'The Joy Of Sex': The Original Hairy, Musky Edition

Nicole Cliffe

It came! It came! The original 1972 Joy of Sex. Thank you, Mohammed from Brookline, MA. May your positive Amazon ratings never go down. (Look at all the unintentional sexual innuendo we've already covered!) I especially would like to thank Mohammed for making my back-up plan obsolete: taking my mother up on her offer to "see if she can figure out what she did with her copy."

And now that it's here, and I'm looking at it, it's a little gross. But endearingly gross. For a much better and more exhaustive look at the merits and career of Alex Comfort, M.B., Ph.D., I would refer you to Ariel Levy's delightful New Yorker piece from 2009. For a wry fictional take on what it would be like to be the children of the book's authors, you should pick up Meg Wolitzer's The Position, in which the Comforts become the Mellows, and it does not go well for them.

A Secret Shame

DOUGLAS WEISS, PH.D.

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(© J0sefino/StockFreeImages.com)

Many men struggle with sex addictions. But in the United States today, a growing number of women also are falling prey to pornography and perversion.

Marsha is a 32-year-old woman who appears to have a perfect life. She is the attractive, healthy wife of a successful doctor in town and the mother of a terrific little boy. She began our first counseling session by saying, "I have everything going for me, but I have a problem I am so ashamed of that I can hardly tell you."