The Recipe for Ecstasy: What Women Want: Sexual and Relationship Satisfaction

A researcher specializing in female sexuality, Means's professional goal is to identify what brings women (particularly African-American women) sexual and relationship satisfaction. To this end, she examines the self-reported desires and stimuli of different groups of women%E2%80%94married women, single women, mothers, etc.%E2%80%94and offers tips and strategies for attaining maximum relationship and sexual satisfaction. These are laudable goals, to be sure. However, Means delivers this information and advice via a poorly constructed cooking analogy that is overused to the point of incomprehensibility and will leave many readers scratching their heads. All of the author's advice can be found in other sources that are more straightforward and skip the clunky analogies. Means tries for a text that is academic and friendly, but ends up missing the mark.