Love & Passion Quote by Alex Comfort

Comfort’s genius here is the deliberate downgrade of sex from mystical Event to solvable social problem. Two “guidelines,” not commandments, not cosmic truths: the tone is pragmatic, almost bureaucratically calm. Coming from the author of The Joy of Sex, that’s the point. He’s not selling transgression; he’s selling competence.

The first rule, “don’t do anything you don’t really enjoy,” smuggles consent into pleasure language. It doesn’t sermonize about duty or morality; it frames boundaries as erotically relevant, not externally imposed. That’s a quietly radical move for the late-20th-century self-help boom, which often treated “being good in bed” like a performance metric. Comfort flips it: if you’re overriding your own dislike, you’re already doing bad sex, whatever the technique looks like.

The second rule shifts the spotlight from self-expression to mutual literacy. “Find out what are your partner needs” treats desire as knowable information, not a mind-reading test. The slightly awkward phrasing even underscores the ethic: ask, listen, adjust. Then the kicker: “don’t balk them if you can help it.” The word “balk” is wonderfully unsexy, and that’s why it works. It frames refusal as an interpersonal roadblock you should examine, not a power move you should wield. Still, “if you can help it” leaves room for limits, mismatches, and reality.

Underneath the plain talk sits a 1970s cultural intervention: sex as negotiation, not conquest; intimacy as skill, not fate.