Debating Ideas is a new section that aims to reflect the values and editorial ethos of the African Arguments book series, publishing engaged, often radical, scholarship, original and activist writing from within the African continent and beyond. It will offer debates and engagements, contexts and controversies, and reviews and responses flowing from the African Arguments books.

In 2017 NGOs turned to courts to unravel Uganda’s ban on sexual education

I have told a story about this sex book, The Whole Picture: The Ultimate How-to for Lovers. It’s a wonderful story. It involves my son, tears, and a father – me – at a loss, for a moment, how to discuss with him, in an age-appropriate way, the sex pictures he had seen in the book. But that is not what I wish to talk about. What I do want to say something about is the book itself. Well, sort of.

Open the book at random. This is one of the things the author, Nicole Beland, says:

‘An anytime treat, oral sex can be the high point of foreplay, the main event of the night, or a bonne bouche that you and your partner return to over and over again during a long and luxurious sexual encounter. Warm, wet and intimate, oral sex can be just as fun and satisfying as full-on intercourse. As a matter of fact, some men and women prefer oral sex to all other forms of fooling around.’

Author’s book from Wits University Press

Maybe some of us prefer oral sex to all other forms of sex play. Maybe oral can be just as pleasurable as full-on fucking.

There are some people who might demur though. There is, as far as I know, a difference in the quantum of fun and satisfaction between the one – or ones – who performs cunnilingus or fellatio and the recipient lying back on the bed, sitting on a table counter, or on all fours. Of course, this is not the case for everyone. Giving and receiving oral sex appear to be different experiences. Regardless, enjoyable as oral is, some men and women prefer whips and feet. Given my reading that much on the literature on sexuality tends to be inclined toward danger and disease, all pleasure is welcome. As such, all I have to say is, let’s leave some space for more research and more stories of sexual play, differences, and joy. We, in a place like South Africa, at this time, with the level and gratuitous nature of violence, desperately need them. But I feel all of us, in all corners of the world, not just in this place, always need them, given stories such as that of Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Jeffrey Epstein and other prominent men.

A book like The Whole Picture is of interest to me as a sexuality researcher because at its core it is a book about sexual pleasure. What is as intriguing in books like it though is that they are never simply about sexual pleasure, as if having gone through the book you have seen them all. There is no such book, thank god for that. We would not have so many books and films and pornography clips if all we need was one sex bible or video to render all others superfluous.

It isn’t that there could never be a text exhaustive enough to answer all our questions and offer all the pleasures we will ever need. It is also not that there are differences among us regarding sexual needs and fantasies and relationship status, and as such different books are needed to cater for different markets. And it’s not that in some countries you will be arrested for anal sex or group orgies and other things some people take for granted – which is to suggest that the Imam, Pastor, legislator or cop are always interested in who we copulate with and how – and authors have to keep in mind the limits or freedoms of speech at play in their own contexts.

Most if not all books on sexual pleasure are at one and the same time also always about something else that may not be readily obvious to many a reader. Like all books there is always something more happening. No book is ever only about the act of sex itself, even the most pornographic. The best books, just like the best pornography, are about stories and not ever just about sex. This is why there is an insatiable sexual desire among humans (in contrast to other animals). It is a desire not so much for sex itself – fun as it can be – but for more sexual stories, more inventive ways of fucking, the realisation of more of our fantasies. There is, then, always another sexual story to be given voice. That, ultimately, is what we crave; another setting for the drama; another time about which we can write and portray in film. And each of these will always find an audience.

In this way, sex books are not unlike any other texts, not unlike poems or novels or ponderous academic books. They have stories running through them, although you must work hard to get to the story in some books on sex. A book that tells a good sex story, or rather stories, is Sex and the Citadel: Intimate Life in a Changing Arab World by Shereen El Feki. It strikes me that, perhaps, for those of us who teach sex at university, maybe even at high school, we should prescribe books like The Whole Picture (which is very doubtful to be prescribed) alongside Sex and the Citadel (which is more likely to be easier to swallow). I know that for those who are researchers in the areas of sexuality and publish in prestigious journals, we write more about what is covered in the latter book and rarely about what is the former. We are more at home writing on the sociology, psychology or politics of sexuality than what people actually do, want to do, do not do. It is as if, even though we identify as sexuality researchers, the central act upon which our work is grounded, sex itself, makes us prissy or otherwise retreat to academic jargon.

One argument the author of The Whole Picture makes for the book is ‘that it is the ideal gift for engagements, weddings, weddings, birthdays or even for your parents’ fortieth anniversary (just kidding, sort of)’. Amusing. Of course, giving the book as a gift to your parents or as a birthday will be the story.

There are other arguments for books such as this. The need for sex education for many adults who in their lives have never received any such education and for helping married couples who wish to rejuvenate or improve their sexual lives. There are, at the same time, arguments that can be made against these kinds of books, including what they exclude or marginalise, for example the possible criticisms that queer sexuality and sex are tucked away at the back of the book.

I am aware that a book such as The Whole Picture may be passé in some parts of the world where, for instance, red light districts, sex shops, fetish clubs, or gay villages are familiar. There are in many countries many places where one can purchase similar how-to sex books, films, DVDs, magazine articles, columns, videos, and other instructional material. It is a while now since Fifty Shades of Grey was made into a major motion picture. And the Fifty Shades trilogy of books was a bestseller in some countries. But sex materials, books and films, and sex-positive spaces are not always as readily available or found in some countries, for religious or legal injunctions.

In my country, sex books and other erotic material, including any category of pornographies you can imagine, are easily accessible, although this freedom is still relatively new and contested. Discussions about sexuality are also commonplace in major cities like Cape Town and Johannesburg. It may be in those circles in which I circulate (and may be uncommon in rural areas and small towns). But it is my view that as far as discussions about sex are concerned, they are more about the politics of sex, violence and disease instead of aphrodisiacs, seduction, and the Kama Sutra. Both kinds of discussion are necessary. That is to say: we need many different stories about ourselves.

Fucking is political, certainly. The knowledge that it is not even three decades when we were unfree – a blink of an eye in the history of homo sapiens – since my country enacted a liberal constitution that guarantees sexual rights and freedoms is never far below our skins. Though the sexual apartheid laws are gone, it seems our sexual lives continue to be underpinned by colonial sexuality, by which I mean, with respect to sex, the opposite of sex between free subjects. All the same, the demise of apartheid and subsequent birth of constitutional democracy in the country heralded a re-charting of the laws on the terrain of sexualities and the slow materialisation of new sexual identities, desires, relations. Political freedom has enabled some sexual freedoms. However, the freedom we enjoy also seems to have unleashed repressed fantasies of sexual violence, precisely because it may be a while before we fully escape sexual coloniality.

Author’s book from HSRC Press

In spite of the violence, we want sex for nothing more than that is a fantastically pleasurable human activity. Sometimes the pleasure drive is so powerful it goes against stupid laws, conservative religious decrees, (hetero)sexist ideologies, and racist politics. And yet it could be that it is not the sex itself but the stories about sex, how we film it and talk about it and write poems about it that is even more fascinating. Listen (or watch in your mind’s eyes) to these lines from Antjie Krog’s poem ‘marital psalm’:

sometimes he catches me by the hind leg

as one big piece of solid treachery

persecutes me

fucks me day and night

violates every millimetre of private space

smothers every glint in my eye which could lead to writing

‘do our children successfully in respectable schools have to see

how their friends read about their mother’s splashing cunt

and their father’s perished cock

I mean wife

jesus! somewhere a man’s got to draw the line’  

Sometimes, it would seem to me, the words in a poem about cocks and cunts can be as pleasurable as the best sex book. We need more, please.