Joy Of Sex Research Articles

Introduction

Responding to doubts expressed by contributors to the Common Knowledge symposium on xenophilia, this introduction to the seventh and final installment seeks to explain the critics’ methodological concerns in a case study of strong affect in the Babylonian Talmud. Examining the story of Rav Rehumi and his wife in Ketubot 62b, the author inquires whether differences of culture and the passage of time make it impossible for us to determine whether love is the affect involved. The case is especially difficult to resolve, given that, while there may be two lovers in this narrative, there may be three objects of love: the rabbi, his wife, and the Torah. In the story, Rav Rehumi is so ravished by Torah that he forgets his wife. Since the narrative does not predicate that he chose not to visit her but, rather, that he was swept away, the author proposes that “studying Torah is sex, not like sex, but sex itself.” The story describes not sublimation of libido but its desublimation. If so, the story confronts us with an unnamed affect in ancient Jewish culture that “encompasses both the joy of sex and the joy of text.” It is not that, dourly, the Talmudic Rabbis cannot imagine, or that they ignore, corporeal pleasure; it is rather that the erotic experience of Torah is the same pleasure but, at least for them, even stronger. This piece concludes, therefore, that a term like xenophilia, which incorporates the word love (philia), is not universally applicable across cultures and epistemai. The concept of love is too various.

The erotics of conduct

ABSTRACTThis article uses a selection of 1970s and 1980s sex manuals to explore Anglo-American gay culture in the years immediately before and after the emergence of HIV/AIDS. Arguing that these texts represent a neglected historical archive, the essay demonstrates that the model of gay liberation that they espouse is caught between individualistic and collective versions of sexual identity, and that this split can best be understood in relation to the wider genre of the conduct book. Noting that sex manuals are inevitably connected to questions of citizenship and imagined selfhood, the article uses a side-by-side reading of The Joy of Sex and The Joy of Gay Sex to show that both texts are structured by demeaning assumptions about class, race, and gender identity. The discussion foregrounds Alan Sinfield’s work, especially his questioning of the egalitarian model of gay identity and his attention to queer reading practices. This in turn leads to a consideration of how anti-relational queer theory might be part of a longer tradition of gay conduct writing; this part of the essay revisits and extends an existing debate between Sinfield and Leo Bersani.

Sex and the Me Decade: Sex and Dating Advice Literature of the 1970s

Sex and the Me Decade:Sex and Dating Advice Literature of the 1970s Anna E. Ward (bio) In an article published in 1976 in New York magazine, author and journalist Tom Wolfe declared the arrival of the “Me Decade,” arguing, “The old alchemical dream was changing base metals into gold. The new alchemical dream is: changing one’s personality—remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self … and observing, studying, and doting on it” (1988, 143). Wolfe highlights sex and sexuality as a key component of this “new alchemical dream,” and indeed, the 1970s saw a solidification of self-help and therapeutic approaches to sex and sexuality aimed at self-exploration and personal transformation. This solidification is particularly noticeable within the booming dating and sex advice literature market of the 1970s. In stark contrast to earlier iterations of this genre, these texts helped establish a market for individually oriented relationship and sex guides that encourage the notion that sex is a constitutive part of identity formation and a critical element of self-awareness. Given the considerable scholarly attention paid to the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s in the United States, the 1970s is often treated as merely an extension of the previous decade, or as a dramatic and unfortunate reversal of gains made in the 60s. This lack of attention to the specificity of the 1970s is troubling for two reasons. First, the 1970s was a decade of profound shifts in the terrain of sexual and gender politics in the U.S., including the two landmark Supreme Court cases Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972) and Roe v. Wade (1973); the publication of William Masters and Virginia Johnson’s Human Sexual Inadequacy (1970), Shere Hite’s The Hite Report: A Nationwide Report on Female Sexuality (1976), Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex (1972), and the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective’s Women and Their Bodies: A Course (1970); [End Page 120] and the release of Deep Throat (1972). The decade was also marked by high-profile battles over the Equal Rights Amendment and sexual orientation antidiscrimination legislation; both issues generated considerable steam for what would become a powerful force in U.S. politics—the religious right and its insistent invocation of sexual and gender politics as wedge issues in the American political landscape. Second, the 1970s was a vitally important decade for specifically feminist and lesbian and gay inquiry into sex and sexual politics, in which both domains (and their overlaps) exerted considerable pressure on popular sexual discourse. To ignore the 1970s as a distinct era of sexual thought in the U.S. is to miss an opportunity to understand the legacies of feminist and queer activism and scholarship and their continuing import for contemporary sexual politics. Revisiting the 1970s as feminist scholars may help illuminate contemporary struggles around sex and their feminist and queer implications. If the 1970s tends to be overlooked more generally, the role of dating and sex advice literature of this era, in particular, is grossly underexamined within feminist and sexuality studies, garnering significantly less attention than early- and mid-twentieth-century marriage manuals. While sales figures alone cannot help us gauge the impact these manuals had on people’s sexual behavior, the impressive circulation of texts like Comfort’s The Joy of Sex, for example, suggests that this literature struck a cultural nerve. The purchase and circulation of texts such as Comfort’s is, in and of itself, a behavior that warrants scholarly attention, particularly given that these texts had to be acquired in brick-and-mortar shops. The acquisition of guides such as these suggests a public increasingly interested in pursuing sexual knowledge, and titillation, beyond the bounds of traditional sexual and gender norms. In this essay, I first trace a brief history of sex advice literature in the U.S., demonstrating that the 1970s literature marks a distinct shift in tone, audience, and content from the literature of earlier decades. I then examine sex and relationship advice literature of the 1970s, considering mass-market literature alongside feminist writings on sexuality during the decade in order to unearth the connections between the two domains. By closely examining 1970s dating and sex advice literature...

The Gospel on Book Theft

The Gospel on Book Theft John Maxwell Hamilton (bio) Twenty-five years ago I wrote a tongue-in-cheek essay for the Sunday New York Times Book Review that showed the power of the printed word. The essay argued that nearly everyone is a book thief and that might not be so bad. We learn something about people from the books they buy. We learn much more from the books they want so desperately that they slip them under their clothes and walk out, as one woman did at the New York Public Library. (She was foiled when the six-inch thick Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, clutched between her legs, fell to the ground in front of the library guard.) Many responses to the Times essay were gratifying. Agitated librarians said I was inciting theft. A reader, distressed to learn that Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book was missing from the Library of Congress, renewed the library’s stock with his own copy, which gave members of Congress and their staffs new material to pilfer. But one common reaction to my list of “the ten most stolen books” was disturbing. Friends hailed me on the street in Washington, D.C., where I lived at the time. “I didn’t know Practice for the Armed Services Test was the third most stolen book,” one said. “Wow,” said another, “that’s really interesting about The Joy of Sex. Who would have guessed it is stolen almost as often as the Bible?” Right, but none of it was true. Except for the Bible. It is the most stolen book—everywhere on the planet. A maid at a Singapore hotel once told me that it was lifted much more often than The Teaching of Buddha, which is written in English and Japanese and includes a note explicitly inviting people to steal it. The Nashville-based Gideon Society, which puts Bibles in hotel rooms all over the world, does not give written permission to steal them, thereby providing lodgers an eternal two-for-one value—salvation [End Page 265] and damnation all in one easy act of putting the book in their suitcases next to their dirty underwear. A better road to salvation than the one offered by the Gideon Society can be found in Brazil’s federal prison system. It recently decided that inmates could earn early release by reading. For each book they finish, prisoners receive a four-day reduction in their sentences. The program is called “Redemption through Reading.” Anyway, after the Bible, who can say for sure which books are stolen most often? Couldn’t absolutely everyone see that I had made this list up, using titles to create categories of theft that I could then discuss at length? The most resounding evidence that the answer was “no!” came later. I was killing time in a bookstore, waiting for a dinner companion. My eye fell on a copy of Abbie Hoffman: American Rebel, a biography by Marty Jezer. Authors, like dogs, are always hunting for their scent, so I naturally opened the book to see what Jezer said about Steal This Book, whether by any chance he mentioned my offbeat comments. Here is what the deadpan footnote on page 229 said: “On November 18, 1990, the New York Times Book Review listed Steal This Book as among the ten book titles most stolen from libraries and bookstores.” After pondering the response to my essay for many years, I have arrived at an explanation. We have nearly limitless credulity for words set in type. We take words on a page as the gospel, even when the book is not a Bible. Readers rail against newspapers as biased or irresponsible, as the outraged librarians did with my essay, but then readers clip what is presented in the newspaper, put it on the refrigerator, and tell their friends about it. When it comes to books, they are even more likely to suspend judgment altogether. Although a book has a price on the outside just like a box of cereal, people treat what is inside as if it were manna. No one understands this suspension of judgment better than consultants. “I was amazed at how...

A Real Short Introduction to Classical Reception Theory

A Real Short Introduction to Classical Reception Theory JAMES TATUM There used to be a large bookstore in New York specializing in books and journals for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered readerships. There I once happened upon a publication that at first glance promised to be a Nostradamus prophecy for future studies in the history of human sexuality. It could also have had important connections with today’s thinking about the literature and culture of ancient Greece and Rome. To understand how all this came about I will need to begin with some bibliography. I make no apology for doing this. Everything has its specialized literature, not least bookstores, and for bookstores properly considered the dominant literary form is not so much the books being sold as the bibliographies that guide booksellers in their selections. Sometimes disdained for being of interest only to narrow specialists or retiring scholars, bibliography can in fact be as exciting and engaging as any poem or novel if the right questions are asked of it. the tale of the floating signifier I never met a language I didn’t like. —Will Rogers how-to-do-it manuals are a popular subject for such emporiums , and this book store in Manhattan dedicated to its LGBT clientele was more ecumenical than most. The full range of human sexuality was well represented, its parade of titles starting with copies of the latest edition of Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex. The many recipes about what it is possible to do with female and male bodies had made Joy a arion 22.2 fall 2014 best seller for years. (“Since 1972, more than 8 million people have come to this wise, witty, and uninhibited bestselling guide to lovemaking and found all they wanted to know about achieving greater sexual satisfaction.”) And these were recipes in no figurative sense, but candid how-to-do-it scenarios , each one focusing on every human orifice and useful body part, with detailed advice about the combinations possible for imaginative love-making. The Joy of Sex with its batterie de cuisine was a direct imitation of Irma Rombauer’s 1931 book The Joy of Cooking, probably the most influential and widelyread cookbook in America from the time it was published to the present, its only possible rival being the two volumes of Julia Child and her French colleagues’ Mastering the Art of French Cooking. As in Rombauer’s Joy there was also consoling advice about what to do in emergencies, as when a fallen soufflé is the unforeseen outcome of much preparation. There was also the revised edition of Doctor David Reuben’s 1969 bestseller Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask). It was an important predecessor for Comfort’s Joy, but it was not really a cookbook. Everything You Always Wanted to Know was aimed at readers who might be inhibited, inexperienced, or outraged by every aspect of human sexuality. Reuben’s book is still in print but is now best remembered as the inspiration of Woody Allen’s 1972 film with the same title. Allen concocted a series of mini-dramas inspired by the questions the good doctor had used to organize his book. Reuben imagined his patients and readers seeking answers to such inquiries as “Do Aphrodisiacs Work?” and “What Are Sex Perverts?” An appropriately climactic finale finds Woody and the male members of his cast dressed as cavorting sperm cells, to answer the question “What Happens During Ejaculation?” The most moving episode is the answer to the question, “What is sodomy?” Gene Wilder plays a successful Upper East Side MD who is visited one day by an Armenian shepherd in love with a sheep named “Daisy.” It happened because of all those lonely nights in the mouna real short introduction 76 tains, the shepherd explains. He would like to be cured of this love affair and a cousin in America had told him about the good doctor. Wilder at first resists, but finally sees her and unexpectedly falls for Daisy himself. In an increasingly reckless cycle of clandestine assignations and intimate dinners in elegant New York hotels he finally loses everything for the...

FINDING JOY IN CHEMISTRY

YOU’VE GOT TO LOVE a chemistry book whose preface draws comparisons to “The Joy of Cooking” and “The Joy of Sex.” What does “The Joy of Chemistry: The Amazing Science of Familiar Things,” by Cathy Cobb and Monty L. Fetterolf, have in common with these other well-known tomes? Introducing joy into what were—and perhaps still are—challenging or delicate subjects. Chemistry has proven to be a perplexing subject for many students. As Henry Adams observed in “The Education of Henry Adams,” “The bit of practical teaching he afterwards reviewed with most curiosity was the course in Chemistry, which taught him a number of theories that befogged his mind for a lifetime.” “The Joy of Chemistry” attempts to lift this fog by demonstrating and explaining chemical phenomena in terms accessible to the nonchemist, providing the reader with a “virtual adult chemistry set.” The authors explain the chemistry of everyday things, from computers and cars to photocopiers and ...

The New Joy of Sex

The New Joy of Sex

The Sex of Joy: A Gourmet Guide to Lovemaking Rhetoric

In turbulent times in U.S. sexual history, Alex Comfort's popular sex manual The Joy of Sex: A Gourmet Guide to Lovemaking served up an exciting yet reassuring menu of sexual practice. More than simply reflecting attitudes, The Joy of Sex participated in shaping the discourses of sex and sexuality of its day. This rhetorical and cultural critique of The Joy of Sex argues that the variety and arrangement of its recipe-book-like entries, compelling illustrations, and other rhetorical elements dramatized and sold an idealized heterosexuality to readers but reduced the meaning of “lovemaking” in the process.

The Joy of Aging: Alex Comfort and the Popularization of Gerontology

Alex Comfort is remembered as the author of the bestselling The Joy of Sex. This versatile and prolific writer, however, also had a distinguished career as a gerontologist, producing many research papers on longevity, publishing important textbooks on the biology of aging and on geriatric psychiatry, and popularizing gerontology in a variety of books and essays for the general public. Exploring a range of his writings—from textbooks to essays, book reviews and magazine articles—this essay will focus on how Comfort drew upon the roles of scientific researcher, doctor, and polemicist to create a series of narratives on aging.

The Joy of Sex

The Joy of Sex

Christians and the Joy of Sex

Christians and the Joy of Sex

The whiteboard: the joy of sex psychology

The whiteboard: the joy of sex psychology

The joy of sex and laughter

A psychoanalyst talks about the ambivalence and ambiguity that lie beneath the surface of what makes us laugh

Women and Self-Help Culture: Reading Between the Lines.

Simonds writes about women's approach to reading. She is most interested in books directed primarily toward women. These books offer advice about managing relationships, enhancing sexuality, developing self-esteem, becoming assertive, and improving our spiritual lives. Simonds looks at hundreds of books, including such well-known ones as Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, Robin Norwood's Women Who Love Too Much, Harold Kushner's When Bad Things Happen to Good People, and Alexander Comfort's The Joy of Sex. Even though many critics see these books as anti-feminist drivel, their continued success says something about American women's search for meaning. Simonds examines the social construction, cultural consumption, and transmission of ideas about gender and the self. She wants to know why such books are appealing and what their readers are doing with them. Readers' own responses to books, though varied, do fall into patterns. A few readers reject the messages found in these books but most affirm the content. They look for validation of how they already feel and for answers to their problems. Traditionally women care for others; reading books gives them a chance to nurture themselves. Simonds explores the cultural messages offered by books. What do the books preach about blame, feminism, and individualism? She looks at sex manuals which advise their readers not only to learn techniques but also to improve their self-identities. She looks at books that deal with the larger arena of relationships between men and women. Authors see such relationships as plagued by nearly insurmountable problems. Men are obstacles that women must work around as they attempt to forge meaningful relationships in what is characterized as a war zone.Simonds discusses the place of books in relation to other forms of She views books as an example of the didacticism that pervades women's experiences. In her words, self-help culture is our culture. The same therapeutic culture that characterizes books can also be found in magazines, soap operas, and talk shows. These books are buyable therapy. In a sense, books commodify readers by urging them to make themselves into objects of analysis and improvement. Such books try to give their readers an understanding of existing problems, but they also help create the problems.Are books politically conservative or liberating? There is no easy answer. The authors of books seek answers through individual change, not social change. They reinforce the traditional dependence of women on authority. But at the same time Simonds argues that books can validate caring, and serve as a form of women caring for women. These books shift the emphasis of caring, as they encourage their readers to care less about their involvements with others and more about their own personal development, but for the ultimate goal of achieving better connections with others.

The joy of sex after a heart attack

The joy of sex after a heart attack

In My Opinion: The Sexual Revolution in Perspective

The critical battles of the sexual revolution appear to be won. is out of the closet, as they say, the sexuality of women is acknowledged, and sexual functioning is viewed as a health entity having positive value from infancy well into old age. I applaud the open honesty with which we can now express our sexual needs and the recognition that the sexual part of the self is as important as the emotional, the intellectual and the physical. Indeed, we now understand that all these elements interact in the determination of life's health and happiness. But something seems wrong. The Joy of Sex is accompanied by the tragedy of a million teenage unwed pregnancies. The beauty of a loving sexual embrace is made ugly by its loveless and degrading exhibition in films and television. Where sex is ennobled in its mutual sharing between caring partners, Madison Avenue treats it as an impersonal commodity whose purpose is to entice attention to a product.

Literature in Crisis

Edmund J. Farrell Those attuned to publishers' annual reports to stockholders, to bottom-line figures (where the buck really stops these days), might sense media hype in my title. No one can deny that books are presently selling well. In its issue of May 30, 1980, Publishers Weekly reported (1) that book sales in 1979 totaled $6.3 billion, an increase of 9.3 percent over sales in 1978, and (2) that, based on its sample survey of more than six hundred bookstores throughout the country, the U.S. Census estimates that sales increased twenty percent in January 1980 over January 1979, an increase larger than that reported for any month in 1979. The Book Industry Study Group, supported by major publishers and others concerned with what we read, forecasts a whopping increase in book purchases in the next three years, with sales totaling $11.2 billion in 1983. Rosy figures, indeed. But books are not synonymous with literature. When one examines what books are selling, figures quickly lose their roseate luster and take on a slightly tawdry sheen. In The New York Times Book Review, December 30, 1979, Roy Walters announced that when hardback and paperback sales were combined, the five best sellers for fiction in the 1970s were The Godfather, The Exorcist, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Love Story, and Jaws. Those for nonfiction were initially reported to be The Late Great Planet Earth, Chariot of the Gods, Your Erroneous Zones, The Joy of Sex, and Future Shock. The list was revised on February 3, 1980, however, when combined sales showed that The Sensuous Woman had earned the

The Joy of Sex After a Heart Attack

The Joy of Sex After a Heart Attack

All about Sex...Despite Dialysis

For patients on maintenance hemodialysis, sex, too, is a wash-out(1). Although information on the sexual functioning of renal patients is minimal, current studies paint a rather gloomy picture. For the majority of dialysis patients, sexual functioning worsens with the progression of uremia and improves only slightly with maintenance hemodialysis(2,3,4). In addition, sterility, amenorrhea, and impotence are not infrequent(5). Before hemodialysis, patients with chronic renal disease seldom lived long enough to be concerned with the emotional and social consequences of their illness. Today, for many of the 25,000 patients in the U.S. on dialysis, life has been extended, living can be relatively normal, and questions of sexual function are of increasing concern. We recognized this when our adult patients on home dialysis at the Artificial Kidney Center of Eugene Talmadge Memorial Hospital began asking us about sterility, diminishing potency, and a lack of interest in sex. The staff was unaccustomed to discussing sexual adjustment, and before assisting patients, we had to become better informed and learn the techniques of counseling. We designed a series of mini-seminars-informal lectures and group discussions-entitled Sexual Adjustment and the Nephrology Patient. Lesson plans were organized as guidelines, such books as The Joy of Sex and The Pleasure Bond were made available to patients and staff, and charts and diagrams were collected to illustrate human sexual response. The mini-seminars were held twice weekly during the regularly scheduled nephrology outpatient clinic. All adult home dialysis patients, both married and single, and their partners were invited to participate. We offered individual sessions for those who could not attend or who did not

Book Reviews : More Joy: A Lovemaking Companion to "The Joy of Sex" Alex Comfort (ed), Ringwood. Penguin. 1975, pp. 222. (No price)

Book Reviews : More Joy: A Lovemaking Companion to "The Joy of Sex" Alex Comfort (ed), Ringwood. Penguin. 1975, pp. 222. (No price)