A Manual’s Labours

books discussed in this review:

The Rise of Viagra: How the Little Blue Pill Changed Sex in America
By Meika Loe
New York University Press
288 pp., $37

The Joy of Sex: Fully Revised and Completely Updated for the 21st Century
By Dr. Alex Comfort
Crown
256 pp., $29.95

When I was twelve, my best friend scratched a line in the dirt with a stick and drew three dots along it. This was the female genitalia, he said. There were three openings: one for childbirth, one for urinating, and one for sex. “If you pick the wrong one,” he told me, “she’ll die instantly.” Boys learned the nuances of sexuality from older brothers or the schoolyard medical expert. Girls were warned by their mothers. These armies clashed in the Chevrolets of the nation.

Other sources were equally arcane or limited: a grainy, black-and-white, war-era film screened in grade-seven health class that warned soldiers about venereal disease, perhaps, or a cursory parental chat. Our desires were contained within us, isolated and abnormal, each adolescent a separate freak. But we were saved by books, among them The Joy of Sex, read in guilty instalments at the local Coles bookstore.

The rise of sex literature was a surprisingly tortuous and unentertaining evolution. In the 1930s, the Freudian scientist Wilhelm Reich wrote that the orgasm was fundamental to our emotional health, a view that was considered subversive. His journals and research notes were burned, and he eventually died in Lewisburg Penitentiary, where he had been imprisoned for contempt of court. In 1948, Alfred Kinsey, a biologist at Indiana University, interviewed 5,300 men and published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Five years later, he interviewed 5,900 women and published Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. He was called the “Father of the Sexual Revolution” and his work was condemned by right-wing groups as being dangerous and immoral. His research was later denounced as skewed and his own sexual character impugned as sadomasochistic. Kinsey is now the subject of a film (Kinsey, starring Liam Neeson). But when his work was first published, there was a fear that it would under-mine the institution of marriage and, by extension, American society. Efforts were still being made to preserve sex-within-the-bounds-of-marriage as something between a right and a duty, depending on your gender.

It wasn’t until the mid-Sixties that the self-help sex book came into its own. In 1966, William Masters and Virginia Johnson published their landmark study, Human Sexual Response. Times were changing and, although the book did come under some criticism, it became a best-seller and its authors were celebrities. Human Sexual Response was authoritative and groundbreaking, though, as the title suggests, still a bit clinical.