Sex that Works
An Intimate Guide to Awakening Your Erotic Life
Strgar’s book offers the tools to feed and grow in sexual curiosity.
For many people, sex isn’t self-explanatory. Author and relationship expert Wendy Strgar explores the many ways women can reconnect with their sexuality, passion, and partners, in her self-help guide, Sex That Works: An Intimate Guide to Awakening Your Erotic Life. Incorporating stories, skill-building exercises, and her personal experiences as a wife, lover, and mother, Strgar’s book is relatable and honest.
Strgar’s premise is simple: sex is best when we’re connected to our deepest, most authentic selves. But in a world with so many distractions, it’s easy to lose sight of who we are and what we want. Human sexuality is bombarded with messages, marketing, and images that can be confusing—whether it’s pornography that shows sex acts that aren’t realistic or pleasurable, or dating apps that make courtship rituals and intimacy building a thing of the past.
Strgar offers a road map back to good sex. She divides Sex That Works into nine chapters, each addressing a different aspect of intimacy. She believes we must define our own personal “normal” when it comes to sex. “Building a working vocabulary for your most intimate physiology is foundational to developing the capacity to express what feels good when, how, and where,” she says. “Let your body’s wisdom lead you into a language of touch.”
Strgar draws from her experience in her thirty-year marriage, as well as twelve years of writing about love, sexual health, and celebrating sexuality. She emphasizes that good sex isn’t prescriptive: it’s a journey, to be undertaken with humor and joy.
Sex That Works speaks mostly to heterosexual, female, cisgendered women in long-term partnerships, and it makes some problematic statements about LGBTQ identities and kink in the process. Generalizations like “people who live in these more marginalized groups … relate more deeply and frequently through their sexual identity” are out of place in a book that is primarily about self-exploration and intimacy.
When Strgar sticks to her subject, her writing glows. Her personal story, along with the many helpful exercises in Sex That Works, shows that it is possible to keep evolving sexually. There is always something new to learn, and Strgar offers the tools to feed that sexual curiosity.
Reviewed by
Claire Foster
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
