BONEHEADED At Bedtime

Think you've got all the smooth moves when it comes to bedroom action? If any of the following sounds familiar, think again Casanova.

SEX HAS A LEARNING CURVE, just like baseball, basketball and boxing. If you're slow to learn in the first two, you irritate your teammates. That's survivable. If you're slow to learn boxing, you pay for it with your face, which is also survivable; guys can usually recover from a knockout within a minute or two. But if you're slow to learn in bed, you piss off women and pay for it with your ego - which can haunt men for years. You can see it in how they carry their shoulders, look at the ground and shuffle their feet around hot women.

The only saving grace is that most of us have pulled a bonehead move once or twice, and some of us occasionally slide every couple of months. In the interest of improving everyone's sex lives, we're focusing on things that should never be done - at least not if you're interested in spending quality time with smart, sexy women.

THE APPROACH

A lot of guys set themselves up for failure long before they ever get close to the bedroom. If you have a pick-up line, no matter how cool you think it is, get rid of it. You’re going to put off even a marginally intelligent woman with any line, and they all can spot a line before you’ve finished the sentence.

Dr. Sadie Allison, author of Tickle His Pickle, says one common bonehead blunder is getting a woman drunk. “Even if a guy succeeds, the sex will be bad,” she notes. “And the morning after will be painfully awkward.”

Allison says other stupid moves include grinding her on the dance floor without introduction – which is “the human equivalent of a dog humping your leg” – and following her around a club or asking her friends for her phone number instead of being direct.

DEAL BREAKER: Guys who go out lacking any sense of personal style and coat themselves with cologne will head home alone, too. Same goes for guys who try to look cool with cell phones, any electronic gadget, or their car. Modern science can’t prove it, but smart women see through the clutter and somehow see the man. We know, we know – it’s freakin’ scary!

GUARANTEED FAILURES

The most ridiculous hit that Terilyn, 26, from Albany, Ga., runs into is when guys find out she’s already in a committed relationship, but try to hook up anyway. They ask her if her boyfriend knows how lucky he is and then proceed to tell her how life with them would be so much better. “They don’t seem to realize how pathetic it is to move in on a relationship,” she says. “Also, since when has it been appropriate for a guy to ask for a first date by requesting that they hang out at her place or his?”

Chastity, 31, from Jacksonville, Fla., says the most annoying pick-up is when a guy acts like he knows you. After he finds out that, oops, you’re not his old friend Betsy, he sticks around trying to get something going. “It’s pretty cowardly,” she says. “I like a man that is brave enough to put it out there and say, ‘I noticed you when you walked in and was wondering if you’d like to sit down and talk.’”

DEAL BREAKER: Don’t be “the sleazy massager.” C’mon, you know how it works – a woman is upset about problems with her lover and confides in her guy friend, who listens, consoles and starts to rub her shoulders, which is nice until the motion turns into a caress, which in turn causes the woman to tense up. “This is an awful situation,” Chastity explains. “You will forever ruin a friendship and it will kill your self-esteem because it’s destined to fail.”

CLOSING THE DEAL

Let’s say you handled the approach well enough -- she’s at your place, you’re kissing on the couch, she’s breathing hard and you’re – well – hard. How can you possibly screw this up? You’d be surprised.

“Too many men try to make love like they’re porn stars,” says Dr. Ian Kerner, author of She Comes First: The Thinking Man’s Guide to Pleasuring a Woman. “Men still don’t spend nearly enough time on foreplay – they rush for the breasts and genitals. Men tend to think you just need to get the genitals in the mood, but women really want their minds and imaginations stimulated to get them in the mood.”

DEAL BREAKER: Kerner, says the environment and setting are more important than most men realize. If you’ve got kid sheets on your bed, if your place is a mess and stinks – or if you want to have sex for 20 minutes before the guys come over, the odds of success aren’t in your favor.

STRONG BUT NOT RUFF

Terilyn notes that women like strong men who can scoop them up, reposition them or hold them tightly – in the right context. But nix the pain – unless specific requests have been made. “I thought one guy was going to bite my clit off,” she says. “And that shit hurts!”

To make matters worse, there are many men who are unfamiliar with the structure of female genitals, says sexologist Yvonne Fulbright, author of The Hot Guide to Safer Sex. A typical dumb move is “poking at her urethra with his fingers or penis instead of her clitoris,” she explains. “Few women find such stimulation comfortable or a turn-on.”

A lot of the rough touching problems, by the way, can be solved by making sure she’s wet – ideally, with her own lubrication, but saliva or a bottle of synthetic lube can keep you in the game.

Some women like to manually stimulate themselves during sex, and some guys like to help with their own hands. “Don’t bother,” Terilyn advises. “You don’t know what you’re doing, even if you’ve been told how. You will never master this – use your mouth.”

When it comes to intercourse, a guy trying to slip his penis into a woman before putting on a condom – if they’ve just started sleeping together or have agreed to practice safer sex – is a good way to slam on the brakes. “This comes down to a respect issue,” Fulbright says. “If he doesn’t respect his health or hers, she will be totally turned off, even when caught up in the moment.” Fulbright also notes that guys need to change condoms or wash their penises after anal sex and before vaginal sex, a bonehead move that can lead to an infection that can leave them both out of action for a couple of weeks.

DEAL BREAKER: Even guys in long-term relationships can screw up plans for the night – like trying to spice things up by surprising a woman with a huge vibrator. “Even the kinkiest and most creative women will back away if you have no class,” Allison warns.

SEX TALK

Women are creatures of communication – they like talking and enjoy innuendo in the right context, even raunchy sex talk. Guys go wrong, however, when talking about tricks they learned from other women, or moves they did in previous relationships. Similarly, if they go too crude, they can yank a woman right out of the mood.

Chastity had one long-term ex-lover who used to love dirty talk. Eventually, “normal” dirty talk just didn’t cut it and he began asking her questions about sexual exploits from her past. It was a turn-off, but she did it to please him. She quickly ran out of real stories. “I would make up some really sick and twisted stuff just to see if he believed it,” she says. “When I realized he really liked the twisted things I was telling him – and was stupid enough to believe them – I dumped him. I hate dirty talk now.”

FINISHING THE JOB

One of the most prevalent bonehead moves is taking but not giving. A lot of men, Kerner reports, enjoy receiving blow jobs, but aren’t willing to go down on their lovers; furthermore, “Many women complain that men lack sexual cliteracy. They don’t understand the role the clitoris plays in female arousal and women don’t get enough pure clitoral stimulation from men.”

No matter what bonehead moves you’ve managed to make along the way, the most obvious mistake is coming first and then not stepping up to finish the job.

“If you come first, you must even the score,” Terilyn advises. “Remember, what you get out of a relationship is equal to what you put into it.”