When I was at school any kid who admitted that their parents had a copy of The Joy Of Sex instantly became very popular. My first girlfriend’s mum, who was daringly divorced, had a copy in the living room and when I first spotted it my eyes weren’t the only things that nearly popped out. In fact I may well have honed my skills as a collector by ceaselessly scanning the shelves at friends’ houses, desperately trying to find a copy amongst the gardening and cookery books. It was apparently the first book to show illustrations of sex – so how did people learn the ins and outs of the old in and out before it was published?
The green copy is from 1840, the red one is 1904.
Sex education still causes controversy but we may as well cut the budget for it along with everything else. A simple walk to Tesco’s is all the modern youf need to become fully up to speed about the mysteries of the opposite sex. Nude bodies appear on billboards, 40 feet high, and every shop and supermarket sells daily papers containing images and text that not so long ago would have been classed as hard core porn. Magazines targeted at teenagers have whole sections on sex including ‘position of the week’ – quite a challenge in the third year of publication, I’d have thought – and anyway most teens cite the internet as the place they receive their sex education. I had a quick look just to check and can report that the net does indeed offer so many detailed instructional films that the rising generation can be left in doubt about precisely what goes where – or not, as the case may be.
‘Erotica’ has been around for a long time but serious instructional manuals are an under valued and over looked sector of collecting and they are also socially important. Even this century a lot of people were more or less ignorant of the sex act itself, never mind the fore play, during play and after play. There was a huge demand for information and books like Aristotle’s Masterpiece went some way to redress the balance.
It was ascribed to the Greek philosopher in an attempt to create respectability but it is certainly not his work. The earliest copies date from 1684 but earlier fragments in Latin are also known. The plain green ‘3/6’ copy shown here is the earliest, dating from about 1840. The red copy is from 1903 and the work was published virtually unchanged until the middle of the 20th Century. There are no illustrations of the sex act but every volume contains plates of cross sections of the womb, complete with a child at various stages of development. It is, in fact, far more of a book for midwives and women in general than a sex manual and the detailed information about delivering babies must have assisted countless millions of women across four centuries. It is also a good example of a subversive text as it was well known and easy to get hold of despite being banned until the 1960s. Sisters, it seems, have always been doing it for themselves.
Plain advice for newly weds, isssued under plain wrapper:
A hundred years later The Sex Factor In Marriage (Williams and Norgate, 1930) was as good as it got and it does indeed go into considerable detail about the physical and emotional aspects of sex. One of the things I like most about it is the restraint shown in the title and cover. Note the ‘In Marriage’, for example. How could it be any other way? Best of all, the whole thing is warily introduced – chaperoned, you might say – by a vicar.
Despite that this book is a revelation. I was expecting it to read like a biology text book crossed with a sermon but in fact about a quarter of it deals with the physical process of sex. She has the best interests of women at heart and goes into considerable detail about the clitoris; stimulation of, not to mention techniques the man can use to ‘control his own feelings until the right moment.’ But the good doctor’s boldest move was to put pleasure on the agenda, possibly for the first time. Just a few pages in we find lover’s lips caressing the nipples, although that was as far south as they went in the thirties. Later she alerts readers to the dangers of monotony by suggesting no fewer than five different positions for sex, which I dare say was quite enough to take any couple up to the end of the war.
Published in 1968. In an attempt to avoid censorship the illustrations of sex positions feature just one person, heaving away at thin air.
In the sixties various other books, some censored, pushed at the boundaries of the permissive society and paved the way for the blockbuster that brought bondage, cunnilingus and ‘foursomes and moresomes’ into the open. In 1972 the provocatively titled The Joy of Sex arrived, featuring those now legendary illustrations of a bearded man and his equally hirsute partner actually, you know, doing it. There are countless editions and it’s hard to think of a more influential book but a first edition can still be had for under £50. It’s mild stuff by today’s standards but of course the modern world has changed its mind about sex; it now looks elsewhere for repression. The recent reprint from Mitchell Beazley no longer contains the passage about sex on a motorbike. It’s been replaced by one on phone sex. The sexual police have retired – but the Health and Safety Army are alive and vigilant. Be careful out there.