The Joy of Sex by Alex Comfort - Excerpt
The Joy of Sex by Alex Comfort - Excerpt
The Joy of Sex by Alex Comfort - Excerpt
THE
joyofsex
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contents
preface by Alex Comfort 6 • preface by Susan Quilliam 8 • on gourmet
lovemaking 24
ingredients 31
tenderness 32 • nakedness 35 • women (by her for him) 36 • men
(by him for her) 37 • hormones 40 • preferences 41 • confidence 42 •
cassolette 43 • vulva 46 • vagina 48 • clitoris 48 • mons pubis 49 • breasts
50 • nipples 52 • buttocks 55 • penis 56 • size 60 • foreskin 61 • scrotum
62 • semen 62 • skin 63 • lubrication 65 • earlobes 65 • navel 67 • armpit
68 • feet 69 • big toe 71 • hair 72 • pubic hair 72 • health 74 • age 76 •
sex maps 78 • fidelity 79 • compatibility 80 • desire 81 • love 84
appetizers 87
real sex 88 • food 90 • dancing 93 • femoral intercourse 93 • clothed
intercourse 94 • safe sex 96 • phone sex 99 • words 99 • technology 100
• frequency 101 • priorities 101 • seduction 102 • bathing 103 • beds 107
• kisses 109 • pattes d’araignée 110 • friction rub 112 • feathers 113 •
aphrodisiacs 114 • fantasy 115 • breathing 117 • tongue bath 120 •
blowing 121 • bites 122 • l’onanisme 124 • fighting 126
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positions 166 • rear entry 169 • postillionage 172 • anal intercourse 173
• croupade 175 • cuissade 176 • kneeling positions 179 • seated positions
179 • turning positions 180 • Viennese oyster 181 • sex for pregnancy
182 • plateau phase 183 • his orgasm 184 • hair-trigger trouble 185 •
saxonus 188 • pompoir 188 • her orgasm 190 • bridge 191 • CAT 193 •
venus butterfly 194 • birdsong at morning 194 • little death 198 • come
again 199 • excesses 201 • simultaneous orgasm 202 • quickies 202 •
holding back 204 • relaxation 205 • afterwards 207 • waking 209
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e. e. cummings
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on gourmet lovemaking
All of us, barring any physical limitations, are able to dance and sing – after a
fashion. This, if you think about it, summarizes the justification for learning to
make love. Love, in the same way as singing, is something to be taken sponta-
neously. On the other hand, the difference between Pavlova and the Palais de
Danse, or opera and barbershop singing, is much less than the difference
between sex as our recent ancestors came to accept it and sex as it can be.
At least we recognize this now (so that instead of worrying if sex is sinful,
most people now worry whether they are “getting satisfaction” – one can worry
about anything, given the determination). And there are now enough books
about the basics; we are largely past the point of people worrying about the nor-
mality, possibility, and variety of sexual experience. This book is slightly differ-
ent, in that there are now enough people who have those basics and want more
depth of understanding, solid ideas, and inspiration.
To draw a parallel, chef-grade cooking doesn’t happen naturally: it starts at
the point where people know how to prepare and enjoy food, are curious about
it and willing to take trouble preparing it, read recipe hints, and find they are
helped by one or two techniques. It’s hard to make mayonnaise by trial and error,
for instance. Gourmet sex, as we define it, is the same – the extra one can get
from comparing notes, using some imagination, trying way-out or new experi-
ences, when one already is making satisfying love and wants to go on from there.
This book will likely attract four sorts of readers. First, there are those who
don’t fancy it, find it disturbing, and would rather stay the way they are – these
should put it down, accept our apologies, and stay the way they are. Second,
there are those who are with the idea, but don’t like our choice of techniques –
remember, it’s a menu, not a rulebook.
Third, most people will use our notes as a personal one-couple notebook
from which they might get ideas. In this respect we have tried to stay wide open.
One of the original aims of this book was to cure the notion, born of non-
discussion, that common sex needs are odd or weird; the whole joy of sex-with-
love is that there are no rules, so long as you enjoy, and the choice is practically
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ON GOURMET LOVEMAKING
unlimited. We have, however, left out long discussion of very specialized sexual
preferences; people who like these know already what they want to try.
The final group of readers are the hardy experimentalists, bent on trying
absolutely everything. They too will do best to read this exactly like a cookbook
– except that sex is safer in this respect, between lovers, in that you can’t get
obese or atherosclerotic on it, or give yourself ulcers. The worst you can get,
given sensible safety precautions, is sore, anxious, or disappointed. However,
one needs a steady basic diet of quiet, loving, night-and-morning intercourse to
stand this experimentation on, simply because, contrary to popular ideas, the
more regular sex a couple has, the higher the deliberately contrived peaks – just
as the more you cook routinely, the better and the more reliable banquets you
can stage.
One specific group of readers deserves special note. If you are disabled in any
way, don’t stop reading. A physical disability is not an obstacle to fulfilling sex.
In counseling disabled people, one repeatedly finds that the real disability isn’t a
mechanical problem but a mistaken idea that there is only one “right” – or
enjoyable – way to have sex. The best approach is probably to go through the
book with your partner, marking off the things you can do. Then pick some-
thing appealing that you think you can’t quite do, and see if there is a strategy
you can develop together. Talking to other couples where one partner has a
problem similar to yours is another resource.
In sum, the people we are addressing are the adventurous and uninhibited
lovers who want to find the limits of their ability to enjoy sex. That means we take
some things for granted – having intercourse naked and spending time over it;
being able and willing to make it last, up to a whole afternoon on occasion; having
privacy; not being scared of things like genital kisses; not being obsessed with one
sexual trick to the exclusion of all others; and, of course, loving each other.
As the title implies, this book is about love as well as sex: you don’t get high-
quality sex on any other basis – either you love each other before you come to
want it, or, if you happen to get it, you love each other because of it, or both.
Just as you can’t cook without heat, you can’t make love without feedback. By
feedback, we mean the right mixture of stop and go, tough and tender, exertion
and affection. This comes by empathy and long mutual knowledge. Anyone
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ON GOURMET LOVEMAKING
who expects to get this in a first attempt with a stranger is an optimist, or a neu-
rotic – if they do, it’s what used to be called love at first sight, and isn’t expend-
able: “skill,” or variety, is no substitute. Also, one can’t teach tenderness.
The starting point of all lovemaking is close bodily contact; love has been
defined as the harmony of two souls, and the contact of two epiderms. At the
same time, we might as well plan our menu so that we learn to use the rest of
our equipment. That includes our feelings of identity, forcefulness, and so on,
and all of our fantasy needs. Luckily, sex behavior in humans is enormously
elastic (it has had to be, or we wouldn’t be here), and also nicely geared to help
us express most of the needs that society or our upbringing have corked up.
Elaboration in sex is something we need rather specially and it has the
advantage that if we really make it work, it makes us more, not less, receptive
to each other as people. This is the answer to anyone who thinks that con-
scious effort to increase our sex range is “mechanical” or a substitute for real
human relationship – we may start that way, but it’s an excellent entry to
learning that we are people and relating to each other as such. There may be
other places we can learn to express all of ourselves, and do it mutually, but
there aren’t many.
Those are the assumptions on which this book is based. Granted this, there
are two modes of sex – the duet and the solo – and a good concert alternates
between the two. The duet is a cooperative effort aiming at simultaneous
orgasm, or at least one orgasm each, and complete, untechnically planned
release. This, in fact, needs skill, and can be built up from more calculated “love-
play” until doing the right thing for both of you becomes fully automatic. This
is the basic sexual meal.
The solo, by contrast, is when one partner is the player and the other the
instrument. The aim of the player is to produce results on the other’s pleasure
experience as extensive, unexpected, and generally wild as his or her skill allows
– to blow them out of themselves. The player doesn’t lose control, though he
or she can get wildly excited by what is happening to the other. The instrument
does lose control – in fact, with a responsive instrument and a skillful performer,
this is the concerto situation – and if it ends in an uncontrollable ensemble, so
much the better. All the elements of music and dance are involved – rhythm,
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ON GOURMET LOVEMAKING
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ON GOURMET LOVEMAKING
One of the things still missing from the essence of sexual freedom is the
unashamed ability to use sex as play. In the past, ideas of maturity were nearly as
much to blame as old-style moralisms about what is normal or perverse. We are all
immature, and have anxieties and aggressions. Coital play, like dreaming, may be
a programmed way of dealing acceptably with these, just as children express their
fears and aggressions in games. Adults are unfortunately afraid of playing games,
dressing up, and acting scenes. It makes them self-conscious: something horrid
might get out. In this regard, bed is the place to play all the games you have ever
wanted to play – if adults could become less self-conscious about such “immature”
needs, we should have fewer deeply anxious people. If we were able to transmit the
sense of play that is essential to a full, enterprising, and healthily immature view of
sex between committed people, we would be performing a mitzvah: playfulness is
a part of love that could be a major contribution to human happiness.
But still the main dish is loving, un-self-conscious sexual pleasure of all kinds
– long, frequent, varied, ending with both parties satisfied, but not so full they
can’t face another light course, and another meal in a few hours. The pièce de
résistance is good old face-to-face matrimonial, the finishing-off position, with
mutual orgasm, and starting with a full day or night of ordinary tenderness.
Other ways of making love are special in various ways, and the changes of
timbre are infinitely varied – complicated ones are for special occasions, or
special uses like holding off an over-quick male orgasm, or are things that, like
pepper steak, are stunning once a year but not staples.
There are, after all, only two “rules” in good sex, apart from the obvious one
of not doing things that are silly, antisocial, or dangerous. One is: “Don’t do
anything you don’t really enjoy,” and the other is: “Find out your partner’s
needs and don’t balk at them if you can help it.” In other words, a good giving
and taking relationship depends on a compromise (so does going to a show – if
you both want the same thing, fine; if not, take turns and don’t let one partner
always dictate). This can be easier than it sounds, because unless their partner
wants something they find actively off-putting, real lovers get a reward not only
from their own satisfaction but also from seeing the other respond and become
satisfied. Most wives who don’t like Chinese food will eat it occasionally for the
pleasure of seeing a Sinophile husband enjoy it, and vice versa.
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ON GOURMET LOVEMAKING
Partners who won’t do this over specific sex needs are usually balking not
because they have tried it and it’s a turnoff (many experimental dishes are nicer
than you expected), but through ignorance of the range of human needs, plus
being scared if these include things like forcefulness, cultivating extragenital
sensation, or role-playing, which previous social mythology pretended weren’t
there. Reading a full list of the unscheduled accessory sex behaviors that some
normal people find helpful might be thought a necessary preliminary to any
extended sexual relationship.
Couples should match up their needs and preferences (though people don’t
find these out at once); you won’t get to some of our suggestions or understand
them until you have learned to respond. It’s a mistake to run so long as
walking is such an enchanting and new experience, and you may be happy
pedestrians who match automatically. Where a rethink really helps is at the
point where you have gotten used to each other socially (sex needs aren’t the
only ones that need matching up between people who live together), and feel
that the surface needs repolishing. If you think that sexual relations are over-
rated, the surface does need repolishing, and you haven’t paid enough atten-
tion to the wider use of your sexual equipment as a way of communicating
totally. The traditional expedient at the point where the surface gets dull is to
trade in the relationship and start all over in an equally uninstructed attempt
with someone else, on the off chance of getting a better match-up by random
choice. This is emotionally wasteful, and you usually repeat the same mistakes;
better by far to repolish.
As to practicalities, we suggest couples either read the book together or
(perhaps even better) read it separately, marking passages for the other
partner’s attention. This works wonders if – as is often the case – you don’t
really talk easily about sexual needs, or are afraid of sounding tactless.
Finally, if you don’t like the repertoire or if it doesn’t square with yours,
never mind; the aim of The Joy of Sex is to stimulate your creative imagination.
Sex books can only suggest techniques in order to encourage you to experi-
ment. You can preface your own ideas with “this is how we play it,” and play it
your own way. But by that time, when you will have tried all your own creative
sexual fantasies, you won’t need books.
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The Joy of Sex
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