We've been hearing about it for nearly a year and now the "The Joy of Sex: The Ultimate Revised Edition // The Timeless Guide to Lovemaking" will be released on January 6. We were pretty excited when we first heard about it—who didn't flip through it as a kid and feel all funny down there?—but based on Ariel Levy's New Yorker review, it appears "ultimate" and "revised" are intended to mean "cleaned up" and "oh yeah, we took the beard off of the man."
Dr. Alex Comfort's 1972 sexual how-to guide has been modernized by British relationship psychologist Susan Quilliam and from what we've seen, we will find a copy of the original to leave around the house for our kids to "find."
Exhibit A: An illustration from the “Vulva” section
See this lovely couple, happily hairy in the Seventies?
Levy writes, “The woman depicted in these drawings is lovely, and, even nearly forty years later, quite chic. Her gentleman friend, however, looks like a werewolf with a hangover.” Well, yeah. But for those of us who happen to go for werewolves with hangovers, we are none too pleased with the "revised" couple:
While we certainly appreciate that this move is called the "Cassoulet" (or is the the "cassolette?" Comfort loosely modeled the "Joy of Sex" after "The Joy of Cooking") we can't help but be bored to death by this clean-shaven, perfectly tanned couple. Does she really have highlights?
But as Levy points out, the language—which these days would probably incite a feminist riot—is also toned down:
It isn’t easy watching beauty get pawed by the beast, and our narrator does not help matters. “At a certain level and for all men,” Comfort informs us, “girls, and parts of girls, are at this stimulus level unpeople.” In “The Joy of Sex,” a male is a man, a female is a girl, and a vagina is, to “males generally, slightly scarey: it looks like a castrating wound and bleeds regularly, it swallows the penis and regurgitates it limp, it can probably bite and so on.” Men can get past such fears, of what Freudians called the vagina dentata, but Comfort cautions that “they are the origins of most male hangups including homosexuality.” The penis, by contrast, “has more symbolic importance than any other human organ.” Lest there be any confusion: “Vibrators are no substitute for a penis.” Comfort even enlists his fictional female narrator to argue the point for him. Under the heading “Women (by her for him),” Comfort writes of male genitalia, “It’s less the size than the personality, unpredictable movements, and moods which make up the turn-on (which is why rubber dummies are so sickening).” At times, “The Joy of Sex” has the feel of a penis propaganda pamphlet.
The rest of Levy's review is an interesting read (Dr. Comfort was cheating on his wife with her best friend and the illustrations are based on pictures he took with the friend, he did a terrible job of telling his son about sex), so go read it.
In the mean time, we guess we would like to request the "updated" and "revised" version with the old pictures. You know, for our kids to find someday.
[The New Yorker: Doing It]
Related:
"The Joy of Sex" Redux