The Joy of Sexhas sold over 12 million copies since its debut in 1972. The original book was written by a doctor who pretended to just be the editor of someone else's work. This week the New Yorker has a very entertaining story about the origins of the book and the sexual life and times of Dr. Comfort.
The memorable drawings in this book were a result of Dr. Comfort submitting dozens of Polaroids of himself and his lover of 10 years (his wife's best friend) to his publisher. The publisher changed these photos to pencil drawings but they looked nothing like the original couple.

If you are a child of the seventies and were raised on “The Joy of Sex,” you are not likely to have forgotten the illustrations. The woman depicted in these drawings is lovely, and, even nearly forty years later, quite chic. Her gentleman friend, however, looks like a werewolf with a hangover. He is heavily bearded; his hair is long, and, it always seemed, a little greasy. His eyelids are usually at half-mast, adding to his feral appearance. In some of the pictures, you can practically smell him. (The smell is unpleasant.)

A new edition is being released this month.

The original drawings have been replaced, with a mixture of modest photographs and impressionistic sketches. The hairiness has been eliminated, and the attractiveness gap between the man and the woman has been bridged. But the people in these pictures do not look as if they were in any kind of sexual ecstasy. Rather, they have the smug smiles of a couple whose 401(k)s have just appreciated. They look as if they were in a Viagra commercial, which is to say that they look like two people who have never, ever had sex.

Once you remove those memorable drawings and Comfort’s batty, phallocentric prose, what you are left with is something that bears little resemblance to the subversive, explosive original. “The Joy of Sex” redux becomes generic—Cook’s Illustrated with boobies.

See Doing It.