Doing It: A New Edition of The Joy of Sex

March 29, 2024

The New Yorker January 5, 2009

“Our Bodies, Ourselves” covered much of the same material as “The Joy of Sex,” just with a different tone. It, too, had illustrations of a hirsute couple having intercourse in a series of positions. Both books said that everybody was bisexual, that sex should be a mutually satisfying, full-body experience, and that the communication of turn-ons could be of great benefit to this enterprise. And both books espoused the (distinctly seventies) notion that sex could be a value-neutral experience, as natural as eating, which undermined the traditional belief that sex ought to be in the service of procreation within the bounds of matrimony.

Read the full story: Doing It: A New Edition of The Joy of Sex by Ariel Levy