‘Maybe I’ll make something with it’: Comics as alternative sex education
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article discusses how the comics form is peculiarly suited to deliver affecting, inclusive sex education. Through analysing the comics anthologies Not Your Mother’s Meatloaf , compiled by Saiya Miller and Liza Bley, and Graphic Reproduction , edited by Jenell Johnson as part of the Graphic Medicine series, this article addresses several specific ways in which these anthologies – and the autobiographical comics they include – demonstrate unconventional and effecting methods of conducting sex education. Comparing these collections to sex education film shows how comics are particularly suited to this goal. These comics anthologies demonstrate the importance of inclusive community-building as a central project of sex education, as well as the need to challenge the teacher–student methodology. Specific comics within these anthologies by Eli Brown and Paula Knight demonstrate how comics allow for radical expressions of how bodies relate to sex and sexuality. Other comics, including those by Alison Bechdel and Alex Barrett, reveal how the pauses and ambiguities fostered by comics heighten their emotional impact and educational value. The overarching power of these narrative comics comes from the self-awareness of the form itself, especially the vulnerability of drawing oneself in relation to sexual experiences. This article concludes that these distinct characteristics of comics allow both a healthy way for creators to look back on their own experiences with sex and, in turn, encourage readers to effectively learn from these depicted experiences.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it