Best Lover - Not A Moment Too Soon
Embracing Teenage Sexualiy
What Parenting Experts are Saying About "Best Lover"
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Best Lover: Not a Moment Too Soon

By Duncan Wright

Damn, I wish I had written this book - it makes a statement of national importance. I am talking about Howard Schiffer’s new, and utterly inspiring How to be the Best Lover. This much-needed book actually addresses teenage boys and healthily affirms their sexuality. Think about it - how rare that validation is, but how necessary, if we are to convey sex as something important and potentially life-changing. Well, somebody thought of it, at last. Best Lover talks positively, pro-actively to teens about sex, and its arrival begs the question: “How could we have had such a blind spot about something that is so socially and personally significant?”

While society offers a commercially driven invitation to salaciously acquire sex on the one hand, and a barrage of moral disapproval on the other, Schiffer is the first to say to teens that the exploration of sex is not just O.K., it is a blessing. Rather than leave our hormone-addled youth in confusion, he is the first to encourage teenage responsibility by exploring what is so attractive about sex, without shame. For instance, Schiffer happily writes, “Guys have powerful sexual urges, and feeling horny is wonderful,” but also “When your girlfriend lets you feel her vagina, she is trusting you at a much deeper level. Enjoy it and respect it.” This is revolutionary stuff.

The course of this groundbreaking book (a really useful tour-guide for parents, as well as teens, I might add) is through the journey that all teens will have to face. Schiffer encompasses everything from masturbation (and what is good about it), to finding a place to safely make out, to internet porn (and how non-representative it is), and all the stages of sexual intimacy with girlfriends. But before parents become alarmed, Best Lover also offers responsibility to his young readers. Schiffer shares that along with sex comes a new level of maturity, and goes into such subjects as STDs and unplanned pregnancy with a frank man-to-man risk-assessment. He doesn’t make sex sound carefree or hedonistic at all. But he does encourage feeling and ownership and decision making, and most beautifully of all, personal reflection and creativity in the world of love and touch.

Symbolically (and it makes this book so different), Schiffer hands over the remote control to its rightful owner. He is making teens the rightful recipients of their own pleasure, but also the authors of their own decisions. Each layer of new discovery carries a new responsibility and this is built into his message.

Ultimately, How to be the Best Lover talks to teens and joins them in what they are facing - a complex, feeling-filled time of experimentation, bringing with it the possibility of shame, rejection and loneliness. Schiffer takes out some of the loneliness and a lot of confusion. He offers a friendly, experienced, but never smug voice to teenage males, to help them navigate their way through what they deserve to enjoy as a wonderful phase of life. And about time, too.

(Duncan Wright is the Arts Editor of the Santa Barbara Independent, and a graduate student in Pre- and Perinatal Psychology at the Santa Barbara Graduate Institute)

Note: Available for reprint in whole or part with permission
(contact howard@heartfullovingpress.com).