Over half of all births to young adults in the United States now occur outside of marriage. A large proportion are unplanned. These facts suggest that today's young adults are drifting into relationships and are often unprepared for parenthood. What kind of future does this mean for their kids and for society as a whole?

In "Generation Unbound," Isabel V. Sawhill discusses likely causes for recent changes in the family, such as an increase in women's economic opportunities, the declining economic prospects of men, greater access to birth control and abortion, and new social norms that allow young people more choice --but provide less guidance on what it means to be an adult.

Isabel V. Sawhill reveals an emerging class divide in patterns of marriage and childbearing: at the top of the ladder are "planners," who are marrying and having children only after establishing a career; at the bottom, and increasingly in the middle, are "drifters" who are having unplanned children early, outside of marriage, and without the stable support of a second parent. This divide is contributing to rising inequality and less social mobility in the U.S.

Isabel V. Sawhill sees merit in the views of those on the political left, who argue for more social supports for the less advantaged, including more educational opportunities, expanded child care, parental leave, family-friendly workplaces, and financial assistance. She also agrees with those on the right who argue for traditional marriage as the best environment for raising children. But, she argues that public policies aimed at restoring marriage have not worked and that existing social supports cannot keep pace with an ongoing tide of childbearing outside of marriage. Instead, she points to a third way: greater personal responsibility among potential parents themselves. Drawing on new insights from behavioral economics, and the promise of new long-acting contraceptives, she suggests a future in which more children will be born to adults who want and are prepared to be parents. Contents

1. An Introduction

2. Changes in the Family: More Diversity, a Bigger Divide

3. Why We Should Worry: The Consequences of Choices about Marriage and Childbearing

4. A Growing Class Divide: Planners vs. Drifters

5. The Traditionalists vs. the Villagers: Why Government Alone Can't Solve the Marriage Problem

6. Making Better Decisions: The Need to Change the Default

7. Peering into the Future: Less Marriage, Fewer Children?

Beginning with the spectacle of hysteria, moving through the perversions of fetishism, masochism, and sadism, and ending with paranoia and psychosis, this book explores the ways that conflicts with the Oedipal law erupt on the body and in language in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, for Chaucer's tales are rife with issues of mastery and control that emerge as conflicts not only between authority and experience but also between power and knowledge, word and flesh, rule books and reason, man and woman, same and other - conflicts that erupt in a macabre sprawl of broken bones, dismembered bodies, cut throats, and decapitations. Like the macabre sprawl of conflict in the Canterbury Tales, this book brings together a number of conflicting modes of thinking and writing through the surprising and perhaps disconcerting use of "shadow" chapters that speak to or against the four "central" chapters, creating both dialogue and interruption.

Gender and sexuality have been neglected topics in the history of Chinese civilization, despite the fact that philosophers, writers, parents, doctors, and ordinary people of all descriptions have left reams of historical evidence on the subject. Moreover, China's late imperial government was arguably more concerned about gender and sexuality among its subjects than any other pre-modern state. Sexual desire and sexual activity were viewed as innate human needs, essential to bodily health and well-being, and universal marriage and reproduction served the state by supplying tax-paying subjects, duly bombarded with propaganda about family values. How did these and other late imperial legacies shape twentieth-century notions of gender and sexuality in modern China? In this wonderfully written and enthralling book, Susan Mann answers that question by focusing in turn on state policy, ideas about the physical body, and notions of sexuality and difference in China's recent history, from medicine to the theater to the gay bar; from law to art and sports. More broadly, the book shows how changes in attitudes toward sex and gender in China during the twentieth century have cast a new light on the process of becoming modern, while simultaneously challenging the universalizing assumptions of Western modernity.

The Gender of Sexuality serves as a fun and informative guide on how to approach the topics of gender and sexuality-two areas fraught with stereotypes and misinformation. The second edition of this book features significant new material on the changing status of gender, same sex marriage, and transgender. After introducing key concepts in gender and sexuality, the authors explore topics such as sexual desire, the role of biology, sexual behavior, uncommitted sexual relationships and "hooking up," marriage and cohabitation, and the politics of sexuality. Examples from popular culture, film, and media invite readers to engage with key concepts. This is an ideal book for courses on gender, sexuality, marriage and family, or social problems.

The archive has assumed a new significance in the history of sex, and this book visits a series of such archives, including the Kinsey Institute's erotic art; gay masturbatory journals in the New York Public Library; the private archive of an amateur pornographer; and one man's lifetime photographic dossier on Baltimore hustlers. Shedding new light on American sexual history, the topics covered are both fascinating and wide-ranging: the art history of homoeroticism; casual sex before hooking-up; transgender; New York queer sex; masturbation; pornography; sex in the city. This book will appeal to a wide readership: those interested in American studies, sexuality studies, contemporary history, the history of sex, psychology, anthropology, sociology, gender studies, queer studies, trans studies, pornography studies, visual studies, museum studies, and media studies. -- .

Force or fraud - rape or seduction? This book examines the development, between the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 and the accession of George III in 1760, of the peculiarly modern habit of making that distinction on the basis of female responsive agency. It tells the story of how rape and seduction came to be distinguished according to measures of women's resistance and consent in low-brow "amatory" writing, and how at the same time amatory fictions interrogated the implications of their own procedures, implications still very much with us today.
The amatory tales of Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, Eliza Haywood, and Samuel Richardson - early pioneers in British prose fiction - were immensely popular in their day. But they were also scandalous and controversial, not least because they so often depicted innocent young women under assault from men in positions of legitimate authority over them. Focusing on an ideologically-inflected strategy it calls "collusive resistance," Force or Fraud uncovers the paradoxical means by which formulaic late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century seduction stories wielded a surprising degree of power and influence - not only over female imaginations, publication lists, and leisure time, but also over the interpretation of one of the age's most troubling problems, the problem of constructing virtuous resistance to those in authority. Stories about the ambiguous seductions of young women helped British political subjects negotiate a period of dramatic change and uncertainty, and to imagine newly legitimate forms of resistance.

This authoritative, state-of-the-art Handbook provides an authoritative overview of issues within sexuality education, coupled with ground-breaking discussion of emerging and unconventional insights in the field. With 32 contributions from 12 countries it definitively traces the landscape of issues, theories and practices in sexuality education globally. These rich and multidisciplinary essays are written by renowned critical sexualities studies experts and rising stars in this area and grouped under four main areas: Global Assemblages of Sexuality Education Sexualities Education in Schools Sexual Cultures, Entertainment Media and Communication Technologies Re-animating What Else Sexuality Education Research Can Do, Be and Become Importantly, this Handbook does not equate sexuality education with safer sex education nor understand this subject as confined to school based programmes. Instead, sexuality education is understood more broadly and to occur in spaces as diverse as community settings and entertainment media, and via communication technologies. It is an essential and comprehensive reference resource for academics, students and researchers of sexuality education that both demarcates the field and stimulates critical discussion of its edges. Chapter 2 is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license via link.springer.com.

Within the so-called seduction community, the ability to meet and attract women is understood as a skill which heterosexual men can cultivate through practical training and personal development. Though it has been an object of media speculation - and frequent sensationalism - for over a decade, this cultural formation remains poorly understood. In the first book-length study of the industry, Rachel O'Neill takes us into the world of seduction seminars, training events, instructional guidebooks and video tutorials. Pushing past established understandings of 'pickup artists' as pathetic, pathological or perverse, she examines what makes seduction so compelling for those drawn to participate in this sphere. Seduction vividly portrays how the twin rationalities of neoliberalism and postfeminism are reorganising contemporary intimate life, as labour-intensive and profit-orientated modes of sociality consume other forms of being and relating. It is essential reading for students and scholars of gender, sexuality, sociology and cultural studies, as well as anyone who wants to understand the seduction industry's overarching logics and internal workings.

This accessible and engaging book explores the ways that "space, place, and sex" are inextricably linked from the micro to the macro level, from the individual body to the globe. Drawing on queer, feminist, gender, social, and cultural studies, Lynda Johnston and Robyn Longhurst highlight the complex nature of sex and sexuality and how they are connected to both virtual and physical spaces and places. Their aim is to enrich our understanding of sexual identities and practices whether they be lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, asexual, queer, or heterosexual. They show that bodies are defined and connected through media such as television, movies, ads, and the Internet, as well as through "real" places such as homes, churches, sports arenas, city streets, beaches, and wilderness. Drawing on a diverse array of historical and contemporary examples, the authors argue convincingly that sexual politics permeate all places and spaces at every level of geographical scale. Thus, they illustrate, sexuality affects the way people live in and interact with space and place, as space and place in turn affect people's sexuality."

The period of young adulthood, from ages 18 to 23, is popularly considered the most sexualized in life. But is it true? What do we really know about the sexual lives of young people today?
Premarital Sex in America combines illuminating personal stories and comprehensive research surveys to provide the fullest portrait of heterosexuality among young adults ever produced. Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker draw upon a wealth of survey data as well as scores of in-depth interviews with young adults from around the country, both in and out of college. Digging underneath stereotypes and unexamined assumptions, the authors offer compelling--and often surprising--answers to such questions as: How do the emotional aspects of sexual relations differ between young men and women? What role do political orientations play in their sexual relations? How have online dating and social networking sites affected the relationships of emerging adults? Why are young people today waiting so much longer to marry? How prevalent are nontraditional forms of sex, and what do people think of them? To better understand what drives the sexual behaviors of emerging adults, Regnerus and Uecker pay special attention to two important concepts: sexual scripts, the unwritten and often unconscious rules that guide sexual behavior and attitudes; and sexual economics, a theory which suggests that the relative scarcity of men on college campuses contributes to the "hookup" culture by allowing men to diminish their level of commitment and thereby lower the "price" they have to "pay" for sex.
For anyone wishing to understand how sexual relations between young adults have changed and are changing, Premarital Sex in America will serve as a touchstone for years to come.

The Greeks and Romans were not shy about sex. Drinking cups, oil-lamps and walls were decorated with scenes of seduction and sexual intercourse which make the modern viewer blush; models of penises were worn around the neck or hung from doorways. In classical Greece, statues of erect penises served as boundary-stones and signposts. In Rome, marble satyrs and nymphs grappled in gardens. How are we to make sense of this abundance of sexual imagery? Were these images seductive, shocking, humorous? Were they about sex or love? And what and how do we learn from them? Sex on Show answers these questions by embracing ancient attitudes to religion, politics, sex and gender to examine how the ancient saw themselves and their world. Covering the sixth century BC to the fourth century AD, as well as some Neoclassical art from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Sex on Show uses detailed visual analysis to bring new insights to Greek and Roman culture and to the meaning of erotic imagery, past and present. This is not simply a book about sexual practice or social history. It is a visual history - about what it meant and still means to stare sex in the face.

The topic of sexuality and gender within the South Asian context is timely and widely discussed across a variety of academic disciplines. Since the end of the last century, there have been debates in the cultural sphere in India on issues concerning Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender people's rights, gender, sex workers' rights and caste. There has also been an explicit visibility for sexuality in the form of discussion around intimate scenes in films, advertisements and moral concerns around pre-marital heterosexual relationships and same-sex relationships. This book brings out the modalities through which explicit visibility of sexuality gets constituted in the public space of India after the 1990s. The specificities through which relations of gender/ sexuality and caste get constituted and performed in regional media provide significant entry points to an understanding of larger structures and the ever-present fissures through which these larger structures emerge. Focussing on the southern state of Kerala, the book investigates women's sexuality and caste through a number of case studies: the Suryanelli rape case, neology in the media and the debates around the life narratives of Nalini Jameela, a sex worker. The book does not stop at representational practices as it also looks at the negotiations between the subject and her represented figures which is a significant addition to the existing body of work in the field of media and gender studies. Sexuality and Public Space in India is a careful interrogation of the mass-mediatized space of contemporary public discourse around sexuality. It will be of interest to academics in South Asian Studies, Sociology, Anthropology and Gender Studies.

This book examines and critiques the fact that Chile's claims to economic exceptionalism have been embodied, often quite aggressively, in a heterosexual, and primarily male, ideal. Despite the many shifts Chilean economics and politics have undergone over the past fifty years, the country's view of itself as a "model" in contrast to other Latin American countries has remained constant. By deploying an artistic, literary, and cinematic archive of queer figures from this period, this book draws parallels among the exceptionalisms of Chile's economic discourse, the subjects deemed most (and least) apt to embody it, and the maneuvers of its cultural production between local and global ideas of gender and politics to delineate its place in the world. Queering the Chilean Way thus sheds light on the sexual, economic, and aesthetic dimensions of exceptionalism-at its heart, a discourse of exclusion that often comprises a major element of nationalism-in Chile and throughout the Americas.

Sex on and with social media is often construed as deviant, risky, or something only teenagers do because they don't know better. Yet, academic scholarship has shown that sex on/with social media can allow people to create and playfully experiment with their identities; build meaningful relationships; accept themselves or build communities. This book brings the multiplicity and richness of sexual practices on, with, and around social media to a curious, intelligent lay reader, and highlights the discrepancy between the media headlines (people fearing it) and what popular Google searches show (people wanting it). The authors describe how social media has changed and shaped sex; address the common misconceptions about socially mediated sex; explain the spaces where social media sex happens, and the practices that count as social media sex. Chapters examine the main misconceptions and anxieties pertaining to socially mediated sex; explore how sexual social media practices are part of our identity; look at it as a communal/ group phenomenon; and analyse social media platforms as the intermediaries and infrastructures shaping and constraining sex. It offers an academically informed, critical but accessible discussion on sex and sexuality on and with social media.

At the height of the Victorian era, a daring group of artists and thinkers defied the reigning obsession with propriety, testing the boundaries of sexual decorum in their lives and in their work. Dante Gabriel Rossetti exhumed his dead wife to pry his only copy of a manuscript of his poems from her coffin. Legendary explorer Richard Burton wrote how-to manuals on sex positions and livened up the drawing room with stories of eroticism in the Middle East. Algernon Charles Swinburne visited flagellation brothels and wrote pornography amid his poetry. By embracing and exploring the taboo, these iconoclasts produced some of the most captivating art, literature, and ideas of their day. As thought-provoking as it is electric, Pleasure Bound unearths the desires of the men and women who challenged buttoned-up Victorian mores to promote erotic freedom. These bohemians formed two loosely overlapping societies the Cannibal Club and the Aesthetes to explore their fascinations with sexual taboo, from homosexuality to the eroticization of death. Known as much for their flamboyant personal lives as for their controversial masterpieces, they created a scandal-provoking counterculture that paved the way for such later figures as Gustav Klimt, Virginia Woolf, and Jean Genet. In this stunning expose of the Victorian London we thought we knew, Deborah Lutz takes us beyond the eyebrow-raising practices of these sex rebels, revealing how they uncovered troubles that ran beneath the surface of the larger social fabric: the struggle for women s emancipation, the dissolution of formal religions, and the pressing need for new forms of sexual expression."

What are the archives of gay and lesbian leather histories, and how have contemporary artists mined these archives to create a queer politics of the present? This book sheds light on an area long ignored by traditional art history and LGBTQ studies, examining the legacies of the visual and material cultures of US leather communities. It discusses the work of contemporary artists such as Patrick Staff, Dean Sameshima, Monica Majoli, AK Burns and AL Steiner, and the artist collective Die Kranken, showing how archival histories and contemporary artistic projects might be applied in a broader analysis of LGBTQ culture and norms. Hanky codes, blurry photographs of Tom of Finland drawings, a pin sash weighted down with divergent histories - these become touchstones for writing leather histories. -- .

Media are central to our experiences and understandings of sex, whether in the form of familiar 'mainstream' genres, pornographies and other sex genres, or the new zones, interactions and technosexualities made possible by the internet and mobile devices. In this engaging new book, Feona Attwood argues that to understand the significance of sex media, we need to examine them in terms of their distinctive characteristics, relationships to art and culture, and changing place in society. Observing the role that media play in relation to sex, gender, and sexuality, this book considers the regulation of sex and sexual representation, issues around the 'sexualization of culture', and demonstrates how a critical focus on sex media can inform debates on sex education and sexual health, as well as illuminate the relation of sex to labour, leisure, intimacy, and bodies. Sex Media is an essential resource for students and scholars of media, culture, gender and sexuality.

Honorable Mention for the 2014 MLA Alan Bray Memorial Award Finalist for the 2013 LAMBDA LGBT Studies Book Award In nineteenth-century America-before the scandalous trial of Oscar Wilde, before the public emergence of categories like homo- and heterosexuality-what were the parameters of sex? Did people characterize their sexuality as a set of bodily practices, a form of identification, or a mode of relation? Was it even something an individual could be said to possess? What could be counted as sexuality? Tomorrow's Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America provides a rich new conceptual language to describe the movements of sex in the period before it solidified into the sexuality we know, or think we know. Taking up authors whose places in the American history of sexuality range from the canonical to the improbable-from Whitman, Melville, Thoreau, and James to Dickinson, Sarah Orne Jewett, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, and Mormon founder Joseph Smith-Peter Coviello delineates the varied forms sex could take in the lead-up to its captivation by the codings of "modern" sexuality. While telling the story of nineteenth-century American sexuality, he considers what might have been lostin the ascension of these new taxonomies of sex: all the extravagant, untimely ways of imagining the domain of sex that, under the modern regime of sexuality, have sunken into muteness or illegibility. Taking queer theorizations of temporality in challenging new directions, Tomorrow's Parties assembles an archive of broken-off, uncreated futures-futures that would not come to be. Through them, Coviello fundamentally reorients our readings of erotic being and erotic possibility in the literature of nineteenth-century America.

While sex work has long been controversial, it has become even more contested over the past decade as laws, policies, and enforcement practices have become more repressive in many nations, partly as a result of the ascendancy of interest groups committed to the total abolition of the sex industry. At the same time, however, several other nations have recently decriminalized prostitution. Legalizing Prostitution maps out the current terrain. Using America as a backdrop, Weitzer draws on extensive field research in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany to illustrate alternatives to American-style criminalization of sex workers. These cases are then used to develop a roster of "best practices" that can serve as a model for other nations considering legalization. Legalizing Prostitution provides a theoretically grounded comparative analysis of political dynamics, policy outcomes, and red-light landscapes in nations where prostitution has been legalized and regulated by the government, presenting a rich and novel portrait of the multifaceted world of legal sex for sale.

Despite being integral parts of all our identities, sexuality, sex and intimacy are what many would call the Last Taboo in dementia care, usually seen as 'problem behaviours' to be stopped and dealt with. Informed by a combination of accessible neuroscience and person-centred compassion, Danuta Lipinska's new book shows that the human need for intimacy, attachment and sexual expression is as important for supporting the wellbeing and personhood of people with dementia as communication and care. Considering the brain as the body's biggest sex organ, it examines the cognitive changes that occur in dementia and what these changes mean in the context of sexual behaviour and consent. Taking Carl Rogers' Core Conditions and Tom Kitwood's psychological needs of persons living with dementia as a starting point, Lipinska offers a unique model for person-centred conversations about sex and sexuality that we have not seen before.

When a mildly kink-themed trilogy became popular in 2012, it resulted in media speculation that feminism was in reverse. As the Western media went BDSM-mad, writer Catherine Scott decided to address the growing anti-feminist conversation about kink. She found there was no writing that looked at the intersection of pop culture, BDSM and feminism; so she decided to create it herself. Taking on the different tropes that kink is often reduced to and how these are represented in books, TV shows, movies and the music industry, Scott explores the debates around BDSM and the issues raised for feminists. Is the female dominant truly powerful, or is she just another objectified body? Does lesbian BDSM avoid the problematic nature of heterosexual kink, or is it actually more subject to the male gaze? And what is it about kink that means pop culture producers, ranging from Anne Rice to the makers of Scrubs, keep using it to attract audiences? Examining these and many more debates that pop culture depictions of BDSM raise for the feminist viewer, Scott interweaves her own experiences and research in the BDSM scene with the way kink is portrayed in the media.

Reimagines black and brown sensuality to develop new modes of knowledge production In Sensual Excess, Amber Jamilla Musser imagines epistemologies of sensuality that emerge from fleshiness. To do so, she works against the framing of black and brown bodies as sexualized, objectified, and abject, and offers multiple ways of thinking with and through sensation and aesthetics. Each chapter draws our attention to particular aspects of pornotropic capture that black and brown bodies must always negotiate. Though these technologies differ according to the nature of their encounters with white supremacy, together they add to our understanding of the ways that structures of domination produce violence and work to contain bodies and pleasures within certain legible parameters. To do so, Sensual Excess analyzes moments of brown jouissance that exceed these constraints. These ruptures illuminate multiple epistemologies of selfhood and sensuality that offer frameworks for minoritarian knowledge production which is designed to enable one to sit with uncertainty. Through examinations of installations and performances like Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, Kara Walker's A Subtlety, Patty Chang's In Love and Nao Bustamante's Neapolitan, Musser unpacks the relationships between racialized sexuality and consumption to interrogate foundational concepts in psychoanalytic theory, critical race studies, feminism, and queer theory. In so doing, Sensual Excess offers a project of knowledge production focused not on mastery, but on sensing and imagining otherwise, whatever and wherever that might be.

Media are central to our experiences and understandings of sex, whether in the form of familiar 'mainstream' genres, pornographies and other sex genres, or the new zones, interactions and technosexualities made possible by the internet and mobile devices. In this engaging new book, Feona Attwood argues that to understand the significance of sex media, we need to examine them in terms of their distinctive characteristics, relationships to art and culture, and changing place in society. Observing the role that media play in relation to sex, gender, and sexuality, this book considers the regulation of sex and sexual representation, issues around the 'sexualization of culture', and demonstrates how a critical focus on sex media can inform debates on sex education and sexual health, as well as illuminate the relation of sex to labour, leisure, intimacy, and bodies. Sex Media is an essential resource for students and scholars of media, culture, gender and sexuality.

This is the first account of sexual liberation in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. Katerina Liskova reveals how, in the case of Czechoslovakia, important aspects of sexuality were already liberated during the 1950s - abortion was legalized, homosexuality decriminalized, the female orgasm came into experts' focus - and all that was underscored by an emphasis on gender equality. However, with the coming of Normalization, gender discourses reversed and women were to aspire to be caring mothers and docile wives. Good sex was to cement a lasting marriage and family. In contrast to the usual Western accounts highlighting the importance of social movements to sexual and gender freedom, here we discover, through the analysis of rich archival sources covering forty years of state socialism in Czechoslovakia, how experts, including sexologists, demographers, and psychologists, advised the state on population development, marriage and the family to shape the most intimate aspects of people's lives.