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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Rereading Alex Comfort's "The Joy of Sex" on the morning after.
Apr 18, 2000 | When I heard that Dr. Alex Comfort had died last month, I decided to revisit the original 1972 edition of his bestseller, "The Joy of Sex: A Gourmet Guide to Lovemaking." Though the book was updated several times, including a 1991 edition with a chapter on AIDS, I wanted to study the Vietnam-era artifact that made such a splash, the one my friend Emily and I snuck out of her mother's house and studied in our treehouse.
But "The Joy of Sex" is hard to find around here. The original 1972 edition isn't in the library systems of Washington or the Maryland county where I live, or in my used bookstore. To view the original, subtitled "A Cordon Bleu Guide to Lovemaking" until the Cordon Bleu people objected, I must visit the rare book reading room at the Library of Congress
The library staff makes me put my stuff in a locker and sends me into the high-ceilinged room with just pencil and paper. The hardcover sits at the end of a long table in a book cradle. I feel like I'm here to take a sex exam I'll fail despite my years of study.
I'm tired; I've come straight from negotiating boundaries in a foreign bed. The guy had explained -- before we got to his place -- that he was fresh out of a long-term relationship and did not want to be anyone's boyfriend now. But if I was OK with some lesser situation, he said, let's get it on.
Either Comfort was ahead of his time, or casual sex hasn't evolved much since he helped get it going. In the introduction he says his book's approach, "depth-psychology in a jargonless form," is just right for 1972, "a moment when primatology and classical human psychodynamics look like joining hands." The strange phrase speaks straight to my Y2K monkey-woman brain.
Last night the smart woman, the one the guy said he likes, admired the clarity with which he kept his emotional distance. The primate then filtered out the content and basked in the admiration. Gee, I "thought," a girl could really fall for a guy with such integrity and eloquence. Thus devolved down past where language has meaning, I hit the lever for the sex pellet and the accompanying shock of disappointment.
My day's work -- plowing through pages of sex proselytizing and those line drawings of the randy hippies -- isn't the best distraction from obsessing about Mr. Last Night. "The Joy of Sex" is divided into three alphabetized sections of entries, more encyclopedia than cookbook.
"Starters" is Comfort's cheeky opinions on birth control, clothes, deodorant, foreskin, nakedness, variety and waking. (Men, he says, like sex in the morning more than women do.) "Main Courses" is an odd smorgasbord: bidet, equipment, handwork, lubrication, mouth music.
The final section, "Sauces and Pickles," is surprisingly saucy for the times. There's bondage, vibrators ("a new standby") and "Viennese oyster." ("A lady who can cross her feet behind her head, lying on her back, of course.") Comfort was even hip to people who have sex dressed as horses, a subcult I had never heard of until the 1999
