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Published in , when sex was still supposed to take place in the dark and under the sheets, the book thrust itself into public consciousness with all the subtlety of a gigolo at a convention of bishops. It was also stunningly popular, a well-thumbed fixture of bedside tables across America that spent weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. The book has undergone various tweaks and expansions over the years, and six years ago the Hairy Man and his somewhat less hairy female partner were relegated to wherever old hippies go to retire.
John McAlley. Looking back from a distance of more than three decades, there's something hilariously off about sexologist Alex Comfort's best-selling ode to getting it on, The Joy of Sex. That groundbreaking first edition, published in , brims with hippie wisdom, general male cluelessness — and hair. A woman's armpits, it counseled, "should on no account be shaved," as not to soften their furry eroticism, and deodorant for both sexes was to be "banned absolutely. And the manual, which describes female genitalia as "slightly scary" to some men, offers strategies for the "defloration" of women. Thankfully, the newly revised Joy of Sex -- the book's first major reissue since Dr. Comfort's update in and death in — approves of waxing and shaving, subs out Serpico and Janis Joplin for a pair of impeccably groomed models and substantially reworks the material to reflect up-to-date knowledge about male and female sexuality. True to its original structure and subtitle — A Gourmet Guide to Lovemaking — this new how-to is still modeled on a cook book with chapters titled "Ingredients," "Appetizers," "Main Courses," etc. Intact, too, is its exclusively hetero orientation and humorously staid and clinical tone. Here's a passage from the manual's not-especially-spicy fetish section, "Sauces and Pickles": "How [sexual turn-ons] become programmed in a given individual isn't known, but there is an identifiable repertoire of components, like the repertoire of feathers one can use in a lure, from which most of these stimuli are made.