Show Me
Show Me! is a controversial sex education book by photographer Will McBride. It appeared in 1974 in German under the title Zeig Mal!, written with psychiatrist Helga Fleischhauer-Hardt for children and their parents. It was translated into English a year later and was widely available in bookstores on both sides of the Atlantic for many years.
A recent review by Dr. Russell A. Rohde claims that the book, “appropriately delves into the issues of breast feeding, adolescence, pubertal changes, menses, sexual anatomies, pregnancy, masturbation, contraception, sexual behavioral disturbances and venereal disease. […] I am not aware of any book comparable to this illustrated primer that fills the needs of sexual education so well.”
D. F. Janssen places it at the one extreme of a late twentieth century visual and textual revolution that enabled parents to illustrate information that up to that time had been transmitted orally. He sees the work as subversive not for its “too frank” portrayal of childhood sexuality, but instead for the primacy that the image takes over the text. In his eyes, the work “comes out of a culture with a long history of pathologising so-addressed ‘primal scenes,’” a history that became manifest in particular with regard to the works of Will McBride.
octavian says:
The big problem with this book was that it contained large-format photographs of naked young children, (including small boys with full-on erections). It was bound to attract controversy, even if (as it claimed) it was an educational publication. Another problem might have been that in the US, the publisher was a certain…. Larry Flint. I have a copy – and even now, more than 30 years later, I’m still confused about whether it’s a good sex education resource for parents and children… or a paedo porn publication.
Josh says:
Children are not asexual. That’s a fact, not an excuse by pedos. And there were tendencies to accept this fact in the 70’s. I don’t see how it harms a child to read such things. While making him think of sexuality as something dirty and bad like we do nowadays *is* dangerous in so many ways.
Jake says:
The whole set of pictures from the book can be found here: http://www.proza.com.ua/culture/pokazhi_mne.shtml
The text from the book can be found here: http://www.xs4all.nl/~johnie/jpp-zm.htm (the pictures above are in reverse order compared with the text)
neskaberoa says:
You can found whole pictures from the book on:
http://neskaberoa.blogspot.com/2010/01/show-me-picture-book-of-sex-for-chil.html