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The creators of The Joy of Sex set out to capture two professional models in heat. But after the pair failed to warm up, the book's illustrator and his young German wife took matters into their own hands.
From "meat shot" (penetration) to "money shot" (ejaculation), most porno is graphic-overlit close-ups of vaginal maws and knotty veined phalli that would make H.R. Giger's Alien wake up screaming.
Strange irony, then, that British and American sex manuals have traditionally included few illustrations, if any. It may have something to do with our Judeo-Christian heritage, all those Old Testament fulminations about abominable acts and St. Paul's notorious hostility toward the flesh. Unlike the explicitly illustrated "pillow books" of Asian antiquity (Chinese Golden Lotus texts, Japanese shunga scrolls), the sex manuals of the West have approached their subject with rubber gloves and a shudder of revulsion. From the Victorian age until the sexual revolution of the 70s, sex instruction in Europe and the U.S. was confined to "marriage manuals," invariably framed in clinical and clerical terms as a matter of physical and moral hygiene. Short version: No juicy pictures.
However, with the publication, in 1972, of The Joy of Sex: A Cordon Bleu Guide to Lovemaking, the marriage manual morphed from a tough-love sermon on the control of sexuality into something new: a how-to for bedroom epicureans, celebrating the freeing of the libido. Waggishly modeled on the comfort-food classic The Joy of Cooking, Dr. Alex Comfort's Joy was an anarchist's cookbook. With pictures! And what pictures they were, as anyone who stumbled on the book as a sex-starved adolescent may recall. The croupade! ("Any position in which he takes her squarely from behind . . . ") The cuissade! ("The half-rear entry positions . . . ") The flanquette! ("The half-facing group of sexual postures . . . ")
Unsurprisingly, the book sold more than eight million copies, was translated into 24 languages, and rocketed to No. 4 on Publishers Weekly's 1973 best-seller list. In the swinging '70s, Comfort's feel-good ethos struck a responsive chord. "Our culture is coming out of a period of moral panic into a re-awareness that there is nothing...