More Tidings of Comfort and Joy

Dear Alex Comfort,

I'm just a housewife, but I sure want to thank you for your lonely struggle for sexual freedom. Your book, The Joy of Sex, enriched my life, particularly that terrific section on "sauces and pickles" (I've been getting into them with relish, if you know what I mean).

Now comes your new book, More Joy. It just knocks me out--that's all I can say. It is really heartwarming to read that "there is nothing to be afraid of, and never was." You took the words out of my mouth when you wrote that all our sexual complications are produced by "garbage" people who oppose "sexual turned-on-ness." (I really admire your way with words!)

Imagine how the garbage people will scream when they learn that you say "All people are both straight and gay if they'd let themselves be," or "The energy American men have spent trying not to express bisexuality ... would solve the power shortage." My husband George doesn't know this yet, and I bet he won't take to your interesting suggestion that one of the advantages of anal intercourse between a man and a woman is that the male partner can close his eyes and pretend that he's in bed with another man.

He's also far behind us free spirits on the aggression frontier, Dr. Comfort. Even after your first book, he refused to tie me up, spank me or push me around in the loving way you recommend.

That's why I adored the idea in your new book about batacas--the plastic-foam bats that sexual partners can smack each other with. I rushed out and bought a pair, and while George was taking off his shoes, I crept up behind him (nude, of course) and gave him a loving bataca shot behind the right ear. As he got up off the floor, he shrieked, "Don't tell me that dingbat has written another book!" and ran right downstairs to our coffee table. He found it there, of course, and kept howling and slapping his thigh as he read your keen advice. Not even another bataca thump could make him stop laughing. He's just repressed. All the money I've invested in ropes, pulleys, electric gadgets and batacas, and George still doesn't think they have much to do with expressing affection. It burns me up.

I guess the only thing to do is to consider group sex--the big new message in More Joy. I like your idea that we shouldn't call them "orgies" any more but merely "sharing." After all, who's against sharing? I can believe it when you say that everyone comes back from an orgy--oops, I mean from a sharing --feeling "breathless, guiltless and ready to return to propriety." Maybe that's because "the main expedience in sharing is quietude, and the intention is sensual rather than sexual." I must say I don't really get this, probably because I am just a housewife, but it sounds uplifting and I guess that's the point.

Your section on jealousy is a dilly. You know, the part where you say that if you find out somebody's been messing with your mate, you can react with pride at the compliment to your taste and luck instead of carrying on "like a backward five-year-old who sees another child with his tricycle."

What gets me is the dumb argument that you've solved all sexual problems by leaving the emotions out, probably because you recommend "cool sex" instead of old "hot sex," with its "tragic intensities." These people haven't even noticed that you included 13 lines on the subject of love in your new book, and actually defined love (very movingly, I might add) as "the mutually satisfying sharing of each other's experience and the experience of each other." Now I guess they'll stop thinking of you as some sort of cold, potty Englishman dishing out new versions of Mechanix Illustrated for the U.S. suburbs. After all, The Joy of Sex has sold 3 million copies, and More Joy sold 150,000 copies even before its official publication date. Can so many people be wrong?

It's getting late, and George is still over there giggling and slapping himself over your book. I told him you are a serious man--a Ph.D., an expert on aging, and author of six books on sex, plus poetry and novels. I even told him about the field research you did at the Sandstone sexual freedom ranch in Malibu, selflessly watching people make love (and participating!) so your book would be accurate. He knows your Joy books got raves from big sex experts all over California, and that some people in the Midwest are actually showing up at bookstores with prescriptions for the books. Still he giggles, the insensitive brute.

Anyway, thanks for everything. For the advice that if you see your daughter masturbating you should be "exceeding glad that she's learning a skill," not to mention the section on the love life of disabled people, including the touching tale of the crippled man who carries on a fulfilling sex life with his big toe. Penthouse magazine has been yammering away on the sex life of amputees for a year now, but there's certainly none of that tackiness and pandering in your sensitive treatment of the subject.

The only problem I have with the book (and I hate to be a compulsive naysayer, as you might put it) is with those drawings. Since I look forward to another book (More, More Joy?), I am enclosing a photo of a penis so your artists will know what one looks like. I hope I am not being too bold.

Millions will bless you for pointing out that sharing in group sex can be a religious experience. I certainly hope, if you're ever in the neighborhood, you come and worship with me.

Yours in joyful free expression,

Betty Jo

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