With the recent media interest in celebrity childhood sexual abuse and rape cases, we think we know what sexual violence is and who 'rape victims' are. But this portrayal is limited. Drawing on in-depth accounts from women who have experienced rape, this book revisits issues of credibility, responsibility and feminism to provide missing details.

This book explains how the short-lived sexual revolution 50 years ago has led to the current evolution of our sexual values and behaviors and social standards among youth culture, examining topics such as communication technologies and sex, teen pregnancy, and divorce rates in the Bible Belt. Is an increase in sexual activity during adolescence a normal part of the transition to adulthood, or evidence of a societal problem? Why would conservative religious youth become sexually active earlier than their peers and be more likely to have an unintended pregnancy or sexually transmitted disease? How are women continuing to lead our society's sexual transformation? Written by an author whose 40-year career in sexology and university administration provides a uniquely qualified perspective upon both sex research and the changing sexual perceptions of American youth, this comprehensive book is must-read for both parents and policy makers. America's Sexual Transformation traces the philosophical, cultural, and scientific developments responsible for the beginning and end of America's sexual revolution that have now spawned a more substantive sexual transformation. It examines traditional theories and attitudes regarding sex, and demonstrates how the findings of sex research provide entirely new paradigms that should replace outmoded and harmful theories. This groundbreaking book also explains who we are as sexual individuals and how we got to be that way. Chapter notes highlight some of the major sex research studies of the past 50 years Case studies and personal histories document unusual sexual preferences and how the practice of sex therapy is changing with current communication technologies A comprehensive index helps readers find salient points easily

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.

Europe and the European Union are unavoidable, if ambiguous, political references in the post-Yugoslav space. This volume interrogates the forms and implications of the increasingly potent symbolic nexus that has developed between non-heterosexual sexualities, LGBT activism(s) and Europeanisation(s) in all of the Yugoslav successor states. Contributors to this book show how the long EU accession process disseminates discursive tools employed in LGBT activist struggles for human rights and equality. This creates a linkage between "Europeanness" and "gay emancipation" which elevates certain forms of gay activist engagement and perhaps also non-heterosexuality, more generally, to a measure of democracy, progress and modernity. At the same time, it relegates practices of intolerance to the LGBT community to the status of non-European primitivist Other who is inevitably positioned in the patriarchal past that should be left behind. >

View the Table of Contents. Read the Introduction.

aThe first book to date to take an in-depth look at the meaning men and women ascribe to their first experiences with sexual intercourse....This body of research appears to be promising and will likely add much information to literature in the area of sexual behavior.a
&$151;"Sex Roles"

"Well written and engaging, Virginity Lost is an extremely valuable contribution, giving us in depth and moving descriptions of how first sexual experiences changed men's and women's lives and capturing interesting comparisons of both heterosexual and homosexual relationships and encounters. Laura Carpenter assumes nothing, and therefore, learns a great deal. Reading this book has changed the way I look at first intercourse. I am in the author's debt, as is, I believe, the entire field of sexology."
--Pepper Schwartz, author of "Everything You Know about Love and Sex Is Wrong"

"A provocative book. Carpenter's extensive in-depth research shows that the meaning of virginity loss differs by gender and by sexual orientation. For the details, read this excellent book!"
--Judith Lorber, author of "Paradoxes of Gender"

"Laura Carpenter has added hugely to our impoverished understanding of how young people manage the transition from virginity. Her lively and graceful account of virginity loss enriches our knowledge of sexual development."--Frank Furstenberg, author of "Teenage Sexuality, Pregnancy, and Childbearing"

"I've read many books in the field of sexuality, and I must say that this is one of the best I've come across. . . . A joy to read."
--Denise Donnelly, co-editor of "Sex Matters: The Sexuality and Society Reader"

aThis is agreat book. It is well researched, grounded in compelling personal stories from 61 diverse young Americans, and accessibly written...Carpenter nicely grounds her analysis in sociocultural context, considering wider social reasons for shifting attitudes toward virginity loss and adeptly attending to the intersecting identifications of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality.a
"Choice," Highly recommended

Nervous, inexperienced, confused. For most, losing your virginity is one of life's most significant moments, always to be remembered. Of course, experiences vary, but Laura Carpenter asks: Is there an ideal way to lose it? What would constitute a "positive" experience? What often compels the big step? And, further, what does "going all the way" really mean for young gays and lesbians?

In this first comprehensive study of virginity loss, Carpenter teases out the complexities of all things virgin by drawing on interviews with both young men and women who are straight, gay or bisexual. Virginity Lost offers a rare window into one of life's most intimate and significant sexual moments. The stories here are frank, poignant and fascinating as Carpenter presents an array of experiences that run the gamut from triumphant to devastating.

Importantly, Carpenter argues that one's experience of virginity loss can have a powerful impact on one's later sexual experiences. Especially at a time of increased debate about sexual abstinence versus safe sex education in public schools, this important volume will provide essential information about the sex lives of young people.

This book examines how gay place-making challenged the juggernaut of neoliberal urbanization in the Malate district of Manila. In this ethnography, Collins explores the creation of place, characterized by neighborhood renewal, gay community and entrepreneurialism, and informal gay sexual labor. Malate teaches us that the power of sexual community to sustain a transgressive, inclusive, gay neighborhood is circumscribed and fleeting, and that urban livability, justice, and freedom must be pursued through organized grassroots political projects if the magic of Malate is to be revived for all its residents.

This text is intended to help social work practitioners move beyond both these often-accepted constructions of sexuality and the range of methods that are available to social workers in their clinical practice. Various themes are apparent throughout each of the chapters in this volume: the range of sexual experience and expression that exists across individuals; a recognition of our society's responses to expressions of sexuality, including the social, attitudinal, and cultural barriers that inhibit the expression of healthy sexuality and that constrain our approaches to assisting individuals with their recovery from trauma; the need to consistently and painstakingly examine our own assumptions relating to sexuality in order to be more effective with our clients; and the delicate balance that is often required when working with clients around issues of sexuality in the context of institutions, community, and societal structures. "

View the Table of Contents
Read the Introduction

aThoughtful, persuasive, solidly constructed, and likely to endure the test of time.a--"Choice"

aHalf the 14 essays in this interdisciplinary study of seventeenth- through nineteenth-century America are reprints--though it's useful to have work that appeared in academic journals collected in one place. Among original work, Ramon A. Gutierrez's revisionist perspective on Native American "berdache" will raise the most eyebrows: rather than exalt their same-sex spirituality, fashionable among gay liberationists and radical faeries alike, the author's theory is that they led lives of sexual ahumiliation and endless work, not of celebration and veneration.a Among the reprints, Caleb Crain's account of a romantic triangle among three Philadelphia men that began in 1786, culled from their diaries, is the sweetest. Several essays draw on court records dating back as far as three hundred years to unearth queer lives, while others glean an intriguing and instructive glimpse of the past through a reading of Colonial-era fiction and journalism.a
--"Q Syndicate"

aIlluminate[s] the complexity, breadth, and social impact of sexuality in history.a--"The Gay & Lesbian Review"

aAn excellent introduction to the dynamic new work on sexuality in colonial and early national America, which not only expands our understanding of early America but forces us to rethink paradigms and periodizations that have long governed histories of sexuality in the U.S. A valuable contribution.a
--George Chauncey, author of "Why Marriage?"

aThis splendid collection illustrates the maturation of lesbian and gay history. The early American era emerges as arich period for understanding same-sex desire in both law and culture. It also proves critical for re-evaluating the dominant interpretations of the emergence of modern homosexual identities.a
--Estelle B. Freedman, author of "Feminism, Sexuality, and Politics"

aThis book fills a huge gap in research on same-sex sexuality, and usefully complicates our historical understanding of acts and identities. Long before Stonewall there were sexual identities! But their character will surprise you.a
--Jonathan Ned Katz, author of "Love Stories"

aRepresents an important contribution to American historical and sexuality studies.a--"The Gay & Lesbian Review/Worldwide"

"A major, ground-breaking study of early America. Readers will come away with a fresh sense of the centrality of sexuality to any understanding of the formation of the new Republic."
--Martha Vicinus, author of "Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778-1928"

"This splendid collection, interdisciplinary but deeply historical, illustrates the maturation of lesbian and gay history as it has expanded its chronological and regional scope and its methodological depths.."
--Estelle B. Freedman, author of "Feminism, Sexuality, and Politics"

Although the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City symbolically mark the start of the gay rights movement, individuals came together long before the modern era to express their same-sex romantic and sexual attraction toward one another, and in a myriad of ways. Some reflected on their desires in quiet solitude, while others endured verbal, physical, and legal harassment for publicly expressing homosexual interest through words or actions.

Long Before Stonewall seeks touncover the many iterations of same-sex desire in colonial America and the early Republic, as well as to expand the scope of how we define and recognize homosocial behavior. Thomas A. Foster has assembled a path-breaking, interdisciplinary collection of original and classic essays that explore topics ranging from homoerotic imagery of black men to prison reform to the development of sexual orientations. This collection spans a regional and temporal breadth that stretches from the colonial Southwest to Quaker communities in New England. It also includes a challenge to commonly accepted understandings of the Native American berdache. Throughout, connections of race, class, status, and gender are emphasized, exposing the deep foundations on which modern sexual political movements and identities are built.

It has often been assumed that Europeans invented and had the exclusive monopoly over courtly and romantic love, commonly considered to be the highest form of relations between men and women. This view was particularly prevalent between 1770 and the mid-twentieth century, but was challenged in the 1960s when romantic love came to be seen as a universal sentiment that can be found in all cultures in the world. However, there remains the historical problem that the Europeans used this concept of love as a fundamental part of their self-image over a long period (traces of it still remain) and it became very much caught up in the concept of marriage. This book challenges the underlying Eurocentrism of this notion while exploring in a more general sense the connection between identity and emotions.

Real Sex Films explores one of the most controversial movements in international cinema through an innovative interdisciplinary combination of theories of globalization and embodiment. Risk sociology, feminist film theory and critical feminist mapping theory are brought together with concepts of production, narrative, genre, authorship, stardom, spectatorship and social audience as several lenses of both 'mutual understanding' and 'galvanizing extension' in ways of seeing this object of 'real-sex cinema'. Notions of personal subjectivity and critical distance, disciplinary co-operation and critique, and cinematic perceptions of the utopia and dystopia of love within risk modernity are the tensions exposed reflexively and in parallel, as each chapter focuses different lenses communicating intimacy, desire, risk and transgression. This is a book which substantively, methodologically and theoretically is embracing and engaging in its consideration of the images, ethics, 'double standards' and embodiments of brutal cinema. Written in a style free of jargon, and crossing the boundaries of film studies, media and cultural studies, the ethnographic turn, risk sociology, feminist psychoanalytical and geopolitical studies, this is a book for students, academics as well as general and professional audiences.

Drawing on hundreds of interviews with 15-22 year old straight and gay male athletes in both the United States and the United Kingdom, this book explores how jocks have redefined heterosexuality, and no longer fear being thought gay for behaviors that constrained men of the previous generation.

Visibility matters in contemporary societies; online, in the media and in the public eye. But who is seen and how? Are women still seen through a male gaze? This book explores the politics of looking and being looked at, and the relationship between actual and virtual worlds, for example in sport, art and cinema.

This book examines how socio-political assumptions inform and shape the contestation of sexuality on the African continent. Across Africa, the idea that homosexuality is un-African, un-Christian, un-natural, and un-cultural is now well established. This book analyzes politically- and religiously-inspired protective homophobia within the context of Africa's socioeconomic and political place in the global community. The author builds upon on-the-ground research and his groundbreaking previous studies on the cultural politics of globalization in Africa to present a wide, complex, and interdisciplinary understanding of Africa's sexual politics.

In Violence and Desire in Brazilian Lesbian Relationships, Allen examines the lives of Brazilian women in same-sex relationships. This examination contributes to interdisciplinary discussions of female same-sex sexuality, violence, race, and citizenship. Using fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, primarily with Afro-Brazilian women in the city of Salvador da Bahia, Allen argues that Brazilian lesbian women reject Brazilian cultural norms that encourage male domination and female submission through their engagement in romantic relationships with each other. At the same time Allen claims lesbian women also reproduce Brazilian cultural ideals that associate passion, intensity, and power with physical dominance through their engagement in infidelity and intimate partner violence. The book demonstrates that lesbian women are nonetheless marginalized as Brazilian citizens through widespread social and political invisibility despite these apparent displays of masculinized power.

Palgrave Advances in the Modern History of Sexuality offers a comprehensive and accessible overview of historical debate in the history of European and American sexuality since c. 1750. Each chapter explores in detail one theme, such as race, pornography, marriage, science or religion, which historians have seen as essential to writing the history of sexuality. The book therefore not only offers a broad introduction to the state of the art, but also suggests new directions for research and debate.

Sex and Ethics: Essays on Sexuality, Virtue and the Good Life, edited by Raja Halwani, is an anthology that addresses a hitherto very neglected philosophical field comprising issues about virtue and virtue ethics, on the one hand, and sexuality and sex, on the other. The topics range from discussions of particular virtues and vices related to sexuality, to the role of sexuality in the ethical life, to feminism and sex and virtue, to issues surrounding virtue and adultery, promiscuity, and pornography.

This dynamic collection of original essays by leading international film scholars and classicists addresses the provocative representation of sexuality in the ancient world on screen. Throughout the history of cinema, filmmakers have returned to the history, mythology, and literature of Greek and Roman antiquity as the ideal site for narratives of erotic adventure and displays of sexual excess. A critical reader on the creative approaches used to screen sexuality in classical settings, contributors utilize case studies from films such as Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Angels & Insects (1995), and Alexander (2004) as well as the television series Rome (2005-07) and Spartacus: Blood and Sand (2010). Featuring contributors such as Antony Augoustakis, Alison Futrell, Paula James, and Corinne Pache, the essays in this collection apply a variety of theoretical perspectives to the role of love and sexuality in screening the ancient world.

This book is a social critique of the cultural taboo of the female virginity in the Middle East. It highlights the unobtainability of this cultural myth and its multilevel destructive influences on various aspects of social life.

This book explores the courtship and marriage of Gwyneth Murray, an English woman, and a Canadian, Harry Logan, who wrote in the personae of their vagina (Dardanella) and penis (Peter) during World War I. Through an analysis of their extensive daily correspondence over nearly a decade, it uncovers the couple's changing attitudes to the intersection of sexuality and religion, to marriage and childrearing, as they navigated the transition from Victorian to modern values. By focusing on first-person narratives, this book enriches our understanding of gender identities revealing how porous the boundaries remained between notions of 'heterosexual' and 'same-sex' friendships. This study offers an unprecedented perspective on one couple's sexual practices, which included mutual masturbation and oral sex, and constitutes one of the most intensive examinations of female attitudes to sexual pleasure in an era of female emancipation.

"Love, Sex, and Democracy in Japan during the American Occupati"on is the first book in English to examine the radical changes that took place in Japanese ideas about sex, romance and male-female relations in the wake of Japan's defeat and occupation by Allied forces at the end of the Second World War. It is based on extensive archival research into popular magazines and newspapers as well as a range of sexological publications including sex guides, reports and manuals published during the Occupation and immediately after. Although the main focus of the book is on heterosexual discourse and practice, the postwar period also saw the rapid development of a range of sexual minority subcultures: both male and female homosexuality are discussed as are a range of heterosexual "perversions," including both male and female cross-dressing and sado-masochism, that were sources of fascination in the early postwar years. The book examines all these in relation to ideas of democracy brought and embodied by the Occupation, adding an important dimension to studies of Japan's sexual customs during the Occupation period.

In this book, Meenakshi Gigi Durham outlines and advances a progressive feminist framework for digital ethics in the technosexual landscape, exploring the complex and evolving interrelationships between sex and tech. Today we live in a "sexscape," a globalized assemblage of media, transnational capital, sexual practices, and identities. Sexuality suffuses the contemporary media-saturated environment; we engage with sex via cellphone apps and airport TVs, billboards and Jumbotron screens. Our techniques of sexual representation and body transformation - from sexting to plastic surgeries - occur in relation to our deep and complex engagements with mediated images of desire. These technosexual interactions hold the promise of sexual liberation and boldly imaginative pleasures. But in the machinic suturing of technologies with bodies, the politics of race, class, gender, and nation continue to matter. Paying acute attention to media's relationship to the politics of location, social hierarchies, and regulatory schemas, the author mounts a lucid and passionate argument for an ethics of technosex invested in the analysis of power.

The mainstreaming of pornographic imagery into fashion and popular culture at the turn of the millennium in Britain and the US signalled a dramatic cultural shift in construction of both femininity and masculinity. For men and women, raunch became the new cool. This engaging book draws from a diverse range of examples including film, popular tabloids, campus culture, mass media marketing campaigns, facebook profiles, and art exhibits to explore expressions and meanings of porn chic. Bringing a cultural and feminist lens to the material, this book challenges the reader to question the sexual agency of the 12-year-old girl dressed to seduce in fashions inspired by Katie Price, the college co-ed flashing her breasts for a film maker during Spring break, and the waitress making her customer happy with chicken wings and a nice set of Hooters. Further it explores the raunchy bad boys being paid handsomely to tell the world about their sexual exploits, online, on film, and in popular press bestsellers. The book also contains thought-provoking artwork by Nicola Bockelmann which focuses on the permeable border between pornography and mainstream culture and urges viewers to question everyday explicitness. Balancing a popular culture approach and a strong analytic lens, Porn Chic will engage a wide audience of readers interested in popular culture, fashion, and gender studies.

Written by sex educator and body-positivity advocate Ruby Rare, Sex Ed is the practical and fun guide to sex that you've always wanted - but never known how to ask for. This is the information you should have been taught at school: a no-holds-barred roadmap that covers everything from how the brain is the most important sex organ and how to communicate what you want to yourself and a partner, all the way down to the messy stuff - solo sex, orgasms, touching, kissing, blow jobs, cunnilingus, anal play, lube, toys, kegels. After all, sex education shouldn't start and end with putting a condom on a banana.

Adventures in Kate Bush and Theory presents Kate Bush as you have never seen her before. Here is the polymorphously perverse Kate, the witchy Kate, the queer Kate; the Kate who moves beyond the mime.Drawing on cutting edge feminist philosophy, critical theory and queer studies, Adventures in Kate Bush and Theory makes theory accessible to new audiences. Through analysis of the music, film, video and dance of Kate Bush, it breaks down boundaries between the academic and popular, showing that theory can be sordid, funny and relevant - despite what most people think.

The first half of the twentieth century witnessed a revolution in contraceptive behaviour as the large Victorian family disappeared. This book offers a new perspective on the gender relations, sexual attitudes, and contraceptive practices that accompanied the emergence of the smaller family in modern Britain. Kate Fisher draws on a range of first-hand evidence, including over 190 oral history interviews, in which individuals born between 1900 and 1930 described their marriages and sexual relationships. By using individual testimony she challenges many of the key conditions that have long been envisaged by demographic and historical scholars as necessary for any significant reduction in average family size to take place. Dr Fisher demonstrates that a massive expansion in birth control took place in a society in which sexual ignorance was widespread; that effective family limitation was achieved without the mass adoption of new contraceptive technologies; that traditional methods, such as withdrawal, abstinence, and abortion were often seen as preferable to modern appliances, such as condoms and caps; that communication between spouses was not key to the systematic adoption of contraception; and, above all, that women were not necessarily the driving force behind the attempt to avoid pregnancy. Women frequently avoided involvement in family planning decisions and practices, whereas the vast majority of men in Britain from the interwar period onward viewed the regular use of birth control as a masculine duty and obligation. By allowing this generation to speak for themselves, Kate Fisher produces a richer understanding of the often startling social attitudes and complex conjugal dynamics that lay behind the vast changes in contraceptive behaviour and family size in the twentieth century.