Sex education, but make it curious

Franklin Veaux Map of Human Sexuality the land of desire

A giant, funny, slightly chaotic map of desire that asks a very good question: what if we stopped treating sexuality like a straight line and started treating it like a country worth exploring?

Image source: HumanSexMap.com, the interactive version of Franklin Veaux's Map of Human Sexuality. The map contains explicit adult terminology, obviously. We are grown-ups here.

If you have ever opened a sex conversation and felt your brain suddenly turn into a blank white wall, the Franklin Veaux Map of Human Sexuality is the opposite of that wall. It is overloaded, playful, nerdy, outrageous, and weirdly useful. It takes the huge territory of human sexual possibility and turns it into an illustrated landscape: islands, regions, routes, borders, scary-looking places, delicious-looking places, and zones you may simply wave at from a respectful distance.

Also known online as the Human Sex Map or the Land of Human Sexuality, it is not a medical chart, not a morality test, and not a checklist you must complete to win the grand prize of being sexually enlightened. It is more like a pleasure atlas. It says: look how much exists. Look how many ways humans invent intimacy, intensity, fantasy, tenderness, control, release, embarrassment, worship, sensation, story, identity and play.

If this is your kind of beautifully nosy rabbit hole, you may also like my pleasure blog, my SEX SEX SEX sexuality workbook, and the free sex education downloads waiting for you on Please PINCH ME HARD.

And that is where it becomes interesting. Because the map is funny, yes. But underneath the joke is something serious: language makes desire easier to discuss.

What Is The Franklin Veaux Map of Human Sexuality?

The Franklin Veaux Map of Human Sexuality is a poster and interactive web project. The official poster listing describes it as a humorous way to show the scope of human sexual experience, and the interactive version lets visitors place little colored pins on the map to mark personal interest, experience, dislikes and fantasy-only zones.

That pin system is the clever bit. On the interactive map, the categories are:

• Tried and Liked: the places you have visited and would maybe visit again.
• Tried, Didn't Like: the places that taught you something, even if that something was "absolutely not, thank you."
• Things I'd Like to Try: curiosity with a little sparkle in its eye.
• Strictly Fantasy Only: hot in the mind, not wanted in the room.

That last category matters. A fantasy is not a contract. A turn-on is not an obligation. A map is not a commandment. Sometimes the sexiest thing about a thought is that it stays safely, privately, theatrically in your head.

The poster

Veaux's store lists the poster as 24 by 36 inches, printed on gloss paper, with a glossary for more unusual practices and terms.

View the poster listing

The interactive map

The online version lets you add pins and save a personalized map. A little old-school internet. A little sex-geography chaos. Very charming.

Open the interactive map

Why The Map of Human Sexuality Works So Well

Sex can feel impossible to talk about when we only have two speeds: clinical or pornographic. The map gives you a third speed: playful. It creates distance, and that distance can make honesty safer. Instead of staring into someone's eyes and announcing your deepest erotic secret like a courtroom confession, you can point at a region on a map and say, "This one makes me curious. This one scares me. This one is a no. This one lives in fantasy, and I like it there."

That is not just cute. It is practical. Good sex requires communication before, during and after. The World Health Organization frames sexual health as more than the absence of disease; it includes a positive, respectful approach to sexuality and the possibility of pleasurable, safe experiences free from coercion and violence. Translation, PPMH-style: pleasure is not dirty, but pressure is.

What The Map Is Not

It is not a complete list of every possible desire. Human erotic imagination keeps inventing new side streets. It is not a scientific taxonomy. It is not a replacement for therapy, safer-sex education, trauma-aware care, or a real conversation with the actual person in your bed.

And please, do not use it to diagnose yourself as boring. If your map has three green pins, two purple pins and a large untouched continent of "nope," congratulations: you are a human being, not a product catalogue.

The hottest people are not the ones who have tried everything. The hottest people are the ones who can tell the truth without making someone else pay for it.

How To Use The Franklin Veaux Map of Human Sexuality With A Partner

Make it a game, not an interrogation. Pour tea, wine, water, whatever makes your nervous system less dramatic. Open the interactive map or look at the poster together. Give yourselves categories. You can use Veaux's original pin language, or make your own:

• Green: yes, I like this.
• Yellow: curious, but I need more information.
• Pink: fantasy only, do not book the tickets.
• Black: no, and I do not need to justify it.

Then compare patterns instead of individual "scores." Maybe one of you is sensation-led and the other is story-led. Maybe one wants intensity and the other wants ritual. Maybe you both discover that the actual turn-on is not the activity, but the feeling underneath it: being wanted, being brave, being helpless, being worshipped, being deliciously naughty, being seen.

For more conversations like this, listen to the deep+dirty podcast or browse more short reads about pleasure, kink and intimacy.

The Real Gift Of The Human Sex Map: Better Erotic Vocabulary

Many people are not sexually closed. They are sexually under-vocabularied. They know "I like it" and "I don't like it," but they do not yet know whether they like anticipation, texture, praise, restriction, secrecy, spectacle, service, dominance, softness, pursuit, resistance, permission, danger-feeling-without-real-danger, or being the center of someone's full greedy attention.

A map helps because it turns sex into terrain. Terrain has landmarks. Landmarks help you say where you are.

And once you can say where you are, you can say the sentence that changes everything: "Meet me here."

Final Thought

Franklin Veaux's Land of Human Sexuality is funny because sex is funny. It is useful because sex is vulnerable. It is sexy because curiosity is sexy, especially when it comes with consent, honesty and the delicious relief of not pretending to be simpler than you are.

So open the map. Laugh at the names. Notice where your eyes go. Notice where your body says yes, no, maybe, not yet, never, or only in the cinema of my mind.

Then have the braver conversation.