Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - The Book That Changed Sex Forever

Episode Date: December 26, 2023

There had been sex manuals for hundreds of years, but by the 20th century they were quite underground. That is, until the Joy of Sex was released in 1972.It was a revolutionary book about sex, and sold over 12 million copies.Who was the man behind it? His name, aptly, was Dr. Alex Comfort, and he was a poet, novelist, anarchist and philosopher, amongst other things.Joining Kate today to explore his work and the impact the Joy of Sex had, is Eric Laursen, author of Polymath: The Life and Professions of Dr Alex Comfort, Author of The Joy of Sex.This episode was edited by Teän Stewart-Murray and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Don’t miss out on the best offer in history! Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts.Get a subscription for £1 for 3 months with code BETWIXTTHESHEETS1 sign up now for your 14-day free trial https://historyhit/subscription/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. But Twinksters, it is I, once again, Kate Lister, here to protect your ears and your brain from whatever nonsense and filth is going to spew forth from this podcast. You need a fair do's warning and here it is. This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things covering a range of adult subjects in an adulty way. And you should be an adult too. And now if you will insist on listening to the rest of this and you happen to get upset, offended, or have your sense, sensibilities trespassed upon.

It's really not our fault because you were warned. Fair do's. Before the internet came along, where did horny teenagers find out about sex? Well, if we're talking about the late 20th century, it might well have been from their parents' copy of The Joy of Sex, which since its publication in 1972, has sold more than 12 million copies.

That's a lot of joyful sex. It was a huge deal, and it promoted the idea of happy, sexuality in our lives, something that I can absolutely get on board with. What lay between its pages was a fully illustrated manual that really did revolutionise people's sex lives. But who was the man behind this pioneering book on sex? How were his ideas of anarchian activism woven into it? And what effect did the book really have on society?

What do you look for a man? Oh, manny, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to it. I make perfect coppents of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the body. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I feel for them. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Dary. Welcome back to Betwixt the Sheath, the history of sex scandal in society. With me, Kate Lister. Some would say that the post-war sexual revolution was down to one thing. The contraceptive pill.

Possibly Elvis's hips. While I may be willing to admit there's some truth to, that, I think that you would have to say that Alex Comfort's 1972 iconic work, The Joy of Sex, definitely played a part in that story. The book made its way into millions of living rooms and presumably bedrooms too, and played a part in destigmatising conversations around sex. But the story of the man behind it is as interesting as the contents of the book itself. Comfort had progressive ideas around gay rights and sex ed, but equally he didn't have a very fallow-centric view of sex. He was a poet, a physician, scientist and an activist.

And today I am joined by Eric Lawson, author of Polymath, the life and professions of Dr. Alex Comfort, author of The Joy of Sex, to find out more about this man who made his own dent on sexuality in the 20th century. I am ready for this if you are Betwixters. Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's own. Eric Larson, how are you doing? Good. Thanks so much, Kate, for having me on. There is nobody I would rather be talking to today, quite frankly, because you have written a biography on such a fascinating man,

a man that I really only knew as writing one particular work, which Alex Comfort, who wrote The Joy of Sex, but your book, your biography, Polymath, the Life and Professions of Dr. Alex Comfort, author of the Joy of Sex. He did so much stuff. He didn't just write good books about how to have sex. He was doing stuff I couldn't have even imagined. It's so fascinating.

My first question to you is what brought you to Alex? What made you think this is a man I need to write about? Like a lot of people, it did start with the joy of sex. I mean, I can remember being about 13 years old and running across copies of this book in a bookstore in San Francisco, you know, stacks of it. And it's got this rather austere cover. but it says the joy of sex. And so, of course, I'm picking it up and furtively looking at it and hoping that nobody calls me out and says, put that book down, little boy, or something like that.

This was at a time when there wasn't really a lot that was available for kids in terms of sex education. And most of what it was was very clinical. This was a very relaxed, welcoming book that was suggesting you just take a look into a lovemaking session between two people. A few years later, I was at university, and I remember running across a reference book called Contemporary Poets, and I'm looking at it, and there's Alex Comfort as a poet, you know, with a dozen or so collections, and he's being written up in this book, and I thought, wait a second, that's the same person. You know, yes, indeed it was. Some years later, I was writing a book about the history of the social security debate in the United States, you know, old age pensions. And of course, I have to learn a little bit

about the discussion around human aging. And I find I run into Alex Comfort again as a gerontologist who did important work on the biology of human aging. So again, I'm running into him. And then a few years after that, a friend of mine suggested that I read a book which had really impressed him called Authority and Delinquency in the Modern State, which was a book by Alex Comfort, which was an attempt to create a kind of a psychopathology of the state. Like, why to state? do genocidal things? How does it attract people who are capable of making decisions like this? And I thought, wait a second, there must be a biography of this guy around somewhere. He's just too interesting, and I couldn't find anything. I found one little book that was less than 200 pages long

that was the study of him as a poet and novelist. It was like a literary study, and I thought, well, this is not adequate. So I started poking around, and I thought, well, maybe I should do this. And I was fortunate enough to find a number of people who knew him. I was eventually put in touch with his son Nick. And he was willing to help. So I was off and running. But it was really just kind of this accretion of interesting things I found out about him. And I became curious about how did all these different things that he did fit together?

He was a physician. He was a gerontologist. He was a geriatrician. He was a poet and novelist. He was an anti-nuclear campaigner. He was an anarchist political thinker. Also, he was kind of a philosopher of science. He wrote about human consciousness, about evolutionary origins of mysticism and religion.

He just was all over the place. And so I was just very, very curious to know how all this fit together. And, of course, one of the things I had to do was to find out more about the sexual revolution. What did that really mean? Because joy of sex came out in 72, when the sexual revolution was sort of well underway. And so the sexual revolution is one of these things that we think we know what it was about. And then when we start looking into it, we found it was a much more complex and interesting thing than we'd presume.

So all of this just dragged me deeper and deeper into what became a really terrifically fun project to find out more about this person. You just wonder, how did he manage to fit sex in at all with everything that he was doing? For anyone that's listening that isn't aware of the book, The Joy of Sex, can you give us a sort of an overview, you know, Spark Notes edition of what the Joy of Sex was and why it was so important and not just a 13-year-old boys in bookshops in San Francisco? Right, right. Well, The Joy of Sex was really kind of a bombshell at the time. You know, there had been sex manuals, which gave you advice on how to do it for thousands of years. I mean, going back to classical India, Japan, Renaissance, Italy, these books had existed. But the whole genre had kind of fallen into this underground category of stuff we disapproved of. And especially by the 17th century and certainly in the Victorian era, these sort of books were things that you would find underground in the, you know, under the counter in a bookstore or you'd get them through the mail. And they tended to be

fairly sleazy and cheesy. And so what Alex was really proposing to do when he developed the joy of sex was, first of all, there were two bestselling books that came out in the years just before that. One was called Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex, but We're Afraid to Ask, which was by a psychologist named David Rubin. And then there was a book called The Sensuous Woman, which was by an anonymous writer, and they were bestsellers. And Alex was appalled by them because he felt that in the guise of being sort of liberatory, they actually promoted a lot of old misconceptions and misinformation and prejudices about sex. So he decided the answer to this is to revive the ancient genre of the sex manual and update it for the modern age. And so that's what he did

with Joy of Sex. The book is illustrated explicitly, but with paintings and drawings, because he and his publisher were worried about the book being banned. But it's organized like in a kind of a humorous way like a cookbook. You've got starters and appetizers. You've got name courses. You've got desserts. Sources and pickles was sort of a category. And he has in the book lots of basic advice and information. Then he has about 28 different distinct poses or positions you can take, which is the old sex manuals used to be referred to as posture books.

You know, in other words, here's various ways you can do it. And so he incorporated that into it. And a key thing with the joy of sex was the voice he adopted. which was, it wasn't sleazy, it wasn't technical, it was this very relaxed, kind of humorous voice. You know, sex in the shower is okay, but don't pull too heavily on the crossbar. It isn't weight bearing, you know, that sort of thing. It's full of little quips like that, which are supposed to kind of disarm you and make you more relaxed and less anxious about sex. Because that was one of his complaints is that physicians particularly had done their best to make people anxious.

and nervous about sex. And his idea was to write a book that would have a voice that kind of took all of that out and let you be relaxed about the whole thing and have fun with it. And so that's, that was really kind of the new voice that he brought to the thing. And the book was designed really to kind of key off of that voice, to have a kind of a presentation that, you know, is sort of a coffee table format with tasteful drawings and photos. So if you were a middle class couple, you could buy this book and use it and not feel embarrassed by it. You could put it on your coffee table in your living room and the guests could take a look at it and not think there was something odd about you. So it was kind of bringing sex into the modern home in a relaxed way. It's not an easy thing to do.

As you said, there have been so many books about sex. They're not hard to find, but they tend to be either lean into the medical aspect of it. And that can be quite alienating because they're talking about sex as if it was a medical operation. Or they can over intellectualize it, which is also quite alienating. Or it's just incredibly sleazy. It's gone too far the other way. To pitch that just right. So you've got a book that is fun to read and the laid back attitude of it is probably what was the most revolutionary, that pitch that he got just right. And it was a huge smash, wasn't it? Yeah, it sold 12 million copies to date in various languages and additions. It topped the New York Times hardcover bestseller list for 13 weeks, and the trade paperback version of it set a record for

how many weeks it topped the bestseller list. So it was an enormous smash. Wow, I hadn't realized it was quite that big. So what's Alex's origin story then? I'd never actually looked into him as much as I should have done. I assumed that when he said he was a doctor, it was like Dr. Pepper or Dr. Dre, but he was an actual doctor. Oh, yeah, yeah. I remember when I first heard about the book and saw it, you know, I looked at this name Dr. Alex Comfort and it sounded like it must be made up. That's it, right? I was like, Dr. Comfort, come on. Actually, it turns out to have been, it was an old Kentish name. That's where the family was from. Wow. He was born in 1920. He grew up in Barnett. His father was a civil servant. His mother was a former teacher who was a very driven,

brilliant woman who brought him up really to be a great scholar from almost day one. She was a French scholar and she taught him to speak French almost before he could speak English. He went to Highgate School on a scholarship. He went to Trinity College, Cambridge on a scholarship. By that time, he was a pretty committed pacifist. And he was very involved in protesting the Allied bombing of civilian targets, cities on the continent during the war. And he got into a huge quarrel in the pages of Tribune with George Orwell over this. After the war, they sort of made up and became friends. But by that time, he was already publishing

poetry and novels and establishing a reputation. He studied medicine at Cambridge, and he was a practicing physician. And he was very involved with the Peace Pledge Union and the campaign for nuclear disarmament. By his 20s, he was an avowed anarchist, and he was pushing for a kind of a philosophy of disobedience against unethical and immoral acts of the state. which is why he opposed nuclear weapons. He was involved with the CND from pretty much the start. It was one of their more visible people. And by that time, he was already writing about sex.

He was one of the first people in the UK to review the Kinsey Report when it came out. So we're talking about 1948. He wrote his first book on sex in 1948, almost 25 years before the joy of sex came out. And by the early 60s, he was one of Britain's more prominent public intellectuals. He was on the BBC all the time, partly about his gerontological work, which he was doing at University College London, study of human aging, but also about sex. And he developed a kind of a line of thinking about this that he pursued throughout his career in which pops up in joy of sex as well, which is he felt that, you know, we tend to think

of sex as having two functions, procreation and pleasure. Alex thought there was actually a third, which he called sociality. And what he meant by that was that sex is one of the key ways that human beings learn to sort of cooperate and work together. You know, what are your needs and desires? What are mine? How can we accommodate each other? How can we find mutual pleasure, etc. And that unlike a lot of socialization where, you know, they beat you over the head and tell you to obey the cops on the corner and so forth, this was more like you achieve it by playing. Yeah. And so he felt that sex is one of the ways that we learn to be a more harmonious society on the most basic level. And he felt that a violent, hierarchical, exploitative society, which is what he saw under capitalism,

that that sex doesn't exist in a vacuum, that all those other things, the job that. And the job, that sex is supposed to do in achieving sociality. So that's how his politics and his thinking about sex kind of dovetailed with each other. It's a hell of a chat up line, isn't it? That one. That works really well. I think we should have sex because we're sociopolitical anarchists and we need to learn how to cooperate. Yeah, yeah. There is an interesting line from one of his books where he said a general outbreak of public resistance to militarism would contribute more to the removal of sexual imbalance than any action through the channels we have come to regard as political.

Wow. You work for the kind of society you want, and you start to get the kind of sex you want, too, and then it reinforces the kind of society you want, and you get a virtuous cycle there. So joy of sex was kind of his way of smuggling this agenda into the mainstream media and the mainstream middle-class conversation. Let's think of sex in a more, in a broader way about what it's social. function is. I'll be back with Eric and Alex after this short break. This is proper 1960s free love. We'll all just keep having sex with each other until everybody's happier. I love this philosophy

because I think that when you look at the 60s and what came out of it, it got kind of cooperated into mainstream culture and commodified itself and it became, as these things do, it then becomes part of the capitalist system. But there were these moments where people really did believe and were arguing that we could make the world better, but by having better sex and vice versa, that there is a link there. And I love that about him. Yeah, there's a, Wilhelm Reich was a popular writer at the time, especially after he died in the custody of the US authorities. And Reich liked to talk about sex as, you know, better sex engenders of better society on a certain level. And Alex agreed with that more or less,

but he kind of turned it on his head in a way, as he said, if you want better sex, you've to look to the kind of society you're creating. You want sex that's not aggressive, that's not violent, that's loving. You'd better look to creating a society that promotes that. So that was kind of his take on it. I love that. I think it's so clever. He seems to have seen sex as it's a microcosm for everything that goes on around us. And for him, and I might have got a wrong take on this, but he is very much about we have to talk, we have to communicate, which is easier said than done, as anyone listening will know, actually saying what you want from a point. partner is not that easy. It's much easier to kind of lie there and go, hmm, it's amazing.

Best time ever. Thank you so much. And you become like a sexual cheerleader in your own pleasure instead of someone who's actually in the game. But his attitude was like, if you can ask, if you can talk and be open to that and to be reciprocal to that, that will feed out into that would make the world better if we could all do that on a bigger playing field. That's exactly right. There's a line from Joy of Sex, which I don't have in front of me, so I'll try and paraphrase. phrase it, which is that a healthfully immature approach to sex as play is what we need, that there should be something about it that encourages communication, that talking about your needs, talking about your desires and how to achieve them is what a loving relationship is all about.

And so it's what sex should be all about. And this is something that I think gets lost in a culture where, you know, men are taught to think of sex as a kind of a gladiatorial contest. If you want to know where that comes from, Alex, I think, was trying to tackle that very question, you know, the very question that the Me Too movement asks. You know, I should say one thing here is if if you go back to the original edition of Joy of Sex, there's plenty wrong with it. There's a kind of a fallacentric aspect to it. And, you know, a lot of it is slanted towards how the woman can help the man to have a good time. If you read between the lines, that's there. Those kind of attitudes are there. But what was good about it again was the voice. And I think the intention behind it comes through, which was to promote a more equal relationship. What I'm saying is basically the book didn't totally get away from the common attitudes of the time. But the fundamental message of it was something that I think is still very valuable today. How did Alex get into sex? But you mentioned earlier that he was friends with Kinsey. And I'm going to ask you to say who he was and why his report was so important.

And leading on from that, how did Alex go from researching aging to, I'm going to write a book about sex? Was that influenced by Kinsey? Was he interested in that beforehand? It was beforehand. He actually started writing about sex before he started his work on human aging, which he was recruited into a few years later. But I'll tell you how his interest in sex started, is that after the war, one of the first jobs Alex had was he was the resident physician at the Camberwell toddlers and families. family's clinic. And this was part of a string of clinics that the British government set up after the war that was basically family medicine. And he was encountering all kinds of situations where couples were completely uninformed about sex. And he felt that nine times out of 10, the problems that they brought to him had less to do with medicine than with just unfamiliarity with the physical, that people were not brought up. People got married and had no idea what to do. didn't know where these toddlers had come from. They just kept a pairing. Right. And so he began to

complain about this. And the first books he wrote about sex, one called barbarism and sexual freedom, which was written for Freedom Press, which is an anarchist publisher. And then a book called Sexual Behavior and Society, which he did for Duckworth. They were really aimed at physicians and counselors and therapists who worked with couples. And it was basically Alex trying to tell them, here's how to deal with people who have no information. Here's how to give them accurate information. It was really he was concerned that there wasn't any kind of infrastructure to get people straight to use the problem of wrong word on this.

And so that was really what got him started. The Joy of Sex was the first book on sex that he wrote for a popular audience. Okay. Where this was really aimed at just the everyday person. And again, that was because he saw books like everything you always wanted to know about sex coming out that he felt were misinforming ordinary people. The other thing was that in the 50s, he got very involved with what wasn't known then as the gay rights movement. This was the time of the Alan Turing tragedy and the Wolfenden Commission.

And Alex was appalled when the British Medical Association released a report in the mid-50s, basically consigning homosexuality to aberrant behavior. And he wrote a scathing critique of this report that the BMA did in The Lancet, which didn't only criticize its conclusions, but it criticized its language, this sort of stigmatization of what were known then as sexual minorities. So he became very involved in this sort of movement to destigmatize sexual minorities at the same time. So that's kind of the origins was, in a way, was his feeling that people were getting bad advice, people were getting bad information, which your amazing book, A Curie's History of sex, that's a lot of the foundation of that is to get people talking about it and to get good

information out is still a years after the joy of sex. I mean, it's still a, it's still a struggle to do that and to get that simple point across, but that's what he was trying to do. Speaking of getting points about sex across, Alfred Kinsey, an American sexologist, who I believe started off by looking at insects or something. He had his own strange, wasks, that's the one. He had his own sort of strange story to this. But he put, published The Kinsey Report into sexual behavior. And that was this huge, again, another earthquake moment in sexual history. But how was Alex connected to that report? How did he know Alfred Kinsey? Well, he didn't initially. I mean, what happened was Alex was one of the first people who got wind of

the Kinsey report in the UK before it was published there. He wrote two reviews of it. One was for Freedom, which was an anarchist newspaper published by Freedom Press. And the other was for the new statesman. And in these reviews, he pointed out that this book was a sort of a seismic event, that it was the first book that was really examining what people actually did, which is what he thought was the point, was not to moralize, not to theorize, but to look at what people actually did. Shortly after that, Alex published barbarism and sexual freedom. And actually, as Alfred Kinsey heard about him, he got hold of that book. And he wrote to Alex's publisher and said, how can I get in touch with this person, Alex's comfort.

Wow. And so they started corresponding. And by this time, Alex was getting more deeply into researching sex. He was a lot of his material, which is at the Kinsey Institute now, he had everything from sort of underground newspapers, catalogs from rubber goods manufacturers who made sort of sex aids, all sorts of stuff because he wanted to understand sort of the length and breadth of sexual behavior. And he and the Kinsey people were actually kind of swapping notes throughout the 50s and 60s and compare, you know, do you have a copy of this? No, can you send it to me? Okay, I've got this

other thing. I'm going to send it to you. They were kind of collaborating as the Kinsey Institute built up its collection, which is really unrivaled today. So Alex, his first trip to the United States in 1958, he met the people at the Kinsey Institute and they developed a very close relationship, which is involved with sort of researching sexual behavior. So that was kind of the origin of his association with them. One thing I think is worth mentioning is that when Alex reviewed McKinsey report, I found a real contrast between the way he covered it and the way it was reviewed in the United States.

Okay. Because in the United States, you know, there was a lot of focus on different kinds of sexual behavior, but not a lot in terms of class. Alex being English, he was very fascinated by the fact that the Kinsey report found a lot of differences between how middle class, working class, upper class people practice sex, that there were dramatic differences in terms of class and income level. And he pointed this out in his reviews, which none of the American critics did.

There was this whole aspect of the Kinsey report, which Kinsey had been very sensitive to, that kind of was lost on American audiences, but not on Alex. I think because he came from a society where class is much more of a kind of a live issue. I've got to ask you about Alex's personal life, which maybe is a bit unfair because, you know, there is a certain amount of the art and then the artist and can you extract the two. But I'd like to think that his personal life was just a trail of sexually satisfied women. Have I got that right? Well, yes and no. Alex, you know, he used to say, even in the early 60s, when he'd go on the BBC and say something sort of that outraged some people about sex, he'd say, you know, actually my private life is rather ordinary. And he would, you know, actually, my private life is rather ordinary. And he would, you know, he would. was living in Loudoun with his wife, Ruth, and his young son, Nick, until about 1960, when he turned 40 and he had a kind of a midlife crisis. And he began an affair with a woman named Jane Henderson, who was a family friend. And it was sort of a passionate affair where it was almost like he

rediscovered sex in middle age. Interesting. And this is at the time when he's already doing research. And he and Jane literally were on this kind of voyage of sexual discovery. They kept a notebook. They took Polaroids. They put the notebook together into a kind of a little book they called the ABC of Love by John Thomas and Lady Jane. And that book in a way became part of the basis of the joy of sex. When Mitchell Beasley, who was the publisher in the UK of the book and designed it, we're trying to figure out ways to illustrate it. Alex was able to produce this notebook and this set of polaroids. Oh my God. Not very good, but that was the beginning of sort of figuring out these different positions and how to illustrate them.

The other thing is actually the Kinsey Institute. The Kinsey people played a kind of an indirect role in the creation of joy of sex because there was an underground book called The Golden Book of Love, which came out early in the 20th century. It was by a Viennese doctor of some sort, working under a pseudonym. And it had something like 560 different positions that couples could practice, most of which look like they would cripple you for life. But this book was circulated privately for decades and decades.

And the Kinsey people had a copy of it, which Alex saw. He was later able to get a copy on microfilm from a library in Vienna. And some of the positions in Joy of Sex are literally lifted from the Golden Book of Love. So this was something that no doubt he and Jane had looked over. But, you know, the point here is that, yeah, there was a kind of a personal origin to the Joy of Sex, too. It was partly a very personal product of a kind of a midlife reawakening about sex. Wasn't just a matter of research. What happened to his relationship with his wife and his mistress?

How did that end? Well, they had a kind of an open relationship for about a dozen years. Alex would spend the weekends with Ruth and Louton and then the weekn nights with Jane in London. And this went on for about 12 years and it made them all fairly unhappy. around the time Joy of Sex came out, he and Ruth finally divorced and he married Jane. So that's eventually how it was resolved. I just have an image of poor Ruth sat there, like going, walking past a bookshop and seeing the joy of sex there thinking, my, fuck it, as if. You're absolutely right.

In fact, Alex, at one point laid down the law to the publishers. The book came out in September, 1972 in the United States, and he asked that they not put it out in the UK for at least a year, following that. And that was also why he insisted on being credited as the editor rather than the author of the book initially, partly because he didn't want to compromise his scientific research in the UK, but also he knew that his and Ruth's marriage was coming to an end and he didn't want to embarrass her too much. I suppose that's quite nice, isn't it? If you're going to drop a how to have amazing sex just as you're divorcing somebody, so you can marry their friend and have amazing sex with them. Right.

There's a bit of tact involved. Yeah, that's exactly right. There's a kind of a keep calm and carry on kind of aspect to the whole thing in a weird way. I find it from my advantage point as an American, I find it very English on a certain level. It is very English, isn't it? I like that. Was he ever, I don't want to say embarrassed about his work, because I'm going to guess that he wasn't in the least, but seeing is that he did so much other stuff and research,

how did he feel about the fact that it was the joy of sex that became his absolute block And there he is doing research on aging and writing poetry and doing anti-war and all this other stuff. And everyone's banging on about this joy of sex book. Well, at the time he didn't mind at all. He was very concerned when the joy of sex came out. The way he put it to his publisher is, is I want to continue to be Dr. Aging. I don't want to be Dr. Sex just yet. The sex guy. He was never embarrassed by it. He felt he was doing something that was liberatory and was for the common good. later in life he occasionally referred to the joy of sex as his albatross because he did feel as though it had kind of overshadowed his other work. He wrote over 50 books and that was the one that hit. But he never was

embarrassed by the book itself. He always stood by what the book said and what it stood for. That was not the problem. He dearly would have liked to have been remembered much more as a poet. And some of his poetry is very good. But that's just kind of how the ships fell. What do you think his legacy is? I should I say the legacy of the joy of sex? Because as you said, it's very progressive, but it is of its time. And, you know, now we can look back and we can say, well, perhaps you should have had more about this. But what do you think its legacy is today? Well, there's a couple of things. Again, anytime you pick up a sex manual and they're all over the place, you can find sex manuals for fundamentalist Christians, for practicing Muslims, for the disabled. In fact, Alex wrote a book about sex for the disabled at one point. There's a sex manual for any. any persuasion you want, but they all partake of this voice that he created and this kind of presentation that he worked out for it. In a way, if you look at any book like that, you're looking at something that was godfathered by the joy of sex. So in that whole kind of genre, that's the legacy. The other thing, I think, is this whole approach to sex, to understanding

sex that he had, which is that sex doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's part of our whole social relations and that if we want to understand what's wrong with sex now, we have to understand what's wrong with the rest of society. That approach to it, I think, is still very valuable today when we understand just how much abuse is going on out there. And then also finally, you know, this emphasis on information and on play, on thinking about sex is something other than something sleazy, something that's merely about procreation, something that is mystical and sort of a woo-woo kind of way. He wanted to bring it down to earth

and let us think of it as how adults play, that it's good and therapeutic in that respect. And so I think that's something that that's still a very valuable perspective to bring to the whole thing. So final question. Did you like him? Because I speak to a lot of people that write biographies

and there's always a certain amount do you fall in love with your subject or sometimes people investigate them and they go, actually, I really don't like this person pretty much. And now I've got to write a book about him. How would you think your relationship with Alex's coming out of this? I think we have a good relationship.

You're absolutely right that there's always that danger of when you write a biography is going in and all of a sudden realizing, oh my God, I can't stand this person. I could be critical of Alex's behavior in the matter of Jane and Ruth. He didn't entirely do the right thing in that respect. I can take him to task for some of the attitudes that he expresses in his books that aren't up to date. but I find him an immensely appealing person in terms of his curiosity about what it meant to be human. That's really what I think binds a lot of what he did together was this immense interest in every aspect of being human, whether it's consciousness, whether it's medicine, whether it's sex,

that he brought this very healthy kind of inquiring attitude to everything that I think is really pretty admirable. So in that respect, yeah, I think for the most part, Alex and I got along well. Eric, you have been just wonderful to talk to today. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? The book is titled Polymath, the Life and Professions of Dr. Alex Comfort, author of The Joy of Sex. It's available from AK Press. And if you go to their website, as well as I have to say Amazon, you can find out about the other books that I've written. Please do.

And I welcome, I'm pretty reachable, so I welcome any comments and criticisms. Thank you so much for talking to me today. You have been, The Joy of Eric. That's what you have been today. You've been fabulous. Well, likewise, Kate. Thanks so much. Thank you so much for listening.

And thank you to Eric for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to follow and review wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And if you really wanted to help us out and do us a little favor, you can hit that subscribe button. If you're listening along and you haven't subscribed,

if you just push that button, it actually really does help. out because then the people who look at these podcasts and try and work out which ones are doing well can say, well, loads of people have subscribed to this one. So just go and do it now if you haven't done it and I will be eternally grateful. Thank you so much. If you'd like us to explore a subject or if you just wanted to say hello, you can now email us at betwixt at history hit.com. We have got episodes on everything from the real outlander to the history of sex work in America all coming your way. This podcast was produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.

me again betwixt the sheets, The History of Sex Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic.