http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/books/review/InsideList-t.html?_r=1BRINGING SEXY BACK: It’s too soon to say what the shift toward home-based recreation will do for another below-the-waist classic, “The Joy of Sex.” The latest version of Alex Comfort’s hippie love manual, which spent 343 weeks on the list after its original 1972 publication, hit the stores last week, bearing the tag line “The Ultimate Revised Edition.” (Is that a threat or a promise?) In her recent book, “The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories,” the journalist Pagan Kennedy calls Comfort “one of the greatest and strangest minds of the 20th century.” Great might be a stretch, but I’ll buy strange. A scholarly expert on snails, Comfort insisted his shy wife garden in a bikini — this was in not-yet-swinging London — and once built a television out of spare parts and glue made from disintegrated Weetabix. Bored with married sex, he took up with Jane Henderson, a librarian friend of his wife’s, often speeding toward their secret pleasure lab with a condom taped to the dashboard. He nicknamed himself “John Thomas,” after the gamekeeper’s penis in “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” and compiled his and Jane’s “kitchen tested” recipes in a privately circulated pamphlet titled “Doing Sex Properly.” In 1961, he published “Come Out to Play,” a novel about a doctor who opens a sex academy in Paris. In his 1963 book “Sex in Society,” he argued for free love and denounced chastity as a public health menace. When “Joy” came out in 1972, it was an immediate sensation. “Without quite realizing what he was up to,” Kennedy writes, Comfort “had found a way to re-brand sex. He’d taken stunts seen nowhere outside of triple-X porn and turned them into entertainments suitable for a suburban couple to try after a few glasses of merlot.” Sadly, the new edition, edited by the British sexologist Susan Quilliam, does not seem to include the homespun sewing pattern for a G-string featured in the original, but it does contain entries on AIDS, Viagra and Internet porn.
Author