Anna N. of Jezebel says
If you’re still using Alex Comfort’s 1972 The Joy of Sex as your guide to such topics as “frigidity,” having sex on horseback, and “tactful ways to take a woman’s virginity,” it’s time to update.
British sexologist Susan Quilliam has revised the famous book, putting more focus where you need it most: the clit. In words oddly reminiscent of Obama’s “McCain doesn’t get it” speech, Quilliam says Comfort gave short shrift to the all-important bit of female anatomy “not because he was anti-clitoris, but because he just didn’t know.” Also included now are sections on Internet porn, vulvar care, and a technique called the “Venus butterfly.” [NY Times]
What’s really scary to contemplate is Comfort was actually fairly state-of-the-art on the clit for 1972! He only started writing the thing a year or two after Masters and Johnson announced their research that it’s all about the clit. And only maybe ten years after “helpful” American gynecologists finally stopped cauterizing** or cutting them out of women who couldn’t stop playing with them(!!!!)
During a trial to shut down a theater for showing the Linda Lovelace movie “Deep Throat” a New York City prosecutor said, with his bare face hanging out, “The movie says it’s perfectly normal to have a clitoral orgasm and THAT IS WRONG.”
Y’ever wonder why old 2nd-wave feminists seem really cranky compared to 3rd-wavers? 3rd-wavers are all too young to remember just how jarringly bad it used to be! It was bad!
The original book is impossibly old-fashioned now in large part because… people back then read it, tried some of the then utterly-unheard-of stuff in it, and took it from there. Some of it’s laugh-out-loud now but compared to everything else available to the general public back then it was light-years ahead.
[** Yes, that J.H. Kellogg. —fl]
