Anne Fadiman's Bookshelf
PAGE 2
The Joy of Sex
By Alex Comfort, MD
Ah, to be in my 20s again, eager and sometimes even able to be as acrobatic as the couple who gamely posed for this book's famous illustrations. There's something touching about the very idea of a sex manual—it's sort of like a how-to book on eating or breathing. But when you're at a certain age, nothing could be more apropos. Back in the seventies, the man in the pictures had longer hair than the woman, and neither had a particularly distinguished body. In the newest edition, they have switched their hair lengths and apparently spent the intervening years working out with personal trainers. Buff and yuppieish, looking ready to throw on their clothes and run out to their jobs at investment banks, they've lost their hippie languor, but they still gaze at each other with the tenderness that suffused every page of the original. As that old reactionary Alex Comfort put it, "You don't get high-quality sex without love."
By Alex Comfort, MD
Ah, to be in my 20s again, eager and sometimes even able to be as acrobatic as the couple who gamely posed for this book's famous illustrations. There's something touching about the very idea of a sex manual—it's sort of like a how-to book on eating or breathing. But when you're at a certain age, nothing could be more apropos. Back in the seventies, the man in the pictures had longer hair than the woman, and neither had a particularly distinguished body. In the newest edition, they have switched their hair lengths and apparently spent the intervening years working out with personal trainers. Buff and yuppieish, looking ready to throw on their clothes and run out to their jobs at investment banks, they've lost their hippie languor, but they still gaze at each other with the tenderness that suffused every page of the original. As that old reactionary Alex Comfort put it, "You don't get high-quality sex without love."
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