retailers in Canada and elsewhere have described this as part of a broader shift in which toys are discussed as shared accessories to partnered intimacy, not only as private products. Supporters of that framing point to wider social acceptance of sexual wellness products. Critics of mass-market sex retail raise other questions, including product quality and the accuracy of marketing claims, which are separate from what any single book covers.