The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Sex Pots – Eroticism in Ceramics by Paul Mathieu

Paul Mathieu’s Sex Pots is a bracing, often surprising intervention in both ceramics scholarship and the wider study of erotic art. Its premise is simple and stubbornly persuasive: clay and the vessel-form have been unusually intimate companions to human sexuality across cultures and ages, and the history of ceramics is one of repeated, inventive erotic expression — in form, in surface, and in social function. He sets out to map that terrain, and he does so with the enthusiasm of a maker, the eye of a historian, and the slipperiness of a provocateur. 

What the book does

Mathieu’s survey is sweeping. Starting from prehistoric and Neolithic examples, he moves through classical Greek and Roman representations, Pre-Columbian imagery (notably the explicit Moche corpus), Asian and Indigenous American objects, and on to 19th–20th-century Western ceramics and the work of contemporary practitioners. Along the way he foregrounds how erotic content can be encoded in form (a vessel that resembles the body), in decoration (explicit narrative scenes), and in use (objects deployed in ritual or intimate practice). The book is richly illustrated and oriented to both art-historical and anthropological concerns; it balances plates of historical objects with discussion of more than a hundred contemporary ceramists who take eroticism as subject or strategy. 

Strengths

1. Ambitious scope delivered with clarity. Mathieu’s command of a wide range of material is impressive. He does not shy from frank description — the book treats explicit imagery seriously rather than sensationally — and that candour allows him to explore functions of erotic imagery (votive, funerary, didactic, recreational) across contexts. 
2. Maker’s insight. As a practicing ceramist and educator, the author repeatedly links form and technique to meaning: how a lip, a spout, or an exaggerated curve can allude to anatomy, how glaze and tactility participate in erotic reception. Those observations make the book valuable not only to historians but to practicing artists who think about embodiment and tactility. 
3. Visual richness. The book is appropriately illustrated and curated to show variety and continuity — a necessary feature for the subject matter, since eroticism in ceramics is as much visual and material as it is textual. Bibliographic apparatus (references, index) makes it useful as a research starting point. 

Where the book is limited

1. Historicism sometimes outruns theory. Written and published in the early 2000s, Sex Pots privileges broad comparative description over sustained engagement with later strands of critical theory (e.g., post-structuralist queer theory, intersectional feminist readings of material culture) that would complicate or deepen some claims about intention and reception. Readers seeking dense theoretical framing will find the book more a provocative catalogue and interpretive primer than a theoretical manifesto.
2. Selection and scope biases. Any survey of erotic material invites questions about selection: what is highlighted, what is elided, and why. While the book makes admirable efforts at breadth (Europe, the Americas, Asia), some readers may wish for a more sustained, contextualized treatment of non-Western objects that fully follows local cosmologies and social norms rather than interpreting them primarily through a Western art-historical lens. 

Style and audience

It’s written with the frankness of a practitioner who understands that ceramics are inherently embodied objects. His prose is accessible without being reductive; the book wears its learning lightly. That accessibility means Sex Pots succeeds as a text for a diverse readership — artists, curators, collectors, and students — while still offering scholars a useful compendium of images and references. The book’s format (illustrated, index and bibliography included) makes it well suited to classroom use or as a reference shelf companion. 

Significance and legacy

As one of the few book-length treatments focused specifically on eroticism in ceramics, this volume fills an important niche. It compels readers to reconsider ceramic vessels as active participants in sexual culture rather than merely passive containers. For contemporary ceramists and curators exploring body, desire, and social norms through clay, Sex Pots remains a catalytic resource — an invitation to think beyond the teapot and the purely decorative, and to recognize ceramics as a field where embodiment, ritual, and representation intersect. Given its publication in 2003, the book should be read alongside newer scholarship and contemporary critical theory, but its images, case studies, and makerly observations still reward close study. 

Sex Pots: Eroticism in Ceramics is a provocative, well-illustrated, and substantive book that will likely remain a go-to introduction on its subject. It is strongest as a wide-angle survey and as a work by a practitioner-scholar who brings material sensitivity to questions about sex, image, and use. Ideal for students, curators, and makers curious about the confluence of form and desire; recommended as a starting point for anyone wanting to trace how the humble pot has, across centuries, come to carry some of our most intimate stories.