Not My Shame
By T.O. Walker
Review by Christian Perring on Tue, Mar 27th 2018. |  | This short monochrome graphic novel doesn't so much tell a story as explore themes about the effects of sexual abuse of young people. Most pages are split into 4 panels, and have rather crudely drawn pictures showing a haunted child and abusive or passive adults. There is writing too, expressing anger at parents and authorities who just allow abusers to do what they want. There are also images of self-harm and bottles of alcohol, with some words about the need to escape. Nearer the end of the book there are some statistics about the prevalence of sexual abuse and the low rates of r
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What Does Consent Really Mean?
By Pete Wallis and Thalia Walllis
Review by Christian Perring on Tue, Mar 20th 2018. | This short graphic novel has teens talking with each other about consent to sex. They voice a number of different views but soon come to the idea that consent should be clear and enthusiastic. They acknowledge that talking about sex can be awkward and difficult, but they come to the conclusion that if the consent isn't clearly voiced, then it isn't really consent. The characters are diverse, including boys and girls, black, white Muslim, and different levels of sexual experience. They talk about the pressures on girls to go along with what their boyfriends want, but they also talk about the pr
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Relax, It's Just Sex
Understanding Non-Possessive Intimate Relationships
By Leslie Spurr
Review by Hennie Weiss on Tue, Mar 13th 2018. |  | In Relax, It's Just Sex: Understanding Non-Possessive Intimate Relationships, Leslie Spurr, relationship therapist, introduces the reader to so called non-possessive relationships, in which mostly married couples decide to have sexual relations with other people while maintaining their own relationship. As such these couples are non sexually exclusive, but maintain most other features of "traditional" relationships or marriages.
Spurr first discusses the differences between exclusive sexual relationships between two people and the non-possessive relationships. Even though both types of relati
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You Know Me Well
By David Levithan and Nina LaCour
Review by Christian Perring on Tue, Feb 13th 2018. | San Francisco. Mark and Kate are high school seniors set to graduate. There is just a week to go. While they are in the same class, they didn't know each other. But they are thrown together during a night of partying in the city. But their romances are with others: Mark has been in love with his best friend Ryan for years, while Kate has been set up with Violet but is nervous about following through. Neither romance is going smoothly, and Mark and Kate help each other out, suddenly becoming close friends, while becoming more distant from their long-term friends. There's lots of emotional drama
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Beyond Speech
Pornography and Analytic Feminist Philosophy
By Mari Mikkola (Editor)
Review by Robert Scott Stewart, Ph.D. on Tue, Dec 19th 2017. |  | The feminist anti-pornography movement perhaps reached its peak in the 1980s when an anti-pornography civil rights ordinance, written by Andrea Dworkin and Catherine Mackinnon, became law in a few cities across the United States. This anti pornography approach differed from previous lines of attack, and particularly those made by conservatives and the religious right, by focusing on civil rights and not on obscenity and the criminal law. This new approach would allow women harmed by pornography to sue pornographers through civil courts. Although the ordinances were eventually struck down by th
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The State of Affairs
Rethinking Infidelity
By Esther Perel
Review by Christian Perring on Tue, Nov 28th 2017. | Esther Perel takes an inquisitive and thoughtful approach to infidelity. She has a recent TED talk that summarizes many of her main themes. As a therapist, she has specialized in couples and individuals who are struggling with problems arising from infidelity. She takes a subtle approach aiming to understand why people have affairs even when they are in love with their partners or when they are taking huge risks by doing so. People even lie about affairs when they have open relationships. Her book explores many aspects of infidelity in a non-judgmental way, and although the chapters have
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Testosterone Rex
Myths of Sex, Science, and Society
By Cordelia Fine
Review by Hennie Weiss on Tue, Nov 14th 2017. |  |
In Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science and Society, Cordelia Fine looks into the past, present and future research regarding sex differences and testosterone. Fine does not state that there are no sex differences among women and men, and does not state that testosterone does not play a role when looking at biological differences, but the overall message based on research is that these differences are often minute and in many ways do not display the stark differences that are culturally entrenched and part of popular belief.
Fine therefore starts with past research. Studies of the past h
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The Story of Sex
A Graphic History Through the Ages
By Philippe Brenot and Laetitia Coryn
Review by Christian Perring on Tue, Sep 19th 2017. | Originally published in French in 2016, The Story of Sex: A Graphic History Through the Ages has now been published in translation in the USA. It starts back in prehistoric times and gives an overview of the sex lives of famous rulers and ordinary people. Later on it addresses various issues in a more didactic way, reflecting the experience of Bernot as a psychiatrist and couple's therapist. The graphics are fun and cheerful, full of nudity and sex, but nothing very explicit or detailed. The basic theme of most stories is that people want to have lots of sex and do as many different
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