On February 10 , 1920, a group of workers published an angry letter in the Evening News of the Moscow Soviet called “Take away the scarecrow.” It was a monument to the revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin by the sculptor B. Korolev, standing on Turgenevskaya Square. And on the same day in England in the Comfort family a boy was born, who was named Alex.
What was common between Mikhail Bakunin and Alex Comfort, it became known only after a couple of decades, when the impressionable English guy was imbued with the ideas of anarchism. He made noise at meetings, dressed defiantly, but did not make a fetish out of anarchism. And the desire to change the world resulted in Alex’s passionate desire to study: he graduated from Cambridge and London Universities, studied medicine at King’s College.
Once a pregnant woman came to him, all in tears. Not because she did not want a child. She was afraid that the neighbors would find out what she was doing with her husband.
This struck the doctor so much that he wondered: when , finally, Puritan England would stop hiding sex under the covers and treat him like something shameful! Without Comfort, sex is like this lady: it is not known what to do – cry or laugh? In general, Alex sat down at a book in which, on long winter evenings, he tried to break the cover of hypocrisy with relations between a man and a woman. And rich practice made it possible to notice not only the ordinary in these respects, but also to carefully study the “deviations”, which, according to Comfort, were not such.
Passion for writing has become akin to illness. Alex wrote prose and poetry, but he cherished that first book, which he called “The Joy of Sex,” for a long time, almost 15 years. It was published only in 1972, city of and is caused by a bombshell! But how else? Let me quote only a small fragment from Comfort’s essay: “… There is one interesting way to have sex – as if you had two sexual acts at once: during normal intercourse, one of you tells the other about some actions that he would like to try next time. Fantasy may be the most rampant. Try to conjure up that which you cannot realize in reality, and find out the desires of your partner. “These hidden desires can be both heterosexual and homosexual, both tender and rude, even aggressive – do not be afraid of them yourself and do not hamper the partner’s imagination.”
“Hidden desires” of the British rushed out, like water during a flood. And in order to quickly melt the ice of mistrust, the author provided the book with “funny pictures”. The Americans liked this most of all; in a matter of days, 630 thousand copies of the book were swept away from the store shelves. And this despite the fact that the book was terribly expensive compared to the rest of the print world – as much as 6.5 pounds! But it was subtitled “A Book on the Art of Love for Gourmets” and consisted of 32 color and over 100 black and white illustrations!
The author’s popularity grew by leaps and bounds! At that time, he was already actively engaged in gerontology. They began to invite comfort to conferences and seminars, eagerly catching his every word. In the same, 1972 , he further fueled his interest in himself, saying at a meeting of the American Gerontological Society: “I am sure that ways to slow down and reverse the aging process are about to be found.” And a year later, he said: “If the United States alone could mobilize the scientific and medical reserves of the United States alone, it would be old for about ten years.” As you can see, the great ones are sometimes mistaken!
As for the “Joy of Sex,” the book outlining the omnipotent teaching was distributed around the world in the amount of 12 million copies and was translated into more than 20 languages. She is still considered the most popular sexuality textbook after the Kama Sutra. Two books published by the “Messiah” in the late 70s – the next “Sex in Society” and “Sexual Consequences of Disability” – did not have such mad success. Have eaten! When Alex died in 2000 , his 55-year-old son, Nick, two years later released a new version of the cult book, picked up the banner of combating sexual prejudice.
The changes were insignificant: the words “wife” and “lady” gave way to the terms “partner” and “woman”. Chapters about AIDS and Viagra were added, which, of course, were not known 35 years ago.
Not without political correctness. Modernizations have undergone technical advice for people in the body. And finally, the phrase about a fat girl who only men from the Middle East can like is gone. Nowadays, the author did not dare to ignore the Islamic factor.
Now we can only guess, what will happen after another three decades? Will one of Nick’s three children take over grandfather and father?
And for those who have never held the Joy of Sex in their hands, I can recommend only one thing: love your beloved, treat them with tenderness and care. Feel free to experiment in bed. Man was born in order to love! And not only yourself!