From Ariel Levy’s droll review of the new edition of the 1970s phenom, The Joy of Sex, which appears in this week’s New Yorker:
The book is still emphatically straight, but [British sexologist Susan] Quilliam has given it a gay-positive tone, in sharp contrast to [the original’s] advice that if you might be that way inclined it was better not to experiment too much with a partner of the same sex, lest you let the gay genie out of the bottle. The original drawings have been replaced, with a mixture of modest photographs and impressionistic sketches. The hairiness has been eliminated, and the attractiveness gap between the man and the woman has been bridged. But the people in these pictures do not look as if they were in any kind of sexual ecstasy. Rather, they have the smug smiles of a couple whose 401(k)s have just appreciated. They look as if they were in a Viagra commercial, which is to say that they look like two people who have never, ever had sex.
About the author of the original, British scientist and physician Alex Comfort:
Comfort suffered a massive brain hemorrhage in 1991, at the age of seventy-one, and [his mistress, muse, and second wife] Jane died shortly thereafter. From then until Comfort’s death, in 2000, his son from his first marriage, Nicholas, was Comfort’s caretaker and took over the business of managing “The Joy of Sex.” “He was good about talking about sex in the abstract, but when he had to tell me about the facts of life he was embarrassed,” Nicholas Comfort told a reporter on the occasion of the book’s thirtieth anniversary. “He got it all over with quite quickly and hoped I wouldn’t ask any questions.
Here Levy discusses the relevance of the book. Here a portfolio of [adult] images from the book. Here the NYTimes review of the new edition.