Every Body

December 15, 2020
With a boisterous and beautiful combination of oral history, essays, comics, and art, career illustrator Rothman and indie filmmaker Feinberg share this inclusive and empowering guide to sexual life. It reads equal parts like a scientific documentary and a sit-down with old friends. The authors interviewed strangers on the street and questioned scholars, scientists, and artists, pursuing a wide variety of experiences as well as perspectives on sex and what it means to have it. There are stories of pleasure, pain, autonomy, first times, assault, pregnancy, aging, confidence, and desire. There's a day in the life of a bouncer at a sex club, and a gallows-humor comic about miscarriage. There's love, herpes, and dildos. The naked form appears in drawings, paintings, and collages. Sex happens in dorm rooms and in cars, church bathrooms, and public parks; alone, and with a group. There are furries, professional dominatrixes, and people old and young, and confessions of both joy and of regret. The book's main takeaway is universality: sex is what unites us, as natural as having a body in the first place. Visually stunning, and running the entire gamut of human emotion, this will make readers laugh, cry, and cheer.

COPYRIGHT(2020) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

December 15, 2020
A creative appreciation of human sexuality through art and anecdotes. Inspired by the sexy stories of others, Rothman began gathering anonymous submissions of people's intimate tales, and she presents the material in a narrative diversified across location, gender, ethnicity, age, and sexual orientation. In this attractive volume, she teams up with frequent New York Times co-collaborator Feinberg, hitting the streets of New York and New Orleans to solicit stories about people's carnal desires and apprehensions. The result is a book brimming with titillating, provocative artwork and essays about the vast terrain of the human sexual experience. Among the most memorable topics and sections: gender and sexual fluidity; the trials and triumphs of an intersex advocate; Feinberg's poignant essay about the "twisted mindset" caused by her body dysmorphic disorder; a section about a "professional masturbator" who "teach[es] groups how to masturbate"; a female contributor's list of "10 Things To Do When You're Horny &Lonely"; a 67-year-old man's first experience with gay sex; a gay man's celebration of his HIV-positive status, which "gave me the gift of having to look at myself....It saved my life"; and the enigmas of vaginismus and sexsomnia ("While asleep, not consciously, I will initiate sex with the person I'm in bed with"). An impressively diverse blend of artistry and perspective, Rothman and Feinberg's book is an entertaining and insightful voyeuristic playground affording a sneak peek inside the bedrooms of everyday people divulging their unbridled desires, fetishes, and complex relationship dynamics. These stories mirror the sexual conventions of a mostly liberated modern society--though some contributors have been challenged by conservative religious upbringings or racial polarization, and others emerged from cultures that shame or restrict the pursuit of sexual fulfillment. Most of the material is explicitly frank and features a liberating body-positive honesty sure to delight any reader fascinated by stories of human sexuality. A delightfully audacious anthology of carnal confessionals.

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