Have you ever really loved a woman?

While it may be OK for women to say they know nothing about sex, men are expected to be good at it from day one. To avoid embarrassing themselves in front of their partners, men are signing up for a ‘practical’ seminar that teaches them to become better lovers.

He was spiritual. He was successful. He was great in bed. Until the day she let it rip. And then none of that mattered anymore. I am not a dustbin, she’d said. That he wouldn’t care if she was just a crash-test dummy. That she had, for all these years, been putting up with his abysmal selfishness and colossal ineptitude in bed.

She had been faking it for 20 years. At 47, Mr P did not see this coming. Not after almost two decades of manufactured marital bliss. His wife, on her part, secured top honours for lousy communication and for not rocking his boat for as long as most marriages won’t even last.

Typical, certified sexuality educator Shiva would say. Men don’t get it and women just don’t talk about it. But they also want to snap out of it. One reason why the Better Lover Seminars conducted by him across Mumbai, Hyderabad, New Delhi and Bangalore have found a steady audience for the past four years. Tellingly, the seminars for men outnumber the ones he’s conducted for women by a ratio of 50:1.

“My parents did not discuss the subtleties of sex with me. At school ‘sex education’ was about eggs and sperms, sexually transmitted diseases and the importance of abstinence. While this was important information, it wasn’t enough. So what does a young man do? He gets his information from the only resources available: his equally ignorant friends or pornography,” says Shiva, who is a database engineer by profession. He does the seminars on the side.

Man on a mission
Like most young men, Shiva was as ignorant about women as the next guy. The little that he knew came from exploits of braggart friends, and porn. “Naturally, my early sexual experiences were disasters,” he says. “I had no clue!”

Eventually, Shiva says, he “sat at the feet of my lovers, urging them to tell me what they found pleasurable and what they didn’t. And I took copious mental notes.” In the process, he received many revelations. He learnt, for example, “that most men aren’t aware that penetration is not the best way to give a woman an orgasm.”

And along the way, he borrowed tips  tricks from international sex therapists and coaches such as Tom Leonardi, Michael Castleton, and Lou Paget. People from all age groups  — the youngest was 21 and the oldest 62 — have signed up for his seminar. They include singles and married people, and they come from different backgrounds —businessmen, software engineers, students, bankers, even NRIs on vacation.

‘You won’t need the long shirt’
Back to Mr P, the mild-mannered insurance agent. Eight months ago, he signed up for the seminar he had heard about through newsletters. With admirable foresight, he drew out his longest shirt from the closet to wear for the seminar, to cover up any possible embarrassment that might raise its head in a group of 12-15 people. After all, he had no idea what was in store — a movie perhaps, or who knows, even a live demonstration.

But they brought out a mannequin instead. “We were asked to take a post-it and stick it on that part of the mannequin we’d go for first while making love,” he says. And as Shiva has learned to expect, most of the slips gathered around the mannequin’s breasts and mouth. Then the coach stepped in and literally covered the mannequin with post-its. “For women, it starts elsewhere,” says a now enlightened Mr P, who even today diligently refers to the notes he took at the seminar.

After some talk involving myth-busting and “women’s psyche”, Mr P and the other participants move to the next level: the ‘kissing exercise.’ They must pucker up and get creative on the back of their hands and keep at it till they get it right. The coach personally monitors each attendee’s technique. “Techniques are important, but you should also know what a woman likes. Women are like fans with regulators that go from one, two, three, four to five,” Mr P adds.

After that comes the fine art of mental foreplay. All attention back on the mannequin again. Kissing and nibbling on the hand in a group is quite alright. For deeper matters, it’s coach to the rescue. He demonstrates everything, right from how to undress her, to the right lip-lock technique, and the best way to caress her. Other things, however, have to be handled individually. A key learning aid is a silicone, hand-held model of the female genitalia. “Generally, a man tries to enact what he sees in porn, which does not work most of the time,” says Mr P. He insists his newly acquired insight on what women want doesn’t make him arrogant, but admits that, “Deep down, I feel  I am better than the other guys.” And adds, “The way the seminar went, I needn’t have bothered with the long shirt.”

‘They are not insecure’
The typical attendee is not the insecurities-ridden person you expect. “On the contrary, he is someone keen to improve every aspect of his life — fitness, diet, fashion and sex,” says Shiva. The ability to satisfy a woman in bed affects all aspects of a man’s life outside the bedroom, he says. “They become more productive at work, perform better at sports, are more relaxed as a parent, and more chilled out with friends.”

The frequency of men’s group seminars is higher than that for women. A group session costs Rs4,800 per person. “Many men don’t want to admit that they have to all learn this, that too at a seminar. Culturally, women have the permission to say they know nothing about sex; they’re even encouraged to do that. But men, we poor men, are raised to feel that we are somehow supposed to know all about sex,” says Shiva. Mr P knew better. Once his son is marriageable age, he says, he will recommend the seminar to him. For him, on the other end of the 40s, it has been a “candid revolution.”