Today is a special, seductive treat for passionate lovers. We will learn how to playfully titillate the sensitive parts of one another’s bodies. We’ll discover the most pleasurable ways to suck toes, to put feet in our mouth, and to lick a wet foot. Let’s watch 1994’s How to Seduce Your Lover Forever from the Sinclair VIDEO LIBRARY, makers of local favorite, The Better Sex Guide to Anal Pleasure.

It’s not impossible I’m the world’s leading expert in sex instructional videos, and I think the most important element of them is the intended audience. You need to have a very clear vision of who you’re making your video for because everyone outside of it is going to see it as hilariously gross pornography. This video did not have a clear vision.

From what I can tell, this is for husbands in long term marriages who managed to burn themselves out on lovemaking without ever finding an erogenous zone. They’ve never tried mouth stuff, are squeamish about sex in general, but they’ve agreed to sit down with their wife to learn how to fuck using the same VCR that plays VeggieTales Silly Sing-Along 2 fifteen times a day. If that’s you, great. You’re about to experience the delicious, tantalizing arousal of intimate touching and sensual lotions. To everyone else, it’s about to get disgusting.

How to Seduce Your Lover Forever is hosted by a therapist named Diana Wiley, who speaks about sex like you raised your hand in church to ask which banana-flavored lubricant is most recommended for shallow pelvised elderly women. It’s both extremely friendly and medical, but just foot-suckingly lewd as fuck.

After insisting everyone involved in sex should be clean, Diana describes the carnival of sexual delights along a woman’s body. “From the eyelids to the earlobes. From the inner thigh… to the nape of the neck… you are invited on an adventure across an erotic landscape. A journey designed to help lovers discover each other’s pleasure zones.” These sex educators are exhausting themselves artistically to put the wonderland of the female body into words, and then they move on to the man’s. Their description of it is much shorter. With perfect comic delivery, Diana says, “From the fingers. To the genitals,” and nothing else. The copy writer for How to Seduce Your Lover Forever either never expected anyone to visit a third location during their erotic voyage down the male body or they are a secret comedy genius.

Diana says, “In planning a special erotic event, why not transform your bedroom? Creating a sensuous, sumptuous, seductive setting?” They demonstrate this by panning along a mostly nude woman on a bed surrounded by dozens, maybe hundreds of candles. It’s an absurd production. Any adventurous couple would recognize they are burning candles worth more than the cost of hiring three TaskRabbits to watch them fuck. If your lover surprised you with this sumptuous, seductive setting you’d say, “Jesus Christ, look at all this. You know I have hobbies other than exploring the erotic landscape of your body, right?”

Multiple cameras pan and zoom along Zach and Tracy’s bodies as they romantically play. Zach peels one of her boobs out of her bra (a technique known as shelling) and draws aimless circles on her leg. These two were obviously told by the producers to improvise some foreplay and they were helplessly out of ideas immediately. It’s pretty awkward, yet also not nearly awkward enough. This is definitely not the first time Zach and Tracy have done something like this in a room full of strangers, but it might be the first time they’ve engaged in this much foreplay. They’re vibrating like caged greyhounds waiting for an instructional video director to say, “And… action on the penetration!”

So while Zach and Tracy wait for the prop master to get the fluid shields up, Diana starts to explain the importance of smell. “Sex has always been linked with smell,” she says. Fine, sure, but it seems strange make “smell nice” two of your first four sex tips. Diana keeps rewording the importance of smell and they cut away from Tracy’s titillated leg to show stock footage of many hands spraying perfume. Spraying nothing, spraying each other… it’s fucking weird. Suspiciously weird.

If there’s one thing I learned from Optimus Prime, Tomax, and Xamot, it’s how to spot a commercial in disguise. Sure enough, a visit to the Sinclair Institute website proved they’re more of an edible lotion and sex perfume retailer than a research center. These dick cream salesmen produced the world’s most extravagant amateur porn video just to try to break into the bored married couple marketplace. Speaking of, meet Carol and Robert.

Carol and Robert try to demonstrate how to sensually eat a bowl of bed fruit as part of your sexual foreplay, but not well. They are jamming apricots into each other’s mouths like two very ordinary people starting to realize they’re about to have sex in front of a film crew. Robert, mouth full of eight different bites of fruit, tries to open Carol’s robe to look at her boobs, misses, completely fucks it up a second and third time, and then gives up. It’s how I picture Jane Goodall getting a breast exam. Zach and Tracy, if you are watching, this is the appropriate amount of awkward I was expecting from the performers.

Next we move on to The Art of Touch, and I’m not exaggerating when I say there is nothing more to this section than the title. Touch your romantic partner. In different spots. Diana explains, “Use your hands as erotic appendages,” but I mean, how would one not? If someone knows to unclench their fists during sex, they are as qualified to describe erotic touching as this tape’s copy writer who suggested, and I quote, “using your fingers as though they were spider legs.” And while on the spider-legged subject of pure sex appeal, let’s meet Richard.

Diana says, “Do like Richard and Tiffany. Stand in front of a mirror. And by self-examination, make an inventory of where you enjoy being touched.” The obvious joke here is that a man would say “my dick” and be done with his list. But that’s exactly what happens! Tiffany goes straight for his junk, he acknowledges yes, the dick part is where he likes to be touched, and that’s the end of their touch inventory! They acted out the joke and Tiffany now knows her lover enjoys being touched on, hold on let me go back and check their notes, “the dick.”

Instead of ending, this section keeps explaining the very concept of touching again from the top until the writer loses their goddamn mind. Diana reads, “The touch possibilities are endless. You want what you had in the beginning of life. The warmth. The contact.” I don’t like how this screenwriter was asked to stretch “touching” into five pages of script, and he found himself going from “try spider legs” to “the touch possibilities are endless” to “all lovemakers want to feel like a newborn baby.” That’s gross, stupid, and criminally gross.

The section called Being Creative With Your Body contains exactly one body creativity tip: film yourselves having sex. It starts with Rich “I Like When You Touch My Penis” Ard filming Tiffany’s naked body while Diana tries to talk you into doing the same thing at home. He zooms in on her asshole while a keyboard plays the kind of bouncy music you only hear in instructional videos. He gets a moist closeup of her labia majora to a soundtrack that would feel right at home in a video about canning your own jam or getting the most out of your John Deere tractor mower. For a porno, this is awful, but for a mango lube commercial, it’s worse.

Richard and Tiffany start to have graphic, tightly framed intercourse. The video gives decent advice about sweet talk, confidence, and eye contact while Richard screws up every word of it. He lays motionless, staring at the ceiling as if there’s a goldfish somewhere bubbling, “Tiffany! That’s not me! Our minds! There’s been some kind of… some kind of total fish-up!”

While in various states of disinterest sometimes drifting near confused or sad, Richard gets lifelessly porked by Tiffany. Diana narrates, “As Tiffany sits on Richard, she is a woman happily thrusting.” I don’t know what we expected from this tape, but this is the least skilled sexual encounter anyone could imagine combined with a bad writer bluntly describing it for the blind. The only one this is helpful for is the terrified goldfish brain trapped inside Richard.

Tiffany gets some flattering shots of her terrible, expressionless lover as he probes her wet canal for answers and finds none. That’s it! I can’t stress enough how this section was nothing more than “try making a sex tape, even if your toadlike lover’s body is possessed by a fish.”

I’m starting to think at least someone involved in this was trying to make a comedy. Because the section Learn to Tease immediately opens on Carol deep-throating Robert. She’s not kissing around the edges of it, tickling him with a furry glove, or misting his perineum with Sinclair-brand anal gland spray. She is bashing the back of her own head out trying to finish him off. If she considers this “teasing,” her idea of full-blown intercourse is going to take most of Robert’s skin off. Diana cheerfully narrates this the same way a Mormon homemaker might double check a chore list. “She sucks on his penis. Until he is close to cumming.”

Before climax, Carol stops so Robert can put his face on her chest and blink on her tits. She responds by rubbing his fully deflated penis and balls with a feather. If you lost two babies in a cave and they grew up in the dark knowing nothing of our ways, the moment they entered puberty they would have better sex ideas than these. I have led a full and diverse erotic life, but I have never been with a woman so terrible in bed she would consider blocking off ten minutes to rub a feather on balls. Carol is the dick-shriveling champion of the world.

Okay, so now you know how to be creative with your body (film their butthole) and you’ve learned how to tease (suck that shit until it’s soft). You’re definitely ready for…

At the start of The Main Event, Diana talks about how couples need to work as a team, and in another perfect How to Seduce Your Lover Forever comedy gag, they demonstrate this with a shot of Zach laying back while Tracy devours his cock. It has all the intimacy of an international traveler getting his shoes shined at the airport. Then Zach moves behind her, shoves her face into the bed, and gets after it. It’s not not loving, but it’s how you would shoot a love scene in a movie where the husband is the villain. It’s also more than adequate to demonstrate to an instructional video audience how to penetrate your wife from behind. They keep going, and going. Diana has no more to say about teamwork. Zach jackhammers Tracy and jackhammers Tracy. We are far beyond the reasonable limits of what anyone would consider “instructional.” We’re creeps in a married couple’s bedroom.

You might be curious what Diana said while she watched these two fuck. Here you go: “As Zach penetrates her vaginally from behind, their intercourse heats up. Because of their upbringing, many women, but not Tracy, believe that tender lovemaking is the only acceptable kind of sex.” It’s remarkable that the producers thought there was a single couple willing to watch a sex instructional video together who would also say, “Oh, honey, look! We should maybe try doing it fast one time.”

It keeps going until Zach stops to catch his breath, but he soon gets back to it. I insist I haven’t left anything out– he had sex to completion into his wife to sell massage oil while a sex therapist described “from behind” like an unspeakable pleasure we’d never heard of.

After Play involves things like snuggling and chatting. Paul and Colleen demonstrate how to do it.

The couple sits in the wet spot having a cup of coffee and a snack while Diana explains how to cuddle. Romantic advice is usually irrelevant or obvious or both, but “don’t flee the home after sex” seems beyond satire. These fucking people hired naked untrained actors to teach viewers about snuggling.

Tracy and Zach go a different direction. They have a nude pillow fight which lasts about 10 seconds before they start to fuck again. They’re not much for foreplay, but they are true overachievers in every other aspect of lovemaking. And with that, we’re done! We now know the basics of maki– wait. There’s forty minutes of tape left?

Okay, sure, Touch and Taste. You’ve heard of them, but Diana wants you to really do them. She leads you on a meditative journey where you take a strawberry to bed and REALLY FUCKING EAT that thing. Here, I’ll let Paul and Colleen demonstrate:

First you suck on the berry. Lick it like you might a foot. Then put her foot in your mouth like you might a strawberry. If you do this right, one of you will be gone by the time you’re done.

There was already a section called Art of Touch, but this is Touch and the Female Body. How are they different? They’re not, but they had a few extra minutes of foot sucking and nowhere else to put the advice, “Women prefer different kinds of breast stimulation at different times of the month. So be sure to ask.” I was making fun of this video earlier for being mostly obvious advice but I would have never thought to ask a woman where she was on her cycle before I squashed her tits.

Besides the generous attention to their feet, Paul and Colleen spend some time licking each other’s eyes and noses. There is no care given to erogenous zones. Paul and Colleen make love like an old dog happy you’ve returned from war. Zach and Tracy would have had two fingers in each other’s assholes by now. Diana also gives this hot tip while Paul rubs Colleen’s butt: “Kissing and… tenderly pulling on her pubic hair. He kisses his way back up to her vulva. Plays with the vaginal lips.” He does that for a while. She is practically begging for mercy. And pleading for penetration.“

The next pointlessly named section for a random selection of sex advice is:

Touch and the Male Body opens with Robert and Carol making out on the bed while she fusses with his limp dong. He is neither a grower nor a shower. Diana says, “Carol is now encouraging Robert to masturbate in front of her, while she licks his scrotum.“

Robert does.

Next up are some quizzes! Exactly two quizzes!

“Boss, I’ve never done a sex VHS quiz before. Should I add some blanks so they can write their answers on the TV?”

“What do you think, you fucking idiot!? I need to find three more couples willing to make filthy love in front of this crew for 200 bucks by Tuesday!”

“Definitely lines. I think mine would be penis four times and then one foot.”

Relaxed and Peaceful? Anxious and Tense? This isn’t going to sound like an insult but I mean it like one: these people sort of know how to fuck, but they can’t make quizzes for shit.

Oh my god, another one about touch. This one features Robert blinking on nipples again, and Carol rubbing his flaccid penis with a feather again. Oh wait, this is new:

Robert uses a makeup brush to apply blush to his wife’s ribs. See, they haven’t run out of erotic ideas! Add some nail polish to her clitoris! Hang tinsel from her ponda baba! The one sex tip the Sinclair Institute keeps coming back to is to strip your lover naked and smear nearby things on them like an idle toddler. This concludes what I hope will be the final section on “touch.”

God damn it. Wait, hold on. This one looks good.

Richard is alone in his gym, benching forty pounds. As a man in his 20’s, he needs to work hard to maintain the look of a ponytailed tube of breakfast sausage with clinical depression. He is glorious. As his mighty arms heave the bar up a second time, Tiffany sneaks in, gets naked, and starts licking his feet. If he likes this, you wouldn’t know from his face, penis, or continued bench-pressing.

Of all the times this video tells us to suck feet, this is the worst and most irresponsible. Instructional videos always give overcautious warnings about checking with a physician before doing a jumping jack, but if you’re sneaking up on people and licking the bottom of their feet while they’re at the gym, you could die. Tiffany’s corpse is probably in a secure virology lab as we speak.

In an earlier section we learned The Set-Up. Now it’s time for SETTING THE STAGE. Picture this: Richard and Tiffany in a bath surrounded by 17 million candles. She washes his hairy toe knuckles for the 9th time this video. She rubs a sponge against his tiny, limp penis several times to let the second camera get closeups. The two of them explore one another’s feet in four inches of swampy butt water. I don’t know why I’m asking you to picture it; I took a screenshot:

As things move from feet to crotches, Diana starts describing it like a livestock masturbator explaining her job to school children. “Richard is gently putting his finger up into Tiffany’s vagina. And she is contracting her P.C. vaginal muscles.” Then, suddenly, this happens:

What was once a beginner’s guide to fucking feet is now some kind of metaphysical energy channeling exercise. Richard and Tiffany nudely do the splits together while they “tighten their genital muscles” at each other. For what seems like hours. Diana explains, “The sexual energy goes up into the brain as they inhale. Their sexual energies blend and dance.” It’s a living nightmare. If you walked in on this, no one would blame you for attacking these two aliens with a shovel.

And since there is no fucking point to any of these bullet points, Diana now starts a commercial for edible oils, gels, and lotions (safe for genitals). Why? I’m glad you asked. She says, while these two creatures are flexing their sex holes, “If a man experimenting with cunilingus isn’t sure he likes his partner’s clean, natural vaginal juices… knowing that the vagina like the eye is self-cleaning… he can mask… those with flavors he prefers. Kahlua, Strawberry, cinnamon, whatever. Some of these edible potions even get warm when you blow on them.” If history’s grossest toenail collectors were assembled to rub their warts on a Lunchables pizza, those men would say, “Aargh! Even we cannot defeat Diana Wiley’s vagina potion sales pitch as the least appealing mouth thing ever.”

Oh good, there’s a whole section for Diana’s disgusting potions. And it of course opens on foot stuff. Tracy is rubbing Zach’s feet while he lays on the kitchen counter before putting his “corona, or head of the penis” in her mouth. She sucks for a while, then rubs honey all over it. It responds by laying on its side, showing no signs of arousal. Zach is a pound-you-from-behind-until-he’s-done man, not a penis-honey-in-the-kitchen man. Diana ignores this and calls his disinterested member “increasingly erect.” Tracy takes an “orange-flavored ice cube” and slops it and Zach’s dong around in her mouth. It does not help his boner, but it does help clean the honey off. Anyway, they’re a sloppy mess and at least four hours from completion. Welcome to POTIONS AND LOTIONS, I guess.

It cuts to Paul covering Colleen in ash with a feather duster. Wait, let Diana explain: “For a change of pace, edible, digestible, naturally made honey dust, is a pleasurable delight.” It looks nothing like eroticism. It looks like they’re getting ready to sneak up on enemy commandos in a volcanic battleground.

Earlier there was some mention of oral sex enhancements, but Diana remembered some more. Try “Natural flavors” with no further explanation except “the saltiness of sweat or pre-ejaculate.” This is all accompanied by a long pitch citing multiple studies on why it’s okay to do oral sex. Who is this goddamn video for? Diana, here’s the ordinary sequence of sexual events in a person’s life: hand stuff, mouth stuff, sex stuff, a huge expanse of sexual experience, watching middle-aged sex instructional videos with our nude yoga partner. There is no conceivable viewer of this full penetration ad for flavored lotions uncomfortable with the idea of genitals in their mouth. If anything, we need a section on crazy shit we can do with the genitals already in there.

Yeah, something like that.

Wait, I take it back. This whole section is dedicated to Richard and Tiffany sitting on each other’s heads in different ways. This isn’t Oral Creativity. This is how Richard gets his own foot fungus on his dick. Diana gives one last desperate pitch for you to try the taboo ritual of oral sex. “Sperm is low in calories!“

There’s only one last lesson, and it’s very advanced. Multiple Orgasms. It starts with Carol desperately trying to get Robert’s flaccid penis back in the game. Nothing is working. She is humming on it. They take turns pulling on it and rubbing it with a popsicle. She fills her mouth with mouthwash?

Maybe you were picturing the woman having multiple orgasms, but no, this is about starting a whole new lovemaking session with an uncooperative penis. The two of them finally get it stiff enough they figure they can mash it in and Carol jumps on it with microseconds to spare! And that, viewers, is how you multiple orgasm. But hold on, don’t throw that dick popsicle away! Lay back and relax. You’ve earned it.