- This Friday, Season 2 of Sex Education arrived on Netflix.
- On this occasion, the platform publishes The little manual Sex Education , a playful and visual work imagined by the Belgian photographer and director Charlotte Abramow, who notably produced the clip Balance ton quoi by singer Angèle.
- This free manual can be ordered online.
Masturbation, height, contraception? Do you have questions about sex? You are lucky, today there are "64 pages to talk about ass without taboos and to address the basics of more fulfilled sexuality". The release, this Friday on Netflix, of season 2 of Sex Education, is accompanied by that of an associated work, The little manual Sex Education , to which Emma Mackey, aka Maeve, lends her face.
A book to order for free online and signed by the Belgian director Charlotte Abramow, to whom we owe in particular the clip Balance ton quoi by her compatriot Angèle, and who wants "that we can talk about ass in an uninhibited way".
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Too happy to present my new project to you! 🎉 On the occasion of season 2 of Sex Education, here is Le Petit Manuel 📕 64 pages to talk about ass without taboos and to approach the basics of a more fulfilled sexuality… Full of information that I would personally have liked to know from my adolescence ! 👀 I am super happy to have been able to propose this idea to @netflixfr and that we have taken it to the end with my great team @opheliesecq @metauxlourds @lisavillaret. Thank you @emmatmackey for lending yourself to the game with such enthusiasm. Thanks to @leneez_ and @coeursetarts as usual and to everyone who participated in the project ❤️. . 👉 The object is free, distributed without shipping costs directly to your mailbox in mainland France! 🇫🇷📬 (it is not available in Belgium, I'm so sorry my Belgians ☹️💔) To pre-order it, go to sexeducation.fr. Attention, limited series 🔥
A post shared by Charlotte Abramow 📸 🎥 (@charlotteabramow) on Jan 13, 2020 at 7:14 am PST
What led you to this “Small Sex Education Manual” project?
It's a pretty improbable story! I was at a friend's birthday and one of the guests, who works with Netflix, asked me if I liked some of their programs. I have cited several, including Sex Education . She contacted me a few days later: Netflix offered to participate in the promotion for the release of season 2 of " Sex Ed ". I immediately had the idea of making a paper tool that would take up a little the theoretical bases of sexuality, in the form of a small manual of sexual education, and especially not a big exhaustive scientific work. It was a very spontaneous process!
How is this manual the continuation of the series?
The release of season 2 again offers the opportunity to bring the subject of sexuality to the carpet in France. We wanted to instill in this manual the soul and the essence of the series, by evoking sexuality in an uninhibited way, to deconstruct taboos.
One of the big advantages of this manual is its price: it is free. Was it important to you?
Ah yes ! The idea was to offer accessible content to as many people as possible. It is an initiative reserved for France: it can be ordered online for free and without shipping costs. And the contents of the manual will soon be available online, so everyone can grab it.
This manual is intended for adolescents, a period when one wonders, where one has complexes, fears ... How do we approach, for a young audience, issues related to sex, body, consent, gender?
We were modeled on the public and the characters in the series: they are partly teenagers at the end of high school, so this manual is centered on the discovery of sex. But we realized, with all the team who worked on this project, that adults who have had an active sexuality for many years also ask questions. We developed it in a very natural way, by adopting a very direct tone, with the same terms as in the discussions that we can have with friends, to address people as we would have liked to be addressed to us when we were 15 or 17 years old. Without being paternalistic or moralizing, nor making a “scientifico-complicado” book.
Having an uninhibited tone allows you to uninhibit the substance of the subject, to convey the message that it is normal and important to talk about sexuality. Without that, we miss essential information, we have no fun, we have doubts or taboos, we don't protect ourselves enough. While porn is very easily accessible and society is hypersexualized, in the end, the real questions around the body and gender stereotypes - which alter sexuality - are never addressed or debated. Fortunately, more and more podcasts, Instagram accounts, and many other initiatives are opening up the world of sex. And this manual is part of this movement.
This manual is divided into twelve episodes. The first is devoted to consent. Because it is a preamble to fulfilled sexuality?
It seemed important to remember that the very first thing to know to have sex is that everyone must agree! However, we may not have learned enough, and the consequence of this is that many people do not really know what consent is. Rapes are committed without their perpetrators or victims even knowing that it is rape.
It was essential to lay this foundation, just before addressing gender identities and sexual orientations, because it is also important to know who you are before you start kissing. The rest of the programming was done naturally, with more anatomical, more social, and finally more sensual episodes, tackling self-discovery, masturbation.
As a photographer and director, image is at the heart of your work. And we find this in this manual, rich in photos and illustrations. What do the images bring here?
With these drawings, the idea was to show different sexes, more realistic, without being believed or vulgar. When you look at a manual - or a porn - the sexes are all alike, and we wanted to show diversity and reassure, both with the drawings and with the photos. This is why I did not retouch any of them: because the hairs, the stretch marks, the buttons, they are normal elements of the body, and erasing them would only create, feed the complexes and the stereotypes of gender and body normed. However, because of this, there are some who are afraid to turn on the light during sex, while what can be considered imperfections, they are simply things that are part of life, therefore of sexuality . And basically, we don't care!
Photos are a way of taking the opposite view from sex education textbooks in France, which leave little room for images, at a time when it is everywhere, where young people only communicate in pictures and emojis on social networks - Instagram, Snapchat or TikTok. And since the influence of the image is considerable, we wanted to make it a tool that questions and opens the debate. In the end, it is an artistic subject that speaks of sex education.
We learn, thanks to this manual, the meaning of new words, which we know little or not, like the dickclit. What's this ?
It is, in trans men who undertake a transition, when the clitoris grows and grows under the effect of hormonal treatments. Until recently, I didn't know all that, nor that the clitoris is an erectile body like the penis. This is one of the things related to sex and sexuality that we have never been taught, and it was important to talk about it because many young people feel bad about their bodies, do not recognize their gender. Young people who do not fall within heterosexual cisgender standards will be happy, by reading this manual, to feel concerned and represented, because it is not only boys and girls, and heterosexuals.
People are multiple, different, and not all have the same needs. This is also why we wanted to talk about asexuality, and remember that sex, pleasure and orgasm should not become injunctions: we have the right not to want, we must hear that some people are asexual. That's all that makes sexual freedom.
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