An epidemic of sexually-transmitted infections and sexual violence is upon us. Political interests are overriding sexual freedom in the name of morality. Marriages are just as likely to fail as they are to succeed. Why, in a time of unprecedented personal liberties and medical knowledge, are so many Americans so uncertain about what constitutes ethical sexual behavior?
Sex Appeal is neither a moralistic screed nor a self-indulgent guide to sexual utopia. Instead, it charts a thoughtful course between extremes to present six ethical principles for sexual health and happiness: do no harm, celebrate sex, be careful, know yourself, speak up and speak out, and throw no stones. Sex Appeal elaborates upon each of these principles, asserting that sex can be fun, safe, and life-enhancing if approached in the right spirit and with the information necessary to make wise sexual choices. Providing clear guidelines for individuals seeking answers to their own personal questions about sex, the book also connects these questions to larger issues, such as how we as a society can reduce levels of sexual harm and sexually-transmitted infections, and how everyday individual choices can support this effort. Persuasive and eminently readable, Sex Appeal offers a welcome dose of clarity and common sense to todays most pressing sexual issues.

A fascinating glimpse into the history of sexual perversions and diversions including fetishism, cross-dressing, 'effeminate' men and 'masculinized' women, sodomy, tribadism, masturbation, necrophilia, rape, paedophilia, flagellation, and sado-masochism, asking how these sexual inclinations were viewed at a particular time in history.

Family Newspapers? provides the first detailed historical study of modern popular press coverage of sex and private life, from the start of the mass newspaper reading boom in 1918 to the triumph of the Sun's sexualized journalism in 1978, when circulation overtook that of its rival, the Daily Mirror.
In this period, newspapers were at the heart of British popular culture, and Fleet Street's preoccupation with sex meant that the press was a hugely significant source of knowledge and imagery about sexual behavior, personal relationships, and moral codes. Focusing on changing ideas of what sexual content was deemed "fit to print," Adrian Bingham reveals how editors negotiated the tension between exploiting public curiosity about sex and ensuring that their journalism remained within the bounds of acceptability for a "family newspaper." The study challenges established interpretations of social change by drawing attention to the ways in which the press opened up the public discussion of sexuality before the 'permissiveness' of the 1960s.
Exploring the spectacular diversity of the press's sexual content--from advice columns to pin-ups, from court reports to celebrity revelations--Bingham offers a rich and thought-provoking investigation of a media form that has done much to shape the character of modern Britain.

For many years the focus of fear and disgust, the anus is actually one of the human body's most wondrous creations-elegant, efficient, and richly supplied with pleasure nerves. However, stress and ignorance can turn the anus and its functions from a source of delight into a painful disability. What's needed is an owner's manual-and here it is Join therapist and sexologist Jack Morin, Ph.D., on this tour of the anus, complete with information and exercises to open the door to new sources of comfort and gratification. You'll unlearn habits that can cause everything from hemorrhoids to chronic pelvic pain- and, if you choose, learn new ways of achieving solo and partnered pleasures through this humblest of portals.

The Cambridge Handbook of Sexual Development is a carefully curated conversation that brings together the top researchers in child and adolescent sexual development to redefine the issues, conflicts, and debates in the field. The Handbook is organized around three foundational questions: first, what is sexual development? Second, how do we study sexual development? And third, what roles might adults - including the institutions of the media, family, and education - play in the sexual development of children and adolescents? As the first of its kind, this collection integrates work from sociology, psychology, anthropology, history, education, cultural studies, and allied fields. Writing from different disciplinary traditions and about a range of international contexts, the contributors explore the role of sexuality in children's and adolescents' everyday experiences of identity, family, school, neighborhood, religion, and popular media.

For many years, the interrelated histories of prostitution and cities have perked the ears of urban scholars, but until now the history of urban sex work has dealt only in passing with questions of race. In I've Got to Make My Livin', Cynthia Blair explores African American women's sex work in Chicago during the decades of some of the city's most explosive growth, expanding not just our view of prostitution, but also of black women's labor, the Great Migration, black and white reform movements, and the emergence of modern sexuality. Focusing on the notorious sex districts of the city's south side, Blair paints a complex portrait of black prostitutes as conscious actors and historical agents; prostitution, she argues here, was both an arena of exploitation and abuse, as well as a means of resisting middle-class sexual and economic norms. Blair ultimately illustrates just how powerful these norms were, offering stories about the struggles that emerged among black and white urbanites in response to black women's increasing visibility in the city's sex economy. Through these powerful narratives, I've Got to Make My Livin' reveals the intersecting racial struggles and sexual anxieties that underpinned the celebration of Chicago as the quintessentially modern twentieth-century city.

The United States may have a puritanical past, but the 21st century is wide open to diverse gender expression and romance. Good Sex is the manifesto-or Manisexto, if you will-for this cultural revolution. Same-sex marriage is legal, the #MeToo movement has exploded, colleges nationwide now teach consent-based sexual health, the media celebrates body positivity, and transgender visibility has become mainstream. Defining "good sex" as both ethical and pleasurable, Catherine M. Roach features such topics as equity, intersectionality, and shared pleasure while offering a lively discussion that is inclusively feminist, queer-friendly, and sex-positive without being divisive. An accessible guidebook, Good Sex provides hope that America's sexual, gender, and racial injustices can be addressed together. After all, this new gender and sexual revolution strengthens the pursuit of happiness and love. Welcome to the revolution!

This ground-breaking book explores the experiences of gay men and their understanding of what it meant to be gay in the 20th Century: from when homosexuality was illegal though the less repressed but no less difficult eras of gay liberation and the HIV-AIDS epidemic.

This unique book examines the relationship between wounding and sexuality, bringing together issues around sexuality, gender, power, violence and representations. Drawing on a range of disciplines including cultural and media studies, sociology and psychology, it explores social practices such as S&M, cosmetic surgery and 'extreme' sports.

In this volume, contributors from a range of perspectives - evolutionary psychology to anthropology, sociology to cognitive and motivational psychology - explore questions of what our attractiveness preferences are and why we find certain others physically attractive, offering a fresh perspective to understanding the perception of attractiveness.

In The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, Lauren Berlant focuses on the need to revitalize public life and political agency in the United States. Delivering a devastating critique of contemporary discourses of American citizenship, she addresses the triumph of the idea of private life over that of public life borne in the right-wing agenda of the Reagan revolution. By beaming light onto the idealized images and narratives about sex and citizenship that now dominate the U.S. public sphere, Berlant argues that the political public sphere has become an intimate public sphere. She asks why the contemporary ideal of citizenship is measured by personal and private acts and values rather than civic acts, and the ideal citizen has become one who, paradoxically, cannot yet act as a citizen-epitomized by the American child and the American fetus. As Berlant traces the guiding images of U.S. citizenship through the process of privatization, she discusses the ideas of intimacy that have come to define national culture. From the fantasy of the American dream to the lessons of Forrest Gump, Lisa Simpson to Queer Nation, the reactionary culture of imperilled privilege to the testimony of Anita Hill, Berlant charts the landscape of American politics and culture. She examines the consequences of a shrinking and privatized concept of citizenship on increasing class, racial, sexual, and gender animosity and explores the contradictions of a conservative politics that maintains the sacredness of privacy, the virtue of the free market, and the immorality of state overregulation-except when it comes to issues of intimacy. Drawing on literature, the law, and popular media, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City is a stunning and major statement about the nation and its citizens in an age of mass mediation. As it opens a critical space for new theory of agency, its narratives and gallery of images will challenge readers to rethink what it means to be American and to seek salvation in its promise.

'An absolute stunner: frank, funny, self-aware, constantly surprising ... One of the most insightful representations I've read of what it feels like to be alive these days' GEORGE SAUNDERS ________________________ One day Heidi Julavits sees her son silhouetted by the sun and notices he is at the threshold of what she calls "the end times of childhood." When did this happen, she asks herself. Who is my son becoming-and what qualifies me to be his guide? What follows starts to feel like uncharted waters. Rape allegations rock the university campus where she teaches, unleashing questions of justice and accountability. Julavits begins to wonder how to prepare her son to be the best possible citizen of the world he's about to enter. And what must she learn about herself in order to responsibly steer him. Looking back to her own childhood in Maine, where she often navigated the coastline in a small boat relying on a decades-old sailing guide, Julavits takes us on an intellectual navigation of the self. Throughout, she intertwines her internal investigation with a wide-ranging exploration of what it means to raise a child in a time full of contradictions and moral complexity. Using the past and present as points of orientation, Directions to Myself examines the messy minutiae of contemporary family life alongside knottier philosophical questions of politics and gender. Through it all, Julavits discovers the beauty and the danger of telling stories as a way to locate ourselves, and help others find us. Intimate, rigorous, and refreshingly unsentimental about motherhood and parenting, Directions to Myself is a love letter to Maine and a reckoning with the disappearance of childhood-her children's and her own-that cements Julavits' reputation as one of the most engaged and innovative nonfiction writers today whose work has been called "fascinating" (Washington Post), "scathingly funny" (Los Angeles Times), and "exquisite" (New York Times).

Intimate relationships exist in social domains, in which there are cultural rules regarding appropriate behaviors. But they also inhabit psychological domains of thoughts, feelings, and desires. How are intimate relationships experienced by people living in various types of romantic or sexual relationships and in various cultural regions around the world? In what ways are they similar, and in what ways are they different? This book presents a cross-cultural extension of the findings originating from the classic Boston Couples Study. Amassing a wealth of new data from almost 9,000 participants worldwide, Hill explores the factors that predict having a current partner, relationship satisfaction, and relationship commitment. These predictions are compared across eight relationship types and nine cultural regions, then uniquely combined in a Comprehensive Partner Model and a Comprehensive Commitment Model. The findings test the generalizability of previous theories about intimate relationships, with implications for self-reflection, couples counseling, and well-being.

The provocative classic work newly updated

An intimate personal odyssey across America's changing sexual landscape

When first published, Gay Talese's 1981 groundbreaking work, "Thy Neighbor's Wife," shocked a nation with its powerful, eye-opening revelations about the sexual activities and proclivities of the American public in the era before AIDS. A marvel of journalistic courage and craft, the book opened a window into a new world built on a new moral foundation, carrying the reader on a remarkable journey from the Playboy Mansion to the Supreme Court, to the backyards and bedrooms of suburbia--through the development of the porn industry, the rise of the "swinger" culture, the legal fight to define obscenity, and the daily sex lives of "ordinary" people. It is the book that forever changed the way Americans look at themselves and one another.

A bestselling author of books on women's psychology explores the journey toward complete womanhood--"conscious femininity". Woodman (Addiction to Perfection) demonstrates the striving of contemporary women for inner balance and wholeness in a patriarchal society that resists the process. 6 halftones.

Following the success of Pink Therapy (1996 Open University Press) as a practical guide for therapists, counsellors and others in related professions working with lesbian, gay and bisexual clients in affirmative ways, this volume is the first to address how this can be approached from ten of the major therapeutic perspectives. Each approach is discussed with regard to its historical and theoretical relationship to these client groups and how the approach can be beneficial or negative. Guidelines for using the perspective supportively or practically are given, along with references for further study. The volume marks an important step in the dialogue between theoretical approaches and in the future development of, and debate about, these increasingly important fields in contemporary therapy.

This wide-ranging anthology takes a close look at the breadth of human sexuality from a Jewish perspective. The essays begin with a look at biblical and rabbinic views on sexuality, and then proceed to explorations of sexuality at different moments in the life cycle, sexuality and the marital model, diverse expressions of sexuality, examples of sexuality education, the nexus of sexuality and theology, and the challenges of contemporary sexual ethics. The Sacred Encounter is a thought-provoking and important Jewish resource. Perfect for personal study, or for high school or adult classes.

A newly revised collection of provocative essays on Sex and its many meanings in our culture by one of the most prolific, original, and highly regarded sexologists in the field today.. This newly updated collection features over 50 per cent new material, spotlighting many of Leonore Tiefer's popular as well as professional writings on the social construction of sexuality. It includes a new section on the creation of female sexual dysfunction (FSD), as well as new treatments of medicalization, feminist sex therapy, sex and humor, sexology and the pharmaceutical industry, and The Kiss. Tiefer's background as a sexologist is unusually broad, including animal mating behavior research, medical research, sex therapy, theories about the classification of dysfunctions, and feminist and cultural analysis. Her wit and passion are evident in such recent essays as Doing the Viagra Tango: Sex Pill as Symbol and Substance, The McDonaldization of Sex, and A New Sexual World-Not, as well as the now classic pieces Six Months at the Daily News, Women's Sexuality: Not a Matter of Health, and Am I Normal? The Question of Sex. This revised collection treats complex and controversial as