The Joy of Sex

Playfulness is a developmental necessity, not a frivolity. Comfort argues that coital play, like childhood games or dreaming, is how humans safely process aggression, fear, and fantasy. Adults grow self-conscious about dressing up and acting scenes because something embarrassing might escape. His prescription: grow backwards into an adult context. Be the sultan, the burglar, the slave, or anything that turns you both on. Bed is the sanctioned place to act out what daylight forbids.

The rules are the rules of child's play. If a game turns nasty, spiteful, or unhappy, stop it. While it stays wild and joyful, it carries a payoff children's games lack. Comfort believed that if adults could shed shame about these immature needs, society would harbor far fewer deeply anxious people.

Male arousal is concrete; female arousal is situational. Comfort presents parallel chapters, one written as a woman advising men, one as a man advising women. His model: male response is brisk and automatic, triggered by objects like a coin in a vending machine, centered heavily on the penis. Female response is keyed to who is doing what, unfolds through skin and breasts first, and cannot be short-circuited by a direct grab at the clitoris.

The fix is empathy and initiative, not assumption. Women are told men often just want to be held and relieved of always having to perform. Men are told that what women value most is intuition and direct initiative, the divine gift of lechery. Crucially, women differ from each other far more than men do, so never assume last partner's technique transfers.

Anatomy settles an old argument. Australian urologist Helen O'Connell's research revealed the clitoris is far larger than assumed: what shows on the surface is a fraction of an organ that runs deep into the pelvis, made of the same erectile tissue as the penis, with a shaft, glans, and foreskin, and roughly twice the nerve endings. It is the only human organ built purely for pleasure.

So drop the hierarchy of orgasms. Comfort and Quilliam reject the old Freudian claim that a vaginal orgasm signals mature sexuality. Most women climax easily from clitoral stimulation but only sometimes, and with effort, through penetration alone. The practical answer for most couples is to combine: choose positions like the Coital Alignment Technique or rear entry that allow hand or vibrator access to the clitoris during intercourse.

Cassolette means perfume box. Comfort's term for a clean woman's natural body scent, which he calls her greatest sexual asset after her beauty. It emanates from hair, skin, armpits, and genitals, is unique to each person, and works through pheromones that attract and relax a partner, often below conscious awareness. Many people, he notes, decide bed or not-bed by letting their noses lead.

Our deodorant culture sabotages this. Comfort argues a mouthful of aluminium chloride in an armpit is one of bed's biggest disappointments, and a truly deodorized partner is another. His counsel: soap and water, not perfume and antiperspirant. Don't douche, which strips both healthy secretions and attractant pheromones. If a partner's scent genuinely turns distasteful long-term, it may signal emotional distaste or infection worth taking seriously.

The obsession is a dominance signal misread. Comfort treats male size worry as the counterpart to female breast anxiety: a status instinct, like a deer's antlers, with almost no bearing on function. The average erect penis is just over five inches, thickness matters more than length, and since only the first few inches of the vagina are truly sensitive, smaller can work as well or better. Flaccid size predicts nothing about erect size.

Men literally see the problem wrong. He offers a neat explanation for why the anxiety persists: a man views his own penis foreshortened from above, and other men's from the front, so his always looks smaller by comparison. No lotion, exercise, or surgery reliably enlarges anything. The advice: she should never comment except favorably, he should stop giving it a thought.

We are born sexual but not identical. Borrowing sexologist John Money's concept of a love map, Comfort and Quilliam describe how each person develops a unique mental template of the ideal lover and act, shaped by early messages, emotional events, and culture. On one level it doesn't matter whether you can swing from chandeliers. On another it matters enormously, because these maps silently drive what arouses and repels us.

Distorted maps breed disappointment. People absorb false beliefs: that men are always instantly hard, that good sex happens spontaneously without effort. Because maps operate outside awareness, we can hold unrealistic expectations and never notice. The remedy is knowledge and disclosure. Explore each other's likes, fears, and dreams openly, because you cannot assume a partner knows yours unless told, nor that you know theirs.

Bondage is about surrender, not coercion. Comfort presents ligottage, the French term for tying up a partner, as a mainstream technique for boosting orgasm, not overcoming reluctance. Citing Havelock Ellis, that restraint of muscular and emotional activity heightens sexual excitement, he explains that helplessness lets people let go completely. The tied partner gets what he calls the sensation of becoming one enormous penis, freed of all performance anxiety; the active partner controls the entire pace of arousal.

Safety converts risk into play. The book codifies rules that predate the modern safe, sane, consensual creed: agree a safe word beforehand, never block an airway, never tie anything around the neck, use quick-release knots, never leave someone helpless alone, and never combine with real anger, drugs, or excess alcohol. Blindfolds work similarly, focusing four senses by killing one.

Function need not fade. Comfort insists the only thing age does to sex is teach you more. About half of couples over sixty-five make love regularly, a higher share than when the book first appeared. The things that stop older people from sex are the same that stop them cycling: bad health, thinking it looks silly, or no partner, and these simply arrive later than we assume. Men's erections come less spontaneously and ejaculation slows, which he reframes as an advantage.

Menopause can unleash desire. As estrogen drops while testosterone stays high, some women discover a lust lasting months or years, a second adolescence. Culture, not biology, sets the ceiling: 90 percent of older French women think sex matters versus 30 percent of British women. The one rule: never stop for long, or restarting gets hard.

Faking builds a prison. Quilliam's counsel to women is blunt: don't. It is hard to do convincingly, since few can fake vaginal contractions and none can produce the telltale flush on breasts and neck. Worse, a single performance sets up a future of self-denial and deceit. The more you fake, the harder it becomes to unfake, and the harder to ask for what you actually need. The same applies to men, who sometimes fake to spare a partner's feelings.

Honesty is the only path to fixing it. In a loving relationship it should be fine to climax only occasionally and still be loved. If you want more, the route is showing, not just telling, a partner what works, since what she needs may not match what he assumes. Fear can literally block climax; neuroscience shows the brain's fear centers must switch off.

Novelty is the antidote to erotic decay. The closing argument confronts biology directly: evolution programs desire only until genes combine and offspring are self-sufficient, setting no target for the long-term couple. But humans are more than genes. The first move against decline is refusing the comfortable, familiar routine that has always worked, except on tired occasions. Challenge routines as an act of love, and reject the belief that any relationship is too old or too long to be daring.

Desire must be updated as you change. Anthropologist Helen Fisher notes that novelty activates the same brain circuits as romantic passion, so trying new variations can replicate early infatuation. The deeper courage is admitting your tastes have shifted over years and saying so aloud. The whole book distills to two phrases worth repeating to a partner: I really want you to, and Yes.