Betty Dodson with Carlin Ross

Better Orgasms. Better World.

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Several years ago in the nineties, I was asked to review another revision of The Joy of Sex written by Alex Comfort's son. At the time, I thought, "If Alex ever read this, he'd disown his priggish son." Now we have a postmenopausal Brit doing her version of The Joy of Sex and it makes me wonder why? Why another revision that dilutes the original book? Alex's version should stand alone as a memory of what sex was like back in the "good old days."

I got to know Alex in the seventies. He was a sweet old guy who never stopped talking and ultimately could bore you into a stupor. But I admired his love of sex. He always said he was sorry we didn't know each other in time for me to illustrate his book. The watercolor drawings he had done for the original book were perfect and I could never have done anything better. However, the line drawings could have been improved upon.

Not long ago I was asked to be interviewed for a documentary about Alex and I told the story of the time we met at Sandstone in Topanga Canyon outside of LA. It was an intentional community based upon nudity and sexual freedom, sort of like an upscale sexual country club. A very beautiful house and grounds in an idyllic setting. The following is an excerpt from my memoir...

Chapter 11. Cooking for the Orgy

I would return to Sandstone several more times before it closed in the late seventies. It was always a pleasure to be there. On one occasion, I was involved in a threesome with a married couple. While I was fucking him on top, she was down between his legs playing with his balls. At one point I looked up and saw a distinguished older man with white hair across the room watching us with the intensity of a devoted voyeur. His gaze never wavered. After a few moments, I waved him over. He approached our sexual play with a kind of reverence I found intriguing, so I pulled him in for a close-up.

Reaching for his hand, I discovered several fingers were missing, but when I finally found one, I licked it wet, and placed it on my clit. The old guy was obviously delighted to add my clit stim while I joyfully fucked the gentleman beneath me. When our scene concluded, our voyeur introduced himself as Alex Comfort, the author of The Joy of Sex, a book that ended up selling over a gazillion copies. He'd been spending time at Sandstone writing The Joy of More Sex based on group sex. His second book never became a big seller. The modern American Puritans know all to well the dangers of letting people know about this kind of sexual freedom that offered safety in numbers, especially for women.

Alex Comfort's original book was a take-off on the Joy of Cooking. Making an analogy between food and sex made sense. Self-sexuality was my daily bread. Partnersex once or twice a week was dining out. Group sex several times a year was a grand banquet where the table was set with multiple partners, sexual pretzels, a stew of hot visuals for voyeurs with a lip-licking audience for exhibitionists. All of this was blended together with the rich scents of sexual pleasure in every exotic flavor imaginable along with something to please everyone's taste.

What most people don't know is when The Joy of Sex came out, there were a lot of conscious hedonists on the East and West Coasts that thought his book was quaint. We were already way ahead of him.