Be A Tiger In Bed

Be A Tiger In Bed, by Paul Warren
November, 1975 Pinnacle Books
(Original publication October, 1971)

Like most other publishers in the early ‘70s, Pinnacle tried to cash in on the success Dell Books enjoyed with their Sensuous Woman and Sensuous Man books. There were many such sex-focused books at the time, all of them offering tips from “experts,” as well as ones that provided overviews of particular kinks, such as the already-reviewed Group Sex Scene.

Be A Tiger In Bed was originally published by Pinnacle in 1971 as How To “Make It” 365 Days A Year. Author Paul Warren is a fun writer, often going into tangents that have no bearing on the topic at hand. It comes off as very obvious that he’s trying to fill space, yet he does so in such a humorous way that you can’t complain.

For it must be noted that, for a book that advertises itself as a guide for men to become “tigers,” Be A Tiger In Bed offers little in the way of guidance or instruction. In fact little attention is even paid to how men can meet women, let alone how to get them into bed. Instead, Warren barrels through 19 short chapters, doling out “tips” without any idea of an outline or theme. We go from learning “how to spot a sensuous woman” in one chapter to reading about how most “true stories” in sex-focused tabloids are fictional in the next.

Warren just sort of jumps from one topic to the next, all of which continues to imply that this was a quick exploitation of The Sensous Man. In fact Warren uses this exact term to describe the ideal reader of this book (not to mention that also in 1971 he published through Pinnacle a book titled The Sensual Male); the idea is, you read this, follow its guidelines, and you will transform into a “sensuous man,” able to spot sensous women out of the pack, able to carry off affairs and one-night stands with aplomb.

But again, the biggest failing is that Warren offers no tips on how to get there. One of the most enjoyable things about these old sex books is the tips on how a guy can pick up a woman, but Warren offers no such wisdom. Instead he gives vague tips on how to spot the tigresses, and also how to keep them happy in bed, but when it comes to how to get them in bed, he says nothing. But then, the book was published in the early ‘70s, right at the height of the free-lovin’ sexual revolution, so it probably didn’t take much effort.

Warren does serve up some guidance in the chapters that focus on bedroom activities. Here the reader gets all manner of sexual tips on how to keep his lady happy (most of them of an oral nature), but again a lot of it is the same as what you’d find in any of the other sex books of the era. And while as stated little attention is paid on how to actually pick up women, Warren does give an overview of how to make yourself more attractive to them: stay in shape (“push back from the table” and work out three times a week) and be in style (check out current issues of Playboy and find less-expensive variations of the styles at your local store).

Warren really shines in the page-filling arena, from chapters on how you can overcome your “anxieties” about “becoming a sensuous male” to even breaking down various “myths” about the sensual life. This leads into my favorite bit in the book, where Warren, somehow finding himself on the topic of how men’s magazines of the time (ie 1971) are filled with bullshit “true” stories of sexcapades, dreams up a scenario in which a writer is meeting with his editor and trying to come up with a new sex story that will appeal to the readers. The whole thing reads like something out of Joe Goldberg’s Quickies.

As expected, Be A Tiger In Bed is filled with anecdotes of things that either happened to Warren or “friends.” In each case these scenarios have the ring of fiction, also as expected. Warren in fact outs himself in an early chapter, relating how he was paid fifty bucks per story by a tabloid for creating “true life” tales (which were completely fictional) of a sexual nature. Another standout section, with Warren relating how he dreamed up a storyline of a guy in a rabbit suit taking advantage of a gal on Easter Sunday, and how the ensuing story went over like gangbusters with both the tabloid’s editors and the readers themselves.

Anyone familiar with the men’s adventure magazines of the mid-‘60s through their end in the mid-‘70s will read Be A Tiger In Bed with a feeling of déjà vu, as the whole book has the same feel as the sex articles in those magazines. Only, it lacks a little of the groovy feel of the era, something that was much more pronounced in The Sensuous Woman and others.

But then, it’s a quick and breezy read, and Warren manages to sound both sincere and jaded (in the “I’m only doing this for the money” sort of way) at the same time. And his “this happened to a friend of mine” stories are pretty fun, too. There are better and more fun sex books from the early ‘70s out there, though, and I will be reviewing some of them eventually.