Sex guys and dolls

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33514, 20 April 1974, Page 10

Sex guys and dolls

Sex Guyed. For Everyman Stroke Woman. By Roger Woddis. Illustrated by Arthur Horner. Michael Joseph. 92 pp. "Blunderbuss: a coachload of pregnant women. Delude: to clean up (TV, films, etc.). No: a short bedtime story. Stalemate: a tired husband.” These are a few of the more polite definitions from the glossary of a spoof sex manual which may win no prizes for promoting community standards but does at least approach sexology with a levity of spirit sadly absent from weightier tomes on the subject. Indeed, if the book proves to be less hilarious than the idea which gave it birth, it is probably because serious sex manuals are themselves too pre-

posterous for parody: one man’s sex comedy is another’s doubtful science, and Roger Woddis’s notions of the bizarre might conceivably be standard practice in the clinics of Vienna or the bed-sitters of Hampstead. The book is not, then, always as funny as it imagines itself to be, but on the whole its suggestions are sufficiently outrageous to be entertaining: Professor A. L. (“I am the greatest”) Mouse’s theories about Shakespeare’s Sonnet 69, and hints for playing strip-chess are two of its more inventive sallies, And no-one who has read it will be able afterwards to run his eye over the most innocent piece of prose without detecting in it double, treble or multiple entendres.