Stuart Jeffries on how The Joy of Sex has changed since 1972 | Books | The Guardian Share on Messenger Close The first edition of the Joy of Sex considered sex on moving motorbikes. "If you have access to a private road, the hazards are yours," counselled the book's ironically surnamed author Dr Alex Comfort. Thirty-six years and 8m copies in 22 languages later, that passage has been excised from the New Joy of Sex. Funless if sensible safety legislation has since made sex on moving motorbikes illegal. Doing it on horseback (as mentioned in the 1972 edition) is also outlawed. So stop that too. More importantly, The New Joy of Sex offers a woman's perspective for the first time. Psychologist Susan Quilliam has updated the original manual with 43 new sections. While acknowledging that Comfort was "fully committed to women's pleasure", Quilliam argues that we have since learned more about how to achieve it. So, for instance, there's much more on the clitoris (the old edition had only four sentences). Hurrah! But the book's still only targeted at straight couples. Boo!

Quilliam's updated version aims to reflect four decades of socio-sexual change. Out goes the prostitution section ("We didn't think it had anything to do with loving relationships"). In come hormones, sex shops, striptease, sex during pregnancy, and a harrowing section on penis injuries caused by vacuum cleaners ("very hard to repair satisfactorily"). There's also lots about cybersex. "Text, email, webcams, teledildonics can all be used to wind each other up to fever pitch during the working day prior to extended evening action," she writes. Quilliam, though, might have mentioned that some bosses frown on virtual foreplay during office hours. Some things remain. The big toe, for instance. "The pad of the male big toe applied to the clitoris or the vulva generally is a magnificent erotic instrument," wrote Comfort, words that appear unchanged in the new edition. Quilliam reckons to have cut only 9% of the original. And there is also a section about horses, though not about lovemaking while astride moving ones. Equine roleplay has been practised since Aristotle was ridden horse-style by his lover.

Those with bigger budgets than his might consider using a bit and saddle, or even pulling a small trap during S&M sessions, Quilliam suggests. "Either sex can be the steed," she adds, in a remark typifying The New Joy of Sex's egalitarian spirit. Happy days! 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 - James Tonkowich The Joy of Sex James Tonkowich | ReligionToday.com Columnist | Friday, August 15, 2014 The Joy of Sex #pleasure The Joy of Sex was first published in 1972. Written by Dr. Alex Comfort (Yes, that was really his name), it carries the subtitle A Gourmet’s Guide to Lovemaking.

According to the introduction: “the people we are addressing are the adventurous and uninhibited lovers who want to find the limits of their ability to enjoy sex.” The book advocates “sex as play” with the primary end being adult physical pleasure. There are chapters on all things sexual with one rather glaring omission. There’s no chapter on pregnancy and childbirth. Yet babies (how quickly we forget—assuming we ever knew) are the primary point of sex, which engages our “reproductive organs.” To the popular mind—perhaps even the popular Christian mind—that statement is, of course, ridiculous. Babies, we think, are not the point of sex. They along with venereal diseases are among the hazards of sex, things to be avoided. Whether it’s fighting about laws governing abortion or arguing about the HHS Mandate concerning free contraception, abortifacients, and sterilization, or counseling couples about to be married (pastors take notice), we spend much more time and energy on the prevention babies than we do on welcoming them. But last week we welcomed a baby and I held Omie Louise Tonkowich for the first time a few of hours after her birth.

Omie is our second grandchild and, along with her brother, a joy to hold and behold. Sitting with Omie in my arms, I thought of C. S. Lewis’s “The Weight of Glory.” “There are no ordinary people,” he wrote, “You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.” He might have added that it is immortals whom we conceive (or strive with all our might to avoid conceiving), immortals to whom we give birth, immortals whom we swaddle and embrace, and immortals whom we nurture through childhood. Conceived by means of sex, Omie’s life dwarfs that of “nations, cultures, arts, civilizations” in duration, dignity, and value. Theirs is to hers “as the life of a gnat.” Dr.

Comfort and our joy-of-sex culture that he helped create have a one-dimensional view of sex, focusing on pleasant activities with body parts and miss the larger and much greater point: sex gives us a share of the creative power of God by involving us in the making of immortals. God’s command to Adam and Eve was, after all, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28). It wasn’t, “Have a lot of fun with your body parts”—though He who designed and created the human body created sexual pleasure as well. Thus we can’t deny the good of pleasure and spousal unity that are part of sex. The sexual coming together of a man and a woman as they give themselves to one another and receive one another is, in fact, an expression of our being made in the image of God. As George Weigel writes regarding John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body” in Witness to Hope, his biography of John Paul II, “Men and women are images of God, not only through intellect and free will, but above all, [quoting John Paul II] ‘through the communion of persons which man and woman form right from the beginning….

Man becomes the image of God… in the moment of communion.’ This yearning for radical giving of self and receiving of another, which Adam symbolically affirms by recognizing Eve as ‘flesh of my flesh,’ is at the foundation of our humanity.” Then he goes on, “It carries with it, ‘from the beginning,’ the blessing of fertility, another way human persons are images of God, for procreation reproduces the mystery of creation.” Not long after The Joy of Sex came out, the National Lampoon satirized it in The Job of Sex. If sex is a matter of proper technique, it will become—and has become—tiresome. If sex is a matter of pleasure for pleasure’s sake, it will become—and has become—compulsive. Worst of all, if sex is simply a bit of fun between adults, not unlike gourmet dining, it will become—and has become—trivial. Stripped of procreation, it’s just another hobby—a fun, pleasurable, even exciting hobby, but just another hobby that people do together. Sitting in the hospital holding Omie, it was easy to see beyond the cultural blinders for there in my arms was the joy of sex.

The Joy of Sex - Juicy Ecumenism The Joy of Sex Pocket The Joy of Sex was first published in 1972. Written by Dr. Alex Comfort (Yes, that was really his name), it carries the subtitle A Gourmet’s Guide to Lovemaking. According to the introduction: “the people we are addressing are the adventurous and uninhibited lovers who want to find the limits of their ability to enjoy sex.” The book advocates “sex as play” with the primary end being adult physical pleasure. There are chapters on all things sexual with one rather glaring omission. There’s no chapter on pregnancy and childbirth. Yet babies (how quickly we forget—assuming we ever knew) are the primary point of sex, which engages our “reproductive organs.” To the popular mind—perhaps even the popular Christian mind—that statement is, of course, ridiculous. Babies, we think, are not the point of sex. They along with venereal diseases are among the hazards of sex, things to be avoided.

Whether it’s fighting about laws governing abortion or arguing about the HHS Mandate concerning free contraception, abortifacients, and sterilization, or counseling couples about to be married (pastors take notice), we spend much more time and energy on the prevention babies than we do on welcoming them. But last week we welcomed a baby and I held Omie Louise Tonkowich for the first time a few of hours after her birth. Omie is our second grandchild and, along with her brother, a joy to hold and behold. Sitting with Omie in my arms, I thought of C. S. Lewis’s “The Weight of Glory.” “There are no ordinary people,” he wrote, “You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat.

But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.” He might have added that it is immortals whom we conceive (or strive with all our might to avoid conceiving), immortals to whom we give birth, immortals whom we swaddle and embrace, and immortals whom we nurture through childhood. Conceived by means of sex, Omie’s life dwarfs that of “nations, cultures, arts, civilizations” in duration, dignity, and value. Theirs is to hers “as the life of a gnat.” Dr. Comfort and our joy-of-sex culture that he helped create have a one-dimensional view of sex, focusing on pleasant activities with body parts and miss the larger and much greater point: sex gives us a share of the creative power of God by involving us in the making of immortals. God’s command to Adam and Eve was, after all, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28). It wasn’t, “Have a lot of fun with your body parts”—though He who designed and created the human body created sexual pleasure as well.

Thus we can’t deny the good of pleasure and spousal unity that are part of sex. The sexual coming together of a man and a woman as they give themselves to one another and receive one another is, in fact, an expression of our being made in the image of God. As George Weigel writes regarding John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body” in Witness to Hope, his biography of John Paul II, “Men and women are images of God, not only through intellect and free will, but above all, [quoting John Paul II] ‘through the communion of persons which man and woman form right from the beginning…. Man becomes the image of God… in the moment of communion.’ This yearning for radical giving of self and receiving of another, which Adam symbolically affirms by recognizing Eve as ‘flesh of my flesh,’ is at the foundation of our humanity.” Then he goes on, “It carries with it, ‘from the beginning,’ the blessing of fertility, another way human persons are images of God, for procreation reproduces the mystery of creation.” Not long after The Joy of Sex came out, the National Lampoon satirized it in The Job of Sex.

If sex is a matter of proper technique, it will become—and has become—tiresome. If sex is a matter of pleasure for pleasure’s sake, it will become—and has become—compulsive. Worst of all, if sex is simply a bit of fun between adults, not unlike gourmet dining, it will become—and has become—trivial. Stripped of procreation, it’s just another hobby—a fun, pleasurable, even exciting hobby, but just another hobby that people do together. Sitting in the hospital holding Omie, it was easy to see beyond the cultural blinders for there in my arms was the joy of sex. Editor’s note: This article was originally published by ReligionToday.com . It is cross posted with permission. The Joy of Sex : Alex Comfort : 9781845339647 The Joy of Sex Dating, Relationships, Living Together & Marriage Review quote The Joy of Sex is to the bedroom as Delia Smith is to the kitchen. -- Rowan Pelling The Daily Mail The one album on lovemaking you should have. The Sunday Times A classic for anyone who needs to know about sex.

The Sunday Telegraph Witty, fanciful and mercifully free of moralising. Time Magazine The Joy of Sex brought hairy, naked people into homes around the country. The Independent Magazine An intelligent sex manual that is serious without being solemn. -- Desmond Morris Intelligent and helpfully free from prudery. Independent on Sunday Invaluable... Beautifully written. The Daily Telegraph Witty, raunchy and practical. Journal of the Institute of Health Education show more About Alex Comfort Dr Alex Comfort, M.B., D.Sc., (1920-2000) was a leading expert on human sexuality and one of the most versatile authors of the 20th century. A pioneer in the study of old age, co-founder of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, anarchist, social commentator, novelist and poet, he wrote over 50 books and countless scientific papers. Dr Comfort also worked as head of research on gerontology at University College London, a lecturer at the Department of Psychiatry at Stanford University and Adjunct Professor at the Neuropsychiatric Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles.

A member of the Royal Society of Medicine and an Associate Member of the American Psychiatric Association, he died in March 2000, aged 80. show more Review Text The Joy of Sex is to the bedroom as Delia Smith is to the kitchen. Rowan Pelling The Daily Mail show more Follow us

Question: Who wrote ‘The Joy of Sex’, first published in 1972?
Answer: Dr. Alex Comfort