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The Spring 2021 Manga Guide
Sex Education 120%

What's It About? 

​Gym teacher Tsuji-sensei has one mission: help with Japan's terrible modern sex education standards. The problem is, her students barely know their birds from their bees! Between a girl who already has a girlfriend, a hard-core BL lover, and a girl who only cares about cats, Tsuji-sensei has her work cut out for her.

Sex Education 120% is scripted by Kikiki Tataki and drawn by Hotomura and Yen Press released its first volume in digital and print for $6.99 and $13.00 respectively.









Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

Let me get this out of the way first – by slapping this book with an “explicit content” label, Yen Press risks undoing what the volume is trying to do: de-stigmatize comprehensive sex education. There is nothing explicit in this book beyond frank discussions of genitals, masturbation, and safe sex, and the one non-explicit almost-sex scene isn't even fully carried out and instead becomes a lesson on consent. But that explicit label could stop people who could really use this from picking it up, and, even worse, contradict the message that it's not harmful or shameful to teach and discuss human sexuality.

The framework of the book makes it clear that that's an uphill battle. A new health teacher at a girls' high school is aghast that the “textbook” for her classes is thin and only has twelve pages on sex ed, with most of it being about male sexuality or assuming heterosexual couples. Because it's something she's always been passionate about, she decides to supplement the curriculum with a much more in-depth and inclusive discussion. So on the first day of class, she not only hands out condoms, but also dental dams. She talks about how there's an assumption that women don't masturbate, and that masturbation has such negative connotations that maybe we should drop the word altogether and use something different. She points out that there's nothing shameful about knowing what your own body looks like (why would you show a sexual partner a part of your body you've never even seen?), and that things like height, weight, and body hair aren't inherently bad. And her students, although a bit flustered at first, eat it right up.

Naturally not everyone does, and those negative voices belong to the school principal and the school nurse, both of whom are horrified that she would teach children those things. But doesn't someone have to? What's wrong with having a full understanding of yourself, your body, and what you can do with it? That's a question the nurse can't adequately answer, and she does back off a little. Of course, it doesn't help that the health teacher has an…exuberant personality and does go to far with the nurse, making “jokes” that make her uncomfortable in the book's one major misstep. It's a striking mistake, though, because the one non-explicit sex scene in the volume features a lesson on consent, with one partner calling the whole thing off after they got started because she's not in the mood, and the other partner taking her at her word and just stopping with an, “It's okay.” It's understated, but that makes it work, much like when another character says that she doesn't understand romance and then being surprised when her friends take her at her word. When she asks why they aren't telling her things like, “Oh, you're just a late bloomer,” and “You just haven't met the right person yet,” her lesbian friend says that people asking her why she doesn't like guys isn't going to change who she is, so why should she question her friend?

Sex Ed 120% isn't entirely perfect, but it is a solid piece of edutainment that fills a niche that's been empty for too long. I hope the explicit content label doesn't keep it from readers who need or want it.


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