The sexual revolution may have reached its high-water mark 50 years ago, the week of August 5, 1973, when The Joy of Sex: A Cordon Bleu Guide to Lovemaking first topped the New York Times list of nonfiction hardcover best sellers. Published the previous fall, the book had swiftly become a publishing phenomenon. For the first time, anyone in America could walk into a respectable bookshop and openly purchase a detailed, illustrated sex manual: a modern version of the guidebooks that Indian aristocrats, Chinese mandarins, and Florentine grandees had consulted centuries before.

The book would notch 11 weeks at number one, and topped the trade paperback best-seller list for 13 months, making it one of the most successful books ever issued in that format, according to Publishers Weekly. To date, it has sold 12 million copies in various editions, and its sequel, More Joy, some 1.5 million more.

The Joy of Sex opened up the popular discourse about sex play, introducing millions of couples to a less anxious, more receptive and mutually pleasurable approach to intercourse than their parents’. While it was written specifically for heterosexual couples, it helped launch a vast genre of explicit better-sex guides addressing every possible inclination—gay, straight, trans, bi-, even some aimed at conservative Christians, Orthodox Jews, and observant Muslims, not to mention book-length explorations of specific techniques—all of which borrow something from the style and voice of their predecessor and that collectively have sold in the many millions.

Written by a 52-year-old British biologist, physician, poet, novelist, longtime anarchist and pacifist, and all-around pundit with the reassuring name of Alex Comfort, The Joy of Sex was a milestone in a cultural transformation that, half a century on, is still unfolding.

The sexual revolution was declared dead and buried during the AIDS crisis and has since endured a powerful, rolling backlash from antiabortion zealots, antigay and anti-trans crusaders, and opportunistic politicians eager to take advantage of the latest moral panic. But it never really ended. Despite efforts to discourage and suppress teenage sexuality, the Centers for Disease Control’s National Center for Health Statistics estimated that even in the pandemic year of 2021, 30% of teens had had sexual intercourse by age 18. Nor has the queer community gone back into the closet. Last year, the Gallup Poll reported that 7.1% of U.S. adults self-identify as other than heterosexual, double the percentage of 2012.

What did The Joy of Sex bring to the sexual revolution, and what does it have to say to us today, in the wake of the #MeToo movement and amidst the ongoing tug-of-war between personal freedom and social control? It was not the first best-seller to discuss sex frankly, but it was the first book from a major publishing house, intended for a mainstream, middle-class audience, that told you—and showed you—how to do it. To secure that audience, it rewrote the language and look of the sex manual: the format, the presentation, and above all, the voice. Previously, books about sex had fallen into one of two categories: sleazy, cheesy, and pornographic, or else dull, clinical, and unarousing. The Joy of Sex, by contrast, was urbane, witty, and disarmingly casual. “A well-designed bedroom can be a sexual gymnasium without it being embarrassing to let elderly relatives leave their coats there,” it advised.

The relaxed, humorous tone was intrinsic to the book’s message: “Bed is the place to play all the games you have ever wanted to play, at the play-level. If we are able to transmit the sense of play which is essential to a full, enterprising and healthily immature view of sex between committed people, we would be performing a mitzvah.” That approach extended to the visuals: a portfolio of paintings depicting the stages of a sexual encounter, a series of drawings explicitly illustrating the various positions described in the text, and a selection of classical Asian erotic illustrations, adding a touch of aesthetic refinement.

To be sure, The Joy of Sex displayed many of the deficiencies of what had always been a male-dominated form. It was noticeably phallocentric. In a good sexual encounter, it told the reader, the penis becomes like a third party or a child of the couple: “‘their’ penis.” That being the case, it was the woman’s responsibility to arouse the man, not so much the other way around. And while the book had no quarrel with non-hetero sex (“we’re all bisexual”), it still framed this as a deviation from the norm. Rape fantasies were fine as long as they weren’t acted upon, and when real rape occurred, it may have been the fault of the woman who deliberately excited a man she didn’t know well. The book would obviously receive plenty of justified criticism on these points and others in the years to come.

In spite of which, The Joy of Sex introduced an important positive element, urging couples to talk about their erotic needs and desires openly, unanxiously, and without embarrassment. “The whole joy of sex-with-love is that there are no rules, so long as you enjoy, and the choice is practically unlimited,” it urged. “That includes our whole skin surface, our feelings of identity, aggression, and so on, and all of our fantasy needs.”

* * *

Comfort’s agenda ran deeper, however. In his day, most people who studied sexual behavior assumed that sex had two functions: pleasure and procreation. Comfort added a third: sociality, or what he called “the forgotten art of being human.”

If socialization is the way we internalize society’s norms of conduct and belief, sociality is how humans learn to associate and cooperate with each other. Comfort held that sex is one of the most basic and profoundly formative ways that we achieve sociality. It’s how individuals, generally in adolescence, accustom themselves to understand and respond to each other’s needs and desires and, importantly, how they learn to share power within relationships rather than compete for it.

Unlike most forms of socialization, sex helps us achieve this not through discipline or instruction but through play. Fantasy is a basic part of erotic enjoyment, Comfort argued, and an important means by which couples understand and accommodate each other. He therefore encouraged exploration and experimentation over rigid sex roles (“refusing to try anything but the missionary position is as much a fetish as only being potent when wearing a diving helmet”).

Here’s how he summed up the elements of a healthy sexual relationship: “mutual respect, mutual communication, and a strong desire to protect one another without any corresponding wish to manipulate or mold.”

Other critics of sexual repression, especially Freudians and the followers of Wilhelm Reich, saw bad sex as leading to violence, oppression, even fascism, but Comfort turned that dynamic on its head. An unstable, economically precarious, often violent society distorts sexual behavior; sex can’t perform its crucial role in building sociality. In turn, a sexual culture riddled with violence helps make a violent society more so; and the cycle continues. Men are conditioned to experience sex as a kind of gladiatorial contest. Sexual imagery becomes increasingly tinged with violence and violent images in art and entertainment are eroticized. Meanwhile, much of the sex education that students receive in school is slanted to reinforce traditional roles and mythologies rather than to challenge them.

Censorship was not the answer, said Comfort, who had campaigned against the devastating air war that the UK and U.S. allies had conducted over occupied Europe during World War II and later against nuclear weapons. Rather, “a general outbreak of public resistance to militarism,” he once suggested, “would contribute more to the removal of sexual imbalance than any action through the channels we have come to regard as political.”

Accurate information that doesn’t just reinforce myths and stereotypes about sex must be made easily available, Comfort argued, and adolescents should be encouraged to explore their sexuality, not stifle it. He stipulated only two commandments: “Thou shalt not exploit another person’s feelings and wantonly expose them to an experience of rejection,” and “Thou shalt not under any circumstances negligently risk producing an unwanted child.”

* * *

The Joy of Sex was Comfort’s attempt to smuggle this agenda into the mainstream by updating the ancient but underground genre of the sexual instruction manual for the modern middle class. His timing was perfect. Booksellers couldn’t get enough copies fast enough, readily seeing it as the logical next step after Masters and Johnson’s dryly scientific bestseller, Human Sexual Response. Some put it on display like their other titles while others kept an unwrapped copy at the counter for patrons to peruse. Either way, opening this explicitly illustrated sex book at your local outlet became a semi-subversive statement for millions. You didn’t just look at it, you got away with looking at it.

Thereafter, and in spite of being repeatedly banned from public and school libraries, The Joy of Sex continued to sell in successive editions, the most recent appearing in 2009, nine years after Comfort’s death.

What kept the book fresh for so long, despite its flaws, was its insistence that we get the best sex when we develop the unashamed capacity to experience it not as an outlet for aggression or a neurotic exercise, but as play. Comfort’s insistence that problems in sexual relations between two people are not separate from social problems such as war, economic injustice, and abuse of authority still echoes strongly at a time when men in positions of power are repeatedly found to have leveraged their status to extract sexual favors.

The revolution that The Joy of Sex sought to instigate in the bedroom and in society at large is still a work in progress. But Comfort’s book, persistently in print and persistently finding readers, reminds us of the critical role that good, mutually satisfying sex can play in building a healthier, freer humanity.

*

Eric Laursen is the author of Polymath: The Life and Professions of Dr. Alex Comfort, Author of “The Joy of Sex” (AK Press).

Political partisanship has a neurobiological basis, a new study shows. It is predicted by the way our brains process basic political words or concepts.

Do conservative and liberal brains work differently? What once might have been a semi-serious topic for kitchen-table discussions of political differences has burgeoned into a lively area of research for neural scientists. Increased ability to observe brain structure and function makes this possible, but the motivation comes from the sharply more partisan political landscape of the past few decades. Communication and cooperation between parties are essential to the functioning of government and society; if political polarization arises or becomes embedded in our brain’s deep wiring, understanding how becomes a matter of great importance.

This article was produced by Human Bridges, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

A recent study exploring this timely area comes from the Carney Institute for Brain Science at Brown University and takes off from previous research showing that polarization isn’t simply a matter of two political camps consuming information from different sources; exposure to opposing perspectives can actually reinforce cognitive biases, suggesting that these have a neurobiological origin.

The researchers—Daantje de Bruin, Jeroen M. van Baar, Pedro L. Rodríguez, and Oriel FeldmanHall—hypothesized that like-minded partisans interpret events the same way because they represent and experience political content similarly as well. In other recent studies, political allies demonstrated synchronized neural dynamics when they consumed the same political content, but that doesn’t explain what drives the similarity. The Brown researchers trace it back to something more basic: the “semantic representations” our brains create to express similarities and organize knowledge. Polarization is triggered not by how the two sides in the abortion debate argue their position, but by individuals’ emotional response to the word “abortion” itself, and the associations it carries for them: all of which occur in the brain, and specifically, the striatum and amygdala, the “regions involved in encoding value and emotional content.”

The researchers’ objective was to determine whether a shared representation of political words in the brain predicts a shared ideological affinity. They recruited 44 individuals, evenly split between liberals and conservatives, to perform two exercises: one reading, the other watching videos while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow. The first exercise was behavioral—taking place outside the brain—and the other was neural—taking place inside the brain.

In the first exercise, participants were presented with 60 words, including “abortion,” “addiction,” “American,” “health care,” “police,” “immigration,” and “welfare,” mixed with a series of animals and objects, and asked to press a button to indicate whether each word was political or nonpolitical. They then sorted each word based on its semantic or associational similarity, producing clusters around hot-button topics like immigration and abortion and politically loaded concepts like Americanness.

The second exercise asked the participants to watch three videos, two of which were included in the analysis: a neutrally worded PBS NewsHour report on abortion legislation, and a politically contentious clip from the 2016 vice-presidential debate between Democrat Tim Kaine and Republican Mike Pence. The fMRI data revealed a close connection between individuals’ ideological bent and the patterns of activity in the striatum when they heard the words “immigration” and “American,” for example. Conservatives shared one pattern of neural activity when processing the word “abortion,” and liberals exhibited another.

Those who showed greater “temporal synchronization of neural states” in response to particular words were likely to have demonstrated a similar political slant in the reading exercise as well. This dovetailed with a previous study which found that conservatives associated abortion with terms like “right to life,” “murder,” and “personhood,” while liberals associated them with “freedom to choose,” “women’s rights,” and “personal autonomy,” among others.

Polarization appears to involve a third area of the brain as well. When participants in the Brown study viewed the segment of the vice-presidential debate on immigration, ideologically like-minded individuals exhibited similar neural activity not just in areas of the brain concerned with value and emotional content, but also in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), which is where mentalizing—the process by which we form a sense of self—takes place. According to the researchers, this means that the affective experiences taking place in the striatum and amygdala, shaped by our ideologies, help determine our most basic sense of who we are.

What the researchers found especially telling was that the results were the same regardless of context. One of the best-known theories of political polarization argues that it results from constant exposure to the same sources of information and opinion; once we engage with a particular set of news or social media outlets, we find ourselves in an echo chamber or informational community that binds us ever more tightly. In theory, exposure to other sources, or different framing of the issues, can reduce partisanship and allows us to process information more dispassionately.

The Brown study suggests this is not the case. In the reading exercise, the words were presented with no context at all; in the video-watching exercise, one of the clips was nonpartisan, the other highly partisan. And yet, the participants grouped the words and responded to them neurologically in the same way. Shared semantic representation, in other words, was the determining factor in both exercises. Or, to put it more simply, “political polarization is driven by how individuals emotionally experience and come to value political information,” the researchers conclude. A word like “immigration” carries the same emotional weight for political partisans, no matter how or where we encounter it.

Some words or issues elicit a stronger reaction than others, depending on the current political climate. The strongest polarized response in the Brown study came from the word “immigration,” for example, with “abortion” a close second and “police” trailing. Individuals who made the same associations with immigration in the reading exercise tended to have the same response to the word in the amygdala. The researchers chalk this up to the fact that they collected their data in early 2019, just a few months after the Trump administration proposed the Build the Wall, Enforce the Law Act, which made immigration the hot-button political topic of the moment. Had they carried out their research later, the Black Lives Matter movement or the Supreme Court’s decision to abandon Roe v. Wade might have produced a different result.

These differences in response underscore an important cautionary point, the researchers say: that political content is complex “and typically ignited in naturalistic conditions” such as watching TV or engaging with social media. Many factors come into play in determining our response when we are bombarded with a constant stream of stimulation involving highly emotional issues. But the Brown study suggests that three factors are most important: semantic representation of key words or concepts; how we segment that information into meaningful units (like immigration or abortion); and the blood flow responses, captured by fMRI, that they trigger.

This does not mean that conservative and liberal brains are different; the process of polarization works the same way no matter how one identifies politically. What the Brown study reveals instead is how deeply our brains absorb semantic representations, and how powerfully they shape our political ideology through our neural processes. If we want to restore civility and cooperation between political parties, our task is more complex than finding the right frame in which to discuss the issues.

Author Bio: Eric Laursen is an independent journalist, historian, and activist. He is the author of The People’s Pension, The Duty to Stand Aside, The Operating System, and the forthcoming Polymath: The Life and Professions of Dr. Alex Comfort, Author of The Joy of Sex. His work has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including In These Times, the Nation, and the Arkansas Review. He lives in Buckland, Massachusetts.

With nearly $1.8 trillion in tax cuts rammed through in just three years, the Bush Administration is now addressing the more fundamental business of restructuring the tax code itself. That means not just chopping existing taxes -- mainly on the affluent -- but shifting the whole focus of the federal government's revenue-raising activities.

One former Administration official who may be gazing wistfully at the new agenda is Paul O'Neill, who spent much of his brief tenure as Treasury Secretary pushing for an attack on the tax code and the Social Security system rather than the series of cuts that the White House prioritized instead. This year, the Administration is finally pressing forward in the direction O'Neill had favored, with a series of initiatives that would eliminate much if not most taxation of savings and investment, and instead aim the tax collector's net squarely at workers' wages.

Health Savings Accounts already became law in December as part of the legislation that created a Medicare drug benefit. HSAs allow individuals to shelter up to $2,600 a year for health expenses, and families $4,500 -- amounts that will rise with inflation. The second ingredient, expected to be a focal point of Bush's soon-to-be-released 2005 budget, is a portfolio of three new tax-exempt savings accounts. Retirement Savings Accounts (RSAs) would take over from traditional IRAs and could not be tapped until the saver is at least 58. The same would apply to Employer Retirement Savings Accounts (ERSAs), which would replace employer- sponsored savings accounts such as 401(k)s. Money contributed to Lifetime Savings Accounts (LSAs), the most radical of the new structures, could total up to $7,500 a year per family member and could be withdrawn at any time for almost any purpose.

The third element of Bush's program is partial privatization of Social Security -- essentially, using a portion of the payroll taxes that fund the current system to create voluntary individual retirement accounts. Four new bills offering different versions of such a scheme were introduced in Congress last year. Aides say Bush plans to set partial privatization front and center in his re-election campaign, and he mentioned it prominently in his January 20 State of the Union address.

All three components of Bush's tax strategy rely on tax-advantaged private savings accounts to pay for services that formerly came from the government or employers -- in this case, employee health care and retirement benefits. In all three plans, as well, individuals could pass on the assets to their heirs when they die. Taken together, these changes will allow affluent Americans to shelter hundreds of billions of dollars a year from taxation, effectively rolling back much of the progressive structure that was implemented beginning with the income tax ninety-one years ago.

How does this work? With more and more capital income -- from savings and investments -- shielded from taxation, that leaves generally less affluent workers to shoulder most if not the entire burden of paying for government out of their wages. "One of the goals long-term is to have the lowest taxation on capital income as possible," explains Eric Engen, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute -- "not just another tax decrease across the board."

But Bush's piecemeal approach to eliminating taxation of saving and investment is bound to make the tax code more complicated, not less -- which some say might be just what the Administration has in mind. Conservative economists have long promoted consumption taxes as a way to encourage saving, even though they fall most heavily on lower-income workers. Leonard Burman, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, says the Bush tax strategy is a first step to replacing the income tax with consumption taxes. "They're going in through the back door, moving to wage taxation by messing up the income tax code so that it's unfair and inefficient -- not just unfair." That will open the way for the White House to eventually propose junking the whole system in favor of a consumption tax, he predicts.

The consequences for lower-income households are ominous. "If someone inherits, say, $1 million and lives off the investment income, that won't be taxed," says Peter Orszag, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has analyzed the three proposed savings accounts. "Yet someone who works hard and sweats it out and earns $1 million over a lifetime will pay a heavy tax burden." Or, as a Congressional committee staffer close to the debate puts it, "If only wages are taxed, that takes us back to a system where the poor are taxed and the rich escape taxation."

The workers most likely to take full advantage of the benefits are the already affluent. HSAs can be used to cover healthcare policies only when hefty deductibles of $1,000 a year for individuals and $2,000 for families apply. And Bush's proposed three-pack of new savings accounts would have none of the contribution limits and other rules that currently keep tax-exempt savings from benefiting only the rich.

Bush's tax overhaul agenda also threatens to blow an even wider hole in the federal budget. The HSAs could skim $6.4 billion off the income tax uptake over ten years, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation. A report issued early last year by the Tax Policy Center, jointly run by the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, estimated that LSAs could drain away $200 billion to $300 billion in revenues over ten years, or an estimated 0.3 percent of what is expected to be the Gross Domestic Product in 2013. RSAs would suck out another $50 billion, or 0.5 percent of GDP, by 2028. The losses in capital gains, interest and dividend taxes would shrink if the White House decides to hold annual LSA and RSA contributions to $5,000 instead of $7,500, as it is reportedly considering, but would still be substantial.

Payroll taxes siphoned into millions of individual Social Security accounts could suck up another $1 trillion over ten years. The problem for low-income workers is what they will do if their personal accounts do not make up for the retirement income they will lose if basic Social Security benefits are cut -- which most of the proposals now being circulated would do in some form.

Bush's tax transformation could fail to fly. Record federal deficits topping $400 billion projected for each of the next two fiscal years could make it hard for Congress to find room for the three proposed new savings accounts. They could also hamper Bush from using payroll tax revenues to create his Social Security accounts.

Democratic leaders in Congress are already flagging some major problems with the savings accounts, especially the fact that savers would pay taxes on their contributions when they make them, rather than later on, when they start to withdraw assets. That could provide a temporary boost to revenues over the next five years, helping Bush to claim he fulfilled his State of the Union pledge to halve the deficit in that period, but draining revenues in later decades.

And the Bush White House tends to get its way on Capitol Hill. The Treasury reportedly is still ironing out details on the three savings accounts. One possibility is to offer a government match to low-income workers, giving them a greater incentive to save and combating the impression that the new accounts are primarily a tax break for the rich. That could win Democratic lawmakers -- and presidential candidates -- over to some version of the plan.