The Joy of Sex (2 page)

I well remember the original publication of
Joy
, and the awed giggles with which I and my friends read, discussed, and then put into practice its suggestions. So I know firsthand what over the decades proved to be true:
Joy
is an astonishing and inspirational child of its age, born not only out of social but also political changes that irreversibly altered the sexual landscape for individuals, couples, and society. Barely a decade before the book’s 1972 publication, the
contraceptive pill had, for the first time in history, enabled women to have control over their own fertility. In its wake came increased female education, emancipation, and self-belief, as well as a whole host of liberalizations, sexual and social – increasing permissiveness, more frequent cohabitation, easier divorce, more available erotica, and gay rights.

Joy
was not only a product of this revolution, it also helped create it.
Dr. Alex Comfort’s aim was to write the first book that gave readers accurate knowledge about sexuality, and permission to use that knowledge. The text and illustrations were designed to both reassure the reader that their sexuality was normal and to offer further possibilities with which to expand their sexual menu. He was hugely effective in his intention – 8.5 million copies of
The Joy of Sex
have been sold to date and it has been translated into fourteen languages. More than that, it was a key influence on the social changes of the late twentieth century and has been a byword for sexual vision ever since.

Why, then, reinvent? There have already been content revisions, in the author’s lifetime and after his death in 2000, the most recent being the highly successful thirtieth-anniversary edition by Alex’s son
Nicholas Comfort. But the very changes that
Joy
itself wrought in society have meant that the book has come to need updating in a more fundamental way. This was my task – to re-create
The Joy of Sex
for the contemporary world; to do what Alex Comfort would have done had he been writing today.

The majority of the text remains the same, but substantial additions have been made. Many of these are informational; there have been countless key scientific discoveries in recent years in the fields of physiology, psychology, psychotherapy, and medicine, while the advent of sexology – the specialist study of sexual matters – has resulted in both rigorous academic research and a more widespread public awareness of, and skill in, sex.

Alongside these informational updates, a great deal of refocusing has been necessary to reflect social shifts. An intimate relationship is a very different animal from what it was in 1972. It’s now largely expected that sex will be part of every love partnership, that bedroom activity will include practices previously considered outrageous, and that these practices will be informed and often suggested via a new raft of technological advances. It’s acknowledged that a woman can lead just as much as a man, both in bed and out of it – one reason why the publisher chose a woman to reinvent the book. And it is, albeit slowly, now acknowledged that a couple’s sex life lasts well into their later years and increases, rather than decreases, in quality.

Yet along with all these positive developments has come a flurry of problems that weren’t predicted in the heady days of 1972. Pressure to have sex; regret that one has had sex; worry that one isn’t sufficiently beautiful to deserve sex; worry that one isn’t having enough sex or enough good sex. And all that is set beside high rates of pregnancy, abortion, and sexually transmitted infections. In the twenty-first century, as we hastily adapt to a society arguably more sexualized than any previous one, it’s a wild world out there.

All of which is why the many changes made to
Joy
have been underpinned by what remains the same – an absolute yet pragmatic optimism around sexuality and its place in our lives. Running throughout the original book was a rock-solid seam of positivity that sex is a good thing and that mature adults, given the right information and inspiration, can be trusted to treat it as such. Despite the headlines and scare stories, I still deeply believe in what Alex Comfort proposed – that sex should be and can be a total joy.

I have loved reinventing the book because Alex Comfort’s values and aims are also mine. I too want to present knowledge in an accessible form. To encourage mature decision-making and offer the skills and strategies to do it. To protest attempts to enforce inhibitions on human sexuality. To see sex as the ultimate in human play, but at the same time a developmental essential that helps us grow as people and partners. Above all, to give people not just the technicalities, the fripperies, or the “junk food” of sexual literature, but an intelligent, thoughtful, and “gourmet” treatment of the topic.

In the end I return to, and repeat in my own voice, Alex Comfort’s words from his first preface. My intention and my hope is that this book will “benefit … the ordinary, sexually active reader – eager to both enjoy sexuality and to be tender and responsible with it.” True in 1972. Just as true today.

Susan Quilliam, 2008

i like my body when it is with your

body. It is so quite new a thing.

Muscles better and nerves more.

i like your body. i like what it does,

i like its hows. i like to feel the spine

of your body and its bones, and the trembling

-firm-smooth ness and which i will

again and again and again

kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,

i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz

of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes

over parting flesh.… And eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill

of under me you so quite new

e. e. cummings

on gourmet lovemaking

All of us, barring any physical limitations, are able to dance and sing – after a fashion. This, if you think about it, summarizes the justification for learning to make love. Love, in the same way as singing, is something to be taken spontaneously. On the other hand, the difference between Pavlova and the Palais de Danse, or opera and barbershop singing, is much less than the difference between sex as our recent ancestors came to accept it and sex as it can be.

At least we recognize this now (so that instead of worrying if sex is sinful, most people now worry whether they are “getting satisfaction” – one can worry about anything, given the determination). And there are now enough books about the basics; we are largely past the point of people worrying about the normality, possibility, and variety of sexual experience. This book is slightly different, in that there are now enough people who have those basics and want more depth of understanding, solid ideas, and inspiration.

To draw a parallel, chef-grade cooking doesn’t happen naturally: it starts at the point where people know how to prepare and enjoy food, are curious about it and willing to take trouble preparing it, read recipe hints, and find they are helped by one or two techniques. It’s hard to make mayonnaise by trial and error, for instance.
Gourmet sex, as we define it, is the same – the extra one can get from comparing notes, using some imagination, trying way-out or new experiences, when one already is making satisfying love and wants to go on from there.