Joy of Sex, 1972 - AbeBooks Joy of Sex, 1972 Results (1 - 10) of 10 Sort By ISBN 10: 067121649X ISBN 13: 9780671216498 Used Softcover Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: Simon & Schuster, New York, 1972. Softcover. Book Condition: Very Good. Illustrated by Charles Raymond and Christopher Foss (illustrator). Later Printing. Sound binding. Clean, off-white pages. Wrappers have overall handling wear, light soiling. ; Explicitly written and illustrated, this is a detailed guide to sex. Illustrated with black and white drawings throughout with additional color plates. ; Drawings; 10.25" tall; 253 pages. Bookseller Inventory # 1470092 ISBN 10: 1845339649 ISBN 13: 9781845339647 New Hardcover Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: Hardback. Book Condition: New.

Not Signed; A bestseller since it was first published in 1972, Alex Comfort's classic work celebrates human physical intimacy with such authority and clarity that a whole generation felt empowered to enjoy sex. It was groundbreaking and unique in the wide range of subjects it discussed and in its reassuring aut. book. Bookseller Inventory # ria9781845339647_rkm Published by Crown Publishers, New York (1972) Used Hardcover First Edition ISBN 10: 1845339649 ISBN 13: 9781845339647 New Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: Octopus Publishing Ltd. Jul 2014, 2014. Buch. Book Condition: Neu. 266x182x32 mm. Neuware - A bestseller since it was first published in 1972, Alex Comfort's classic work celebrates human physical intimacy with such authority and clarity that a whole generation felt empowered to enjoy sex. It was groundbreaking and unique in the wide range of subjects it discussed and in its reassuring authority and sense of fun.

No other book has come close in providing such a wise, witty, uninhibited - sometimes delightfully eccentric - guide to lovemaking. And the original illustrations are absolutely iconic. 256 pp. Englisch. Bookseller Inventory # 9781845339647 ISBN 10: 1845339649 ISBN 13: 9781845339647 New Hardcover Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: Hachette Australia, 2014. Hardback. Book Condition: New. 1. 18.3 x 26.2 cm. A bestseller since it was first published in 1972, Alex Comfort's classic work celebrates human physical intimacy with such authority and clarity that a whole generation felt empowered to enjoy sex. It was groundbreaking and unique in the wide range of subjects it discussed and in its reassuring authority and sense of fun. No other book has come close in providing such a wise, witty, uninhibited - sometimes delightfully eccentric - guide to lovemaking. And the original illustrations are absolutely iconic. Hardback.

Bookseller Inventory # MM-47075198 Alex Comfort, Charles Raymond, Christopher Foss Published by New York (1972) Used Softcover First Edition Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: New York, 1972. Softcover. First Edition; First Printing. Both volumes Very Good+ in wrappers. Contained within a Very Good slipcase, which shows edge wear and soiling. Clean pages. Soiling to front and rear panels. First Edition; no additional printings indicated. ; 8vo 8" - 9" tall. Bookseller Inventory # 97025 More Information About This Seller | Ask Bookseller a Question 6. Bookseller Image Published by VEB Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften Berlin u. a. Used Hardcover Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: VEB Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften Berlin u. a. 1.) Kurt Starke; Walter Friedrich: Liebe und Sexualität bis 30, VEB Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften Berlin, 3.

Auflage/1986, 354 Seiten, mit zahlreichen s/w Fotoseiten, weißer (etwas vergilbter) illustrierter Karton-Umschlag, Format 21 x 14,5 cm, gut erhalten (Foto). 2.) Tiffany. Blonde Versuchung, Cora-Taschenbuch, 1999, 125 Seiten, Einband: illustrierter O. Karton, am Rücken leicht gestoßen, sonst gut erhalten. 3.) Georg Siegmund: Die Natur der menschlichen Sexualität, 1. Auflage 1969, 118 Seiten, Verlag Volk und Werk Köln, Einband: Illustrierter O. Karton, gut erhalten. 4.) Alex Comfort: Joy of Sex. Freunde am Sex. Mit vierundachtzig Illustrationen, Ullstein Taschenbuch 1981, 254 Seiten, gut erhalten. 5.) Magazin Eroticats, 15 Postkarten von Cleo-Petra Kurze, herausgegeben von "Das Magazin" Berlin.

6.) Kurt Starke: Junge Partner, Tatsachen über Liebesbeziehungen im Jugendalter, Urania-Verlag Leipzig, Jena, Berlin, 2. Auflage/1981, 190 Seiten, farbig illustrierter Karton-Deckel, gut erhalten. 7.) Nicholas Allan: Wie ich entdeckte, daß ich Sex brauche, Aus dem Englischen von Elmar Kreihe, Claassen Verlag Hildesheim, 1996, ISBN 3-546-00107-9, 167 Seiten, farbig illustrierter Karton-Umschlag, gut erhalten. 8.) Jutta Resch-Treuwerth: Leben zu zweit, Briefe unter vier Augen, Fotos von Hans-Jürgen Horn, Verlag Neues Leben Berlin, 2., überarbeitete und ergänzte Auflage/1985, 279 Seiten, farbig illustrierter Karton-Deckel, am hinteren Schnitt leicht fleckig, sonst gut erhalten (Foto). 9.) "Darf ich mit 19 schon Sex haben?

In dieser Woche wäre der Berliner Sexualpädagoge Rolf Borrmann 80 geworden", Artikel/Kopie (Neues Deutschland vom 25. Juli 2008). (Anm.: Diese ironische zu verstehende Überschrift verweist auf die großen Verdienste von Rolf Borrmann die Sexualität für die Jugend aus dem Kanon der Dogmatik geholt zu haben.). 10.) Chatherine Millet: Das sexuelle Leben der Chatherine M., aus dem Französischen von Gaby Wurster, Goldmann Taschenbuchausgabe, 1. Auflage 2003, sehr gut erhalten. 11.) Hanna Ozogowska: Fünf Minuten vor der ersten Liebe, Aus dem Polnischen übertragen von Kurt Kelm, Illustrationen von Gwidon Miklaszewski, Nasza Ksiegarnia 1978, 253 Seiten, farbig illustrierter Klapp-Umschlag, gut erhalten. 12.) Carlfred B. Broderick: Kinder- und Jugendsexualität.

Sexuelle Sozialisierung, Rowohl Taschenbuch 1975, 117 Seiten, Papier leicht gebräunt, leinenkaschierter O.Karton-Einband, Einband altersfleckig. 13.) Sonderheft "Junge Liebe", Für Dich. Illustrierte Zeitschrift für die Frau (DDR). 3. Märzheft 1972 (12/1972), 47 Seiten, gut erhalten. 14.) Heinz Grassel: Sagst du es deinem Kind? Zur Geschlechtserziehung im Kindes- und Jugendalter, Volk und Wissen Volkseigener Verlag Berlin, 8. Auflage/1982, 136 Seiten, mit Abbildungen, broschiert. 15.) Klaus Pleißner: Junge Liebe, Zeichnungen Werner Hahn, Verlag Neues Leben Berlin 1985, 197 Seiten, farbig illustrierter Kartonumschlag, gut erhalten. 16.) Christiane Tramitz: Du und kein Anderer. Wie wir einander suchen und finden.

Biologische Aspekte der Partnerwahl. Mit Beiträgen von Philipp Doermer und Martina Stoyanoff-Odoy, ECON Verlag Düsseldorf, Wien, New York, Moskau 1992, 319 Seiten, Hartcover mit O. Schutzumschlag, sehr gut erhalten. 17.) "In einem anderen Land. Der Leipziger Sexualwissenschaftler Kurt Starke über Partnerschaften in Ost und West - und das Ende des FKK", ganzseitiges Interview (Neues Deutschland vom 22./23. Dezember 2012). 18.) Kurt Starke: "Sexuelle Grenzüberschreitungen. Missbrauch von Kindern ist ein großes Thema, doch Differenzierung bleibt aus", ganzseitiger Artikel (Neues Deutschland vom 28./29. Juni 2014). 19.) Biographisches zu Kurt Starke (* 13.

Mai 1938 in Königshain), deutscher Sexualwissenschaftler, Jugendforscher, Soziologe und Autor, aus dem Internet (Bearbeitungsstand: 27.12.2012). 20.) "Republikweit 'Unter vier Augen'. Zum Tode der Publizistin Jutta Resch-Treuwerth" (Neues Deutschland vom 20. Februar 2015 und "Journalistin Resch-Treuwerth gesto. Bookseller Inventory # DN-1017 Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: New York: Crown Publishers, 1972, 1972. Hardcover. Dust Jacket Included. Published in New York by Crown Publishers in 1972. First Edition. Book fine except for slight fading along bottom edge.

DJ good except for chipping on corners, wearing and tearing along top and bottom edges, fading on covers and spine, water stains on bottom of front cover and spine, pealing on edges of DJ, half inch tear on front of cover, half inch tear on bottom edge of back DJ, one inch tear on bottom edge of spine. DJ price reads "$12.95". Bookseller Inventory # 004331 Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: Kukje Gallery, Seoul, SOUTH KOREA, 2005. Illustrated Boards. Book Condition: Fine. First Edition. Small 4to. 100pp, profusely illustrated in b&w. Designed by Herman Lelie and Stefania Bonelli. Text in English and Korean. "Tim Noble and Sue Webster have created a remarkable group of anti-monuments in their eleven-year career, mixing the strategies of modern sculpture and the attitude of punk to make art from anti-art. They sculpt piles of street rubbish, studio debris, and taxidermied animals into astonishing representations of life with "real" shadows of the artists themselves hovering over their accumulations of discarded objects. These abstract forms mysteriously reverse the abstraction into figuration".

Published in conjunction with their 2005 Kukje Gallery exhibition "The Joy of Sex", bad boy and girl Noble and Webster have created an artists' book that drolly appropriates fellow Brit Dr. Alex Comfort's best-selling 1972 instruction manual of the same title by substituting their own images rendered in a similar mundane illustrative style as the graphically coupling couple. A most handsome copy of this uncommon item. PLEASE NOTE: Due to the explicit nature of some of the content here, you must be at least 18 years of age to order this item. Artists' Book. Bookseller Inventory # 020600 How the Joy of Sex was illustrated - BBC News BBC News How the Joy of Sex was illustrated By Cordelia Hebblethwaite BBC World Service 26 October 2011 Close share panel Media captionIllustrator Chris Foss explains how he become involved in the book Forty years ago, a London publisher was working on a groundbreaking sex manual - a "gourmet guide" to sexual pleasure, with copious and detailed illustrations. But how could this be done tastefully and legally?

Think of The Joy of Sex and chances are your mind will drift to an image of a man with a bushy beard and a woman with hairy armpits. It's not a photograph, but the nearest thing to it in pen and ink. In early 1970s Britain, photographs would have been too risque. But hand-drawn illustrations based on photographs? Maybe society was ready for that. "We were a bit nervous when we took this on," remembers one of the book's illustrators, Chris Foss. "The publisher had to write a contract which confirmed that they would pay our defence if some old fart decided to make an issue out of it." Perhaps we were in a bubble, we were all completely bonkers! Peter Kindersley, Art director, Joy of Sex In the summer of 1971, Britain had been gripped by the Oz trial, in which the editors of a satirical magazine were found guilty of obscenity for publishing a sexualised parody of the children's comic character Rupert Bear.

(The judge was famously called a "boring old fart" in court by a defence witness, the comedian Marty Feldman.) It was also only 11 years since Penguin Books had faced an obscenity charge for publishing DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover - the full text, complete with four-letter words and descriptions of sex between the lady and the gamekeeper. But Penguin had been found not guilty thanks to the literary merit of the work, so Joy of Sex art director Peter Kindersley calculated that the quality of the art work would shield the publishers, Mitchell Beazley, from prosecution. The images were graphic - they showed genitals and countless sex positions - but they were also artistic, and tasteful. For good measure, he also added a number of historical images from India and Japan. "There was concern about the explicitness of the pictures and therefore we thought as a foil we would put in some of these ancient pictures," says Mr Kindersley. "In a way we were relating ourselves to the past… We wanted to make the book feel as though it was related to a great tradition of explicit pictures." Positions But before the artists could start work the team had to find models to pose for them.

Find Out More The Joy of Sex is the subject of today's edition of the BBC World Service history programme, Witness Browse the archive Plan A, explains Mr Kindersley, was to use models from London's Soho district - the hotbed of the capital's sex industry. "We found all these people who started posing, but halfway through the pose they would ask for an extra £100 ($160) - it was just complete chaos," he says. There was some difficulty finding a workable Plan B. As the project approached a dead-end, it was the book's other illustrator, Charles Raymond - responsible for the colour artwork - who came to the rescue. He volunteered to do the modelling himself, with his German wife, Edeltraud. Chris Foss, who was responsible for the book's black-and-white illustrations, took the photos. The book's author, Dr Alex Comfort, had given them dozens of positions to get though, and all were done for real over two hectic days in early 1972.

Dr Alex Comfort & Joy of Sex Alex Comfort (1920-2000) was an academic, novelist, poet and peace activist, who studied the biology of ageing He lived in California with his second wife Jane (shown above) from 1972 to 1985 Joy of Sex was translated into more than 20 languages, and sold more than 10m copies It was on the New York Times best-seller list for a decade Per capita, the book has sold more widely in Australia than any other country It was banned in Ireland from 1974 to 1989 The miners were on strike and they had only limited light to work with before the power cuts would plunge them into darkness. "We'd say: 'Charlie, we've only got another 20 minutes,'" recalls Mr Foss.

"And he'd say: 'Oh I'm terribly sorry' and he'd go off to prepare himself to perform again, and Edeltraud would go: 'Charles, Charles, please, please come on, we only have 10 minutes, please two more positions.' "So it was all quite fraught shooting the positions - but it worked." The same kind of matter-of-fact approach applied in the post-production. "I remember Chris and Charles coming into the office with all these absolutely explicit photographs," says Mr Kindersley. "And we all stood round saying: 'That's a good one, yeah that's very good.' "Perhaps we were in a bubble, we were all completely bonkers!" he laughs. "We just all took it literally. We said: 'Yes, that's a great picture of bondage' or whatever it was. "There was never the conversation: 'Oh we couldn't put that in the book.'" California The pictures delighted author Alex Comfort, partly because Charles and Edeltraud looked so natural and unposed, absorbed in their private sexual relationship. "The great thing about Charles and his wife was that they were completely authentic - you couldn't get more authentic," says Mr Kindersley.

"It was a real happening - it wasn't a cooked-up thing - and Alex really liked that." Some ancient sex manuals China: Emperor Huang-Ti is credited with writing the first sex manual, about 4,500 years ago Ancient Rome: The poet Ovid wrote The Art of Love about 2,000 years ago - though it is more of a guide on how to find lovers and keep them than a sex manual India: The Kama Sutra, believed to be written by the philosopher Vatsyayana in about the 3rd Century, includes a detailed section on sex Arab world: The Perfumed Garden of Sensual Desire by Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Nafzawi was written in Tunisia in the 15th Century, and is sometimes referred to as the "Arab Kama Sutra" Dr Comfort had been spending a considerable amount of time in California, whose permissive sexual mores, including "foursomes" and "moresomes", he believed would become the norm everywhere. He was a frequent visitor to the Sandstone Ranch - a kind of retreat for sexual adventure, where clothes were more often off than on, and sex with multiple partners was the norm.

His message in the book - which marked a big departure from earlier writings on the subject - was that sex, and sexual experimentation, were fun. The different positions reproduced by Charles and Edeltraud were compared to the courses of a meal. He too, however, was anxious about possible repercussions, such as being struck off the medical register. So he presented himself in the original edition as the editor, claiming that an anonymous couple had handed him the text, which he had merely tweaked and contextualised. But there were no repercussions. The timing of the book was perfect and the marriage of a sexually liberal message and daring but inoffensive pictures was an instant hit. As Mr Kindersley toured book fairs around the world, the response was "electric" and many big publishers took it on. There were of course some rejections. The one he remembers best was the US men's magazine Playboy - the models were just a little too hairy for their liking. The Joy of Sex ended up selling more than 10 million copies around the world - more than five million in the United States alone, where it stayed in the New York Times best-seller list for a decade.

Photos take over The illustrations are fantastic - they are legendary in the history of sex manuals James McConnachie, Author of The Book of Love There had been sex manuals before of course, but they had not been illustrated in anything like such a comprehensive way. Contrary to popular belief, the Kama Sutra was not originally illustrated, according to James McConnachie, author of The Book of Love: In Search of the Kamasutra, and The Rough Guide to Sex. The image we have of "a world of exotic, moustachioed aristocrats doing exaggerated acrobatic sex, with women on swings, or with their ankles round their ears" has nothing to do with the original Kama Sutra, says Mr McConnachie. Miniatures from 16-18th Century India - well over a 1,000 years after the book was written in India - were only tagged on when the text was translated into French and English at the end of the 19th Century, he says. The Joy of Sex was therefore jumping into untested water, but carried off the illustrations with such aplomb that few have dared even try to emulate it, according to Mr McConnachie.

"The illustrations are fantastic - they are legendary in the history of sex manuals," he says. Extracts from The Joy of Sex "Sex is the most important sort of adult play. If you can't relax here you never will" "Chef-grade cooking doesn't happen naturally... It's hard to make mayonnaise by trial and error... Cordon Bleu sex, as we define it, is exactly the same situation" "Plan your menus. Nobody wants a seven-course meal every time" "Deodorant: Banned absolutely, the only permitted deodorant is soap and water" "Personal taste apart, we see no earthly reason why pairs of friends shouldn't make love together: plenty now do" Source: The Joy of Sex, 1972 edition Anne Hooper, a British sex therapist and author of numerous bestselling books, agrees. Like many other sex books in the 1980s, the first ones she wrote were not illustrated at all. In the years since then there has been "a general easing" in what can be published, she says.

From the 1990s onwards it became common practice - and remains so to this day - to use photography in sex manuals, and once photos were used illustrations suddenly looked dated, says Ms Hooper. In order to mark a clear distinction with pornography though, genitals are never shown, nor do the models have real sex. The Joy of Sex is still on sale, but is now a very different book from the original. Its free-love message sat uneasily with the arrival of HIV/Aids, and Alex Comfort himself revised the text in light of this. Then, in 2008, the book was significantly updated and re-worked by relationship psychologist Susan Quilliam, who added more of a female perspective on sexuality. The illustrations were also changed in an attempt to bring it up to date. "The bearded man was an icon - but he was a '70s icon," says Ms Quilliam. Tenderness Chris Foss has not looked at the original black and white illustrations he did for the book for almost 30 years. Snapping open a sturdy little grey suitcase, he starts to root through.

Image caption The BBC was unable to contact Charles Raymond to interview him for this story He used to do up to three book covers a week, and so - back then - considered this just another job. "With the benefit of hindsight, it was a seminal work, but of course at the time, you just didn't realise this." What does he attribute the book's success to? He stops and lingers on an image of Charles and Edeltraud, stretched out post-coitally on a rug. "That's very tender isn't it? They are obviously having a relationship. You can just tell by the way her body lies." He pauses for a moment. "I think the fact that they were in love had something to do with it." Witness will be broadcast on BBC World Service on Wednesday 26 October. You can download a podcast of the programme or browse the archive . Doing It Doing It A new edition of “The Joy of Sex.” By Table of Contents Credit Art by Tom Wesselmann, “Bedroom Painting No.

6” (1968) / Estate of Tom Wesselmann / Licensed By Vaga NYC In 1961, the British scientist and physician Alex Comfort wrote a novel (his fifth) called “Come Out to Play,” in which his alter ego, Dr. George Goggins, opens a clinic with his girlfriend to teach patients advanced sexual techniques. There he develops a compound called 3-blindmycin, which has the power to turn people on: “not raise the libido,” Comfort later told a journalist, “but thaw the superego, the part of the mind that says ‘mustn’t.’ “ In a climactic scene, an explosion releases a cloud of 3-blindmycin over Buckingham Palace, leaving throngs of uninhibited Englishmen in its wake. Years afterward, Comfort said he’d always hoped that Peter Sellers would play him if the book were made into a film; for his leading lady, he pictured Sophia Loren. Hollywood seems not to have been interested in the story.

But if someone were to make a bio-pic of Comfort’s own life it might well feature a scene intercutting that aphrodisiacal cloud with images from Comfort’s most famous book, the 1972 best-seller “The Joy of Sex.” That, too, was a kind of explosion, intended to unleash its readers’ sexual potential by counteracting their ignorance and shame. “The Joy of Sex,” which has sold more than twelve million copies worldwide, was an “unanxious account of the full repertoire of human heterosexuality,” according to its author. It was the English answer to Japanese pillow books, illustrated texts designed to show couples where to put what, and was further enhanced by helpful advice: for instance, “Never, never refer to pillow-talk in anger later on (‘I always knew you were a lesbian,’ etc.).” With its discreet cover and its content divided into Starters, Main Courses, and Sauces & Pickles, the book was loosely modelled on “Joy of Cooking,” the culinary how-to book that had transformed the way its readers thought about food.

Comfort wanted to do the same thing with making love—help people gain a sense of proficiency with the subject matter, and ultimately render them capable of “Cordon Bleu sex.” But people had never been ashamed to cook. “The Joy of Sex” was something new. Unbridled eroticism “could well be the major contribution of the Aquarian revolution to human happiness,” Comfort wrote. He cautioned that people who failed to come to terms with an aggressive sexuality were “apt to end up at My Lai or Belsen.” Comfort’s fellow-Britons were already familiar with his immoderate style of self-expression and his utopian thinking when “The Joy of Sex” appeared. Comfort often aired his “anarcho-pacifist” views on the BBC, and he had published several political polemics, in addition to his novels, books of poetry, and what was at the time the preëminent textbook on gerontology. Comfort was brilliant and multitalented, but there was a certain pat, self-satisfied idealism to much of his nonscientific work.

In 1941, George Orwell wrote an eviscerating review of Comfort’s novel “No Such Liberty,” deploring “the argument which is implied all the way through, and sometimes explicitly stated, that there is next to no difference between Britain and Germany, political persecution is as bad in one as in the other, those who fight against the Nazis always go Nazi themselves.” Orwell noted, “If I treat Mr. Comfort’s novel as a tract, I am only doing what he himself has done already.” Comfort had a tendency to focus single-mindedly on a given notion or project at the expense of any kind of balance: while he was a student at Highgate School, in London, he became convinced that he could concoct a superior version of gunpowder. He blew off much of his left hand. By the time he was finished with his experiments, his thumb was the only remaining digit. Later in his life, when he was practicing medicine, he said that he found this claw he’d created “very useful for performing uterine inversions.” After he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, his enthusiasms led him to accumulate six degrees, including a doctorate in biochemistry.

Comfort turned his attention to sexual liberation with a similar zeal. He offered readers a creation myth for “The Joy of Sex” on the first page, claiming that the book was based on a manuscript that an anonymous and particularly sexually advanced couple had presented to him in his capacity as a biologist. “I have done little to the original draft apart from expansion to cover more topics,” Comfort wrote. “The authors’ choice of emphases and their light-hearted style have been left alone.” In fact, both the choice of emphases and the lighthearted style were Comfort’s; he wrote every word of “The Joy of Sex,” though his credit on the book says “edited by.” Comfort later claimed that he had made up this randy authorial couple because in England at the time it was frowned upon for physicians to write mass-market books, “an implementation of the principle that doctors don’t advertise—of which I thoroughly approve, by the way,” he remarked to a journalist in 1974. But it was also probably a subterfuge, to protect the feelings of his wife of thirty years, Ruth Harris. For more than a decade, Comfort had been sleeping with Ruth’s best friend, Jane Henderson.

(Comfort met both women at Cambridge.) Comfort and Henderson took dozens of Polaroids of their erotic experiments, which they gave to the publisher Mitchell Beazley along with Comfort’s manuscript—originally titled “Doing Sex Properly.” The artists Charles Raymond and Christopher Foss were charged with transforming those photographs into pencil drawings, although the couple they depicted looked nothing like Comfort and Henderson. If you are a child of the seventies and were raised on “The Joy of Sex,” you are not likely to have forgotten the illustrations. The woman depicted in these drawings is lovely, and, even nearly forty years later, quite chic. Her gentleman friend, however, looks like a werewolf with a hangover. He is heavily bearded; his hair is long, and, it always seemed, a little greasy. His eyelids are usually at half-mast, adding to his feral appearance. In some of the pictures, you can practically smell him. (The smell is unpleasant.) It isn’t easy watching beauty get pawed by the beast, and our narrator does not help matters.

“At a certain level and for all men,” Comfort informs us, “girls, and parts of girls, are at this stimulus level unpeople.” In “The Joy of Sex,” a male is a man, a female is a girl, and a vagina is, to “males generally, slightly scarey: it looks like a castrating wound and bleeds regularly, it swallows the penis and regurgitates it limp, it can probably bite and so on.” Men can get past such fears, of what Freudians called the vagina dentata, but Comfort cautions that “they are the origins of most male hangups including homosexuality.” The penis, by contrast, “has more symbolic importance than any other human organ.” Lest there be any confusion: “Vibrators are no substitute for a penis.” Comfort even enlists his fictional female narrator to argue the point for him. Under the heading “Women (by her for him),” Comfort writes of male genitalia, “It’s less the size than the personality, unpredictable movements, and moods which make up the turn-on (which is why rubber dummies are so sickening).” At times, “The Joy of Sex” has the feel of a penis propaganda pamphlet.

There was not a lot of feminist outcry about the book when it was published, probably because in 1972 there was so much else for feminists to cry about. There was, however, a feminist alternative: the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective’s “Our Bodies, Ourselves.” The book announced on its original, 1971 jacket that it was “By and for Women,” and with its democratic inclusion of numerous voices it had the vibe of a consciousness-raising group. (In fact, it was the product of one.) “Our Bodies, Ourselves” covered much of the same material as “The Joy of Sex,” just with a different tone. It, too, had illustrations of a hirsute couple having intercourse in a series of positions. Both books said that everybody was bisexual, that sex should be a mutually satisfying, full-body experience, and that the communication of turn-ons could be of great benefit to this enterprise. And both books espoused the (distinctly seventies) notion that sex could be a value-neutral experience, as natural as eating, which undermined the traditional belief that sex ought to be in the service of procreation within the bounds of matrimony.

“Our Bodies, Ourselves” added information on health, nutrition, self-defense, childbearing, and a rather more involved section on lesbianism. (“The Joy of Sex” has a drawing of two naked ladies kissing under the heading “Bisexuality,” while “Our Bodies, Ourselves” includes a chapter entitled “In Amerika They Call Us Dykes.”) If “The Joy of Sex” was like “Joy of Cooking”—though in some ways it was closer to Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” what with its strong authorial voice and affection for elaborate undertakings, to which Comfort assigned French names like pattes d’araignée, cuissade, and feuille de rose—“Our Bodies, Ourselves” was like the “Moosewood Cookbook.” Everything in it was healthful, enlightened, nourishing. Here’s a trick you might try at home sometime: pick almost any recipe in the “Moosewood.” Now add bacon. You will find that the addition of this decidedly unwholesome ingredient makes the food taste much better. “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” likewise, lacked a certain trayf allure.

The revised edition of the book—even the original—is a fantastic resource for educating young women (and very sophisticated girls) about their physicality. But as an erotic reference for adults in 2008 it’s a little vegan. Of course, there are endless alternatives now. If you are young and sassy, for example, you might enjoy “Sex: How to Do Everything,” by two women who call themselves Em & Lo and have a penchant for frisky wordplay. A character in John Updike’s “The Witches of Eastwick” thinks that “marriage is like two people locked up with one lesson to read, over and over, until the words become madness.” If this rings true to you, you might be interested in “The Best-Ever Sex Handbook: Successful Techniques and New Ideas for Long-Term Lovers.” If you are Wiccan, there’s “Wicked Voodoo Sex,” in which the author, Kathleen Charlotte, promises to help you reclaim your “wanga.” But none of those books have been huge best-sellers or cultural touchstones in the way that “The Joy of Sex” and “Our Bodies, Ourselves” were.

Partly, this is because “Joy” and “Our Bodies” were a part of a movement that radically reformed the way the English-speaking world conceives of sexuality. At this point, only on Opposite Day is sex under-publicized in America. And there is also the matter of the World Wide Web. As the puppets in the Broadway musical “Avenue Q” sing, “The Internet is for porn.” Of course, the Internet is for everything, but it’s particularly good for quick answers: When was the Ming period? How do you prepare a truly fluffy frittata? And what is “The Flying Camel”? Into the mobbed marketplace of how-to books and limitless Googling, Crown is releasing a new edition of “The Joy of Sex” ($29.95). Comfort himself revised his book several times; now Susan Quilliam, a British “relationship psychologist and agony aunt” (as her Web site describes her), has endeavored to modernize the text for a new, post-feminist era.

Gone are some of the most outrageous Comfortisms, such as “Don’t get yourself raped,” or his dubious assessment of the rhythm method—“It may well account for the slightly higher incidence of abnormal babies among Catholic users through stale eggs getting fertilized.” Deodorant is no longer “banned absolutely,” as it was by Comfort, and armpit shaving is not referred to as “ignorant vandalism.” Finally, and crucially, rear-entry intercourse is no longer called sex “à la Négresse.” Quilliam has succeeded in bringing “The Joy of Sex” up to current standards. Instead of opening with a crack about “one-legged ladies,” as Comfort did, Quilliam adds a well-written section on special considerations for disabled readers, which is sensitive without being condescending. The book is still emphatically straight, but Quilliam has given it a gay-positive tone, in sharp contrast to Comfort’s advice that if you might be that way inclined it was better not to experiment too much with a partner of the same sex, lest you let the gay genie out of the bottle. The original drawings have been replaced, with a mixture of modest photographs and impressionistic sketches.

The hairiness has been eliminated, and the attractiveness gap between the man and the woman has been bridged. But the people in these pictures do not look as if they were in any kind of sexual ecstasy. Rather, they have the smug smiles of a couple whose 401(k)s have just appreciated. They look as if they were in a Viagra commercial, which is to say that they look like two people who have never, ever had sex. Once you remove those memorable drawings and Comfort’s batty, phallocentric prose, what you are left with is something that bears little resemblance to the subversive, explosive original. “The Joy of Sex” redux becomes generic—Cook’s Illustrated with boobies. What was revolutionary in 1972 seems obvious now, and to present the material otherwise feels silly and square.

It is difficult, for example, to take seriously the claim made by the new “Joy” that anal sex is “one of the last taboos,” when it was listed as fair game in Comfort’s text nearly forty years ago—and appears in both the Kamasutra (of the third century) and the Chinese “Rou Pu Tuan,” from the Ming period (1368-1644; I Googled it). Quilliam hews to Comfort’s basic premise that too much weirdness in sex is just as bad as too little, and the new edition retains Comfort’s assertion that “exclusive obsessions in sex are very like living exclusively on horseradish sauce through allergy to beef; fear of horseradish sauce, however, as indigestible, unnecessary, and immature, is another hangup, namely puritanism.” But, if procreation is no longer the goal of sex, why is one erotic practice more nutritious than the next? Who gets to decide what is horseradish and what is beef?

One is reminded of a line in Comfort’s poem “Notes for My Son,” in which he says, “Remember when you hear them beginning to say Freedom / Look carefully—see who it is.” Comfort’s freethinking did not extend beyond the boundaries of his own inclinations, and he said as much in his text. “We have tried to stay wide open, but it is always difficult to write about things one doesn’t enjoy, and we have left out long discussion of the very specialized sexual attitudes . . . which aren’t really love or even sex in quite our sense of the word.” Comfort and his wife, Ruth, divorced shortly after “Joy” came out: the unpleasantness of his infidelity seems to have been heightened for Mrs. Comfort when her husband became internationally known as “Dr. Sex.” In 1973, a few months later, Comfort married his mistress and muse, Jane, and the two moved to Santa Barbara so that Comfort could assume a post at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, a liberal think tank.

The move also gave them closer proximity to the Sandstone, a clothing-optional community of utopian swingers in Topanga Canyon, which was reportedly visited by Timothy Leary, Sammy Davis, Jr., Betty Dodson, and the porn star Marilyn Chambers, and which Comfort and Jane had frequented since 1970. “Often the nude biologist Dr. Alex Comfort, brandishing a cigar, traipsed through the room between the prone bodies with the professional air of a lepidopterist strolling through the fields waving a butterfly net,” Gay Talese wrote in “Thy Neighbor’s Wife.” But Jane, according to a friend who was interviewed by the journalist Pagan Kennedy, eventually tired of group sex and open marriage. (Sexual fads may come and go, but jealousy is forever.) At the same time, Comfort’s relationship with the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions soured, and he became involved in lawsuits with the center over breach of contract. In 1985, Comfort and Henderson returned to England, where he lived the rest of his life, more or less monogamously, in Kent.

Comfort suffered a massive brain hemorrhage in 1991, at the age of seventy-one, and Jane died shortly thereafter. From then until Comfort’s death, in 2000, his son from his first marriage, Nicholas, was Comfort’s caretaker and took over the business of managing “The Joy of Sex.” “He was good about talking about sex in the abstract, but when he had to tell me about the facts of life he was embarrassed,” Nicholas Comfort told a reporter on the occasion of the book’s thirtieth anniversary. “He got it all over with quite quickly and hoped I wouldn’t ask any questions.” ♦ The Joy of Sex: The Ultimate Revised Edition: Alex Comfort: 9780307587787: Books - Amazon.ca “Answers questions no one had in 1972 . . .

this time through the eyes of women, too.” —New York Times “There’s something to celebrate about the enduring life of so seminal a piece of educational literature.” —NPR “[Succeeds] in bringing The Joy of Sex up to current standards.” —The New Yorker “An old book now has a lot of new tricks.” —Men’s Health “A bellwether of human sexuality for decades . . . the new version is better.” —Washington Post “Witty, fanciful, and mercifully free of moralizing.” —Time “An intelligent sex manual that is serious without being solemn.” —Desmond Morris, author of People Watching and The Human Sexes: The Natural History of a Man and a Woman From the Hardcover edition. About the Author DR. ALEX COMFORT was one of the world’s leading experts in the field of human sexuality and one of the most versatile authors of the twentieth century. He died in March 2000 at the age of eighty. SUSAN QUILLIAM is a relationship psychologist and an advice columnist. She writes, broadcasts, and presents internationally on topics surrounding love and sexuality.

40 years on from the most revolutionary sex manual ever: Why do so many women still miss out on the REAL joy of sex? | Daily Mail Online 40 years on from the most revolutionary sex manual ever: Why do so many women still miss out on the REAL joy of sex? comments Two major bombshells hit Britain in 1972 — the launch of Cosmopolitan magazine and the publication of The Joy Of Sex, the seminal self-help sex manual which was rather more risque than anything Cosmo had to offer. I was a 19-year-old newlywed when I started work as a junior sub-editor at Cosmo that year, delighted to find that new books landed on my desk every day from publicists hopeful of favourable reviews. I remember the day The Joy Of Sex arrived in the office: I made sure no one was watching, then slipped it into my handbag. Missing out: 40 years after The Joy of Sex was released, why are so many of us still sexually unfulfilled? Alex Comfort’s no-holds-barred guide to sex — containing graphic illustrations of sexual positions I’d never even heard of — changed lives, my own included.

I may not have been a virgin when I married, but I had plenty of hang-ups. My sex education had consisted of my mother telling me, ‘It really isn’t too awful if you love someone,’ which hardly made it an experience to look forward to. By contrast, The Joy Of Sex transported so many of us from a sense of shame, silence and fear around sex to a world where we could approach it with openness, enthusiasm and, yes, even joy. This month marks the 40th anniversary of the initial publication of The Joy Of Sex, now available as an e-book but also reissued as The Joy Of Sex — The Timeless Guide To Lovemaking. RELATED ARTICLES Share this article Share If the original book was addressed mostly to men, the new version is clearly targeted more closely at women, providing a fascinating insight into how the sexual landscape has changed in the past four decades. I was married in 1972 to a man nine years my senior who was far more sexually experienced than me. Several of my married friends, including men, were virtual novices at sex. For them it was an exercise in trial and error, often culminating in mutual disappointment rather than simultaneous orgasms.

So there’s no wonder we couldn’t wait to get our hands on The Joy Of Sex, a handy guide telling us how to get it right and have fun in the process. The author was not a free-loving American hippy as so many people assumed, but a highly-qualified British doctor, born in 1920 and educated at Cambridge University. Don't miss out on the real Joy of Sex: The original copy of the book, while revolutionary, was out of date compared to our current knowledge of the female anatomy Times have changed: The original Joy of Sex was slightly chauvinistic - claiming a man shouldn't ever have problems becoming aroused if his partner was 'young and pretty' The author of more than 50 works of fiction and non-fiction, as well as head of research into gerontology at University College London, Alex Comfort was a pacifist, poet and co-founder of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. But it’s The Joy Of Sex, which has sold more than ten million copies worldwide, for which he is chiefly known.

Previously, Comfort, who died in 2000 at the age of 80, had written one sexually explicit novel and an academic treatise, Sex In Society, and had translated the erotic classic, The Koka Shastra, from the original Sanskrit. Susan Quilliam, the respected relationship psychologist and sexologist responsible for the revised edition of the book, recalls the impact the original had on her. Still teaching: Cosmopolitan was launched in the same year as The Joy of Sex in 1972 (left) and is still educating women on all-things-sex today ‘In 1972, I was 22, and my boyfriend, who was a year younger, was doing a degree,’ she says. ‘One weekend we were alone in his shared flat, and he went into his flatmate’s room to get a record or something and came out brandishing a copy of The Joy Of Sex. ‘We spent the weekend in sexual experimentation before returning the book to his flatmate’s room and buying a copy of our own. It taught me a great deal, and the fact that it was full of humour made us laugh, too.’ So how different is the new from the original?

And what does it tell us about changing sexual mores? Thrilling: Gone with the Wind's Clarke Gable and Scarlett O'Hara enjoyed real passion In broad terms, Quilliam discovered that much of the biology was out of date. We know so much more now, for example, about the centrality of the clitoris to female sexual pleasure, and the influence of hormones and brain chemistry on sexual sensation. Quilliam says that although Comfort took women’s pleasure seriously, he was slightly chauvinist. She explains: ‘For example, he said no man should suffer erectile difficulty if his partner is young enough and pretty enough, which is both sexist and patently untrue.’ It’s important, Quilliam believes, to see the huge impact of the original in the context of society at a time when the puritanism and austerity of the post-war years were still fresh in the mind. There had been no legal abortion until 1968, and for the first few years after its introduction in 1961, the contraceptive pill was available only to married women, and to engaged women at the discretion of family planning clinics and on presentation of a letter from their vicar.

It wasn’t long after this that Comfort’s book was published. Missing out: 40 years after The Joy of Sex was released, why are so many of us still sexually unfulfilled? Curiously, the revised Joy Of Sex is in certain aspects more conservative than the original —ironic, since we live in a world where, courtesy of the hit erotic novel Fifty Shades Of Grey, even sado-masochism is widely and openly read about and discussed. For example, sex on a moving motorbike, advocated by Comfort in the original, was banished from the new book on the grounds of it being both dangerous and illegal. Sex on horseback was excluded, too: Quilliam believed no one would be up for it. When Comfort wrote his book, he was 52 years old and had been married for almost 30 years. For a decade he had also been conducting a passionate ten-year affair with a woman who was to become his second wife. He divorced his first wife not long after the book was published. As a doctor, Comfort realised, from talking to patients, how little the average person knew about sex.

A pregnant patient once told him she was ashamed to let her neighbours know she was expecting because they’d know she’d been having sex. He was on a mission to educate and it was typical of this iconoclastic, unconventional man, deeply in lust with his mistress, to share with a broader public just how joyous sex could be. Sex toys for sale at Boots: We are far more open about sex now than when the book was first published As Quilliam puts it: ‘Here was a man writing from both his heart and his loins.’ Despite the book’s extraordinary success, Comfort didn’t like the popular soubriquet ‘Dr Sex’, saying he would rather be remembered for his poetry and his work on the science of ageing. So is the new version of the book likely to capture the public imagination as strongly as the original? Quilliam has updated The Joy Of Sex sensibly and authoritatively, at the same time managing to retain the quirky and humorous style of the original. But something has been lost. If the hairy couple on the original cover are more likely to make us laugh today than to turn us on, the soft-focus, pseudo-erotic photographs in the new edition miss the sensitivity of the originals.

Amazon's Top eight steamy sex reads The Art of Seduction, by Robert Greene She Comes First: The Thinking Man's Guide to Pleasuring a Woman, by Ian Kerner Fifty Shades of Pleasure: A Bedside Companion: Sex Secrets That Hurt So Good, by Marisa Bennett The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, by Neil Strauss Sheet Music: Uncovering the Secrets of Sexual Intimacy in Marriage, by Kevin Leman Guide to Getting It On! A Book About the Wonders of Sex, by Paul Joannides, Gröss Daerick Sr. The Modern Kama Sutra: The Ultimate Guide to the Secrets of Erotic Pleasure, by Kamini Thomas, Kirk Thomas Every Man's Battle: Winning the War on Sexual Temptation One Victory at a Time (The Every Man Series), by Stephen Arterburn, Fred Stoeker, Mike Yorkey The story of how the original illustrations — pencil drawings of a couple in myriad positions — came about is instructive. It was decided early on to use illustrations rather than photographs, so as not to fall foul of obscenity laws.

Only the previous summer, in 1971, Britain had witnessed the media frenzy of the Oz trials, in which the editors of a satirical magazine were found guilty of obscenity for publishing a sexualised parody of Rupert Bear. There were originally two illustrators working on The Joy of Sex: Charles Raymond did the colour drawings of a couple making love, while Chris Foss drew the more technical black-and-white illustrations of positions and techniques. The original plan was to take photographs of models working in the sex industry and use them as the basis for copied drawings. But when budget problems arose Charles Raymond came to the rescue, volunteering to model with his German wife, Edeltraud. Given how open everyone seems to be about sex these days, and the huge amount of material available on the internet, it’s tempting to argue that a how-to sex manual is something of an anachronism. Not so, according to Quilliam. ‘You should see my postbag,’ she says.

‘The world’s sexual problems clearly haven’t been solved and, given the spread of pornography, we need now more than ever to embrace a joyful view of sex based on proper values.’ On the question of whether we enjoy sex more or less today, Quilliam is equivocal. ‘The answer’s both yes and no. On the one hand we are living in an age of hedonism, but on the other I witness far more fear and distress around sex than in the past,’ she says. ‘We may meet someone and go to bed with them immediately, but we still worry. We worry about loss of desire, we worry about whether we should be swinging from the chandeliers, and we worry about the proliferation of date rape and pornography. ‘We even worry about whether we’re sufficiently beautiful to deserve sex. In some ways, despite a gap of 40 years, we feel there’s less joy about sex if only because we feel pressurised to have more of it.’ Four decades after Alex Comfort wrote his groundbreaking book with the intention of spreading his joyous instruction to the world, Quilliam’s conclusion is as salutary as it is sad.

Question: Who wrote The Joy of Sex, published in 1972?
Answer: Alex Comfort