Joy of Sex: In Search of Comedy and Sexual Gratification By Marya E. Gates (Joy of Sex, 1984, Cinématographe)

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Released in 1972, The Joy of Sex was a sex manual aimed at helping the general public embrace the sexual revolution and find more satisfaction in their sex lives. Modeled off of the popular cookbook, The Joy of Cooking, the cheeky manual borrowed the red font and elegant look of the culinary classic's cover, as well as its organizational style. Chapters on foreplay, oral sex and sexual positions were found in sections titled Starters and Main courses.

Written by British physician and scientist Alex Comfort, the book guided readers through various appetizing positions and ideas for sexual activity, shattering taboos and introducing average households to the basics of topics like swinging and S&M (although the first edition did not acknowledge gay sex). Illustrated by artists Chris Foss and Charles Raymond, the graphic sex acts in the manual were based on photographs taken by Foss of Raymond and his wife. The aim was to show the positions in more enticing—and often titillating—ways than the clinical style of scientific books on copulation. In order to work around obscenity laws, the book also included classic illustrations from Indian and Japanese erotica, showcasing the literary history of erotic illustration. In short, a lot of thought and care was put into the creation of the book, with the hope that it would help the world have better sex.

The impetus for the 1984 teen sex romp Joy of Sex, however, did not come with such care or lofty aspirations. After the book's popularity—it spent a whopping 11 weeks on the New York Times Best Sellers list, and a further 70 weeks in the publication's top five between 1972 and 1974—Paramount Pictures optioned the film rights solely so they could use the title. Despite the newfound freedoms of New Hollywood, there was no aim to adapt the text into a cinematic guide for the sexual fulfillment of its audiences. The goal was a quick and dirty cash grab. Unfortunately, there was nothing quick about the film's long journey towards the big screen.

First came a decade of false starts and rejected pitches. Charles Grodin wrote a meta adaptation, in which a screenwriter flails while trying to adapt a sex manual for a big Hollywood studio. Although this script was rejected by Paramount, it eventually made its way to MGM, where it became 1985's Movers & Shakers. A version starring John Belushi, penned by John Hughes, and slated to be Penny Marshall's directorial debut, fell through when the comic actor died before it could go into production.

With four months left on their option, Paramount reached out to producer Frank Konigsberg, who had made a name for himself producing television films as diverse as Bing Crosby's White Christmas and Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones. Writer Kathleen Rowell, hot off of her adaptation of S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders, was hired to throw a script together, along with co-writer J.J. Salter, in their only credited film work.

Martha Coolidge was the final piece of the puzzle to come into place. Her previous film Valley Girl was an unexpected commercial and critical hit and made a star out of its lead actor Nicolas Cage. Although Valley Girl had its roots in the teen sex genre, Coolidge found more organic ways to integrate the requisite bare breasts, and ultimately crafted a sweet romantic comedy twist on Romeo and Juliet.

Like Atlantic Releasing's initial plans for Valley Girl, the goal was for Joy of Sex to be in the vein of Animal House or Porky's, but what Coolidge did instead was rekindle a bit of the magic she brought to her earlier hit. Pulling from the Valley Girl cast, supporting players Cameron Dye and Michelle Meyrink moved up to the lead roles as Alan and Leslie, two horny high school seniors looking to lose their virginity before the school year is over. Character actor Colleen Camp brings her singular off-kilter energy as a sexed-up undercover narc, while Joanne Baron once again plays a high-strung, deeply fragile teacher in over her head.

Lightning may not have struck twice, but what Coolidge and her screenwriters managed to craft, despite a much lower budget, a truncated filming schedule, and lots of studio interference, is no also-ran, nor is it the unmitigated disaster its reputation would have you believe. Like both her previous film and Amy Heckerling's sex comedy Fast Times At Ridgemont High, Joy of Sex aims to balance its screen time between the sex lives of the boys and the girls who make up the world of the hilariously named Richard M. Nixon High School. However, its heart is really found in the experiences of Leslie and her friends.

Before cutting to a title sequence montage split between both Alan and Leslie getting ready for school, the film begins with Leslie reading from her diary. She recalls how her parents met on the first day of senior year, and although she isn't in a rush to meet her life partner, she does wonder aloud, "Wouldn't it be nice to get swept off my feet and consumed by passion?" Coolidge's camera holds on Meyrink's face as it fills with the wonder of youthful anticipation. Leslie is a girl with her whole life ahead of her and Coolidge crafts a film that understands and respects her generation's newfound sexual freedom.

Leslie and her friends are coming of age in the generation after the sexual revolution. Contraceptives like the pill are available and everyone seems to have a vibrator in their side table. These girls want to get laid, just like the boys. They just don't know quite how to go about it. While both Alan and Leslie have big plans to lose their virginity, Alan has his own copy of The Joy of Sex, which, in a cheesy bit of product placement early in the film, he brings to school wrapped up like a textbook; Leslie, on the other hand, has to achieve her goal by following her own instincts, which mostly means talking through her plans with her best friend Melanie (Lisa Langlois).

While Melanie has a major crush on the local news anchor, Ted Vincent (Paul Tulley), Leslie sets her sights on various boys in her class. After getting a mole checked out by her pediatrician (a leering Eugene Robert Glazer), she overhears what she thinks is a terminal diagnosis. This puts her mission to lose her virginity into overdrive. "I have to know if it's worth all this time we spend thinking about it," she tells Melanie. The rest of the film follows her failed sexual exploits without any sense of judgment, even when each attempted conquest ends in either a slapstick sight gag or some other overly contrived personal disaster.

What remains revelatory about Leslie's mission to find a sex partner is simply that she has the agency to act on her desires – and does!

In contrast, aside from one mishap with a sex worker, Alan spends most of the film just talking about how horny he is and complaining because he wishes he could find an equally horny girl. "Sex is a stacked deck, and women hold all the cards," Alan's older brother Dinko (D.W. Brown) tells him. Yet, while it's clear that girls like Leslie actually are as horny as the boys, she actually puts her plans into action, while Alan remains largely passive, as if sex should just come to him solely because he is a horny male. Although this critique of male sexual entitlement is slight, it still feels subversive today.

About halfway through the film a character named Sharon (Cristen Kauffman) is introduced during a swim class in which the boys catcall the girls in their swimsuits. It's clear she's pregnant, and the girls at first whisper behind her back until Leslie tells them it's not funny. After the class, Leslie finds Sharon cleaning out her locker. "They're acting like I'm contagious." Sharon says as she prepares to leave school – and essentially her whole future – behind. She will finish her education at night school, but that means quitting her after school job at the medical center. Leslie also uses this conversation to discuss what it's like to have sex for the first time. Sharon shares that it's not great the first time, but gets better the more you do it. This echoes advice Michelle had heard and related to Leslie earlier in the film.

Again, while the boys are just looking for a place to stick it, the girls are thinking more holistically: Will the experience be good for them? Is it worth potentially derailing their whole life if it results in pregnancy? That such a profound scene is played out while a slapstick drug bust takes place in the background is one of the many ways in which the film serves as a showcase for Coolidge's adept skill at balancing studio demands – the cartoon-esque comedy that National Lampoon films were known for – with something authentic and real about the teenage experience, and in this case specifically the female teenage experience.

In fact, Coolidge continually contrasts these thought-provoking and heartfelt conversations between the girls in the foreground with outlandishly humorous and/or sexual situations in the background. Everywhere you look at Richard M. Nixon High School and beyond, there are teenagers making out. They're stretched out on the school's lawn. Hot and heavy up against the lockers. Snogging in red leather booths at the local greasy spoon. When Alan exclaims, "Everyone is getting some but me," it truly seems like he's not wrong.

Many of the adults in the film are just as horny as the teenagers. In one startling pair of contrasted scenes that take place in the Hotel Lorelei, where Alan's older brother tends bar, two adults attempt to seduce our young leads. Earthy maintenance worker Roberta (Carole White), tired of hearing Alan complain about the lack of horny girls, takes him to a storage room where she tries to corrupt him. At the same time, Leslie meets up with news anchor Ted in one of the hotel's rooms, hoping that he will run a story on Sharon. Once Leslie realizes he's interested in more than just the story, she at first decides to go with the flow, retreating to the bathroom to get ready for this next big step in her sexual life. After a slapstick mishap leaves her diaphragm on the ceiling, she comes to her senses and calls the whole thing off.

Once again Leslie takes a more active role in her sexual situation, choosing at first to sleep with the older man, then calling it off, whereas Alan is dragged into the encounter without much agency at all. Thankfully, the film never crosses the line in terms of either adult character actually committing statutory rape, although it is fascinating that Roberta's aims are framed mostly as trying to help Alan with his sexual frustrations, whereas Ted is played as strictly a predator. Like several of the weighty themes in the film, this thread is left dangling, though it poses many questions for the viewer to contemplate.

Leslie also wins the battle to get Sharon re-enrolled in school, ensuring that her pregnancy does not come with a future-altering punishment. We never do find out who the father is, and frankly it doesn't matter. Although abortion is never mentioned, the way the situation is presented plays as staunchly pro-choice. Sharon should have the right to choose to be a mother and pursue her education. In an era where so many rights regarding women's bodily autonomy are under attack, the frank way her pregnancy is treated with respect and empathy, unfortunately, still feels radical today.

After the film was finished, National Lampoon paid to have their name taken off the project. Coolidge was fired after she removed gratuitous scenes of female nudity, although she declined to have her name replaced by Alan Smithee. Later she told the L.A. Times she left her name on the film because the "Smithee" alias is only for "when the director finds himself"—when the director finds himself or herself answering yes to these questions: Will the film 'embarrass me, humiliate me, disgust me for the rest of my life?'"

Despite the studio's interference, it's undeniable that Coolidge made a film that respected the experience of the girls at its center, one filled with a strong sense of heart and subtly radical politics. She was also proud of the cast she assembled for the film, and would work with Michelle Meyrink and Joanne Baron again in her next film, the critically acclaimed Val Kilmer vehicle Real Genius.

Coolidge may not have been the right director for what the studio had envisioned for their would-be teen sex comedy, but the tender—and nudity-free—ending of Joy of Sex, in which Leslie and Alan finally realize they are right for each other, reveal secrets about themselves solely to each other, and, it's implied, will spend quality time exploring their sexuality together, in search of real intimacy and sexual gratification as a couple, ultimately achieves the goal set out by Comfort's book in the first place.

Marya E. Gates is a freelance film and culture writer based in Chicago. She studied Comparative Literature at U.C. Berkeley and also has an overpriced and underutilized MFA in Film Production. Her credits include RogerEbert.com, IndieWire, Emmy Mag, The Playlist, Nerdist, and more.