BRINGING SEXY BACK

Among the reasons I have to feel grateful that I did not come of age in the 1970s, the "buttered bun" and the "grope suit" rank high on the list. Both of these terms are explained in the first edition of the "Joy of Sex", published in 1972 by Dr Alex Comfort, an English gerontologist who, according to a piece in today's New York Times, "practised his own joy of sex by ditching his wife and moving to a free love commune in California." His book, with its "hairy man" illustrations and titter-provoking subject matter, was a huge success, with 343 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List, and on night-tables everywhere.

Cows Between our politicians and the internet there would seem to be enough sex floating around, but Susan Quilliam, a British "sexologist" aims to update Comfort's material for the 21st-century reader. In her new edition-- the British version came out in September, the American release is next month--she's removed the buttered bun and grope suits, as well as sections about sex on motorcycles and horseback, and tactful ways to deflower virgins. (According to the Times of London, she's somewhat reluctantly left in the section on "Foursomes and Moresomes".) But her update has larger goals. She wants to bring the public up to speed on advances in scientific research on sex, and add more heft to Comfort's explication of the female body--“Not because he was anti-clitoris,” she told the New York Times, “but because he just didn’t know.”

Most poignant are the necessary additions of topics that didn't exist in the '70s--when AIDS wasn't on the map, condoms were still 'optional', and it was the era of free love, not of hooking up and fabulously expensive call girls (or boring bachelors, for that matter). As Quillaim told the Times, “Alex Comfort wrote the book on...the atmosphere...in the late Sixties and early Seventies, of seeing sex as something like a big treasure box you were opening and taking out wonderful things. There was a real innocence. And an innocence of the hurt that can be done.”

Of course, back then there was no such thing as “teledildodonics" either. I'll let you guys look that one up. ~ ARIEL RAMCHANDANI

Picture credit: storem (via Flickr)