Book REVIEW: Sexuality A Graphic guide Meg Barker & Jules Scheele
Eric Page
Sexuality A Graphic guide
Meg-John Barker & Jules Scheele
This creative and engaging book impresses on every level, historically it gives a pretty good introduction from earliest societies attitudes and practices then sweeps across various global societies giving insight and learning from different epochs, cultures and highlighting social changes and who and what made them happen. The fun and informative monochrome illustrations that are on every page of this book bring a light-hearted insight into the topics being discussed.
The illustrations immediately let you know what’s being debated here and help to highlight intersectional aspects for contemplation. Scheele’s deft comic touch shines a light into the darkness of shame, fear and frustrations. Their work has a brilliant Queerness that shimmers on the page and sometimes difficult subjects given a gratis without loosing a sense of fun. The book looks at lots of up to date concerns, examining their roots in prejudice, bigotry or intolerance and looks at ways of integrating previous taboo subjects into everyday healthy practice. This guide is fun, educational and makes you think, it presents as an easy to understand graphic guide to sexuality, which it certainly is, but it’s also rather more reflective than that.
As the book gathers pace, and leads on from previous chapters Barkers’ solid historical understanding gives us insight into the monsters and pitfalls that hang in the glooms of sexuality but there is a solid narrative drive about acceptance of the infinite diversity of human sexualities and sex and how embracing, understanding and enjoying them is the healthiest approach for a culture or society to take. Barker has a non nonsense take on the vast stores of human experience and learning, parsing out the crap, pausing to point out why it’s crap, and contextualise the crap, but then moving on with the nuggets and crystals of wisdom they have distilled in their mind to share with us. The useful bits.
Barker and Scheele have combined their talents again (check out the other books in this series) to serve this entertaining book about sexuality which manages to tease gently along the balance between being erotic and historically informative. I learned as i read, things i already know were gently nudged into a deeper understanding and that’s the very best way to teach, through interest, fun and fun virtual stimulus. Why ain’t they been given a TV series yet?
