The Joy of Sex, the world’s most beloved bible of intimacy after the ancient Indian treatise, the Kama Sutra, has hit its second wind.
Thirty years after it first thrilled readers, the British manual is riding high again, with an updated fourth edition due out at the end of September.
The Joy broke ranks with the florid pornography sold in sex shops and frigid manuals on ”marital” life for dutiful wives.
Once subtitled ”a Cordon Bleu Guide to Lovemaking” until the famous French culinary academy objected — The Joy divides chapters on sex into courses like a meal to be savored.
The book, which in revised form dubbed itself ”a gourmet guide” for couples, spoke honestly and humorously about intercourse not as a duty or a crime, but as both pleasure and pasttime.
The couples who twist and turn in helpful diagrams have changed with age. The man is no longer bushy-bearded. The woman has taken off her 1970s boots.
But the new edition has remained faithful in its practical simplicity and unabashed openness to its British creator.
Alex Comfort, an eccentric man of many trades, was a doctor by training, a poet and writer by craft, a peace activist and anarchist who once shared a prison cell with the philosopher Bertrand Russell.
Legend has it that he summed up the birds, bees and all between to write his book in a mere two weeks.
Comfort, who died in 2000 at 80, said he decided to write The Joy when one of his patients, a pregnant woman, confessed she was worried.
Her pregnancy had humiliated her, she said, ”because now all my neighbors will know what my husband and I get up to.”
Comfort’s gallery of descriptions and positions are presented without false modesty.
In the bedroom or a daring slew of other spots, in flamboyant costume or a birthday suit, even using the big toe ? Comfort enlightened millions shamelessly with a streak of suggestions, calling only for his counsel to be applied between consenting adults.
His writing, while it assumed certain 1970s conventions of gender and sexual identity not up to date with current beliefs, was often peppered with humor.
”In England to have regular love out-of-doors, you need to be frost-proof and own a park. In Spain, you need to be priest-proof,” he wrote.
His writing was coupled with illustrations — hirsute man, bangled, long-tressed woman — that were based on photos taken of a husband-wife couple posing according to Comfort’s descriptions.
In his chapter on ”perversions,” he turned around common contempt for certain sexual practices and focused it instead on the abuse of power.
”The commonest perversions in our culture are getting hold of some power and using it to kick people around,” he said.
As an activist, Comfort collaborated with Bertrand Russell’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and described himself as ”an aggressive anti-militant”.
He continued to do medical research, studying the ageing process in wild and captive fish and animals. He wrote poetry and nearly 50 novels.
But despite the diversity of his activities, the Cambridge-educated Comfort is still most famous today as the western world’s Doctor Sex.
His son Nick Comfort, a British political advisor to the Labour party who helped supervise the new edition, has helped to give a more contemporary touch to The Joy of Sex.
Terms for husband and wife have been replaced by the more
neutral ”partner”.
A chapter on HIV and Aids, already existent in recent editions but updated, speaks of safety precautions and risks.
Comfort’s comments on prostitution have been made more politically palatable, calling it an act based on the need for money instead of man-hating impulses.
Viagra, the much publicised medicine for male impotence, as well as hormone replacement therapy for post-menopausal women, also make their debut in this edition.
But Comfort’s joy in promoting group sex — which he claimed helped to fight possessiveness — was phased out in the previous 1991 edition at the height of the Aids epidemic.
Over eight million copies of The Joy of Sex have been sold in 20 languages worldwide. It remains a hit in Anglo-Saxon countries, with over five million sold in the United States. – Sapa-AFP