To an outsider, author Paul Joannides’ relationship to his bestselling sex guide, The Guide to Getting It On feels more like the connection a captain has to his ship than an author to his monograph. Over 11 years, the book (which is self-published through his company, Goofy Foot Press)has been edited and updated five times, more than doubled in size, and sold more than 650,000 copies worldwide. Trained as a research psychoanalyst, Joannides now makes the Guide his full time job, spending more than a year of 60-hour work weeks preparing for each new edition.

Talking with Paul it’s clear that the book has become not only a paying job and a labor of love, but a relationship with a life of its own. Below he charts a course through childhood, religion, the highs and lows of self-publishing and the good and evil in each of us (and those are the sexy parts).

Few people set out to make their lives work writing about sex. How did you end up working in sexuality?

I usually tell people it was revenge for eight years in Catholic school.

In your book you describe yourself as a research psychoanalyst, but I know you best as what I would call a popular sex education writer. How do you would you describe the work you do in sex?

I guess if I have a talent, it's that I am occasionally able to write about the science of sex in a way that makes it possible for the reader to stay awake at least through the first paragraph or two. Sexuality is the strangest thing to write about. It's a bit like food. How do you write about food and make it interesting? With sex, one way people make it interesting is to make it dirty.

They write for the reader's crotch instead of his or her cortex. Sadly enough, I've not done anything that sensible.

Do you remember where you first learned about sex?

The Encyclopedia Britannica? I wish I were kidding. I can't say I learned about sex as much as I stumbled through sex. When people call me an expert on sex, it always cracks me up. If I were an expert, I can assure you, I'd be having sex at this very moment rather than writing about it.

On the other hand, it is a pretty wonderful and fascinating subject. I mean, is sex ever just sex? It's usually part of a relationship of some kind, and there's usually more to a relationship than there is to just about anything else in life. The sex that each of us has and the sexual person we've become has so many dimensions to it -- dimensions that include our culture, religion, economics, art -- and so on. I try to be mindful of all these things when I write about sex.

What sort of training or background do you have in sexual health?

Nada. Not a bit. Kind of interesting, given that my book is being used in a lot of college sex-education courses, and even in the occasional medical school. I think some of the benefits are that I wasn't immersed in the academic politics, and didn't have any heroes or paradigms that I was invested in. I owed nothing to anyone, and took nothing for granted. So my book not only broke the mold, it pretty much shattered it.

Speaking of heroes, do you have any sexual heroes?

Just about anyone who's been in a relationship for 20 years and is still enjoying the sex that they are having with their partner!

Do you include yourself in that category?

Sorry, only been married 10 years. Shewwwwwwww!

Any sex villains?

That's a fascinating question. Are there really any villains that are unique and totally separate, or are they mostly just the parts of ourselves that we don't want to acknowledge -- our own Darth Vader, Cruella De Vil or Lord Voldemort?

From my childhood, I can remember what a huge and ominous character Satan was. And there's no doubt in my mind that there are some incredibly evil people in this world, but I wonder how much of my childhood Satan wasn't just a personification of the parts of myself that scared me, the parts that didn't want to do what I was SUPPOSED to do. And that's just Satan. I don't even want to talk about my childhood notion of God, who was a pretty harsh, cantankerous task master who did not like sex at all. When it came to sex villains, God didn't have a whole lot on the devil.

So maybe my book and my work is a way of reassuring myself and the reader that sex is good, and given the size of the darned book, we might think I need a lot of reassurance!

One of the things I appreciate about your writing is how you talk about sex in a larger context (long term relationship, casual sex, the context of religion, culture, etc…) and how sex represents many things. Do you think the ways we have sex says something about ourselves? Can you tell something about a person's relationship by how they have sex?

Remember the old saying, "does she do it like she dances?" So, you're wondering if the sex a couple has says something about their relationship? That's a good question. I've heard from a number of women who said they stayed in really bad relationships because the sex was so good, and from people who endured really bad sex because the relationship was so good -- one would hope these examples are in the minority.