The lessons I learnt from The Joy of Sex, more than 50 years on

The scandalous guide offered explicit tips on ‘lovemaking’, but has it stood the test of time?

A moment of high passion. My partner – who for the purposes of this article would like to be known as “X” – executes a curious leg movement, kneeing me forcefully in the crotch. “What’s with the S&M?” I wail. “I was trying to do scissor position,” he explains. “Isn’t that what lesbians do?” I enquire. “Stick to the guide!”
For, lo, we are doing it by the book: the tome in question being Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex: A Cordon Bleu Guide to Lovemaking, first published in 1972, as an erotic recipe manual for Baby Boomers. By August 1973, it had topped the New York Times bestseller list, where it sat for 11 weeks, after which it spent over 70 weeks in the top five. Suddenly, radically, anyone could stroll into a bookshop and purchase this graphic guide to getting it on, illustrated with hirsute hippies – he blackly bearded, she luxuriantly power-muffed.
Why, you may ask, are X and I using a how-to over half a century old by way of inspiration? Blame Jilly Cooper. Like many, I found myself bewitched by the shag-utopia in Disney’s Rivals: lusty, unapologetic, conducted with mutual gusto. And where did our heroes and heroines acquire this let-it-all-hang-out attitude? Why, from Alex Comfort, of course. As fellow Alex, 44-year-old Alex Hassell, who plays Rupert Campbell-Black, remarked: “My mum and dad had the books [Cooper’s] on their top shelf, next to The Joy of Sex.” The two went together like slap and tickle.
The Joy of Sex’s author, Alex Comfort, was a doctor, aware that post-war sex remained a mystifying subject to many, and source of misery therein. His publishers had just released a cookery book, dinner parties more of a Seventies trend than pottery and macramé and likewise Comfort’s book offered a recipe format. 
However, even with this cosy cookbook conceit, his guide provoked scandal, Comfort becoming known as “Doctor Sex”, he and his wife of three decades divorcing after publication. He then married his long-term lover, and ex-wife’s best friend, with whom he had been conducting an affair. (They are the sexually experimental “we” of the authorial voice.) The pair left Britain for California, seat of the swinging Sixties, swinging itself an incentive.
And, yet, for all its educational explicitness, The Joy of Sex, reads as the relic of a bygone – and more innocent – era: a time before the internet was awash with choking scenes, teenagers exposing themselves for likes. For all the talk of group sex among friends, Comfort’s manual champions monogamous attachment. “This book is about love…: you don’t get high-quality sex on any other basis,” it insists. These well-thatched couples are devoted, locked in their libidinous duet.
Born in 1971, this is how I remember the Seventies. The end of the decade may have brought John Travolta’s thrusting hips in Saturday Night Fever. However, in the boho bourgeois area of Birmingham in which I grew up, marital passion loomed large. Husbands painted their wives disporting themselves naked on their walls, all rosy nipples and labia; others were too jealous to let hairdressers touch their innamorata’s tresses. 
Our home didn’t need to boast a copy of Comfort’s manual – openness abounded. My father was a psychiatrist, my mother a nurse, spawning five children in 12 years, our Sunday lunches spent discussing “raising the dead” (patients’ pre-Viagra impotence solutions) a disturbing phrase until light dawned. Still, The Joy of Sex was in every other home, as ubiquitous as a fondue set and Crying Boy picture. Tens of millions of copies were purchased in over 20 languages, spawning five sequels and numerous spin-offs; its principal sequel, More Joy, selling 1.5 million.
Flash forward to today and I gen up via two copies – a 1976 paperback featuring “a few stains” (gah!) and a less insalubrious 2002 update. I immediately pick up facts, not all of which I’d like tested. Who knew that cupping and shaking the mons pubis can lead to orgasm? As for the repeated insistence on being stimulated by my partner’s big toe – no f***ing way.
A love/hate relationship with the text develops. I admire Comfort’s desire to grant his readers the gift of knowledge. His 1991 preface stresses the need for his manifesto: his very medical school lacked a guide with which to teach human sexuality. As late as the 1990s, my father taught this subject to first-year medical students to find his lecture hall packed with all disciplines from drama students to engineers.
However, the cooking / playing metaphors deployed by our oracle turn my stomach, ditto the insistence on body odour as a calling card. It’s taken ten years to persuade X to wear deodorant and I’m not having him regress now; let alone smother my orgasmic moans with his odiferous armpit. Informed that my “cassolette” (perfume box) is my greatest asset, I keep thinking “cassoulet”.
Comfort may argue for equality, but the implied reader of the book is clearly male, his instrument his female partner. Meanwhile, I am struck by how much time Seventies lovers had on their, er, hands.  With no mobile phones, three (often merely two) television channels, and 9-5 working days, they can lavish time on charting obscure erogenous zones, engaging in head-to-toe “tongue baths”.  What hope our time-starved sexual scenarios?
I consult psychologist and coach Sue Quilliam, who penned The New Joy of Sex, to global frenzy in 2008, following Comfort’s death. I describe the guide as “utopic” and she agrees. “It was very well-meaning,” she observes. “It established that sex wasn’t frightening or dirty, but something everybody does. I loved the permission it gave, the emphasis on pleasure granted to both genders, and the idea that sex was a skill you could develop.” Seventeen years on, she added more research, made the text more female-friendly (including more on the clitoris), and removed intercourse on a moving motorbike as distinctly non-safe sex.
And so to my book report on erotic menus written the year that I was born. Full disclosure: my attempt at cultivating a big bush failed. I simply don’t have it in me. As for the focus on communicating with your playmate, X, a public schoolboy, is extremely happy to have more intercourse, but utterly repulsed by discussing it. Arcane position-wise, I wouldn’t say we have too much to learn, having met when we were in our 40s. While I note that the “pompoir” method, using the vaginal muscles to stimulate the penis, “the most sought-after feminine sexual response…learned only by long practice…by throwing the will into the part affected” is something we pelvic-floor aware modern women take in our stride.
Nevertheless, there is much to learn about – if not openness – then shall we say readiness? This, rather than in our internal athleticism, is where we need to throw the will. For one thing that Comfort didn’t predict was that, the more society sanctions sexual exploration, the less people will desire it. Fifty years on, we may occupy a porn-utopia, but our sex is as fast – and unsatisfying – as our food: craved as a convenience, if at all. Brits are having less sex now than during the last 30 years, according to the British Medical Journal, less than half (41%) of those aged 16 to 44 having had intercourse once a week during the last month.
Spurred by my vintage venery guide, I begin to appreciate that I was more skilled as a single adventurer, seizing opportunities to broaden my repertoire, and do the deed full stop. Cheered on by Comfort’s long-haired lovers, I start allowing time for sex, space. Occasionally, I even persuade skinflint X to leave the heating on, so we can lounge about naked as Joy dictates. Was retro rogering better than today’s sexcapades? No, but there may have been more of it.
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