How the Joy of Sex was illustrated

By Cordelia HebblethwaiteBBC World Service

Forty years ago, a London publisher was working on a groundbreaking sex manual - a "gourmet guide" to sexual pleasure, with copious and detailed illustrations. But how could this be done tastefully and legally?

Think of The Joy of Sex and chances are your mind will drift to an image of a man with a bushy beard and a woman with hairy armpits.

'The Joy Of Sex': The Original Hairy, Musky Edition

Nicole Cliffe

It came! It came! The original 1972 Joy of Sex. Thank you, Mohammed from Brookline, MA. May your positive Amazon ratings never go down. (Look at all the unintentional sexual innuendo we've already covered!) I especially would like to thank Mohammed for making my back-up plan obsolete: taking my mother up on her offer to "see if she can figure out what she did with her copy."

And now that it's here, and I'm looking at it, it's a little gross. But endearingly gross. For a much better and more exhaustive look at the merits and career of Alex Comfort, M.B., Ph.D., I would refer you to Ariel Levy's delightful New Yorker piece from 2009. For a wry fictional take on what it would be like to be the children of the book's authors, you should pick up Meg Wolitzer's The Position, in which the Comforts become the Mellows, and it does not go well for them.