The Female Orgasm

And how to draw it

So. This panel…THIS PANEL. It was a conversation, y’all.

When I wrote it, I envisioned Layla with her back arched, her head thrown back in a moment of ecstasy, her eyes shooting beams of light to the sky. I thought about it like those lovemaking scenes in Battlestar Galactica when the Cylons would glow. That moment of bonding would make it happen, but the humans never saw it. So when I saw Khary had draw these two face-to-face, I explained what I had been picturing. He said to me, “I’m not comfortable drawing a sixteen-year-old having an orgasm.”

Hold up. The whole book is about a pregnant sixteen-year-old. WE KNOW HE PUT HIS P IN HER V! Now she’s dealing with the consequences of it. Shouldn’t she at least get a moment of pleasure out of the whole thing? (Reader, I said all these things. I admit, I did not react well.)

But I can say that, right? Because I’m a grown woman. I’ve been through the ringer and come out the other side, comfortable with owning my sexuality. I’m not a man trying to navigate the nuance of portraying the situation. I’m not the teenage girl in the story who is being observed. My gut reaction of “Teenage girls get to have sexual pleasure too!” is well-meaning but probably a little too simplistic in a world where young women are still victimized at an alarming rate.

I want young women (and all young people) to have comfortable, happy, healthy relationships with their bodies and their sexuality. And of course I want to celebrate young women getting pleasuring from their sexual encounters. But I appreciate that Khary is careful and considerate about depicting women. There’s a difference between drawing the character’s pleasure and drawing something for the reader’s pleasure, and he didn’t want to cross that line. I wish all men were as careful and thoughtful about such situations.

Listen to what your partner is comfortable with, folks. In bed, and in comics!