Sexuality, Self, and Society
Susan Rahman, Nathan Bowman, Damitra Jackson, 2022
Why is it so hard to talk about sex, even with the person closest to you? Professor of sociology Susan Rahman and her co-authors show that much of what we call “normal” was written for us by culture, and often with mistakes. This is a book about myths, the body, fantasies, consent and desire that changes over the years, and about two skills that help with all of it: honest conversation and self-love.
Who it is for
For adults who want to feel less ashamed of their body and their desires, talk more freely about sex with a close person, and tell myths apart from what is actually known.
Asking for what you want is radical self-love, and it also makes you far more attractive.
A small mirror before the first lesson
Susan Rahman starts her course on human sexuality not with a lecture but with a small assignment. Take a small mirror and find a quiet place where no one will disturb you. After that, the choice is yours. You can calmly look at your genitals and check whether you know what each part is called. You can look in the mirror and tell yourself what you love about yourself. Or you can do both. Nothing has to be handed in: two or three lines about how it felt stay with you alone.
This assignment, strange at first glance, explains the whole book. Rahman has taught this course since 2011, and she is a professor of sociology in Northern California. In 2022 she and her co-authors published a textbook that is open to everyone. Her starting idea is simple: there is too much shame around the body and sex, and it rests mainly on myths and wrong information. We, the authors say, spend too much time criticising ourselves when we could be enjoying ourselves.
The book rests on two themes. The first is honest conversation, both with yourself and with a close person. The only sure way to know whether another person wants closeness, the authors think, is to talk and make sure the desire is mutual. The second is accepting your own body, which Rahman calls radical self-love. And the overall conclusion: there is no single right way to be a sexual person.
You will see who writes the script of your sexuality long before the first date, which myths get in the way of pleasure and what research says about them. You will learn how to tell a close person about your desires and fantasies, what consent really is, and why desire changes over the years but does not go away. Let’s start with where our ideas of the “normal” come from.
The script someone wrote before you
In 1995 Susan Rahman was writing her master’s thesis and asked 1,200 students at a university in Northern California what they had been told about sex at home. Her hunch was this: boys and girls hear very different things from their parents. The survey confirmed it. On the whole, parents said little about sex, and when they did, it depended on the child’s sex. Sons were given to understand that they should go out and gain experience. One student’s father gave him a brief account of intercourse, and two months later took him to a sex worker. Daughters were taught to protect their bodies and not to have casual relationships. One female student wrote that she would like to ask her mother about sex but did not dare: if her parents found out she was no longer a virgin, she would be thrown out of the family.
This is how the double standard works, as the authors call it: the same behaviour is allowed and even praised in one sex and forbidden in the other. But something else matters more. Each of these students left home with a ready-made script. A sexual script, in the book’s sense, is a set of unwritten rules: who makes the first move, what may be wanted, how everything should look. It is learned the way a part in a play is learned. The lines are suggested by family, school, friends, religion and the media, and the script is learned, not received at birth.
How differently it is written is clear from two islands that anthropologists described more than half a century ago. On the Irish island of Inis Beag, even married couples did not take off their underwear during intercourse, and men believed that sex harmed their health and avoided it before heavy work. On the Pacific island of Mangaia, sex was seen as both a pleasure and a means of continuing the family line, and adolescents received detailed lessons in sex from adults. The authors note that life there today probably looks different. But the people are the same, and the rules are opposite.
What follows for a couple? When two people with different scripts meet, as Rahman writes, they will have to relearn a great deal. The typical mistake is to take your own script for nature and your partner’s script for a quirk. The first step the authors suggest is simple: remember what you were told about sex as a child, including through silence, and ask yourself whether those messages help you now or get in the way.
About the author
Susan Rahman has taught a course on human sexuality since 2011 and works as a professor of sociology and behavioural sciences in Northern California. She wrote the book together with Nathan Bowman, Damitra Jackson, Anna Lushtak, Remi Newman and Pratik Sander. The original was published as open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
All books by this author: Susan Rahman, Nathan Bowman, Damitra Jackson
Terms from the book
- Johnson
- O’Connell
- clitoris
- menopause
- Gottman
- double standard: A rule under which the same sexual behaviour is forgiven or even praised in one sex and forbidden in the other. The American researcher Ira Reiss defined it in 1960.
- sexual script: The name the authors give to the unwritten rules about sex learned since childhood: who shows desire, what may be wanted and how everything should look. It is a frame for understanding, not a diagnosis.
- Inis Beag: A small island off the coast of Ireland. Anthropologists described it in the 1960s-1970s as an example of very strict rules about sex.
- Mangaia: An island in the South Pacific, one of the Cook Islands. The anthropologist Donald Marshall described it as an example of a very open attitude to sex.
- hymen: The hymen, a thin membrane at the entrance to the vagina. Even from birth it covers the entrance only partly, and it cannot tell you whether sex has happened.
- Masters: William Masters (1915-2001), an American researcher who, together with Virginia Johnson, studied in the laboratory how the body responds to sexual arousal.
- vulva: The external female genitals: the mons pubis, the outer and inner labia, the clitoris and the entrance to the vagina.
- Lorde: Audre Lorde (1934-1992), an American poet, writer and activist. She called the erotic the feeling of fullness in life, not only the sexual.
- interoception: The perception of sensations inside your own body: heartbeat, tension, arousal.
- Lehmiller: Justin Lehmiller, an American researcher of sexual behaviour and the author of Tell Me What You Want (2018), a book about the science of sexual desire.
- Harel: Daniel Harel, PhD, co-founder of the Somatica institute, which trains sex and relationship coaches. Together with Celeste Hirschman, he co-wrote the book Making Love Real.
- Hirschman: Celeste Hirschman, co-founder of the Somatica institute and co-author of Making Love Real with Daniel Harel.
- coercion: Sexual coercion: an attempt to get sex through pressure, persuasion, guilt, alcohol or force, including after a refusal.
- Planned Parenthood: An American non-profit organisation that works on reproductive health and sexual education. Its foundations were laid by Margaret Sanger, who opened the first clinic in 1916.
- Garcia: Juliana Garcia, a mother who shared for the book her stories of motherhood and of how she teaches her son about consent.
- AIDS: Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, which can develop from HIV if it is not treated. Today HIV is treatable, and people living with it live long lives.
- erectile dysfunction: Difficulty getting or keeping an erection. Most often it is linked to illnesses that disturb blood flow.
All terms
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