Still bubbling...

The big news on Joy of sex for today is that the antipodean campaign has kicked off. The nice lady from Hodder in Australia has started lining up interviews already for the October 1st launch: so Sydney Morning Herald yesterday, News.com today and an increasing number of radio interviews lined up for the near future.

Yesterday, I also did an interview for the Times on the latest piece of research suggesting that men might be genetically programmed to be unfaithful. I have no problem with the research - very respectably done by the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.

What I got a little heated about was the suggestion put forward in some quarters that a genetic tendency equals an excuse. There may be sound reasons for men (and women, let's not forget) to spread their genes around, but actioning that in today's society is dictated far more by upbringing, personality and personal ethics than by a genetic imperative.

Parallel to this, you may have noticed, has been launched a book by one Gary Neuman who claims that if a man strays, it's the woman's fault. Again, excuse me? Yes, women need to work hard to make sure that relationships are healthy and happy - but so do men. And once again, however miserable a partnership, infidelity is an option not an inevitability. You do have a choice here.

As Alex Comfort originally said in Joy of Sex, and I retained in the update, "we have to find our own fidelities."

What a good week...

I truly don't want to turn this blog into a celebration fest - but this has been such a fun week.

Regular readers will recall that it was The Times last Saturday, then The Sun on Monday. Then I was asked to write a piece for The Express for Wednesday. Then I was on Woman's Hour this morning doing a twohander with Brett Kahr, a lovely therapist from the Tavistock Centre. And that's not counting the Australian interviews and the Indian interviews.

Woman's Hour, unsurprisingly, was eager to look at the issues posed when a woman rewrote JOY. Did I feel that it was necessary to realign the book a female viewpoint (answer: absolutely and according to his son Nick, in 2008 Alex Comfort would have agreed). Did I get irritated at Alex for his lack of feminism (answer: for his time he was actually very pro-feminist).

The Times of India, meanwhile, wanted to know whether I'd included the Kama Sutra in the New Joy of Sex (answer: yes) and whether the western sexual tradition had a manual as old and as explicit as the KS. (answer: no of course not, did you really think we would!).

Next week, the Brazilians are ringing. I wonder what they'll ask about - sex on the beach at Ipanema? Watch this space.

A tale of two features

Interesting how two very different features can reflect such very different, and yet similar views of the same topic. Or to put it another way, The Times and The Sun both do a good job.

The Times coverage of The New Joy of Sex came out on Saturday morning. It majored hugely on the social significance of the project, delved into my own background, and happily reflected the key point about the whole book: that despite the fact that sex is all around - I would argue *because* of the fact that sex is all around - we need an informed sex manual as much now as we did in 1972 when JOY was first published. (I also hugely liked the big picture of me in a punt!)

The Sun coverage came out this morning and on the surface looked utterly different. Screaming headlines, capitalised key words, lots of sexy pictures, and boxouts comparing what is "in" the new book and "out" of the first one. One might think that the points made were going to be both less subtle and less accurate. Actually no. The same message about the necessity for sexual information and resources came across just as strongly.

Aside from being a potentially useful "compare and contrast" lesson for media students, these two articles made me reflect. It's fashionable to accuse the redtops of scandal-mongering. It's almost as fashionable to sneer at the broadsheets as being merely vehicles for the chattering classes. And either paper, when writing up the material they had to work with - research, the book itself, the interview with me - could have dramatised, patronised or generally let themselves be hi-jacked by the temptation to write The Joy of Sex in an irresponsible way. It's a sex book, after all - and could have easily been fair game.

But neither paper into that trap. At the heart of each - expressed very differently but making their point just as accurately - was an extremely effective treatment of the messages I am trying to get across. So thank you to both journalists involved. You've just made a huge contribution to sex education in Britain today.

Check out Body and Soul tomorrow!

Just a quick post to tell you about the very first piece of coverage of The New Joy of Sex - by the London Times.

I had great fun doing it - they sent a very accomplished interviewer up from London to spend an afternoon with me. But even more enjoyably than that, they also got a photographer to take some snaps.

Said photographer decided that it would be a great idea to shoot the whole thing on a punt, so imagine me, the photographer and a rather bemused punt chauffeur taking us round and round in circles on the River Cam just in front of King's College Chapel while the tourists floated by gawping.... Embarrassed? You could say that.

The results will be the lead interview in the Times Body and Soul supplement tomorrow Saturday 23rd August; so please do check it out.

Yes!!!! The big day is approaching!

I admit it. For the past six months I have been a positive tease on this blog.

I have been hinting - more than broadly - that I have been involved in a big sexuality project, which I haven't been at liberty to talk about. Now, I can spill the beans.

You may remember, or have heard of, the seminal book Joy of Sex, written by Dr Alex Comfort in 1972. It's been a huge success, selling 8 million copies worldwide, but sadly Alex died in 2000, though his son Nick did a great job of updating in 2002.

Since then, the publishers have been searching for a female sexologist to "reinvent" the book for the twenty-first century. In 2006 they chose me - and for the past two years I've been working on the project. Now, it's all come to fruition - the UK launch date is September 8th, with a US launch in 2009.

I'm very proud of the New Joy of Sex. All of it has been revised and brought up to date. About half of it has been completely rewritten. There are forty three new sections covering everything from the clitoris through to internet sexuality. And there's a total reorientation of approach - from the mores of 1972 through to the new hedonism (and the new puritanism) of 2008.

As you can imagine, I am getting very excited - not just for myself, but because this is such an important book. What I realised in (re)writing it is that Alex Comfort was one of the first people to emphasise not only the joy but also the power of sex; we tend these days to treat the whole thing as a game, but it's an extremely potent force in life. The New Joy of Sex book, hopefully, makes that statement.

So...for the next few weeks, watch out for regular updates on this blog - of what's happening with Joy of Sex, the launch, and all the interesting work that seems to be coming in on the back of it.

Watch this space...

Shades of Salem?

I was surprised when I heard - via an American friend - that a rise in teen pregnancy rates in a small East coast US town had hit Time Magazine. Hardly the stuff that front page covers are made of, I would have thought. This story, however, hinged on the claim that there the girls had agreed to get pregnant en masse.

Now that was interesting. I was intrigued when I read the Time feature - and so, apparently, was every news desk in the world. Within hours, Google had several hundred thousand hits on the story and the reader postings on each of those individual stories were numbering in the millions.

The facts are these. Having had a pregnancy rate of about 4 per year up to 2007, over the past year 17 of the female students of Gloucester High fall pregnant. Then, when interviewed by Time magazine, the school principal reports that the girls have a 'pact' with each other to aim for motherhood, and that the repeated queuing for pregnancy tests - and the high-fives on getting positive results - are part of a planned project. All of a sudden it's mayhem. The school officials are unavailable for comment. The town officials call an emergency meeting excluding the Principal. Gloucester's mayor is quoted as denying a "blood-oath bond".

Excuse me? Blood oath bond? Secret pact? I'm not suggesting it's great that 17 girls are currently having to face the challenges of motherhood far too early in their young lives. I'm not claiming we should approve if they did all dare each other to get pregnant. And I'm not saying that we - and all countries with a high teenage pregnancy rate - shouldn't be doing our best to lower that rate (ironically, Gloucester officials recently opposed attempts by local sexual health projects to issue contraceptives to school students).

But it does seem to me - whether or not the story is true - to be a huge overreaction, an overreaction by a society that seems threatened by any hint that young girls might decide to take their lives into their own hands. The principal's original term 'pact', the mayor's term 'blood-oath bond' and more worryingly, the willingness of the press to pick up and run with those loaded terms seem to me to be out of all proportion to the original 17 pregnancies. Shades of Midwich Cuckoos, Villa of the Damned. and the Salem witch trials - which actually happened only 10 miles from Gloucester.

Let's not get threatened by this. Let's not turn natural disapproval into a witchhunt. Let's not see this as any more than it is - a troupe of insecure, immature teens who want to love and be loved and - instinctively knowing that motherhood is a wonderful thing - decide to go for it.

Lust to love - what next?

We like to think we live in an age where sex can be utterly casual, no strings, no commitment. But sex is a powerful bonding mechanism, and so very often - and this goes for the lads as well as for the girls - something that started as pure pleasure turns into something much more significant and much deeper. If you find yourself falling in love with someone with whom you've agreed to have a 'casual' relationship, what should you do?

• Be honest with yourself; don't keep on pretending you don't care when actually you do.
• Give it space. Take the time to think things over and find out what you really feel about your partner.
• Be honest. Tell your partner what you feel - it's only fair. If they back off, then they were a lost cause anyway.
• If your love isn't returned, don't wobble or pressure: there's no law to say that just because you have fallen in love, your partner should too.
• You can't make someone else love you - but you can save yourself from heartbreak. Set a time limit of - say - three months, then walk away.
• Don't rush into more casual sex - after rejection, you'll just be that much more vulnerable to falling in love again.
• If your love is returned, celebrate hugely. Lust that turns into love is a wonderful thing!