For those wishing to expand upon their sexual skills and knowledge, there are plenty of places across North America where you can be schooled in the art of lovemaking. Whether you are curious about Japanese rope bondage, BDSM, talking dirty or giving amazing head, there is a class out there for you (see sidebar for locations near you).

 

My local adult store, the fabulous Venus Envy, has offered such classes for the past 10 years, since the store began. "We opened with a mandate to educate as much anything else, so offering classes fits with our vision," says store owner Maggie Haywood. Venus Envy's classes attract a diverse crowd, and their fellatio class is the most popular…

 

I arrived five minutes early, and there were already a few other women milling around the store, checking out the dildo displays and flicking nervously through the many sex books. The workshop facilitator, Shannon Pringle, was placing handouts on the chairs at the back of the store, which upon closer inspection turned out to be anatomical drawings of a penis. She called us over and we gathered sheepishly.

 

There were nine women in the class, I couldn't work out if one was perhaps a really convincing trans-gendered man and spent too much time looking for her Adam's apple. There was a Portuguese woman in her late-40s, who was ending a call with her husband, telling him he wasn't allowed to call again until the class ended. One of the three saucy nursing students sat at the back teased her, "Eager, is he?" Yes, she admitted, he sure was.

 

The other participants included two raucous sisters, a very quiet woman in her 40s who looked quite shocked to be there and a totally hot young girl with massive boobs who I imagined was a stripper. Pringle, by the way, was gorgeous and friendly. It was obvious from the get-go that the workshop was going to be fun once we were all warmed up.

 

The class started with a brainstorming session about what was great about giving head (it's a huge turn-on, it's a great way to show off, that you might get some oral loving back) and what's not (pubes, getting an unexpected facial, gagging, forceful hands on the back of your head, lockjaw).

 

Pringle said that she would give strategies for dealing with all of the negatives, and show us how to make it a more positive experience. By the time we'd finished bitching about and praising blow-jobs, all nerves had disappeared.

 

We had to choose dildos that we were going to practice various things on. Cue much laughter from the nursing students and chatter about whose boyfriend had the biggest dick. The Portuguese woman had obviously never handled one before, and stared fascinated at its seven inches of realistic latex skin and balls.

 

There was plenty of hands-on instruction, we practiced putting condoms on the dildos using only our mouths, and using lube to give a hand-job to assist in speeding up fellatio. We discussed using cock-rings and vibes to tickle a guy's taint and balls. When the vibes were getting passed around, the candid Portuguese woman complained, "But if I use this on my 50-year-old husband, it will all be over and I won't get any," which dropped the jaws of even the nursing students.

 

Much hilarity ensued when one of the sisters demonstrated how she liked to use her teeth on a man's cock, by nibbling up and down on it like it was an ear of corn. The more we laughed, the more enthusiastically she gnawed on the dildo. I seriously hoped she was joking about that being part of her technique.