Not Your Mother's Meatloaf: A Sex Education Comic Book

by Saiya Miller, Liza Bley

Overview

As teenagers today navigate increasingly fluid identities and choices, there is a demand for an accessible, interactive tool to help share knowledge about sex and sexual health; one that demystifies the facts and speaks frankly about experiences whose lessons often fall into the grey areas.

Since 2008, Miller and Bley have held an open call for young people to create comics that address a variety of topics involved with sex education. We have since produced several issues of a sex-ed comic called Not Your Mother’s Meatloaf. The work is chosen from a vastly varied group of submissions and attempts to challenge hetero and gender normative practices in sex education. The comics address topics like body image, safer sex, consent, and relationships, from positions that have historically been left out of sex education.

These graphically illustrated personal narratives address different themes, such as “Firsts,” “Bodies,” “Health,” “Age,” and “Endings.” The book will bring together the best of the material from the Not Your Mother’s Meatloaf comics, along with new graphic stories and writing by the editors providing personal and sociological background.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781593765170
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	07/30/2013
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)
Age Range:	14 Years

About the Author

Saiya Miller graduated from Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts. She has worked as an educator and activist, teaching art and music, as well as using comics and zines in workshops for teenagers. She lives in Brooklyn, NY and Vermont.

Liza Bley studied writing in New York City, where she also worked at Make, a craft and sewing school, and contributed sampled to the book Embroider Everything Workshop.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Not Your Mother's Meatloaf

"I wish I could go back in time and learn about sex from this book."—Alison Bechdel, author of Are You My Mother? and Fun Home

"Not Your Mother’s Meatloaf—seven chapters of candidly self-aware comics and writings—explores the multifarious world of the human sexual experience. Topics include experimentation, faking orgasms, cross-dressing, learning how to casually talk about sex with friends, abusive relationships, finding liberation through positive influences, first times, last times, health, age, identity, body image, substance abuse, masturbation and strange desires. While some traditional sex-ed books can seem patronizing toward adolescents, Not Your Mother's Meatloaf consists of real people telling their own stories." -Albuquerque Weekly

From the Publisher

Doing it—as portrayed by young comic artists. Miller and Bley have been gathering comics written by youth since 2008, and this compilation pulls together 50 different young authors from across the country. Hetero sex, queer sex, BDSM, hookups, innocent sex, dirty sex, first times, multiple times, healthy, unhealthy, safe and sometimes not-so-safe—the deed is presented and illustrated in 50 different graphic (often in both senses of the word) stories and vignettes that will enlighten, educate, intrigue and...um...inspire... readers on several different levels. The collection is divided into seven chapters on such topics as "Bodies," "Identity," "Health" and "Endings"; the editors contribute prose introductions to each. Some of the stories are sweet, as in one of how two girls meet on a nude beach as children. Others are dark, such as Leah Johnston's installment that includes images of a woman tied and bound. Some blur the lines between educational and titillating, such as "Train Cum," which explores a spontaneous, messy, consensual encounter between two men in a train station. There's no doubt teens of all ages will be scrambling to get their hands on this title; it's more of a matter of finding adults who are willing to offer it to them. A frank and honest look at sex and sexuality. (Graphic anthology. 16 & up)

Kirkus Reviews