The Story of Sex aims to cover, well, the history of sexuality of the human race, starting about two million years ago with Homo habilis, then running through all of human history to conclude with a four-page look at a possible sexual future for the rest of the 21st century. All that fits into a hundred and eighty-three pages of comics - including full-page title cards for the dozen chapters - though there is a text foreword and several pieces of textual backmatter on specific topics as well.
Now, those pages have long captions in the panels, and generally seven or eight panels to a page, so if we apply the usual "picture = 1k words" rubric generously - and it does us no harm to be generous - we end up with the equivalent of a fairly hefty book. But, I have to admit, it does seem to be a semi-random walk through various topics related to sexuality than a single integrated story.
Philippe Brenot has the credentials to write this book: he's an anthropologist, director of the Sexology Department of Paris Descartes University, and author of a number of other books on sex and sex history, which seem (before this one) to have mostly stayed in French and not been translated over to my side of the Atlantic. He's also a psychiatrist, and there is a define strain of psychiatric thinking in Story of Sex - not overly Freudian; he's more modern than that - which the discerning reader will notice and take into account.
It opens well, though the section on Homo habilis and other early hominids is the place I most felt the lack of a list of references. I probably would never seriously check them out, but I like having them there to skim, and the lack makes me wonder if it's due to assumptions about the audience or if the book were drafted without references to begin with.
The following chapters are fun but scattershot: I expect that we have little or no documentary evidence about the everyday sex lives of regular people in antiquity, so instead we get a series of mythology and some gossip about Babylon, Egypt, Greece, and Rome, including an extensive bit on Cleopatra.
Next comes a Middle Ages chapter that covers a thousand years in less than twenty pages. And I suppose I should be clear about the cultural focus on Story of Sex: this is a European book, about European civilization. The ancients are included the same way they were for 19th century schoolboys: they obviously led to our civilization, the best and most special and most important one ever. Brenot gives examples from various parts of Europe once we hit the Middle Ages, but it's clear this is a France-centric narrative. On the other hand, if you were going to pick one European country to be the exemplar for sex, it would have to be France, wouldn't it?
To be blunter, the sex lives of people in Japan and China and Kenya and Uruguay and Easter Island and India are quietly left out, to focus on the origins of the Christian world of mostly Northern Europe. Italy doesn't get much mention after the Romans depart, except for some moments in Casanova's story and various Popes denouncing things, and Spain is entirely absent. There's a secondary focus on England and the broader English-speaking world, so it won't feel foreign to US or British readers, but it's very much organized around the specific bits of the history of sex that led to modern French people.
The last few chapters are based on, as far as I can tell, more solid, knowable research, and are consequently full of facts and details. Brenot, since he's writing about sex and is actually in favor of it, uses a framework of talking about individual rights and expression versus societal repression, and obviously comes down on the side of the individual. It's a reasonable story, given the whole sweep of history, though he may make it more central than some readers are willing to credit.
There are also a few points in Story of Sex when I wished for more social history - Brenot is good at what the kings and nobles were doing (or who they were doing), since those things were recorded at the time. There's less about what the everyday sex life and rhythms of marriage and child-bearing were for middle or working-class people once we hit the medieval world - he doesn't even mention the two-sleep system of medieval times, which was clearly really important to a lot of people's sex-lives for hundreds of years.
Still, this is a two-hundred page book for a mass audience in comics form. I might quibble, but Brenot got quite a lot into this package, and in the main I think he chose the right material.
The art is fun and energetic, from Laetitia Coryn, whose work I haven't seen before - and a quick Google didn't show anything else of hers that has been translated. (Though she does seem to script her own books most of the time, in the French manner - I wonder what she writes about, when she writes her own material?) Coryn has to draw a lot of people nude or semi-nude or physically engaged, and she does it well - she has great body language and her people are engagingly emotional and open.
Really, you're not going to find any other comics history of sex out there, are you? Good thing this one is pretty definitive and a fun read, too.
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