One thing we know for certain is that sex is personal: perhaps the most intimate thing of all. But sex is also shaped by a complicated web of cultural, social and political forces outside of ourselves. Fear-mongering, moral panic and outdated attitudes prevail, but if #MeToo has taught us anything, it's how dangerous it is to keep conversations about sex hidden from view. Behind Closed Doors invests in a radical, inclusive and honest sex education, taking us beyond learning about the 'birds and the bees', to identifying inequality that stands in the way of sexual freedom. From contraceptives to virginity, consent to pornography, transphobia to sexual abuse, the book shows how our desires are influenced by powerful political processes that can be transformed.

Drawing on ethnographic research and often deeply personal experiences with musical cultures, Queering the Field: Sounding out Ethnomusicology unpacks a history of sentiment that veils the treatment of queer music and identity within the field of ethnomusicology. The thematic structure of the volume reflects a deliberate cartography of queer spaces in the discipline-spaces that are strongly present due to their absence, are marked by direct sonic parameters, or are called into question by virtue of their otherness. As the first large-scale study of ethnomusicology's queer silences and queer identity politics, Queering the Field directly addresses the normativities currently at play in musical ethnography (fieldwork, analysis, performance, transcription) as well as in the practice of musical ethnographers (identification, participation, disclosure, observation, authority). While rooted in strong narrative convictions, the authors frequently adopt radicalized voices with the goal of queering a hierarchical sexual binary. The essays in the volume present rhetorical and syntactical scenarios that challenge us to read in prescient singular ways for future queer writing and queer thought in ethnomusicology.

Christians Under Covers shifts how scholars and popular media talk about religious conservatives and sex. Moving away from debates over homosexuality, premarital sex, and other perceived sexual sins, Kelsy Burke examines Christian sexuality websites to show how some evangelical Christians use digital media to promote the idea that God wants married, heterosexual couples to have satisfying sex lives. These evangelicals maintain their religious beliefs while incorporating feminist and queer language into their talk of sexuality-encouraging sexual knowledge, emphasizing women's pleasure, and justifying marginal sexual practices within Christian marriages. This illuminating ethnography complicates the boundaries between normal and subversive, empowered and oppressed, and sacred and profane.

The movement of millions of settlers to Siberia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries marked one of the most ambitious undertakings pursued by the tsarist state. Colonizing Russia's Promised Land examines how Russian Orthodoxy acted as a basic building block for constructing Russian settler communities in current-day southern Siberia and northern Kazakhstan. Russian state officials aspired to lay claim to land that was politically under their authority, but remained culturally unfamiliar. By exploring the formation and evolution of Omsk diocese - a settlement mission - Colonizing Russia's Promised Land reveals how the migration of settlers expanded the role of Orthodoxy as a cultural force in transforming Russia's imperial periphery by "russifying" the land and marginalizing the Indigenous Kazakh population. In the first study exploring the role of Orthodoxy in settler colonialism, Aileen Friesen shows how settlers, clergymen, and state officials viewed the recreation of Orthodox parish life as practised in European Russia as fundamental to the establishment of settler communities, and to the success of colonization. Friesen uniquely gives peasant settlers a voice in this discussion, as they expressed their religious aspirations and fears to priests and tsarist officials. Despite this agreement, tensions existed not only among settlers, but also within the Orthodox Church as these groups struggled to define what constituted the Russian Orthodox faith and culture.

The last twenty years have seen a growth in multi-disciplinary work in the area of sexuality, culture and health. What was once a set of specialist concerns has been steadily mainstreamed. Alongside this, a broader interest has developed in 'social' and 'cultural' factors relating to sexuality and sexual health, from family planning and STI management to gender and intimate partner violence and the technologisation of sex. This book offers a research-based overview of key topics relevant to social and cultural perspectives on sexuality and sexual health. Beginning with an extended introduction and divided into six sections, it looks at culture, sex and gender, sexual diversity, sex work, migration and sexual violence. Each section opens with an editorial discussion which places the theme, and the chapters that follow, in a contemporary context. Six additional substantive chapters can be accessed online at www.routledge.com/cw/aggleton. Including cutting-edge conceptual and empirical material from around the world, this is a key resource for students in, and across, a variety of academic disciplines in the social and health sciences. It is especially suitable for readers from sexuality studies, gender studies, development studies, anthropology and sociology as well as those with public health and social work backgrounds.

The last twenty years have seen a growth in multi-disciplinary work in the area of sexuality, culture and health. What was once a set of specialist concerns has been steadily mainstreamed. Alongside this, a broader interest has developed in 'social' and 'cultural' factors relating to sexuality and sexual health, from family planning and STI management to gender and intimate partner violence and the technologisation of sex. This book offers a research-based overview of key topics relevant to social and cultural perspectives on sexuality and sexual health. Beginning with an extended introduction and divided into six sections, it looks at culture, sex and gender, sexual diversity, sex work, migration and sexual violence. Each section opens with an editorial discussion which places the theme, and the chapters that follow, in a contemporary context. Six additional substantive chapters can be accessed online at www.routledge.com/cw/aggleton. Including cutting-edge conceptual and empirical material from around the world, this is a key resource for students in, and across, a variety of academic disciplines in the social and health sciences. It is especially suitable for readers from sexuality studies, gender studies, development studies, anthropology and sociology as well as those with public health and social work backgrounds.

When we talk about sex, we talk about women as mysterious, deceptive, and - above all - untrustworthy. Women lie about orgasms. Women lie about being virgins. Women lie about who got them pregnant, about whether they were raped, about how many people they've had sex with and what sort of experiences they've had - the list goes on and on. Over and over we're reminded that, on dates, in relationships, and especially in the bedroom, women just aren't telling the truth. But where does this assumption come from? Are women actually lying about sex, or does society just think we are? In Faking It, Lux Alptraum tackles the topic of seemingly dishonest women; investigating whether women actually lie, and what social situations might encourage deceptions both great and small. Using her experience as a sex educator and former CEO of Fleshbot (the foremost blog on sexuality), first-hand interviews with sexuality experts and everyday women, Alptraum raises important questions: are lying women all that common - or is the idea of the dishonest woman a symptom of male paranoia? Are they trying to please men, or just trying to trick and trap them? And what affect does all this dishonesty - whether real or imagined - have on women's self-images, social status, and safety? Through it all, Alptraum posits that even if women are lying, we're doing it for very good reason--to protect ourselves ("My boyfriend will be here any minute," to a creep who won't go away, for one), and in situations where society has given us no other choice.

Providing one of the first comprehensive, cross-cultural examinations of the dynamic market for sexual services, this book presents an evidence-based look at the multiple factors related to purchasing patterns and demand among clients who have used the internet. The data is drawn from two large surveys of sex workers' clients in the US and UK. The book presents descriptive baseline data on client engagement with online platforms, demographics and patterns of frequency in different markets, information on smaller niche markets and client reactions to exploitation, safety and changes in the law. The book makes clear that a variety of situational as well as individual factors affect the willingness and ability to purchase sexual services. The view that emerges shatters the stereotypes and generalistions on which much policy is based and demonstrates the complexities surrounding who pays for sex and the contours of sexual consumption in consumer culture.

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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.

Sex in the Middle East and North Africa examines the sexual practices, politics, and complexities of the modern Arab world. Short chapters feature a variety of experts in anthropology, sociology, health science, and cultural studies. Many of the chapters are based on original ethnographic and interview work with subjects involved in these practices and include their voices. The book is organized into three sections: Single and Dating, Engaged and Married, and It's Complicated. The allusion to categories of relationship status on social media is at once a nod to the compulsion to categorize, recognition of the many ways that categorization is rarely straightforward, and acknowledgment that much of the intimate lives described by the contributors is mediated by online technologies.

What would happen if pleasure were made the organizing principle for social relations and sexual pleasure ruled over all? Radical French libertines experimented clandestinely with this idea during the Enlightenment. In explicit novels, dialogues, poems, and engravings, they wrenched pleasure free from religion and morality, from politics, aesthetics, anatomy, and finally reason itself, and imagined how such a world would be desirable, legitimate, rapturous-and potentially horrific. Laying out the logic and willful illogic of radical libertinage, this book ties the Enlightenment engagement with sexual license to the expansion of print, empiricism, the revival of skepticism, the fashionable arts and lifestyles of the Ancien Regime, and the rise and decline of absolutism. It examines the consequences of imagining sexual pleasure as sovereign power and a law unto itself across a range of topics, including sodomy, the science of sexual difference, political philosophy, aesthetics, and race. It also analyzes the roots of radical claims for pleasure in earlier licentious satire and their echoes in appeals for sexual liberation in the 1960s and beyond.

This book examines sexuality in the past, and explores how it helps explain sexuality in the present. The subject of sexuality is often a controversial one, and exploring it through a world history perspective emphasizes the extent to which societies, including our own, are still reacting to historical change through contemporary sexual behaviors, values, and debates. The study uses a clear chronological structure to focus on major patterns and changes in sexuality-both sexual culture and sexual behaviors-in the main periods of world history, covering topics including: * The sexual implications of the transition from hunting and gathering economies to agricultural economies; * Sexuality in classical societies; * The postclassical period and the spread of the world religions; * Sex in an age of trade and colonies; * Changes in sexual behaviors and sexual attitudes between 1750 and 1950; * Sex in contemporary world history. This new edition examines these issues on a global scale, with attention to anthropological insights on sexuality and their relationship to history, the dynamics between sexuality and imperialism, sexuality in industrial society, and trends and conflicts surrounding views of sex and sexuality in the contemporary world.

Engaging with discussions surrounding the culture of disease, Disrupting Breast Cancer Narratives explores politically insistent narratives of illness. Resisting the optimism of pink ribbon culture, these stories use anger as a starting place to reframe cancer as a collective rather than an individual problem. Disrupting Breast Cancer Narratives discusses the ways emotion, gender, and sexuality, in relation to breast cancer diagnosis and treatment, all become complicated, relational, and questioning. Providing theoretically informed close-readings of breast cancer narratives, this study explores how disruption functions both personally and politically. Highlighting a number of contributors in the field of health and gender studies including Barbara Ehrenreich, Kathlyn Conway, Audre Lorde, and Teva Harrison, this work takes into account documentary film, television, and social media as popular mediums used to explore stories of disease.

Mediated Intimacy looks at contemporary sex and relationship advice, exploring how our intimate lives are shaped through different media, from manuals and magazines to television and Twitter. By exploring how intimacy is constructed through different media texts, the authors consider which ideas and practices these changing forms of 'sexpertise' open up, and which they close down.The book reveals the intimate operation of power in mediated advice, how words and images, stories and sound can work to shore up social injustice. It critically engages with the ideas of choice and responsibility in sex self-help, arguing that these can obscure and/or justify oppression, even if they're sometimes experienced as empowering and/or pleasurable.This bold and incisive book provides a radical challenge to the assumptions underlying the sex advice industry, and presents a critical, collaborative and consensual vision for sex advice of the future.

A 2015 survey of twenty-seven elite colleges found that twenty-three percent of respondents reported personal experiences of sexual misconduct on their campuses. That figure has not changed since the 1980s, when people first began collecting data on sexual violence. What has changed is the level of attention that the American public is paying to these statistics. Reports of sexual abuse repeatedly make headlines, and universities are scrambling to address the crisis. Their current strategy, Donna Freitas argues, is wholly inadequate. Universities must take a radically different approach to educating their campus communities about sexual assault and consent. Consent education is often a one-time affair, devised by overburdened student affairs officers. Universities seem more focused on insulating themselves from lawsuits and scandals than on bringing about real change. What is needed, Freitas shows, is an effort by the entire university community to deal with the deeper questions about sex, ethics, values, and how we treat one another, including facing up to the perils of hookup culture-and to do so in the university's most important space: the classroom. We need to offer more than a section in the student handbook about sexual assault, and expand our education around consent far beyond "Yes Means Yes." We need to transform our campuses into places where consent is genuinely valued. Freitas advocates for teaching not just how to consent, but why it's important to care about consent and to treat one's sexual partners with dignity and respect. Consent on Campus is a call to action for university administrators, faculty, parents, and students themselves, urging them to create cultures of consent on their campuses, and offering a blueprint for how to do it.

Vider uncovers how LGBTQ people reshaped domestic life in the postwar United States. From the Stonewall riots to the protests of ACT UP, histories of queer and trans politics have almost exclusively centered on public activism. In The Queerness of Home, Stephen Vider turns the focus inward, showing that the intimacy of domestic space has been equally crucial to the history of postwar LGBTQ life. Beginning in the 1940s, LGBTQ activists looked increasingly to the home as a site of connection, care, and cultural inclusion. They struggled against the conventions of marriage, challenged the gendered codes of everyday labor, reimagined domestic architecture, and contested the racial and class boundaries of kinship and belonging. Retelling LGBTQ history from the inside out, Vider reveals the surprising ways that the home became, and remains, a charged space in battles for social and economic justice, making it clear that LGBTQ people not only realized new forms of community and culture for themselves-they remade the possibilities of home life for everyone.

This agenda-setting text has been fully revised in its second edition, with coverage extended into the Christian era. It remains the most comprehensive and engaging introduction to the sexual cultures of ancient Greece and Rome. * Covers a wide range of subjects, including Greek pederasty and the symposium, ancient prostitution, representations of women in Greece and Rome, and the public regulation of sexual behavior * Expanded coverage extends to the advent of Christianity, includes added illustrations, and offers student-friendly pedagogical features * Text boxes supply intriguing information about tangential topics * Gives a thorough overview of current literature while encouraging further reading and discussion * Conveys the complexity of ancient attitudes towards sexuality and gender and the modern debates they have engendered

Representations of consensual sadomasochism range from the dark, seedy undergrounds of crime thrillers to the fetishized pornographic images of sitcoms and erotica. In this pathbreaking book, ethnographer Staci Newmahr delves into the social space of a public, pansexual SM community to understand sadomasochism from the inside out. Based on four years of in-depth and immersive participant observation, she juxtaposes her experiences in the field with the life stories of community members, providing a richly detailed portrait of SM as a social space in which experiences of "violence" intersect with experiences of the erotic. She shows that SM is a recreational and deeply gendered risk-taking endeavor, through which participants negotiate boundaries between chaos and order. Playing on the Edge challenges our assumptions about sadomasochism, sexuality, eroticism, and emotional experience, exploring what we mean by intimacy, and how, exactly, we achieve it.

What does it mean to be "in search of Aphrodite?" For most women, sex is complex, and more than a juxtaposition of body parts. Women sense the possibility of depth, meaning, even transcendence, but in a somatically disconnected, sexually superficial world, it can be difficult for a woman to discover her inner fire, define who she is sexually, and confidently communicate this to her partner. Part philosophy, part treatment manual, In Search of Aphrodite addresses women's sexual problems from an inspiring, creative perspective, integrating Jungian Psychology and sex therapy. Readers will deepen their understanding of the sexual psyche and how this realm impacts women's lives, as well as what the author calls the journey of Sexual IndividuationTM. Chelsea Wakefield covers a variety of topics such as healing ancient wounds, resolving inner conflicts, exploring sexual essence, identity, scripts, primal instinct, desire, fantasy, longing, and more. She offers pathways to sexual enrichment and improved communication with a partner. Sexual archetypes are introduced and organized around the author's Sexual Essence Wheel. Gatekeepers and Eros-inhibiting archetypes are described, along with what to do when treatment stalls. This book is appropriate for: * Clinicians who are nervous about venturing into conversations about women's sexuality * Clinicians who are comfortable with sexual topics and are curious about new interventions * Sex therapists who want a treatment model that acknowledges the multidimensional aspects of sexuality * Jungian analysts and Jungian oriented practitioners who want helpful tools for addressing sexual issues as an invitation into individuation * Pastoral counselors and spiritual guidance practitioners who seek to heal souls wounded by sexual trauma and sex-negative teachings * Women who want to explore their sexual psyche and define their sexual essence, and men who wish to better understand the sexual depths of women. Rich with case histories and an "Inner Cast of Characters" that clients can explore, this resource will help women discover joyful embodiment, innate eroticism, and sexual pleasure!

In the twelfth century, the Catholic Church attempted a thoroughgoing reform of marriage and sexual behavior aimed at eradicating sexual desire from Christian lives. Seeking a refuge from the very serious condemnations of the Church and relying on a courtly culture that was already preoccupied with honor and secrecy, European poets, romance writers, and lovers devised a vision of love as something quite different from desire. Romantic love was thus born as a movement of covert resistance. In "The Making of Romantic Love", William M. Reddy illuminates the birth of a cultural movement that managed to regulate selfish desire and render it innocent - or innocent enough. Reddy strikes out from this historical moment on an international exploration of love, contrasting the medieval development of romantic love in Europe with contemporaneous eastern traditions in Bengal and Orissa, and in Heian Japan from 900 to 1200 CE, where one finds no trace of an opposition between love and desire. In this comparative framework, Reddy tells an appealing tale about the rise and fall of various practices of longing, underscoring the uniqueness of the European concept of sexual desire.

A philosopher, essayist, novelist, pornographer and fervent Catholic who came to regard the brothels of Paris as his true 'churches', Georges Bataille ranks among the boldest and most disturbing of twentieth-century thinkers. In this influential study he links the underlying sexual basis of religion to death, offering a dazzling array of insights into incest, prostitution, marriage, murder, sadism, sacrifice and violence, as well as including comments on Freud, Sade and Saint Theresa. Everywhere, Eroticism argues, sex is surrounded by taboos, which we must continually transgress in order to overcome the sense of isolation that faces us all.

Celebrate the LGTBQ community with this small but perfectly formed guide to Pride. What began as a protest for gay rights following the Stonewall riots of 1969 in New York has grown to become a global celebration of LGBTQ culture. In the 50-odd years since the original protest, and what is now widely accepted to be the first Pride march - Christopher Street Liberation Day, 1970 - Pride events are now attended by millions each year, celebrating how far we've come, recognising where we have to go and highlighting important causes in the queer community. The Little Book of Pride is a concise look at everything you need to know about Pride, revealing the history, the key people involved, the best Pride events around the world, inspirational quotes from famous queers, Pride facts and a fun Pride survival guide.

It's time to talk back. The generation born into evangelical purity culture has grown up, and many have started families of their own. But as time goes on, it's becoming more evident that many still struggle with purity culture's complicated legacy-its idolization of virginity, its mixed messages about modesty and lust, and its promise of a healthy marriage and great sex for those who follow the rules. In Talking Back to Purity Culture, Rachel Joy Welcher reviews the movement carefully, examining its teachings through the lens of Scripture. Compassionate, faithful, and wise, she charts a path forward for Christians in the ongoing debates about sexuality-one that rejects legalism and license alike, steering us back instead to the good news of Jesus. It's time to talk back to purity culture-and this book is ready to jump-start the conversation.

A sweeping survey of sexuality in Europe from the Greeks to the present, Desire: A History of European Sexuality follows changing attitudes to two major concepts of sexual desire - desire as dangerous, polluting, and disorderly, and desire as creative, transcendent, even revolutionary - through the major turning points of European history. Chronological in structure, and wide ranging in scope, Desire addresses such topics as sex in ancient Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, sexual contact and culture clash in Spain and colonial Mesoamerica, new attitudes toward sexuality in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and sex in Bolshevik Russia and Nazi Germany. The book introduces the concept of "twilight moments" to describe activities seen as shameful or dishonorable, but which were tolerated when concealed by shadows, and integrates the history of heterosexuality with same-sex desire, as well as exploring the emotions of love and lust as well as the politics of sex and personal experiences. This new edition has been updated to include a new chapter on sex and imperialism and expanded discussions of Islam and trans issues. Drawing on a rich array of sources, including poetry, novels, pornography, and film, as well as court records, autobiographies, and personal letters, and written in a lively, engaging style, Desire remains an essential resource for scholars and students of the history of European sexuality, as well as women's and gender history, social and cultural history and LGBTQ history.