Alex Comfort may be the most famous anarchist of the second half of the twentieth century. But he wasn’t famous for his politics, at least not directly. It was his sex manual, The Joy of Sex: A Gourmet Guide to Lovemaking, first published in 1972, that brought him fame. A US bestseller for the next seven years, it sold in the millions and spawned several sequels (More Joy of Sex, etc.). For a while, it seemed like a piece of suburban home decor. Comfort died in 2000 at the age of eighty, but the “Ultimate Revised Edition” is still readily found on-line.
The Joy of Sex was one of the most significant books of the ’70s, a cultural landmark of the Sexual Revolution. Instead of bombs, which Comfort had started campaigning against during World War II, he threw orgasms in his effort to re-make the world.
To give a flavor of what was being revolted against in the 1960s and ’70s: Comfort, a British-licensed physician, knew that the British medical board could punished MDs who wrote scandalous works. Photographs would probably have gotten the book banned; instead, it had line drawings. The book was originally to be titled Doing Sex Properly, an antidote to personal experience: when Comfort first married in 1943, neither he nor his partner, Ruth, knew what to do, and so they did it badly.
Pagan Kennedy, taking a leaf from The Joy of Sex’s cookbook-like table of contents, tells Comfort’s fascinating story in “seventeen positions.”
“He took stunts seen nowhere outside of triple-X porn and turned them into entertainments suitable for suburban couple to try after a few glasses of merlot,” Kennedy writes. “Looking back, his greatest stroke of genius was to abandon the one-size-fits-all model used in nearly all the previous sex manuals. Alex […] championed the idea of different tastes for different tongues.”
Comfort was born in Great Britain in 1920, which, according to poet Philip Larkin, was four decades before “sexual intercourse” was invented in the UK. Yet Comfort would come to epitomize the free-wheeling “Me Decade” of the ’70s. After The Joy of Sex came out, he and Ruth divorced; he subsequently married his long-time mistress, Jane Henderson, the librarian with whom he had actively researched The Joy of Sex (“200 positions tried at home” could be the book’s subtitle), and ended up in Southern California, where he worked in a think tank and hung out in a nudist colony.
The Seventies, baby? Of course, Comfort was already in his fifties by then. His sex-positive worldview came out of his life: as anti-war activist, as pioneering gerontologist, as bad-sex experiencer, as campaigner against the death-machines of the state.
At fourteen, Comfort blew off most of the fingers of his left hand while tinkering with fireworks. His first book was published when he was all of seventeen: The Silver River, a “little gem of a travel book,” detailed the voyage he took with his father on a tramp across the Atlantic. In his early twenties, in the midst of World War II, he debated George Orwell, twenty years his senior, over pacifism. Some of that debate, detailed in Comfort biographer Eric Laursen’s The Duty to Stand Aside, was in verse.
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Comfort condemned the Allied strategy of area bombing, which took tens of thousands of civilian lives and razed German cities to the ground. This was, needless to say, not a popular perspective in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Britain. He argued, in a line of reasoning still relevant today, that the meeting of a war crime with a war crime was still a war crime. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki confirmed his opinion that those leaders who waged modern warfare were extremely dangerous men (they were all men, then), if not criminally insane.
During the Cold War, Comfort worked with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the more militant Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War. In 1961, he and others were jailed for helping to organize a sit-down anti-nuclear demonstration in Trafalgar Square. That same year saw the publication of his novel Come Out to Play, which posited a superego-suppressing drug —“3-blindmycin”—used to turn the Queen and all her ministers, especially the warmongers, into flower children. For Comfort, it was “good sex” versus war and death for all time: his last book, published in 1994 when he was seventy-four, was a collection of his combative writings from the 1940s, titled Writings Against Power and Death, a title that nicely encapsulated his life.
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