Put What Where? (23 page)

Comfort’s book wrote the manifesto for our new, sex-sodden age, when he declared: ‘In books prior to the seventies, perversion meant, quite simply, any sexual behaviour which the writer himself did not enjoy.’

Comfort declared that people should worry less about harmless sexual quirks, and more about ‘the commonest perversions in our culture ... getting hold of some power and using it to kick other people around, money-hunting as a status activity, treating other people, sexually or otherwise, as things to manipulate and interfering with other people’s sex lives’. Right on, man.
The Joy of Sex
was not only the first sexually explicit illustrated sex manual to be widely published. It was also the hairiest: bushy beard, legs, armpits, everything. Comfort even embraced promiscuity, unlike Reuben. He was in favour of steady relationships – but said they can last 50 years or 15 minutes. He was also sympathetic to gays and lesbians.

It was the first manual to treat sexual activity purely as pleasure, with headings such as ‘gadgets
and gimmicks’ or ‘foursomes and moresomes’ and a gourmet approach to coupling that relied on sensual culinary descriptions. It was nothing short of a phenomenon. Since 1972, it has sold more than 12 million copies, been translated into two dozen languages and reportedly earned $3 million for the author. But Comfort described
The Joy of Sex
as an ‘albatross’ that detracted from his other contributions to science and the arts. In his long and productive life, he wrote 50 other texts, ranging from a novel about the Roman Emperor Nero, to medical textbooks and volumes of poetry. But everyone remembers him as the free-love freak who wrote that hippy manual.

That’s what you get for being a troublemaker. He was born in 1920 in North London and began causing chaos at an early age. Comfort described himself during childhood as a ‘perfect little bastard’. He blew the fingers off his left hand at the age of 14 while trying to make gunpowder. After running away from school, his mother taught him from their home. But his literary promise was evident early on, too. Comfort wrote his first book,
The Silver River
, when he was only 18. He based it on a trip he took with his father to Africa and South America. Newspaper reviewers praised his precocious talent.

His hippy tendencies showed themselves as a young man in the Second World War, when he declared himself a conscientious objector. Instead of fighting, he studied medicine at Trinity College, Cambridge, but failed his medical finals the first time round because, having emerged from an air-raid
shelter dirty, unshaven and scruffy, the patient he was to examine refused to let him near them. A medical career was not enough, though, and the young Dr Comfort turned to writing poetry, becoming lauded as one of Britain’s most promising young poets. After the war he joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and ran a pirate ban-the-bomb radio station, using a mobile transmitter to interrupt BBC news bulletins with his anarchist propaganda. He was never caught. Comfort also wrote a popular protest song that was adopted by Nina Simone. Considering his later claim to fame, it had the unlikely title of
Go Limp
– an instruction to peace marchers on how to resist arrest passively.

In 1960, he joined the Committee of 100, which had been launched by the philosopher Bertrand Russell to organize mass civil disobedience against Britain’s nuclear arsenal. The following year, he was jailed for a month with around 40 other committee members for refusing to be bound over to keep the peace. His fellow prisoners included some of the era’s leading creative minds, such as the playwright Robert Bolt. Comfort spent some of his jail time teaching his cellmate, the 89-year-old Russell, to sing Irish revolutionary songs. Comfort was also among the great and good who wrote an open letter to
The Times
in 1967, supporting the Wolfenden Report’s call for gay sex to be legalized.

Comfort’s medical career prospered despite his activism. He lectured in physiology and then specialized in gerontology – elderly people’s medicine – at University College, London. He discovered
the life-prolonging powers of artificial antioxidants and his 1956 book
The Biology of Senescence
remains a seminal work on ageing. He continued to write – poetry, novels, social histories and literary criticism. In 1961, his
Darwin and the Naked Lady
reminded the world of the power of Indian erotica, and three years later, his
Koka Shastra
translation hit the shelves.

Comfort dismissively remembered writing
The Joy of Sex: a gourmet guide to lovemaking
, in only two weeks. ‘Somebody rang me to say that the London Hospital was not teaching sex properly and would I talk to them about it. So I spoke to the head of professional psychiatry and ended up agreeing to write a book myself,’ he recalled. He denied, somewhat disingenuously, ever being any kind of authority on sex before he wrote the book. He claimed he did the research while he was doing the writing. On another occasion he claimed the book was based on a mix of personal experience, reading and talking to people. Perhaps, though, the book wrote itself, thanks to experience learnt from his complicated personal life. Comfort had attempted to pioneer dual-domesticity – living with two women in two different houses. He called them Wife 1 and Wife 2, but the experiment failed and he was forced to choose between them. Shortly after
The Joy of Sex
was published, his 29-year marriage to Ruth Muriel Harris ended in divorce and he married Wife 2, the sociologist Jane Henderson.

The book was originally called
Cordon Bleu Sex
, but the owners of the Cordon Bleu copyright
objected. The replacement title was possibly inspired by a contemporary Buddhist book,
Joy
, but remained modelled on gourmet cooking. The book was arranged in three sections, ‘Starters’, ‘Main courses’ and ‘Sauces and pickles’. Its jaunty style also helped to distance it neatly from the tawdry world of porno. Sex, just like food, was now lifestyle. ‘Chef-grade cooking doesn’t happen naturally,’ Comfort wrote. ‘It’s hard to make mayonnaise by trial and error, for instance. Cordon Bleu sex, as we define it, is exactly the same situation.’ And if you had a mishap with the mayonnaise, the book included practical advice such as how to remove stains – ‘with a stiff brush, when the stain has dried, or with a dilute solution of sodium bicarbonate’.

It was written with the simple aim, Comfort said, of showing that sex could be fun. There was a political motive, too: he believed that sexually fulfilled lovers were unlikely to harm others, saying: ‘If people have a very happy home life, as I’ve always had, they are probably extremely reluctant to kill people they have never met. War is for mugs.’

Soon after the book was published, Comfort moved to California and lectured in psychiatry at Stanford University. Later he became a professor at the University of California at Berkeley’s neuropsychiatric institute. He also joined the Sandstone experimental sexual community in Topanga Canyon near Los Angeles, which he wrote about in his best-selling follow-up,
More Joy of Sex.
Gay Talese, an American writer, visited Sandstone in the early 1970s, and in his 1981 book
Thy Neighbor’s Wife
,
described him. ‘Often the nude biologist, brandishing a cigar, traipsed through the room between the prone bodies with the professional air of a lepidopterist strolling through the fields waving a butterfly net. A gray-haired, bespectacled owlish man with a well-preserved body, Dr Comfort was unabashedly drawn to the sight of sexually engaged couples. With the least amount of encouragement – after he had deposited his cigar in a safe place – he would join the friendly clutch of bodies and contribute to the merriment.’

Comfort said he did not recognize the description and, indeed, according to his journalist son Nick, life with Dr Joy as his father proved to be a distinctly erogenous-free zone: ‘His idea of sex education was to race through the most basic facts of life when I was 12 – and then only after my school had sent him a missive about personal hygiene,’ Nick wrote. ‘It is the disappointing truth that, while life with a father of staggeringly varied intellectual interests was seldom dull, I probably heard less talk about sex than the average child.’

Comfort died on 26 March 2000 at a nursing home in Britain, aged 80, after a series of strokes. The philosophy of his early poems ruled his work. In 1946, he had written, ‘I recognize two obligations: to do nothing to increase the total of human suffering, and to leave nothing undone which diminishes it.’ In 1994, he declared that he still held these principles, ‘But I’ve become more of a Buddhist.’

Comfort’s death marks the end of a breed, and thus the end of this history. Why stop here?

It is not simply because Dr Joy was the last in a long and eccentric line of true misfit manual writers, but also because his work finally brought us full-circle back to the original Chinese manuals’ unabashed accent on sexual pleasure – albeit in the interests of peace and love, rather than immortality.
The Joy of Sex
also put copulation back on top of the coffee table, rather than under the counter, as an activity that was healthy rather than a cause of deep, disabling shame. Irwin Edman predicted with surprising accuracy in 1932 that, ‘By 1982 sex will have become much less a theme for either poetry or analysis. Much of the romanticism and all of the hypochondria on the subject will be over.’ Perhaps, though, he could have more accurately swapped romanticism with hypochondria.

The book also ends here in order to evade a difficult and perplexing question: how do you examine today’s overcrowded advice market? The question is akin to asking, how do you study a stampede? The
clamour of sex advice that now comes at us from more angles than a Roman orgy is notable more for its volume than its content. It is, in its everything-goes, self-help, live-your-life style, ultimately homogenized, and driven infinitely more by marketing budgets and focus groups than by the eccentric whims of social outcasts and dreamers. That is not to deny that it is a fascinating phenomenon, but I suspect that the true nature of our modern era of celebrity experts and relaxed attitudes will only become clear through the lens of retrospect. In three or four decades’ time, I expect that the students at some university faculty of Applied and Theoretical Sex Advice will be studying the Millennium Sexplosion with the same mirth, incredulity and horror that shakes us when we think of the masturbation scares of the Victorian era. What indeed will they think of us? Will they link our obsession with orgasms to our endless need to go shopping? Perhaps they will wonder why we bought so many manuals but seemed to have little time or energy for sex. Will they link that paradox with the way many of us buy celeb-chef cookbooks but rely on microwaves and eating meals out?