By Meghan Shannon
Catherine Roach wants us to have good sex.
Roach, a Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at the New College who has been researching gender and sexuality over the past twenty-five years, makes this bid in her five-part public scholarship Manisexto, Good Sex. In her book, Roach asserts good sex consists of the following: Sex has to be pleasurable and sex has to be ethical for it to be good. Roach unfolds these two pillars, acknowledging that America’s climb toward good sex is foundational to our collective sexual citizenship, democracy, and liberation.
America’s current gender and sexual revolution is being met with oppressive pushback. In 2022, we witnessed the reversal of Roe v. Wade and an onslaught of anti-trans legislation. As I spend time with Roach’s book, I’m reminded and assured that our larger culture will continue to push to view sex in inclusive and empathetic ways, and I feel secure with this fact. Her text provides a thoughtful guide for how we talk, think, approach, consider, and have good sex.
Good Sex is a work of public scholarship that approaches and distills massive concepts from gender expression, to consent, to body positivity and neutrality, to how we understand and interpret goodness. With sex being an encompassing topic, how did you arrive at the five-part Manisexto structure? What was your process in determining the content of each Manisexto, and how did you decide to order the presentation of each Manisexto?
The book is a synthesis of my twenty-five years of teaching and researching about gender and sexuality in American popular culture. I was seeing signs of a hopeful, although still incomplete, revolution unfolding among my students and echoing far beyond them, throughout the culture as a whole. The book pulls this vision into focus.
Each of the five points of what I call the “Manisexto” (a manifesto about sexuality, if you will) centers around the concept of “good sex” from the book’s title. This title plays on the dual meanings of the word good as both ethical and pleasurable. As to the ethical: good sex is consensual, does no harm, and impacts people’s lives in positive ways. As to the pleasurable: good sex is erotic, satisfies desire, and leads to physical and emotional enjoyment for all partners involved. In both senses, sex should do good and feel good. In both senses, sex is good. The Manisexto is the essence of America’s new gender and sexual revolution.
The book is structured in five sections that build sequentially to lay out the five central commitments of this transformational shift occurring in the culture: an affirmation of positive sexuality (people have the right to their sexual choices), inclusion for gender and sexual diversity (such that diversity is normalized), body acceptance (critiquing narrow, toxic standards and gender scripts for what counts as the good/sexy body), consent (meaningful and informed, in any relationship), and the importance of equity in sexual pleasure (with concepts of “cliteracy” and closing the orgasm gap).
My goal for the book is to facilitate new thinking and conversation: How to understand and navigate today’s changing landscape? How to think critically about its challenges and potential? The book is intended as an accessible guide to chart this new terrain.
I’m curious about the creation of this book. In the text, you say the sexual script in American culture is twofold and contradictory, yet it is being slowly reconstructed through how we think about and approach sex. When did you begin noticing this reconstruction? And did the idea of this book come from a specific moment or experience that reflects these changes in cultural scripts?
The planning for the book began around 2016, when I started teaching a new, large lecture course called Sexuality & Society. I developed the course as part of our campus-wide general education curriculum at The University of Alabama. It features partnerships with other professors working in related fields and with campus offices offering student services in the area. The undergraduates who enroll in the course come from all majors: engineering to music, public relations to religious studies. The students responded enthusiastically to the course and to its central premise that we’re living in an important moment of transformational shift. The course became a classroom-based research project, with the book developing organically from my lectures and our lively class discussions.
Two phenomena in particular really got us thinking about this shift in cultural scripts around sexuality. One was the 2015 Supreme Court decision in favor of marriage equality that had just legalized same-sex marriage throughout the US. The other was the #MeToo movement that took off so explosively in 2017 (when the “MeToo” hashtag went viral in October of that year, 4.7 million people used it within twenty-four hours on Facebook). Both of these moments signaled a broad-based change, and both occurred around the same time that transgender visibility was becoming much more mainstream.
With more cultural acceptance and legal protection than ever before for diversity in gender expression and in romance, and with calls of “Enough is enough!” against previously tolerated or hushed-up sexual wrongdoing, we’re at a tipping point into a new era of gender and sexual revolution. At the heart of this transformation—and the backlash it provokes—is a culture-wide conversation about sexual and gender justice.
What obstacles did you face when writing this book?
Frankly, my biggest obstacle in writing this book was my own emotional labor in processing the stories of trauma I heard from the students. It is hard to grow up in America without being made to feel bad in some way about your body, your gender, or your sexuality—made to feel bad by the culture, parents, peers, religion, or school that you aren’t doing body, gender, or sexuality “right,” in accordance with traditional scripts about how we are supposed to live out these fundamental aspects of our humanity. So many young people suffer bullying, shaming, discrimination, harassment, coercion, or outright abuse and assault. High-quality comprehensive sex education is still inconsistent across the country; misinformation and fear- or guilt-based sex ed still sadly rife. (One student told me she was seventeen years old before she learned women could have orgasms; she thought it was a perk reserved for guys).
At various points, the writing process made me cry, gave me nightmares, made me pull back and take a deep breath. But I always returned to the text. Ultimately, working on this book gave me great joy and satisfaction in thinking that it might help spark conversation and positive change on issues of such vital importance today.
You note that there is a visual economy that is inextricable from how sex is presented in our culture. Sex and image can be education-based and diagrammatic, it can be salacious, graphic, celebratory, capitalistic, among many other things. In Good Sex, the first image we see is of two femme people kissing with the caption “In 2015, the US Supreme Court decided in support of same-sex marriage,” and the last image we see is of a woman in an opulent gown with candles and a scenic background. Why was it important to use images in this book?
Two reasons. First, Good Sex is designed as a trade book for a general audience. The team at Indiana University Press and I wanted the book to be readable and attractive, for the layout to pull readers in right away with a colorful and visually engaging presentation. So, the format of the book features lots of sidebars, pull quotes, colors, fun fonts, icons, and images. Second, as you note, sexuality is pictured throughout our visual economy, from TV and film to advertising imagery to the constant visuals of social media platforms. As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. Some images, like the one you mention of the fairytale princess wedding pose, encapsulate gender and sexual scripts with particular efficiency. “Find your one true love and live happily ever after” remains an enduring cultural message that shapes people’s ideas of romance, gender, and sex (traditionally, in the mandatory direction of heterosexual and reproductive male-led marriage). Putting that image smack-dab on the page helps us to recognize the narrative and then begin to unpack its power as an imperative.
Which images resonate most powerfully with you?
I try not to choose favorites in life, but I am delighted we could include the picture of Laverne Cox, the Emmy-winning producer and actress. She is from Alabama, where I am based, and went to the same high school as my son. Aside from her electric onscreen presence (I loved her in “Inventing Anna”), she’s been a great advocate for human rights equity, particularly in the area of LGBTQ+ activism. She gives new meaning to our state university’s cheer, “Yea, Alabama!”
When writing this book, did you discover scholarship or information that surprised you? Is there a particular topic you understand better now or view differently, having written through it?
I find the topic of inclusive masculinity very interesting as a recent response to all the discussion about the problems of toxic masculinity, especially after the #MeToo movement took off. It’s a new area of scholarship and public discourse that we’re starting to hear more and more about and that has the potential to make a real difference.
The point here is that there is more than one way to be a good man and that overly narrow norms for “tough-guy” masculinity hurt not only girls and women but also boys and men themselves. Feminism, in its various waves since the mid-19th century, won huge gains for women and enabled all sorts of new freedoms and possibilities (although a glass ceiling, wage gaps, and rape culture still exist). Men, in contrast, remain limited in some surprising ways.
They certainly get advantages from patriarchy and male privilege, but in other ways they remain quite tightly confined by the “Man Box” rules of their traditional script of masculinity. The old gender codes of “boys don’t cry” and “no sissy stuff allowed” still apply, with often virulent shaming or mockery if a guy dares to violate these codes and step out of the box. There’s no cultural shame in a woman being a doctor, but there remains shaming or suspicion around a man being a nurse; gals can wear pants or skirts, but it’s hard for a guy to pull off wearing a dress (although the “bro skirt” and unisex styling are gaining ground). Furthermore, through #MeToo, we’re learning more about how often males have their sexual consent violated and the even greater taboos they suffer against speaking out against coercion and assault. The assumption is that a guy can’t be raped, that he should have been able to fight it off, or that he must have wanted it because a “real man” is always up for sex.
My chapter “Boys Don’t Belong in a Box” discusses this material. These conversations are happening across the culture and are always lively in my classroom. One student whom I quote in the book said, “Recently I’ve come out from the haze of Guyland, and it is so freeing.”
This book is a testament to how Americans are beginning to see sex and gender in inclusive, open, and positive ways. Why was it important to include your students’ thoughts and experiences in this book? How did you determine what to include?
This book, more than anything else I’ve ever written, is in response to my students. I wanted to include their thoughts and experiences precisely because it is their age group of young adults that is leading this wave of social change in America. The cultural shift I am tracing in the book is in many ways a demographic one led by the Generation Z cohort of my college students. In recent American polls1, one out of five Gen-Z youth now identify as LGBT, 84 percent of them support same-sex marriage2, and students who are gender-nonbinary and queer are increasingly visible and supported in schools across the country. Young people tend to embrace diversity as a given. It is this generational shift that gives me hope the present-day moment is getting us closer to a robust vision of inclusion and positive sexuality.
Accordingly, the book is full of the students’ voices. Their written responses to our weekly topics in the Sexuality & Society course furnish all the pull quotes in the book. I chose some of the most compelling and insightful comments from students who had granted permission at the beginning of term for extracts from their work to be included, anonymously, in this research project. I should note that almost all the students, every term, sign up to have their assignments considered for inclusion in the project. They have a lot to contribute and they want to be heard.
Is there an anecdote from one of your students that particularly takes your attention?
There is, although it’s not a happy one, I’m afraid: A young student, freshly arrived on campus and just moved into the dorms, meeting someone who seemed fun and nice, making out in their dorm room, happy to be there until things go further than they want, saying no, saying stop, having their words make no difference. I’ve heard that story in so many different versions, from students of all genders. The story became my motivation to try to do more. I told myself that even though I couldn’t solve all these problems, what I could do was create a trauma-informed and student-centered course and commit to teaching it every single term so that students would have a safe and supportive curricular space to read, write, think, and discuss what needs to change—and what is changing—to bring about a world of greater justice, inclusion, and love. And I could write a book that emerges from that classroom space, a book that highlights the students’ own voices and insight. That’s what I’ve tried to do. These young people represent the future of America. Their resilience and commitment to diversity and equity make me proud to teach them.
1 NBCUniversal News Group. (2021, June 9). Nearly 1 in 5 young adults say they’re not straight, global survey finds. NBCNews.com. Retrieved January 9, 2023, from https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/nearly-1-5-young-adults-say-they-re-not-straight-n1270003
2 Jones, Jeffrey M. “LGBT Identification Rises to 5.6% in Latest U.S. Estimate.” Gallup.com, Gallup, 20 Nov. 2021, https://news.gallup.com/poll/329708/lgbt-identification-rises-latest-estimate.aspx.
Catherine M. Roach has 25 years of grant-funded research experience on gender, sexuality, and American popular culture. A two-time Fulbright awardee with a PhD from Harvard and publications in both fiction and nonfiction, she’s been an invited visiting professor in Canada, Australia, and Europe. She is Professor of New College, an innovative liberal arts program at the University of Alabama, where she’s won the school’s top research and teaching awards and where she offers a popular cross-university course titled “Sexuality & Society.” Originally from Ottawa, Canada, she is based in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
Buy GOOD SEX: Transforming America through the New Gender and Sexual Revolution from your favorite independent bookstore or find it HERE.
Meghan Shannon is a writer and visual artist based in Chicago. Her essays and photographic work explore queerness, grief, and sexuality. She holds an MFA in Nonfiction Writing from Columbia College Chicago. Her debut short film, Good Grief, is set to premiere June 2023.
