The Joy of Sex

"This is important in that, like the Marie Stopes, it was the first book of its kind. It describes itself as a ‘gourmet guide’ to sex and it was written 50 years after Stopes and takes thing on a stage. It has those wonderful line drawings and I remember demolishing it as a guide on how to do it. The 60s were supposed to be swinging but it didn’t really start until The Joy of Sex in 1972. It seems so innocent really now, all those daring explanations of S and M and positions, but it was before Aids and people were so optimistic. It was as though we’d discovered sex and free love. It was only 40 years ago, but since then Aids and all the implications of free love makes it look dated and innocent. Marie Stopes still has more to offer contemporary couples in terms of strong, punchy sex advice for men and women. Of course there’s more to sex than just getting into positions. It’s about what’s going on in your head space, and sex changes as you change."

"The Joy of Sex was a seminal book. It not only reflected but created the sexual revolution. Even now, people who haven’t read it know what it’s about. When you mention it, they’ll go, ‘Oh yes, that was that book with the bearded man, wasn’t it?’ The Joy of Sex was born out of Alex Comfort’s experiences with couples who came to him when he was working as a GP. He’d have people turning up to his surgery saying, ‘We can’t have a baby. Why not?’ Or ‘We’re not enjoying sex. Why not?’ They didn’t seem to know very much about sex—even in 1972 when they were getting messages that they all ought to be having sex all the time. I’d just come out of university and my experience there was guys saying, ‘You’re on the Pill, so why not?’ We learned how to do it, but there was no actual help there apart from what we got through discovery, which was great. I love sexual discovery. Alex was so nervous about the book that he wondered whether it would be banned. Indeed, in Australia, The Joy of Sex was sold in plastic covers. You had to buy the book before you could take the plastic cover off and read it. In Britain it was more laissez-faire, but there was a lot of wariness about it. And then, just a few years after the book took off, we had the AIDS epidemic. Just as we were getting a good sense of what Alex was talking about, we were no longer able to talk about sex in the same way. If there was any joy being discovered in sex as a result of his book and other projects, it ended and sex was wrong again. Yes, the model was a book called The Joy of Cooking . Alex brought in all his knowledge to write it. He had medical knowledge, clearly, but he also used to have a folder where he kept interesting newspaper articles and he would look through them to get ideas. The book was hugely successful and a tour de force . Nobody had done anything like it before. We’d had Mary Stopes talking about marital commitment, but nobody had said, ‘Look, sex can be joyful.’ Alex’s view was, ‘I love sex. I know my patients want to love sex; let’s just tell people everything.’ And then he and the publisher got together and worked out it would be a recipe book: you could enjoy sex as much as you enjoyed eating and cooking. Absolutely. This was not only a re-edit job—it badly needed updating. It wasn’t just that some of the science was inaccurate: Comfort mentions the world clitoris only five or six times in the entire book! He’s very pro-women and very liberated as far as sex is concerned, but it needed updating in terms of values as well. It reflected 1970s values. There’s a lot of emphasis on the man as the active person. It was written by a man, for men. And it’s quite chauvinistic. There’s one quote: “Impotence in old men (may be) due to . . . lack of . . . an attractive partner.” And it’s very liberal. Nowadays we’re more aware of the dangers of sex. So we had to take some stuff out—like his suggestion of having sex on a moving motorbike and the fairly regular references to group sex. He says things like ‘If you have close friends over, you’re going to make love to them.’ Nowadays, that’s not what you do. And I’m not entirely sure it was happening in 1972! It may have been what people wanted to happen, rather than what was actually happening. So we had to take out a lot of that. We did put in tenderness. We did put in a lot more about the clitoris. We (when I say ‘we’, I had two research assistants working with me) did insert a lot about sexual health and sexual therapy. Much of it was woven in; I’d take a piece of 500 words and would add in a sentence or a paragraph. There were over 40 additional sections. It was certainly longer than the original, although only marginally, because we cut out about 10 or 12 sections—including the motorbike one."