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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Serie: Graphic Guides
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
'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
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CONTENTS
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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 withFears around educating kids about sexualityThe 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.5
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 haveBeing sexually attractive and desirable to others often brings power and successSex provides the possibility of deep, intimate connection with another human being: of being utterly seen and wanted for who we areSexual attraction can be a key component in the excitement of “falling in love” and bonding with partnersOur sexual desires may reveal much about our inner livesSexual freedom can be linked to personal and political liberationThrough our sexual – or asexual – identities and shared experiences we may find community and belonging with likeminded peopleClaiming 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.*
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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 social shifts, as well as acknowledging the serious damage that we have caused by reproducing them and passing them on.
BEFORE SEXUALITY: THE CLASSICAL WORLD
Historians have called Ancient Greece and Rome a period “before sexuality” because sex had such radically different meanings then. The erotic was part of public life, intrinsically linked with social and political order.
Men in Ancient Greece demonstrated their dominance over others by penetrating them, including all women, male slaves, foreigners, or younger aristocratic boys. Enjoyment of the “passive” role of being penetrated was culturally stigmatized, associated with femininity and submission.
Male desire for both men and women was so taken for granted that there were debates over which was the superior form. It was suggested that armies should be composed of male lovers since warriors would be brave to impress each other.
Due to the everyday struggle for survival, there was more cultural anxiety around food than sex, although over-indulging in either was seen as a problem, and self-control was highly valued. Women were viewed as lacking such self-control and had the status of minors, although there were some examples of recognition of women’s desire for each other. Such women were regarded as inappropriately masculine.14
CHRISTIANITY
Early Christianity shifted away from the Greco-Roman ideal of having self-control, and away from the Jewish celebration of fertility, which included desire within marriage.
The Christian ideal was to have no desire and to avoid all sex unless for procreation. Lust was linked to humanity’s expulsion from Eden. Jesus asked that his disciples be unmarried. Celibacy and purity were revered. Gradually these ideas filtered into popular consciousness and began to be supported by laws forbidding adultery, divorce, and “sodomy”.
However, early Christianity did open up possibilities for non-sexual erotic/ecstatic experiences and for close same-gender relationship bonds.
MEDIEVAL PERIOD
Historian Eleanor Janega points out that in the Middle Ages, “sodomy” referred to any kind of sex that couldn’t result in procreation.
All extramarital sex was regarded as sinful, and marital sex should be untainted by desire given that desire endangers the soul. Married couples were encouraged to have penis-in-vagina (PIV) sex quickly.
There were rules restricting sex to certain days of the year, times of day, and to clothed missionary position sex – only when the woman wasn’t menstruating or nursing. Women were viewed as more sexual – and more able to enjoy sex – than men in medieval Europe. This distinguished them from men, as closer to animals.16
THE ENLIGHTENMENT
During the Reformation of 16th and 17th-century Europe, the Protestantism of Luther and others – alongside the scientific revolution – disrupted the hold of Catholicism. Secular rulers became more powerful, and concern shifted from policing inner sin to outer crime, distinguishing private and public life.
Many intellectuals proposed the pursuit of happiness as the most important goal in life, which eventually became enshrined in the United States Declaration of Independence. Many linked the pursuit of happiness explicitly to sexual pleasure, writing erotica as well as philosophy, and using pornographic works to criticize religious and political authorities. So sex became linked to freedom and liberty, and viewed as a private matter.
However, it took until the industrialization of the 18th century for this freer approach to sex to filter down from the elite classes to everyone.17
SEX HIERARCHIES OVER TIME
So, across time and place good, acceptable sexuality has generally been differentiated from bad, unacceptable sexuality, but how they are differentiated has differed a lot: penetrator vs penetrated; honourable vs shameful; controlled vs excessive; chaste vs desiring; for procreation vs for pleasure; natural vs unnatural; harmful vs beneficial.
Sometimes women have been seen as less sexual than men, sometimes more so. Whichever way around, in these patriarchal societies, this has always involved women being seen as inferior and sexually questionable.
By the 18th century, the understanding of women as lecherous and seductive had been reversed and they were seen as sexually passive and at risk of seduction by men. This was probably because men’s sexual behaviour was no longer so curbed by religious rules– enshrined in law – except in relation to sex with other men, which was regarded as unnatural.
THE INVENTION OF SEXUALITY: VICTORIAN PERIOD
During the 19th century there was a backlash against the perceived dangers of libertine approaches to sex, following the horrors of the French Revolution. Concerns about crime rates and the impact of population growth on food supply led to churches and governments attempting to manage desire again.
As more and more people worked outside the home, the private sphere became idealized, as did love between husbands and wives. Marriage was deemed the appropriate place for sex to happen. Romantic love, sex, and happiness became intertwined in ways that continue to this day.
The emerging capitalist model was of men going out to make money, and women working unpaid in the home, caring for and reproducing the workforce. For this reason men and women became seen as increasingly opposite: men as strong, ambitious, and not showing emotion or vulnerability; women as passive, delicate, nurturing, and dependent. This combination was romanticized, and also regarded by scientists and medics as natural sexual expression. In this way gender, sexual, and relationship normativity became linked together, enshrined in the ideal of the married, romantic male/female couple who had PIV sex with each other.19
SEXOLOGY
At the turn of the 20th century sex became an object of scientific study. Influenced by Darwinian theories of sexual selection, sexologists deemed reproductive instincts natural and normal, and everything else as a form of deviance to be categorized and explained.
Sexologists classified these so-called “perversions” in weighty tomes, often only published in Latin in an attempt to keep them from the masses.
