Flavor of the Week: How Players Do (and Don't Do) It

My soul shrivels when I recall a dark moment from my youth. I was diligently manhandling the pussy of a lithe, redheaded aerobics instructor when she drew a breath and laid one of her hands on mine. “Um. What do you think you’re doing?” she asked sincerely. I recall being frustrated by her naiveté and her ignorance about her own body. “Dude, shut up,” I said. “That’s your G-spot!” That was the first time I experienced the curious sensation of a girl’s body convulsing with laughter from the inside. I was 21: old enough to drink, smoke and die in an oil war in a faraway corner of the globe, but unable to master the smallest (and most vital) piece of female geography.

I’ve come a long way, baby. When asked to review a recent instructional sex DVD, I figured I had little to learn. [How Players Do It ]promises to provide viewers with “the knowledge for becoming the man you always wanted to be.” Lest any sincere enlightenment seekers or female-to-male pre-ops get confused, that means teaching clueless handfucking het boys how to bone a girl with such porno panache that she will boast of your cocksmanship to everyone at State College of University.

I intended to review the DVD by testdriving its techniques on a willing victim, but I underestimated how difficult it is to maintain a hard-on while laughing your ass off. The disc appears to be narrated by a perv who I would be hesitant to buy a joint from, let alone trust for sex advice. After a moaning montage of hardcore humping to an unctuous groove, he advises that playerdom is centered on four principles, which are each accompanied by an image: 1) Knowledge: a naked girl with a come-hither stare; 2) Creativity: Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon; 3) Confidence: a squirrel standing upright with a huge, pendulous scrotum dangling between his furry legs; 4) Experience: a photo still of our onscreen proxy (who sadly looks like a 99-cent version of Heath Ledger) with his finger in a girl’s butthole. My viewing partner burst into giggles, and I wilted with laughter. This DVD’s tableau accurately delivers a little genius, some cornball humor and full on, guffaw-inducing, fraternity-pledgeperverted idiocy.

Maybe they’re on to something. The central riddle of sex-ed is how to initiate the immature into a subject requiring maturity. We’ve all endured the joyless official version, with the oil paintings of bisected penises and splayed vaginas about as appetizing as intestines coated in fur, with voiceover more solemn than a 9/11 memorial. Jersey Shore language and junior high hi-jinx coupled with grizzled pornstar know-how may effectively implant the knowledge that I gained only from trial and error (and error and error).

But in sex DVDs, as in life, the missteps are far more entertaining. During an awkward makeout scene between a high mileage B-lister and our pasty stand-in who appears anxious to bone before his Viagra wears off, it’s painfully obvious that it’s the first time either of them have been paid to kiss someone on the mouth. “He’s gay!” my accomplice shouted helpfully.

Aspiring Casanovas are advised to indulge their woman in eight to 14 minutes of foreplay. In the absence of any kind of “first base” egg timer, I turned to iTunes. While several Sonic Youth and Mogwai numbers fall just short—and the live version of “Whole Lotta Love” is way too long—Pink Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdrive” is the perfect prelude to laying pipe.

Though the entire production is salted with unfortunate euphemisms for the female anatomy, the two clueless Brits who narrate the breast section deserve a special lashing for using not just “jugs” and “cantaloupes” but “ski slopes,” even once uttering the tragically misguided phrase, “Be sure to compliment your girl’s milkers.” Their presence is intended to give the DVD an international vibe; instead, it clarified that men the world over remain clueless about women. Then they mentioned that the undersides of women’s breasts are more sensitive than the topsides. I glanced at my accomplice, tiny Siskel to my Ebert, and muttered: “I didn’t know that. Are they?” She looked at me and put her hands on her tits. “Shit, dude, they are! Even I didn’t know that.”

A hot girl-on-girl scene about the elusive G-spot went unpredictably awry. “Hot? I’d say that dyke looks like a tranny Chle Sevigny if that didn’t just describe Chle Sevigny!” Well, at least I was into it, that is until the unannounced screenin-screen of a guy fingering a tiny furry vagina puppet. My sidekick clapped her hands together in real joy: “It’s fingerbanging for the hearing impaired!” This hot-esque babe is knucklesdeep in a real, sexy vagina, so why are we subjected to what looks like a guy getting his fingers eaten by one of the aliens from Critters? Seriously, it’s the most unsettling thing I’ve seen since those YouTube vids of monkeys mouthraping frogs. Even this scene coughed up another little gem: When eating pussy, a broad flat tongue is preferable to a pointy, lizard tongue. “And don’t change it up when the girl’s getting hot,” my sidekick contributed, “that’s like hitting the ‘reset’ button on your Nintendo when you’re about to beat the final level.”

It seemed a fitting homage that the anal sex chapter takes place in Brooklyn. As the Jim Jones of a local gypsy-punk outfit once put it, “Dude, I am telling you, the ass, it’s the pussy of the future!” and we’ve been cutting-edge for years. The DVD producers even accidentally got it right: The section is hosted by one “John Ad-cock” (boo!) a poseur who, like most Brooklynites, pretends to be from Brooklyn. Still, for a production so obsessed with wordplay, they really blew the obvious “Alternate Ending” joke. Finally, I would question the use of the word “shit” as a placeholder in this chapter, as in, “You ready to rock this shit?” Um…no, hopefully not.

Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously said, “There are known unknowns: That is to say we know there are things we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns— the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” He may not have been talking about the mysteries of the female orgasm but his point is well taken. This DVD is recommended not just for those of you who know you don’t know what you’re doing, but also for those arrogant bastards like me, who think you do.