The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories

by Pagan Kennedy

  Since the 1940s, he’d been reading and publishing papers on gerontology; now he hoped to do for the aged what he had once done for the sexually innocent. In 1976, he published a manifesto against the warehousing and dehumanizing of old people, titled A Good Age. He intended his new book to be as groundbreaking as Joy, a bestseller that would radicalize the wrinkled. However, as it turned out, readers were not as eager to join this revolution. The book sold respectably, but couldn’t begin to match the influence of Comfort’s big hit. Still, Alex kept on with his crusade. He flew to conferences on gerontology, trying to wrangle his way to the top of the field. When the proceedings bored him, he jumped up on stage and summarized the disagreements with a limerick, written on the spot. He couldn’t resist proving how much smarter he was than any of them. The scientists and doctors out there in the audience, those men with their sober expressions and sharp name tags, thought of him as a pop-culture idiot. Joy had ruined his reputation among serious people. He wanted it back.

  He shed his jumpsuits for tweed blazers; he anticipated the breakthroughs he’d make in the field. He published a shower of books and articles. But wherever he turned, he was dismissed as the guy who had written that sex book.

  “There was the publicity roller-coaster which he quite enjoyed,” according to Nick Comfort. “But he wanted to be treated seriously. He was an academic of considerable gravity.” Still, it wasn’t just his pop-culture past that tainted his reputation as a biologist. Alex had little interest in making a scientific argument; instead, he published polemics. His crusade had been—and would be—to convince people to see their bodies as ideas. This may be one reason that he did not anticipate AIDS, even in the midst of the orgies, with fluids splattered everywhere. Alex could not seem to accept that viruses and cells and bodies themselves might have antirevolutionary agendas.

  Likewise, he insisted that most of the problems of the old came from discrimination—rather than decay or illness. And now he began to imagine a new kind of utopia, a place where the gray-haired could be cherished as sexual and intellectual beings. In such a society, he believed, health problems would nearly vanish for the old.

  THREE STROKES

  It was 1991. The house in Kent, England, smelled of curry and pipe smoke. Prints from India—which he and Jane had collected during their many trips—hung above the sofa. Alex had embraced his role as the globe-trotting gadfly; he jetted around, speaking out against age-ism.

  Today, he was pottering around in his study, working up notes for a nursing conference in Australia. Except he couldn’t seem to concentrate. His thoughts had gone foggy. He picked up a pencil to make a correction on his manuscript. Australia. He’d never been before. He was just entering his 70s, and by his calculations, he had twenty good years ahead of him, at least. The rest of his life stretched ahead, enormous as Australia, undiscovered and sunny.

  And then he collapsed.

  It was Jane who found him. She punched numbers into the phone. Soon, paramedics crowded around, snapping their latex gloves, prodding him all over. He rode in an ambulance and then a helicopter. The next day, he woke up in a new country; it was not Australia. The monitors beeped beside him. The nurses—whom he would never again lecture in conference halls—whisked in and out. His jaw had frozen up. He shook all over. The doctor came by and explained—slowly, as if Alex were an idiot—that he’d suffered a massive brain hemorrhage. He’d obviously taken a hit to his motor cortex. Years before, writing A Good Age, he’d been so confident: “The human brain does not shrink, wilt, perish or deteriorate with age. It normally continues to function well through as many as nine decades,” he’d asserted. But now his own brain begged to differ.

  He drifted in and out of consciousness for weeks. Someone held his hand and told him Jane had died. She’d suffered a massive heart attack.

  Seven months later, they put him in a wheelchair and his son Nick wheeled him out into the world of taxicabs and crowded crosswalks, where everyone had somewhere to rush. Everyone but him. Nick—the son he’d hardly known—would handle most things for him now, from bills to fan letters to updating the next edition of The Joy of Sex. He would be installed in a little flat around the corner from where Nick, his wife, and the grandchildren lived. And do what? “Leisure is a con,” he’d written, but now he had nothing but idleness ahead of him. He would enter that condition he feared most, and which he’d tried to eliminate with his theories: he’d become an unperson.

  When the next stroke hit him, paralyzing his right side, he moved into a nursing home. On Sundays, he rode in an ambulance to Nick’s house and sat immobilized while his grandchildren ran around him. When he spoke, people leaned in, wrinkled their foreheads, and asked him to repeat himself.

  ALBATROSS

  The book had made him a multimillionaire and vaulted him to worldwide fame. But he didn’t want to be famous like this, a wax figure propped up in a chair, expected to talk endlessly about the same goddamn thing. “Joy is frankly an albatross,” he said to one journalist in 1997, pumping his thumb for emphasis.

  In his mid-70s, Alex Comfort had shrunk into a codger with Einstein hair and furious eyes, immobile in his wheelchair. With his right hand paralyzed, his left thumb had become his only lever on the world. He typed poetry with it, one painful letter at a time. He gestured by wiggling that thumb, so that his whole will seemed to live in that snail-like appendage.

  Today a young reporter—a girl, really—would be visiting him; she’d told him she was doing a story about the 25th anniversary of Joy. Before the girl came, his nurse, Linda, set him up in a spotless suit and arranged him in the chair.

  The reporters always asked the same question. How did he come to write The Joy of Sex? And behind their question lay another question that he heard in the snigger of their voices. They cared nothing about the other 50 books he’d written, now arrayed on shelves behind him. Always Joy, Joy, Joy. Had they not read his poetry? His scientific papers?

  The reporter—a beautiful girl, just as he’d hoped—entered and reached out for his hand. But he had nothing to shake, so she smiled awkwardly. She asked where to put her tape recorder. “Stick it wherever you like,” he tried to quip, but his mouth wouldn’t cooperate.

  The girl questioned him for hours, and because she was kind enough to flirt a little, to make him feel human for a moment, he did his best to answer.

  She wanted to know whether he’d marry again.

  He laughed. Who would want a cripple stuck in a wheelchair?

  But your brain works, the girl said.

  Yes, that’s true, he replied. But no one wants to marry a brain.

  He wanted to tell her it wasn’t supposed to go like this. He thought he’d known his enemies: the Tories, Thatcher, the sword rattlers, the physicists who designed bombs, the prudes, the teetotalers. But now he’d been defeated in the way he least expected. The true enemy had turned out to be so small, and not at all political: bits of brain tissue in the motor cortex and possibly the parietal lobe. And Joy had become an enemy too. The book was an albatross straight out of Coleridge.

  Remember how the poem goes? A ship gets lost in a storm, and bangs around among ice floes; the sailors believe they’ll die at sea. Then salvation comes in the shape of a bird, an albatross that leads them to open water. The sailors venerate the bird as an emissary from God—or most of them do. One free-thinking anarchist on board refuses to acknowledge the bird as holy. This anarchist, who loves shocks and explosions of all kinds, shoots the albatross dead.

  And then the winds cease, the sails drop, and the ship founders in the terrible silence of the sea. The other men hang the dead bird around the anarchist’s neck as a sign of his sin. Years pass. The anarchist recants. And yet, still he wears the ghost of that dead bird around his neck. It weighs him down. It humbles him. And eventually he and his greatest mistake merge into one.

  Alex Comfort died in 2000.

  SOURCES

  Alex Comfort obituary. The Guardian (London), March 28, 2000. />
  Allyn, David. Make Love, Not War: An Unfettered History. New York: Routledge, 2000.

  Banks-Smith, Nancy. “Privates on Parade.” The Guardian (London), Jan. 5, 2001.

  Comfort, Alex. Come Out To Play. New York: Crown Publishers, 1975.

  ———. A Good Age. New York: Crown Publishers, 1976.

  ———, ed. The Joy of Sex: A Cordon Bleu Guide to Lovemaking. New York: Crown Publishers, 1972.

  ———, ed. More Joy. Crown Publishers, 1974.

  ———. The Silver River: Being the Diary of a Schoolboy in the South Atlantic. London: Chapeman & Hall, 1936.

  ———. Writings Against Power & Death. London: Freedom Press, 1994.

  De Bertodano, Helena. “25 Years of Joy.” Chicago Sun-Times, Jan. 5, 1997.

  ———. “Labour of Love.” Courier Mail (Queensland, Australia), Nov. 23, 1996.

  Dery, Mark. “Paradise Lust.” Vogue Hommes, Spring/Summer 2005, pp. 244–7.

  Gray, Paul. “Less Joy.” Time, May 19, 1975.

  Hammel, Lisa. “Will the Real Alex Comfort Please Stand Up?” The New York Times, June 2, 1974.

  Heller, Zoe. “Where’s the Beard?” The Daily Telegraph (London), Sept. 17, 2002.

  Hunt, Liz. “Alex Comfort’s Joy of…Poetry.” The Independent (London), Nov. 12, 1996.

  Illman, John. “Has the Joy of Sex Stood the Test of Time?” The Guardian (London), Nov. 12, 1996.

  Jones, Patti. “Better than Sex.” The Seattle Times, Jan. 27, 2003.

  Jones, Steve. “Adventures in Thought: Experiment in Literature and Science.” Transcript of a talk given at the University of East Anglia on June 16, 2006.

  ———. “My Greatest Mistake.” The Independent (London), Sep. 3, 2003.

  Kenner, Hugh. “The Comfort Behind the Joy of Sex.” The New York Times Magazine, Oct. 27, 1974.

  Martin, Douglas. “Alex Comfort, 80, Dies…” The New York Times, March 29, 2000.

  Salmon, Arthur E. Alex Comfort. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978.

  Savage, Dan. “The Doctor of Love.” The New York Times, Jan. 7, 2001.

  Sayre, Nora. “Ahh!” The New York Times, Feb. 11, 1973.

  Stuever, Hank. “Joy of Sex Back on Top?” Author’s Son Updates a 30-Year-Old Classic.” The Washington Post, Feb. 25, 2003.

  Talese, Gay. Thy Neighbor’s Wife. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co., 1980.

  Twenty Twenty. “The Joy of Sex.” First aired on BBC Channel 4 in 2001.

  Updike, John. “Coffee Table Books for Higher Coffee Tables.” The New York Times, Oct. 28, 1973.

  Walsh, John. “Everything We Wanted to Know about Sex.” The Independent (London), July 16, 2002.

  INTERVIEWS

  Nick Comfort, interviewed by Pagan Kennedy, 2007.

  Robert Greacen, interviewed by Pagan Kennedy, 2007.

  Marilyn Yalom, interviewed by Pagan Kennedy, 2007.

  Genius on Two Dollars a Day

  She’s striding down a hallway at MIT with a bucket in one hand and a length of string in the other. Amy Smith—winner of inventing awards, and the brain behind such creations as the screenless hammer mill and the phase-change incubator—must fish some water out of the Charles River before she can teach her next class. As she lopes along, Smith describes the ordeals of testing water in remote villages. Her words spurt out. She’s a woman on fast-forward, and she does not so much talk as download information. I’m jogging to keep up with this lanky, deeply tanned scientist and the bucket bumping against her leg.

  We reach the massive front doors of MIT’s main building and she pushes out into the crisp air and roar of traffic. She hurries toward the steps. Without interrupting her disquisition on water-testing, she perches sidesaddle on a banister. Elegantly poised, she slides down the handrail, still talking.

  She lands on the sidewalk with a practiced leap. “You slide faster in the winter,” she says, “when you’ve got a wool coat on.”

  If you’re an inventor and you ride the banister below the pillared entrance of a university, there’s a good chance that you could come off as way too cute. It’s something Robin Williams would do if he were playing an inventor in a Disney movie. But Smith can get away with this kind of flourish. She is, after all, one of the brightest minds in a movement that sets out to prove that the best technology can be cheap and simple. The banister is a perfect example: it requires less energy than the stairs, and it’s free.

  In a culture where innovation means coming up with new functions for the cell phone or new spam-busting software, Smith is gloriously out of step. She designs medical equipment and laborsaving machines for people who live at the far end of a dirt road in Africa. Her inventions cost anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a few pennies. “You can’t understand how important a grain mill is,” she says, “until you’ve spent three hours pounding grain and gotten a cup-and-a-half of flour.” It is this kind of understanding—of tedium, of tired muscles, of hunger pangs—that Smith brings to her designs.

  An hour later, in Smith’s “D-lab” class, students gather around a huge, black-topped slab of a table. It’s the first semester of design lab, and these undergrads are learning about the politics of delivering technology to poor nations, how to speak a little Creole, and the nitty-gritty of mechanical engineering; during the mid-semester break, they’ll travel to Haiti, Brazil or India. There, they will act as consultants in remote villages, helping locals to solve technical problems. Oh yes, and the students will also test village drinking water for dangerous bacteria.

  Today, Smith is training them to do just that. Students practice, using a small pump to pull polluted water (from the Charles River) through a filter. Smith points to a piece of the water-testing rig—what looks like a silver barbell. “This test stand costs $600. Personally, I find that offensive.” When the students work in the field, she says, they will be using a far cheaper setup—one that she patched together herself for about $20 last year, using a Playtex baby bottle. “You can do a lot more testing for the same amount of money.”

  Now the students have made cultures of Charles River water in petri dishes. The next step is to incubate the petri dishes for an entire day at a steady temperature. But how do you pull that off in a lean-to in Haiti, with no electricity for miles around? Again, Smith has a solution. She passes around a mesh bag of what appears to be white marbles. The “marbles” contain a chemical that, when heated, will stay at a steady 37 degrees Celsius for 24 hours. The balls are the crucial ingredient in one of Smith’s inventions—a phase-change incubator that requires no electricity. The design won Smith the 1999 BF Goodrich Collegiate Inventors’ Award. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may soon endorse her incubator, and “from there it’s not a big step to go to the Red Cross,” she says. One day it could be a key piece of equipment at rural health clinics in Africa, Haiti, India—where doctors depend on intermittent electricity or none at all.

  At the moment, however, Smith is still in the process of manufacturing the incubators—she has founded a startup company to handle the exigencies of getting her incubators up and running, and out into the field. “I have 6000 of these balls on their way here from China as we speak,” she says.

  Now, Smith wants to demo a bacteria test in the dark. She asks a student to cut the lights. He flips a switch. For a moment, nothing happens and then the room vibrates with a mechanical hum, and panels close over a bank of skylights in the ceiling. Everyone cranes their necks to watch. The panels move in menacing slo-mo, like something out of a James Bond movie. A few people giggle, as if they’ve suddenly become aware of the contradictions thrumming in this room—they’ve come to one of the best-funded technical institutes in the world to learn how to work with Playtex baby bottles.

  A few weeks from now, Smith will give them one of their toughest lessons in the gaps between first world and third. The students will spend a week surviving on $2 a day in Cambridge—the equivalent of what the average Haitian earns.

  Last year, Jamy Droui
llard—who TA-ed Smith’s class—performed the assignment along with his students. Drouillard grew up in Haiti, but that didn’t give him any special edge. He laughs, remembering his chief mistake. “I bought a bunch of Ramen noodles, a bunch of spaghetti, and some ketchup. It got sickening after Day Three. Actually, before Day Three. I should have mixed and matched instead of buying ten boxes of spaghetti. In Haiti, people come up with creative ways of varying their food intake.” He said the assignment drove home Smith’s point quickly—living at subsistence level requires enormous creativity. The African farmwoman who finds a way to make a scrap of land yield enough cassava root for her family, she, too, is an inventor.

  Last year, at a lavish banquet, Smith pulled out crackers from her pocket and nibbled while colleagues feasted around her—she was sticking to the $2-a-day assignment, in fellowship with her students. For Smith, the exercise must have been a snap. She had, after all, lived at the edge of the Kalahari Desert.

  “I never got very good at the Bushman languages. My accent is really bad,” Smith says. “There’s fourteen different clicks and I always did the wrong ones. So I used to click as I walked around, trying to get it right.”

  In the late 1980s, as a Peace Corps volunteer, she was stationed in Ghanzi, a backwater of Botswana down a dirt path that could take as long as two days to travel. “Nobody wanted to live there. You got sent there for punishment if you did badly in a job.”

  Smith taught local kids math and science. She coached volleyball and ran the beekeeping club. To escape the stray cats that had taken over her bedroom, she slept outside her rooms, at the brink of the desert.

  “I knew I wanted to stay in this country,” she says, even though a certain loneliness was setting in—the loneliness of the nerd.