The Human Being Sex Life

Ora Ruven

To build the full story I disguised myself as the little girl I was, telling of her reading — which is my new, present reading — of the book The Human Being Sex Life.

Yossi Sidi, curator of the exhibition, invited me to show a new work in an exhibition devoted to sexuality. He presented fifteen questions from the well-known Kinsey and Hite questionnaires, and asked for a work responding to one of the questions that interested me. The first question immediately triggered a strong childhood memory, as if it had waited for that very question to surface: “What was your earliest source of knowledge about sex?” The answer was, of course, the book The Human Being Sex Life that I found in my father’s large library. I read it in secret, with great excitement, when I was a little girl of ten; it was clear to me that the memory of this book would be central to the new work.

Driven by the desire to remember, I searched libraries and found, in the Jewish education archive at Tel Aviv University, The Human Being Sex Life by A. Matmon, 5709 (1948–49), published by the Institute of Hygiene and Sexology. The same red cover I remembered, with the same anatomical drawings of male and female genitals. And, wonder of wonders, landmark texts on sexual equality that I did not remember. Returning to the book brought up more memories of treasures I found in my father’s library. There was also a book on Pompeii, known for the sex scenes preserved in its ruins. Those scenes had a place of honor in the exhibition I presented in 2015. I returned to the ancient sex drawings and understood from them, suddenly and now, the sexual equality I hold to — even if there was not really sexual equality in Pompeii. I added them to the raw-material arsenal for the work.

In the animation I used a time-lapse technique in iPad drawings of couples in sex scenes (egalitarian!), inspired by the Pompeii drawings, and material from the book The Human Being Sex Life. With all these materials I entered virtual reality glasses with an edited soundtrack. To build the full story I disguised myself as the little girl I was, telling of her reading — which is my new, present reading — of the book The Human Being Sex Life.

I would like the work to be shown in every fourth-grade class for ten-year-olds — because at ten I discovered the adult sex-education book that also describes intercourse positions — and I am still here.