Intact, too, is its exclusively hetero orientation and humorously staid and clinical tone. True to its original structure and subtitle - A Gourmet Guide to Lovemaking - this new how-to is still modeled on a cook book (with chapters titled 'Ingredients,' 'Appetizers,' 'Main Courses,' etc.) and remains a smorgasbord of stimulating, if somewhat buttoned-down by Internet-era standards, ideas and images. Comfort's update in 1991 and death in 2000 - approves of waxing and shaving, subs out Serpico and Janis Joplin for a pair of impeccably groomed models and substantially reworks the material to reflect up-to-date knowledge about male and female sexuality.

Thankfully, the newly revised Joy of Sex - the book's first major reissue since Dr.

And the manual, which describes female genitalia as 'slightly scary' to some men, offers strategies for the 'defloration' of women. A woman's armpits, it counseled, 'should on no account be shaved,' as not to soften their furry eroticism, and deodorant for both sexes was to be 'banned absolutely.' In the book's once-notoriously explicit charcoal illustrations of acrobatic sex acts, the woman's hirsute lover, in retrospect, bears a sidesplitting resemblance to the GEICO caveman. That groundbreaking first edition, published in 1972, brims with hippie wisdom, general male cluelessness - and hair. Looking back from a distance of more than three decades, there's something hilariously off about sexologist Alex Comfort's best-selling ode to getting it on, The Joy of Sex. 2009: The modern man is a clean-shaven lover.

The Joy of Sex by Alex Comfort