Everything we wanted to know about sex: Life after Comfort

In 1972, Dr Alex Comfort set out to demystify sex with his 'gourmet guide to lovemaking'. Thirty years - and eight million copies - later, 'The Joy of Sex; still has the power to tickle the nation's fancy. John Walsh reports

For Philip Larkin, sexual intercourse began in 1963; for the rest of us, sex only got seriously under way 30 years ago, in the summer of 1972. That was when a strange book appeared on the coffee tables of the affluent British middle classes. The cover showed a long-haired, Cro-Magnon roughneck with a black beard, tilting his face towards the face of an alarmed-looking brunette from a Modesty Blaise comic strip. They were clearly just about to kiss – but a feral, hungry quality about the man implied that something more fundamental was about to happen. And in the book's ensuing pages, something did. The bearded Neanderthal and his silky-haired inamorata disported their naked selves through 200-odd pages of complicated sexual calisthenics and languorous flesh-devourings in gulp-inspiring close-up.

For the first time ever, the full lexicon of sexual possibility, the whole positional and directional compass of love-making, the actual what-goes-where machinery of engorged human interconnectedness was on spectacular physical display. How we gawped, we teenagers, as we leafed through the pages in the living-rooms of our friends' liberated parents. Bloody hell, we thought, how can they just leave a volume called The Joy of Sex, containing actual drawings of people having oral sex, just lying about on this mild suburban coffee table, as if were one of those arty photographic books on Venetian masks or migrating birds? Such bizarre explicitness in the heart of the suburban Seventies. It made you feel gob-smacked, intrigued and slightly repelled all at once, as you might have felt on walking into a room and finding your girlfriend's mother and father on the sofa with nothing on.

Oddly enough, that little domestic fantasy was quite close to what Dr Alex Comfort had in mind when he first came up with the concept of the book. His ideas about sexual liberation changed a lot in the 12 years of the book's gestation, but at their core was a desire to remove decades-old accretions of guilt and shame from the business of sexual intercourse. He used to claim he was inspired by a woman patient who told him (in 1960) that she was appalled to be pregnant, because soon her neighbours would know that she and her husband had been getting up to dirty, sordid acts of darkness.

The Joy of Sex set out to demystify love-making, but also to allow it to be regarded as something else: a recreation. It was not to be regarded any more as a duty, a guilty secret, a quick one at the end of an evening, a stab in the dark or a silent embarrassment. From now on, Comfort decided, it was going to be something more akin to a banquet. It was subtitled "A Gourmet Guide to Lovemaking" and divided into small chapters like a succession of dishes – ingredients, appetisers, main courses, sauces... The contents page was a triumph of titillation: a litany of exotic, French-boudoir terms ("Postillionage, Negresse, Croupade, Cuissade, Florentine, Saxonus, Pompoir...") and a list of intriguingly surreal nouns ("Horse, Goldfish, Viennese Oyster... Swings, Rocking Chair, Horseback, Motorcycle...") The book suggested that having sex involved a great deal more than, well, having sex – that making love was not, as commonly perceived, two and a half minutes of frenzied activity followed by an apology and a cigarette, but should be a sensuous excursion – part ballet, part workout – lasting several hours and reaching several levels of rapture.

It wasn't just the Holy-mackerel drawings of genitalia going into genitalia that characterised the book, but its many pictures of the couple just lolling about, more or less intertwined, lazily toying with each other, shifting their flesh semi-erotically, licking and browsing and whiling time away – it was, in other words, a hyper-realistic modern representation of the Garden of Eden, a place of lotus-eating sybaritism and thoughtless happiness; a dream that, Comfort promised, lay in the grasp of every pubertal being. And eight million pubertal human beings accordingly snapped it up.

If you could bear to tear yourself away from the pictures, you noticed that the accompanying script was a great deal better written than the words that tended to accompany the pictures in Mayfair or Penthouse magazines. Comfort was a stylish writer with a gift for the breezy one-liner: "A woman with the divine gift of lechery will almost always make a superlative partner." "Male sex response is triggered easily by things, like putting a quarter in a vending machine." He offered sensible advice about the use of pillows, the penetrative magic of the big toe, and whether there was any point in worrying about the size of your bits. You tended to trust his pronouncements because he seemed to know so much – about the sounds people make when climaxing, for instance: "There is a striking consistency, over ages and continents, in what women say in orgasm. Japanese, Indian, French and English all babble about dying, about Mother (they often cry out for her at the critical moment) and about religion, even if they are atheists." Now that's what I call research.

It wasn't just the wit that surprised the reader, but his warm, benign tone of voice, with its occasionally crackpot enthusiasms (Comfort was terribly keen on group sex and the California "swinger" mentality), its muttered warnings about things he didn't like or found distasteful (he was never very keen on homosexual anal sex, which he thought best avoided), and its glancing political asides. In a sub-section called "Perversion" he wrote: "The commonest perversions in our culture are getting hold of some power and using it to kick other people around, money-hunting as a status activity, treating other people, sexually or otherwise, as things to manipulate. And interfering with other people's sex lives, to ensure that they are as rigid and as anxious about them as the interferer."

The book was an instant smash hit both here and in America, and was translated into 24 languages. Though Mitchell Beazley's first print-run was a tentative 10,000 copies, sales broke though the million barrier in a matter of months. Since 1972, it's been revised twice, reprinted dozens of times, spawned a sequel (More Joy: a Lovemaking Companion to The Joy of Sex) in 1973, brought in new illustrators, encouraged a few score of imitations and sold eight million copies worldwide. This September, a 30th anniversary copy will be published in a handsome purple livery, its contents updated (there are whole sections on Aids, Viagra, safe sex, hormone replacement therapy, contraceptives) and its language rendered less archly Seventies (women are no longer called "girls", thank you very much, and the words "man" and "wife" have become the neutral "partner") and every magazine in the land, from Saga to Maxim, will carry articles about its ground-breaking, sex-is-a-banquet significance. But it would be a shame if, amid all the anniversary hoo-hah, the extreme oddness of the book's creator, and the eccentricity of its creation were forgotten.

Dr Alex Comfort was one of nature's most brilliant eccentrics. Late in his life (he died in 2000, aged 80), he was enraged by any suggestion that his name was known throughout the world as the chap who wrote the book about the bonking beardie. He was, dammit, a physician, a poet, a novelist, an anarchist, an advanced political thinker, a pacifist and an expert in the shadowy field of gerontology (the study of the process of ageing). Above all he insisted on his credentials as a physician. Every copy of The Joy of Sex carries, after the author's name, the letters "MB, DSc" as a reminder that the book is the work of a serious fellow, not an amateur sexologist. (The fact that most doctors use the letters "MD" and science graduates are usually "BSc" or "MSc" may have led some readers to question his proudly worn honorifics). He had a dazzling early career, fraught with strange accidents, encounters and travels. Comfort was mostly educated at home by his parents in Highgate, north London. His father was an education officer with London County Council. The precocious Alex attempted a home-made bomb when he was 14, but when it exploded it blew off three fingers of his left hand. He attended Highgate School and published his first book, The Silver River, about a trip to Argentina and Senegal made while still an 18-year-old student. A first attempt at fiction was sent to Evelyn Waugh for his comments – but Waugh disobligingly begged him to destroy it forthwith.

Comfort read natural sciences at Trinity College, Cambridge, and wrote his first novel (The Power House) while there; when it was published, he was still only 21. This dizzying record of achievement continued into the war years, as he joined the physiology department of London Hospital Medical School, then later the zoology department of University College, London, studying ageing patterns in fish and animals. But his studies were joined by a new interest in polemic and pacifism (he called himself "an aggressive anti-militarist"). The two combined in a controversial article demanding that certain Allied leaders, who had organised the saturation bombing of Germany should be arraigned as war criminals. It was not well received.

More novels, plays and books of verse flew from his typewriter in the 1950s and 1960s. He joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and tried to teach Bertrand Russell socialist hymns when they met in prison after both were arrested at a demonstration. He published 50 books, innumerable papers – and in 1962, after visiting India for the first time, he translated the Koka Shastra, a sex manual, from the original Sanskrit. It was The Joy of Sex in ovo – detailed, exhaustive, instructive, pictureless, just waiting to be born.

He had himself been writing a guide to "Doing Sex Properly" since 1960, with the help of his mistress, Jane. They wrote under the noms de plume of "Jane and John Thomas", after the name Mellors gives his and Connie's genitalia in Lady Chatterley's Lover. Jane, a librarian, turned up in a Channel 4 documentary last year, to recall how, as the couple worked on the book, she would ask Comfort to remind her what exactly had been going on at various stages of their lovemaking. Could he help her out with little memory-jogging notes and drawings? The lovers wrote up the taxonomy of sex at blinding speed (some claim that the first draft of The Joy of Sex was done in two weeks), but they were stuck for ways to illustrate it.

They called in two artists, Charles Raymond and Chris Foss, explained what they had in mind, and showed them Comfort's own rudimentary drawings ("Alex was suggesting things we'd never seen before," claimed one) and some explicit Polaroids of his sex life with Jane. Raymond and Foss still were not sure of the best way to present to the thunder-struck British public 200 illustrations of a man and a woman having full-frontal sex. They looked through soft-porn magazines in search of inspiration. They hired models from Soho for their unique perspective on sexual activity. Then Charles Raymond had a brainwave. Why didn't he undertake to demonstrate 100-odd sex positions with his German wife Edeltraud, while his friend Chris photographed them, and then both men could produce line drawings from the resulting snaps? According to the documentary, the unique photographic shoot took place in the midst of an icy winter, at the time of the miners' strike. Edeltraud was enthusiastic, bossy and efficient. "Charles!" she would say, "Position number one. Come on, Charles!" Then she would tick off the number on a piece of paper and say, "Right Charles, now we do this one..."

Mr and Mrs Raymond are, therefore, the couple – the hairy caveman and the stroppy Fräulein – that you could see in the original book, drawn faithfully by Raymond's own hand and that of Chris Foss. Sadly, you can't see them any more, unless you know the American art collectors who snapped up the originals in 1972. The bearded man was dropped for the sequel, and, for later versions of The Joy of Sex, the soft 2B pencil drawings of John Raynes were employed instead – they showed a curly-haired Greek god pleasuring a lively twentysomething woman who much resembles (unless I'm imagining it) Julia Sawalha.

Thirty years later, Charles Raymond now lives in the Wye Valley near the Welsh border, a passionate ecologist and keen musician. His famous beard was shaved off years ago, but pale shadows of its shaggy magnificence grace his chin from time to time. The book's art director, Peter Kindersley, became the co-founder of the high-design publishing company, Dorling Kindersley. The book's publicist at Mitchell Beazley, Carmen Callil, went on to found the feminist house of Virago. Comfort's son Nicholas went on to become political adviser to the Secretary of State for Scotland, Helen Liddell. He is also trustee of his dad's estate and keeper of the flame of his reputation.

Dr Alex Comfort, MB, DSc, has been dead for two years and most of his books are forgotten, but The Joy of Sex rides gleefully onwards. The amazing shock value of those early pictures may have evaporated over the years, but the insouciant text and genial libertarianism of his approach put a spring in the step of the post-Woodstock generation, and told it to treat sex more lightly, more recreationally in the future. You gazed at the strenuous rutting of the hairy man and his bossy wife, and laughed about it and inwardly digested its subtext: be ashamed of nothing, try absolutely everything unless it hurts, indulge your partner's most bizarre whims, use your imagination, be amazed at what bodies can do when let off the societal leash. And you inwardly decided to book a place in this Edenic banqueting hall as soon as possible. Even if you knew you were never really going to find yourself at a Californian orgy with 10 people imploring you to join them in an invigorating group flanquette.

The wit and wisdom of Dr Alex Comfort

On sexual postures: "Endless time has been spent throughout history, chiefly by non-playing coaches, in giving fancy names to upwards of 600 of these. Collecting them is obviously a human classificatory hobby."

On discipline: "There is a venerable superstition that beating is a sort of sexual tabasco, the hottest erotic condiment, and no way-out party or porn is complete without it. The occasional spank at the right moment fits well into most people's repertoire."

On normality: "We don't have a single, 'normal' pattern of sex behaviour, but a bunch of responses, like the fingers of a hand. Good, unworried lovers use all five fingers of all four hands."

On orgies: "Orgies need a hell of a lot of martini lubrication. One can't shed two millennia of preachments with one's underclothes."

On dancing: "All ballroom dancing in pairs looks towards intercourse. In this respect, the Puritans were dead right."

On deodorant: "A mouthful of aluminium chloride in a girl's armpit is one of the biggest disappointments bed can afford."

On feathers: "Try stiff wiry ones or an old-fashioned feather mop."

On al fresco sex: "In England, to have regular love out-of-doors, you need to be frost-proof and own a park. In Ireland or Spain, even though it is warm in Spain, you need to be priest-proof too."

On mirrors: "If you have never made love in front of a big mirror, try it – not only for voyeur effect, but to show you how un-ridiculous you look making love."