Sex Was More Fun in the 1970s

By Katherine Forsythe, National Sexuality Resource Center. Posted April 27, 2009.

The new ultimate revised edition of The Joy of Sex by Dr. Alex Comfort is finally here, thirty-seven years later. Here’s a review from The Washington Post. The reviewer is a woman who was not around for the first The Joy of Sex. Though she gives comparison of the new and old edition fair treatment, she can’t possibly understand what a radical icon of freedom the original book became. You had to be there to understand what this book really meant. It gave us permission to begin the sexual liberation we enjoy today (and continue to liberate) to be the men and women we were meant to be.

I remember when The Joy of Sex came out. I kept it in my bedroom, and read it with my new husband, and sometimes without him. It was "far out". It was titillating. It was rebellious. It was freeing.

It was 1972. The Vietnam war was finally, and humiliatingly, coming to an end. Two years earlier, I had graduated from The University of Michigan. A liberated woman coming of age in the '60s -- that’s how I saw myself. A bra burner. A protester (I remember locking elbows and holding a candle  in a huge circle two hundred yards in diameter, on the "Diag" at U of Michigan, singing We Shall Overcome, interlocking arms with the black students, a radical action for both of us. Who knew that in the presidential election of 2008, we really would overcome? We had yet to get past the dreaded Orwellian 1984!.

Somehow, however, my "liberation" led me to being married in 1970 upon graduation. It never occurred to me that being liberated did not include marriage. After all, I had marched in the moratorium on Washington. I had lain in the mud at Woodstock. So what if I got married? It didn’t mean I was giving up my cause(s). By the way, I was also in a sorority. Sorority girls got married after graduation.

There was a new freedom being born when the first The Joy of Sex came out. Old traditions were being threatened, but not entirely released. There were a lot of contradictions. Burning my bra and living in a sorority house? You had to be there to understand. As Bob Dylan proclaimed, "the times they are achangin’" (but not changing completely, not yet). We stood up and we protested everything. The environment. The War. Racial inequality. The University Editorial policy. Sex. We protested sex.

"Living together" outside of matrimony was radical. We hid it from our parents (whom, we were confident, had no sex before marriage. In later years, I found out that was a lie. Go Mom and Dad!). It was mutinous to insist on sleeping in the same bedroom as your boyfriend/girlfriend when you came home for the weekend. Okay, do that at college, if you can get away with it, but don’t shove it in your mortified parents’ faces.

The world was graduating from the Ozzie and Harriet world, and into the revolutionary, shockingly funny world of All in the Family. Still, we pretended a lot. No one was gay. They were queer (the original connotation, not the one used today). Lesbians were mostly gym teachers. "Queer" men lived in New York and did nasty, dark, unspeakable things. Everyone had two parents (of different genders). Wives had dinner ready for Father when he arrived home. Divorce was a desperate, tragic act.

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