Crystal Hardie - Sex Positions: Tips and Techniques to Master Amazing Sex Positions!

When Dr. Alex Comfort published his 1972 book, The Joy of Sex , all hell broke loose. The world was not quite ready for the proposition that sex was supposed to be fun. In fact, for American religious zealots of the day, sex was no fun at all and a matter to be discussed only in the privacy of a darkened bedroom. And so it was that the nascent Religious Right movement demanded that the book be removed from libraries all across the nation.

This, however, did not prevent The Joy of Sex from dominating the bestseller list for quite some time. Someone certainly read it, despite the best efforts of zealots to suppress it. Never mind the fact that it remained in the top five for a full seventy weeks in the two years following publication. In other words, it was a national sensation.

When we think of that period of time, perhaps we remember Richard Nixon, Watergate, the oil crisis and maybe even the Vietnam War. Perhaps we remember all those historic cataclysms, but through the lens of the waning years of the Hippie Revolution.

The Christian conservative movement in the United States began to take root and grow, at least in part, because of the youth, civil rights and womens rights movements in the 1960s. Hot on the heels of the Beat Generation, came the white-picket-fences antithesis lives lived without boundaries and without rules previously believed to be the gold standard for all. It was all so improper. So wild and unhinged. So hairy. So sexy. So un-American.

The counter-Revolution would continue apace and to this day, remains a political force. While greatly diminished, what was later to take on the moniker Moral Majority raised to what it saw as the challenge of sexual openness, experimentation with drugs and the sheer horror of women escaping from their appointed positions in the kitchen. The era of Don Draper and his Mad Men was over and it seemed America was growing up too quickly for the taste of some, as the wheel turned and history marched on.

All this is the backdrop for The Joy of Sex and the great, American duality of purpose to be both a beacon unto the nations and the Spanish Inquisition, simultaneously. Its true theres a segment of society that continues to insist that the darkened bedrooms of the nation are the only place for a discussion about sex and sexuality. Its also true that its this same segment which insists on poking its head through that bedroom door to see what were up to in there and who were doing it with.

Duality of purpose is a funny thing.

Despite the efforts of those who fear that somewhere, someone may be having a good time (hat tip, H.L. Mencken), time has most mercifully marched on. Today, we find ourselves living in a world of sexual openness and possibility and the acceptance of those who differ from us in their sexual orientations and gender perceptions. These are good changes. These are needed changes.

But banality has set in. Sexuality has become a perfunctory and mundane affair. Even the Hippies, with their long hair and tie-dyed Bacchanalian sexual attitudes, probably knew it would all come crashing down on them, in the end. Many of them figured it out only when they looked out their kitchen windows and realized This is no acid flashback, man. I really am in Colorado Springs. Perhaps we can trace the demise of sex in our times to the satyr-like womanizing of Abbie Hoffman, or the marriage of the former Barbarella (of Orgasmatron fame) Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden. Whenever it happened, though, sex became the frozen condensed orange juice of our personal lives. Something we mixed up and hoped would not foul our sense of flavor.

Whatever it was that triggered the demise of satisfying, lasting sexual connections, its lead to this latter day banality. Its refried (and not in that good, frijoles way). Its reconstituted, ersatz, bland, boring slurry, stuffed in our faces at every turn. There it is, staring us down, daring us to tell it how many times per week we do it. Less than three times? Unhealthy!

Breasts loom from push up bras, twenty feet high, towering over us menacingly. Shirtless males leer at us in the latest must have jeans. Salacious tales of politicians tapping their feet in bathroom stalls and wearing diapers with women they rent, scream at us from the headlines of newspapers. But the internet has it all beat.

On the internet, one can order in sex! Just like Chinese food and only slightly less cost effective. Men can observe partially dressed (or nude) women performing various sex acts with objects, other women, men or a combination of all of the above. Pornography can be had in black and white, color, still photography, film, video, or live streamed feed. Its all there and its all monotonously banal. We are duly saturated with it.

It seems that people have come to prefer sex that doesnt involve the presence of another human being. Even order-in sex cant hope to compete with the US pornography industry, which rakes in an almost inconceivable $10 billion to $12 billion per year, in the USA, alone. Interestingly, the constituency that appears to consume it most voraciously is the same one that rose in reaction to the morally permissive Hippies. In a 2014 survey, 50% of men who had recently attended a Promise Keepers (mens revival) rally, admitted to having viewed pornography, within one week of having done so. From Jesus to group sex in 60 seconds and all in the privacy of their own homes.

Nonetheless, the effect on our sex lives is to leave us even less satisfied than we were in the days before Dr. Comfort broke the barrier between the darkened bedroom and the town square, where sexual openness is concerned. Repression has been replaced with saturation. Prudery replaced with banality. Sex has gone from being fun to being boring and that, to me at least, is a sad state of affairs.