Authors: Alex Comfort
The Joy of Sex
For Cambria, whence it all began
Copyright © Octopus Publishing Group Ltd 2008
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in Great Britain by Modset Securities Ltd., London, in 1972. Updated and reillustrated editions were published in 1991, 1996, 2002, and 2008 by Mitchell Beazley, an imprint of Octopus Publishing Group Ltd., London. This current edition was published in Great Britain as
The New Joy of Sex.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Comfort, Alex, 1920–2000.
The joy of sex / Alex Comfort, Susan Quilliam.—Rev. ed.
Originally published: New York : Crown, 1972; 1st American ed. of
revision originally published in Great Britain in 2008 by Mitchell Beazley.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Sex instruction. 2. Sex customs. I. Quilliam, Susan. II. Title.
HQ31.C743 2008
613.9'6—dc22 2008017531
eISBN: 978-0-307-45213-9
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Hannah Barnes-Murphy
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Copy Editor
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Proofreader
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Tim Foster
Senior Art Editor
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Illustrator
Russell Faulkner
Production Manager
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v3.1
contents
preface by Alex Comfort
I am a physician and human biologist for whom the natural history of human sexuality is of as much interest as the rest of human natural history. As with the rest of human natural history, I had notes on it. My wife encouraged me to bring biology into medicine, and my old medical school had no decent textbook to teach a human sexuality course.
Joy
was compiled and, very importantly, illustrated, just after the end of that daft and extraordinary non-statute in Western society, the Sexual Official Secrets Act. For at least two hundred years, the description, and above all the depiction, of this most familiar and domestic group of activities, and of almost everything associated with them, had been classified. When, in the sixteenth century,
Giulio Romano engraved his weightily classical pictures showing sixteen ways of making love, and
Aretino wrote poems to go with them, a leading ecclesiastic opined that the artist deserved to be crucified. The public, apparently, thought otherwise (“Why”, said Aretino, “should we not look upon that which pleases us most?”) and
Aretin’s
Postures
have circulated surreptitiously ever since, but even in 1950s Britain pubic hair had to be airbrushed out to provide a smooth and featureless surface.
People today, who never experienced the freeze on sexual information, won’t appreciate the propositions of the transformation when it ended – it was like ripping down the Iron Curtain. My immediate predecessor in writing about domestic sex,
Dr. Eustace Chesser, was (unsuccessfully) prosecuted for his low-key, unillustrated book
Love Without Fear
, and even in 1972 there was still some remaining doubt about whether
Joy
would be banned by the Thought Police.
The main aim of “sexual bibliotherapy” (writing books like this one) was to undo some of the mischief caused by the guilt, misinformation, and lack of information. That kind of reassurance is still needed. I have asked various people – chiefly older couples – whether
The Joy of Sex
told them things they didn’t know, or reassured them about things they knew and already did or would like to do. I have had both answers. One can now read books and see pictures devoted to sexual behavior almost without limitation in democratic countries, but it takes more than a few decades and a turnover of generations to undo centuries of misinformation; and of this material, much is anxious or hostile or over the top. People who worried, when the book first came out, if they did some of the things described in it may now worry if they don’t do all of them. That we can’t help, nor the fact that the same people who went to doctors because of sexual fear and inhibition under the old dispensation now go complaining of sexual indigestion under the new.
Sexual behavior probably changes remarkably little over the years – sexual revolutions and moral backlashes chiefly affect the degree of frankness or reticence about what people do in private; the main contributor to any sexual revolution in our own time, insofar as it affects behavior, has not been frankness but the advent of reliable
contraception, which makes it possible to separate the reproductive and recreational uses of sexuality. Where unanxious books dealing as accurately as possible with the range of sexual behaviors are most valuable is in encouraging the sexually active reader – who both wants to enjoy sex and to be responsible about it – and in aiding the helping professions to avoid causing problems to their clients. It is only recently, as ethology has replaced psychoanalytic theory, that counselors have come to realize that sex, besides being a serious interpersonal matter, is a deeply rewarding form of play. Children are not encouraged to be embarrassed about their play; adults often have been and are still. So long as play is not hostile, cruel, unhappy, or limiting, they need not be.
One of the most important uses of play is in expressing a healthy awareness of
sexual equality. This involves letting both sexes take turns in controlling the game; sex is no longer what men do to women and women are supposed to enjoy. Sexual interaction is sometimes a loving fusion, sometimes a situation where each is a “sex object” – maturity in sexual relationships involves balancing, rather than denying, the personal and impersonal aspects of arousal. Both are essential and built-in to humans. For anyone who is short on either of these elements, play is the way to learn: men learn to stop domineering and trying to perform; women discover that they can take control in the give-and-take of the game rather than by nay-saying. If they achieve this, Man and Woman are one another’s best friends in the very sparks they strike from one another.
This book has changed considerably since its first edition and it will be revised again in the future as knowledge increases. What will not change is the central importance of unanxious, responsible, and happy sexuality in the lives of normal people. For what they need – in a culture that does not learn skills and comparisons in this area of living by watching – is accurate and unbothered information. The availability of this, and public resistance to the minority of disturbed people who for so long limited it, is an excellent test of the degree of liberty and concern in a society, reflected in the now-old injunction to make love, not war. It is a socially relevant test today.
Alex Comfort, M.B., D.Sc., 1991
preface by Susan Quilliam
I am a relationships psychologist and sexologist whose lifetime aim, through a variety of expert roles, has been to help people enhance their emotional and sexual partnerships. So when the publishers of
The Joy of Sex
approached me to “reinvent” the book for the twenty-first century, it seemed to me the fulfillment of everything I have been working for.