Sexuality: A Graphic Guide

By Meg-John Barker and Jules Scheele

'Sexuality delivers the goods, making the history and theory of sexuality downright sexy ... I learned more in one session with this book than I've figured out in a lifetime.' Christine Burns MBE, author of Trans Britain


They're back! Writer Meg-John Barker and artist Jules Scheele once again team up in this cheeky and informative comic-book follow-up to Queer and Gender.


Sex is everywhere. It's in the stories we love - and the stories we fear. It defines who we are and our place in society ... at least we're told it ought to.


Sex and sexuality can seem like a house of horrors, full of monsters and potential pitfalls. We often live with fear, shame and frustration when it comes to our own sexuality, and with judgement when it comes to others'. Sex advice manuals, debates over sex work and stories of sexual "dysfunction" only add to our anxiety.


With compassion, humour, erudition and a touch of the erotic, Meg-John Barker and Jules Scheele shine a light through the darkness and unmask the monsters.


'The art introduces a set of reoccurring characters, tongue-in-cheek references to the Scooby-Doo gang, who journey through a haunted house confronting and unmasking the villains: patriarchy, white supremacy, ableism, and capitalism personified ... The sum: accessible, compassionate reading for readers wanting to think more deeply about sex, society, and how they intersect.' Publishers Weekly

• Language: English
• Publisher: Icon Books
• Release date: Feb 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781785786549

Meg-John Barker

Meg-John Barker is a writer, therapist, and activist-academic specialising in sex, gender and relationships. They are a senior lecturer in psychology at the Open University. @megjohnbarker on Twitter.

Book preview

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGE

CHAPTER 1: THE INVENTION OF SEX

CHAPTER 2: SEXUAL IDENTITY

CHAPTER 3: THE SEX ACT

CHAPTER 4: SEXUAL DESIRES AND BEING NORMAL

CHAPTER 5: EROTIC RELATIONSHIPS AND EXPRESSING SEXUALITY

CHAPTER 6: HOW SEX WORKS

CHAPTER 7: CONSENT

CHAPTER 8: FUTURE SEX

CHAPTER 9: RETHINKING SEX

FURTHER RESOURCES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

BIOGRAPHIES

COPYRIGHT

SEXUALITY: GOING TO THE PLACES THAT SCARE US

Sex is sold to us – and used to sell all kinds of things – with the promise of great pleasure, liberation, and self-understanding. It’s also a topic fraught with confusion, contradiction, and danger. Although sex is everywhere around us in wider culture, it’s something that most of us actually know very little about because of:

Stigma around talking openly about sex – even with people we have sex with

Fears around educating kids about sexuality

The very limited understandings of sex and sexuality that make it into mainstream media, therapy, or sex advice.

SEXUAL FEAR AND SHAME

Despite sex being everywhere, it remains taboo. Most of us hold a great deal of anxiety, embarrassment, and shame about our erotic desires and attractions, our bodies and our desirability, and the ways we do – or don’t – engage in sex.

Our sexuality is often seen as an essential aspect of our identity – revealing truths about us that have implications far beyond what we do sexually. We fear discovering that we’re sexually abnormal or dysfunctional and that this might mean there is something more fundamentally wrong or bad about us.

Fear, shame, and confusion around sexuality are understandable. People are still killed, imprisoned, cast out of their families and communities, medically or psychologically treated, and stigmatized, bullied and discriminated against for having the wrong kind of sexual desires, having sex with the wrong types of people, or at the wrong times. There are huge potential costs to acting on our desires, and to not acting on them. And sex is often bound up with our yearnings for love and belonging, and fears of pain and rejection.

PLEASURES AND POTENTIALS

Our sexuality may also be our passport to pleasure, joy, success, and/or liberation.

Sex can be one of the most exciting, pleasurable, even transcendent, experiences that many people have

Being sexually attractive and desirable to others often brings power and success

Sex provides the possibility of deep, intimate connection with another human being: of being utterly seen and wanted for who we are

Sexual attraction can be a key component in the excitement of falling in love and bonding with partners

Our sexual desires may reveal much about our inner lives

Sexual freedom can be linked to personal and political liberation

Through our sexual – or asexual – identities and shared experiences we may find community and belonging with likeminded people

Claiming our sexualities – or asexualities – and being open about them can feel a vital way of being authentic, real, and proud.

MULTIPLE MEANINGS OF SEXUALITY

Sexuality refers to both: the constellation of social meanings that our wider culture attaches to sex and our deeply personal individual experience of the erotic.

Sexuality is socially constructed: our society develops and passes on strong messages about what is sexual, which sexual behaviours are acceptable or not, and what it means to have a certain sexuality, through media, laws, education, medicine, and science. At the same time, we all have a lived experience of sexuality which involves our bodies, feelings, and desires, and which shapes our relationships and wider lives. Sexuality is both within us and in the world. How we see our and others’ sexuality informs which erotic experiences are available to us. People have different experiences and can resist dominant messages about sexuality, and this is part of how cultural understandings shift over time.

Sexuality includes, but is about more than, just having sex. It also includes: our capacity for sexual feelings; the kinds of people we’re attracted to and how; and how we identify ourselves and how others categorize us.

INTERSECTING SEXUALITY

Sexuality can’t be separated from other social structures and our position within them. The way sexuality operates – and how we experience it – is intrinsically bound up with: gender, race, class, disability, nationality, ethnicity, age, generation, geographical location, faith, and more.*

OUR SEXUALITY JOURNEY

If we’re going to fully understand sexuality, we’re going to need to confront our social and individual ghosts, monsters, and demons. This book aims to be a friendly guide through this potentially scary, uncertain territory.

* Much gratitude to Kimberlé Crenshaw and all the other intersectional feminists and critical race theorists who have pointed this out over the years.

CHAPTER 1: THE INVENTION OF SEX

It may sound strange, but the ways we currently identify our sexualities, understand our desires, and have sexual relationships all came into being pretty recently. We also remain haunted by the ways of understanding sex that have emerged over the centuries.

HISTORICAL HAUNTINGS

Sexuality is also haunted by the ghosts of all those who have been hurt or lost their lives because of the ways sex has been understood, and policed, over time:

Women who died in childbirth, who had no reproductive rights or access to birth control; people sterilized, killed, and denied relationship rights during eugenic attempts to keep nations pure; black slaves who were repeatedly raped by their owners because they were regarded as property; sexually diverse people – and understandings – wiped out during colonization; and those who died from HIV/AIDS and other STIs due to lack of available contraception and prevailing attitudes towards sex.

We see the legacy of these historical traumas in the stereotypes – and treatment – of disabled people, people of colour, working-class people, sex workers, women and queers, in relation to sex.

A POTTED HISTORY OF SEX

In this chapter, we’ll explore how we’ve arrived at our view of sexuality in the West – and how that view has been imposed on others around the world. We’ll visit ghosts who draw our attention to the dangers of limited understandings of sex, and we’ll explore the social structures and forces that informed – and enforced – these views.

We often assume that the way sexuality is understood and expressed in the time and place we currently occupy is right, normal, and natural. Looking across time – and around the world – helps us to see that things have been different, and could be different again.

Looking back helps us to understand why our current understandings of sexuality feel so entrenched. They carry the heavy weight of history. Changing them would require huge individual and