by Natalie Bennett

At the start of “Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now”, the Barbican curators are almost paranoically determined to remind you that you are in an art gallery, not some slimy back street show, despite the “strictly no under 18s” sign on the door. So, they proclaim, “We are offering you the pleasure of being seduced by the artistry with which sexual subjects have been brought to life. Above all we hope that seduced will help us reflect on what we share with people from different ages and cultures.”

And they even show a playful turn, beginning with a plaster cast of fig leaf for Michelangelo’s David “unknown artist probably English 1857” – apparently it was presented to Queen Victoria at her request, to protect the modesty of those viewing a plaster cast of the original. After that, it might not surprise you to know that there are few English, or British, artists here. Or that in the Bourbon Museum in Naples the “reserved cabinet”, where visitors had to get a special permit, most requests came from Englishmen.

The claim for some sort of universalism in approach to sex made at the entrance is further dispelled by the ancient material. To the Greeks and the Romans sex was about much more than, well sex.

I can’t imagine precisely the purpose of meaning of the tintinnabulum, a chime shaped as a large winged penis that has limbs that are also penises (or should that be penii? I’ve not previously had cause to ponder that grammatical question.) But surely it must have been symbolic and religious – just like the art of Pompei.

Then, by the Apollodoru painter, is an Attic kylix of circa 490BC showing a sapphic scene of a crouching woman fingering another. But she’s holding a vase in one outstretched hand and perhaps playing a musical instrument in the other – the meaning is surely symbolic rather than erotic.

And into early modern times, particularly but not solely with work of “popular”, “low art” forms, some of this ancient sense of sex as symbol remains. I was struck by the curiously prosaic imagine on a French 16th-century polychrome majolica ceremonial dish of a woman with a basket of phalli. She’s seated on the ground in a demure posture, with her legs tucked under skirt and a serious expression. Similar in feel is an etching by Giulio Romano (Pippi) of a naked woman approaching a man on a bed to kill him. A fully dressed haggard man, perhaps death, holds back the curtain for her.

Often too, sexual art is as much about politics as pleasure. An etching by Rembrandt van Rijin from the 17th century, “The monk in the cornfield”, engaged in fervent intercourse with a male partner was surely political, for all this it is a beautifully executed piece of homoerotic art. The exhibition notes that Sade’s novels were tolerated after the revolution because political pornography had played an important role in undermining the ancien regime.

These are all lines that can be traced through time and culture, but there’s one certainty here that crosses over almost all of the art. Sex here, is for the women depicted, very often very clearly work. They are the ones labouring; men, whether participating or looking at the art, are enjoying, relaxing, consuming.

On one Japanese shunga print the woman is playing the lute in the act of congress while man lies back and watches. That looks like hard work. In the sometimes disturbing Kinsey collection of pornography, is a perhaps 1890s photograph of a woman lifting her dress to show her naked body. It covers her face, but in every line of her body is resigned misery.

A collection of British photographs from that era has women dressed as maids showing their genitalia for higher class male gratification. They are young but you can see the marks of hardship in their faces, and, in some, clear discomfort at what they are doing.

But just occasionally there is amusement, a woman who turns her gaze piercingly upon her viewers. This is very clear in the photograph of a woman using a parsnip for unusual purposes. She says with her eyes: `the jokes on you”. You feel she was paid rather well for it — by her standards at least — and not the least discomforted by the experience.

The imbalance continues right into the modern era, with the photographs of Jean-Jaques Lebel’s performance of “120 minutes devoted to the divine Maruis from 1966”. We’re not told the name of any of his mostly female performers.

Only at the very end of the show, chronologically, is this KR Buxley’s “Requiem”, a riposte to Warhol`s “Blowjob”. Unlike him she doesn’t hide behind the camera but is the object of the lens. Her face evokes the ecstasy of Bernini’s St Teresa, an effect in part achieved by the film being accompanied by Faure`s 1888 requiem. Then towards end she looks down to her partner and thanks him.

It is a very rare — in this exhibition at least — exposure of a genuinely female-centred eroticism. She’s not here, it appears, doing the work, but unlike the males coming before, she’s at least aware of, and appreciative of, the efforts of those who are.

Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now, continues at the Barbican until January 27. Other views: on Guardian arts blog, a Telegraph collection of images, and The Times.