The Problematics: ‘The Joy Of Sex’ At 40, A Movie That Paradoxically Offers Little Sex And Even Less Joy

The foundational texts of the sexual revolution as it manifested itself in suburban America in the 1970s were Dr. David Reuben’s 1969 Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask and Alex Comfort’s 1972 The Joy Of Sex. I will not tell tales out of school concerning my own sainted parents, who are no longer with us, but instead will aver that if you were a school kid in this period you knew SOMEONE whose parents owned a copy of either or both books, and that finding them and sneaking peeks at them was a highbrow variation on trying to find where your dad  — that’s your dad, not mine — cached his back issues of Playboy. 

In Reuben’s book you could look up things like “Ejaculation” and “wet dreams.” And also check as to whether the good doctor confirmed that thing an upperclassman in my middle school declared to a group of wide-eyed youngsters, which is that you need to keep a lid on whatever masturbation habits you might be contemplated because, it turns out, a man is limited to only 10,000 ejaculations in his lifetime. (The book did not address that issue, as it happens, and so decades later we are still left to fend for ourselves.) The attraction of Comfort’s book was its attractive, detailed, but somehow not in the least bit titillating line drawing illustrating How To Do Sex In Different Positions.

These books were such sensations that Hollywood determined to make movies out of them. But how? As COMEDIES, of course. 

Reuben’s book was made into Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex, an anthology of sketches on several sexual topics by writer-director-performer Woody Allen in 1972. If you don’t care for the guy now, this isn’t the picture that’ll win you to his side. Comfort’s book took over a decade to get to the screen, which is one reason the now forty-year-old movie is the strange way that it is — the rights holders only got grinding on the project when they realized their deal on the property was going to run out in mere months. And so, another comedy, or ostensible comedy, 1984’s Joy Of Sex, was born.

The ingredients thrown together were of a certain quality. The director was Martha Coolidge, who had made, and would go on to make, some sensitive and fun pictures about young love and sexuality — including the 1983 comedy Valley Girl and the 1991 drama Rambling Rose. (Her debut feature, a documentary about her own sexual assault called Not A Pretty Picture, is very much worth your time.) For whatever reason, the scenarists — there had been a scheme to make this picture a National Lampoon-branded send up, with a script by John Hughes, but that promising idea never bore fruit — chose to concoct a tale of two high schoolers, male and female, desperate to divest themselves of virginity. The cis-het plot is, ultimately, the sole way the movie kept to the book, which acted like gay sex didn’t exist. (And indeed an answer book, not by Comfort called The Joy of Gay Sex followed some years later; none of my friend’s parents had that one.) This gave the picture the opportunity to introduce some appealing young actors, and the leads, Michelle Meyrink especially, fit that bill. Cameron Dye is fine as the guy, but I like the girl better because I’m just that way. 

The movie’s opening is super bouncy, with colorful credits and jaunty music letting us know that school is in. Dye’s Alan is seen tucking a copy of Comfort’s manual into his school folder, which tells us the name of the institution: Richard M. Nixon High School. If that gag strikes you as a knee-slapper, you’re in luck, because it represents the tenor of the ostensible humor here.  Then it’s off to boys and girls’ sit-down phys ed classes, where the Central-Casting-Stereotypical-Stocky-Probably-Lesbian teacher of the girl’s class point to a poster and announces, “This is the male sex organ, consider it the enemy.”

Strolling outside school, Alan moans to a classmate, “Everybody’s gettin’ it but me.” There’s an exchange student, Farouk, whose exotic ways are mocked by the largely white students, until it is discovered that this Abu Dhabi native is rich. Ernie Hudson plays the principal, and it’s nice to see a Black face, and it’s especially nice to see Ernie Hudson’s face, but he’s not given much to do. It’s weird to see Colleen Camp, just turned thirty at the time of the shoot, play a student, but there’s a reason for that, and since I’ve just told you there’s a reason for that, you’ll probably be able to figure it out. 

The proceedings contain not much sex and little joy. Not even Christopher Lloyd, as the gym coach who’s also the dad of Meyrink’s character, can uplift the proceedings.  (There’s a bit where a kid slices off the breast of a Venus De Milo replica outside the school. Ick.) It was apparently a miserable experience for Coolidge, who was asked by producers to shoot scenes of topless teens running through school hallways and then instructed to excise them. The only nudity in the movie comes via a stag film accidentally screened by student. 

So what’s the good in any of this? I’m glad you asked. As it happens, accidentally of course, The Joy of Sex was in some respects a test run for a subsequent Coolidge film that is rather good and a lot of fun indeed, 1985’s Real Genius. Sex features the inspired portrayer of comedic jerks Robert Prescott as an obnoxious high-schooler (he himself was approaching 27 when Joy was shot); he’d go on to play the incredibly irritating Kirk in Genius. The Valley Girl veteran Meyrink saddled herself with a very nerdy haircut for Genius, as the female consort of its male high-school prodigy. We shall not speak here of what she was subjected to in Revenge of the Nerds in 1984, but I am not sure that her late ‘80s retirement from the screen was entirely unmotivated. 

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface, published by Hanover Square Press, and now available for at a bookstore near you.