This is an encyclopaedic overview of royal scandals, covering nearly 1000 years, from the passionate Plantagenets to Henry VIII's alarming head count of wives and mistresses, to the sapphic crushes of Mary and Anne Stuart right on up to the scandal-blighted coupling of Prince Charles and Lady Diana.

Sex is usually assumed to be a closely guarded secret of prison life. But it has long been the subject of intense scrutiny by both prison administrators and reformers--as well as a source of fascination and anxiety for the American public. Historically, sex behind bars has evoked radically different responses from professionals and the public alike. In "Criminal Intimacy," Regina Kunzel tracks these varying interpretations and reveals their foundational influence on modern thinking about sexuality and identity. Historians have held the fusion of sexual desire and identity to be the defining marker of sexual modernity, but sex behind bars, often involving otherwise heterosexual prisoners, calls those assumptions into question. By exploring the sexual lives of prisoners and the sexual culture of prisons over the past two centuries--along with the impact of a range of issues, including race, class, and gender; sexual violence; prisoners' rights activism; and the HIV epidemic--Kunzel discovers a world whose surprising plurality and mutability reveals the fissures and fault lines beneath modern sexuality itself. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including physicians, psychiatrists, sociologists, correctional administrators, journalists, and prisoners themselves--as well as depictions of prison life in popular culture--Kunzel argues for the importance of the prison to the history of sexuality and for the centrality of ideas about sex and sexuality to the modern prison. In the process, she deepens and complicates our understanding of sexuality in America.

The Dictatorship of Sex explores the attempts to define and control sexual behavior in the years following the Russian Revolution. It is the first book to examine Soviet "sexual enlightenment," a program of popular health and lifestyle advice intended to establish a model of sexual conduct for the men and women who would build socialism. Leftist social theorists and political activists had long envisioned an egalitarian utopia, and after 1917, the medical profession took the leading role in solving the sex question (while at the same time carving out a niche for itself among postrevolutionary social institutions). Frances Bernstein reveals the tension between the doctors' advocacy for relatively liberal social policy and the generally proscriptive nature of their advice, as well as their lack of interest in questions of personal pleasure, fulfillment, and sexual expression. While supporting the goals of the Soviet state, the enlighteners appealed to "irrefutable" biological truths that ultimately supported a very traditional gender regime. The Dictatorship of Sex offers a unique lens through which to contemplate a central conundrum of Russian history: the relationship between the supposedly "liberated" 1920s and "repressive" 1930s. Although most of the proponents of sexual enlightenment in the 1920s would suffer greatly during Stalin's purges, their writings facilitated the Stalinist approach to sexuality and the family. Bernstein's book will interest historians of Russia, gender, sexuality, and medicine, as well as anyone curious about social and ideological experiments in a revolutionary culture.

Taking the long view, the Christian religion for two thousand years maintained a disapproving attitude toward human sexuality ("sex is dirty"). As David Carr of Union Theological Seminary observes, "From the outset, Christianity has depicted sex as a dangerous, chaotic, anti-spiritual force." Such a negative attitude raises the question: Why has the church over the centuries exhibited a hostile attitude toward sex? Sullivan attempts to answer that question in Part One of this book. He contends that early Christian theologians failed to understand the mythic character of the Adam and Eve story and read into it ideas which are not there. In addition, early theology preached that "the soul and the body - which is inferior to the soul - are constantly at war with one another." Since human sexuality involves the body (which is inherently bad), early theologians concluded sex must be bad. In Part Two of "Rescuing Sex from the Christians", Sullivan examines the controversial subjects of masturbation, homosexuality, adultery, and prostitution and demonstrates how the Christian idea of sexuality has vilified these practices, not always for the good.

An examination of why so few people suffering from environmental hazards and pollution choose to participate in environmental justice movements. In the coal-mining region of Central Appalachia, mountaintop-removal mining and coal-industry-related flooding, water contamination, and illness have led to the emergence of a grassroots, women-driven environmental justice movement. But the number of local activists is small relative to the affected population, and recruiting movement participants from within the region is an ongoing challenge. In Fighting King Coal, Shannon Elizabeth Bell examines an understudied puzzle within social movement theory: why so few of the many people who suffer from industry-produced environmental hazards and pollution rise up to participate in social movements aimed at bringing about social justice and industry accountability. Using the coal-mining region of Central Appalachia as a case study, Bell investigates the challenges of micromobilization through in-depth interviews, participant observation, content analysis, geospatial viewshed analysis, and an eight-month "Photovoice" project-an innovative means of studying, in real time, the social dynamics affecting activist involvement in the region. Although the Photovoice participants took striking photographs and wrote movingly about the environmental destruction caused by coal production, only a few became activists. Bell reveals the importance of local identities to the success or failure of local recruitment efforts in social movement struggles, ultimately arguing that, if the local identities of environmental justice movements are lost, the movements may also lose their power.

As anyone who has watched television in recent years can attest, we live in the age of Viagra. From Bob Dole to Mike Ditka to late-night comedians, our culture has been engaged in one long, frank, and very public talk about impotence--and our newfound pharmaceutical solutions. But as Angus McLaren shows us in "Impotence," the first cultural history of the subject, the failure of men to rise to the occasion has been a recurrent topic since the dawn of human culture.
Drawing on a dazzling range of sources from across centuries, McLaren demonstrates how male sexuality was constructed around the idea of potency, from times past when it was essential for the purpose of siring children, to today, when successful sex is viewed as a component of a healthy emotional life. Along the way, "Impotence" enlightens and fascinates with tales of sexual failure and its remedies--for example, had Ditka lived in ancient Mesopotamia, he might have recited spells while eating roots and plants rather than pills--and explanations, which over the years have included witchcraft, shell-shock, masturbation, feminism, and the Oedipal complex. McLaren also explores the surprising political and social effects of impotence, from the revolutionary unrest fueled by Louis XVI's failure to consummate his marriage to the boost given the fledgling American republic by George Washington's failure to found a dynasty. Each age, McLaren shows, turns impotence to its own purposes, using it to help define what is normal and healthy for men, their relationships, and society.
From marraige manuals to metrosexuals, from Renaissance Italy to Hollywood movies, "Impotence" is a serious but highly entertaining examination of aproblem that humanity has simultaneously regarded as life's greatest tragedy and its greatest joke.

A passionate and consoling study of sexual love by one of Britain's finest philosophers. "A dazzling treatise, as erudite and eloquent as Simone de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex" and considerably more sound in its conclusion." - "TLS". "He is an eloquent and practised writer" - "The Independent". When John desires Mary or Mary desires John, what does either of them want? What is meant by innocence, passion, love and arousal, desire, perversion and shame? These are just a few of the questions Roger Scruton addresses in this thought-provoking intellectual adventure. Beginning from purely philosophical premises, and ranging over human life, art and institutions, he surveys the entire field of sexuality. Equally dissatisfied with puritanism and permissiveness, he argues for a radical break with recent theories. Upholding traditional morality - though in terms that may shock many of its practitioners - his argument gravitates to that which is candid, serene and consoling in the experience of sexual love.

Heritiere de 1968, la decennie 1970 est couramment pensee comme celle de la liberation sexuelle. A l'encontre des interpretations simplificatrices, cet ouvrage apporte un regard critique sur l'idee d'une liberation de la sexualite. Il decortique les manieres de dire et de penser la sexualite durant ces annees en etudiant divers points de vue: celui de la sexologie, du planning familial, de l'education sexuelle et des mouvements feministes et homosexuels. Leur confrontation montre que s'il existe bien de la part des mouvements feministes et homosexuels un appel a renverser les normes sociales en matiere de couple, de famille et de sexualite, cet appel reste etranger aux structures institutionnelles de la sexologie, du planning familial et de l'education sexuelle. En retracant l'histoire d'un passe proche, cet ouvrage eclaire la construction sociale et historique des enjeux actuels en matiere de sexualite et rappelle les liens etroits qu'entretiennent politiques de la sexualite et maintien de l'ordre social.

This edited collection examines pornography as a material practice that eroticises gender inequality and sexual violence towards women. It addresses the complex relationship between pornography and medicine (in particular, sexology and psycho-therapy) whereby medicine has historically, and currently, afforded pornography considerable legitimacy and even authority. Pornography naturalises women's submission and men's dominance as if gendered power is rooted in biology not politics. In contrast to the populist view that medicine is objective and rational, the contributors here demonstrate that medicine has been complicit with the construction of gender difference, and in that construction the relationship with pornography is not incidental but fundamental.A range of theoretical approaches critically engages with this topic in the light, firstly, of radical feminist ideas about patriarchy and the politics of gender, and, secondly, of the rapidly changing conditions of global capitalism and digital-technologies. In its broad approach, the book also engages with the ideas of Michel Foucault, particularly his refutation of the liberal hypothesis that sexuality is a deep biological and psychological human property which is repressed by traditional, patriarchal discourses and which can be freed from authoritarianism, for example by producing and consuming pornography.In taking pornography as a cultural and social phenomenon, the concepts brought to bear by the contributors critically scrutinise not only pornography and medicine, but also current media scholarship. The 21st century has witnessed a growth in (neo-)liberal academic literature which is pro-pornography. This book provides a critical counterpoint to this current academic trend, and demonstrates its lack of engagement with the politics of the multi-billion dollar pornography industry which creates the desire for the product it sells, the individualism of its arguments which analyse pornography as personal fantasy, and the paucity of theoretical analysis. In contrast, this book re-opens the feminist debate about pornography for a new generation of critical thinkers in the 21st century. Pornography matters politically and ethically. It matters in the real world as well as in fantasy; it matters to performers as well as to consumers; it matters to adults as well as to children; and it matters to men as well as to women.

Starting with the mid-nineteenth-century campaign by the American Female Moral Reform Society to criminalize seduction and moving forward to the late twentieth-century conservative effort to codify a national abstinence-only education policy, "Regulating Desire" explores the legal regulation of young women s sexuality in the United States. The book covers five distinct time periods in which changing social conditions generated considerable public anxiety about youthful female sexuality and examines how successive generations of reformers sought to revise the law in an effort to manage unruly desires and restore a gendered social order. J. Shoshanna Ehrlich draws upon a rich array of primary source materials, including reform periodicals, court cases, legislative hearing records, and abstinence curricula to create an interdisciplinary narrative of socially embedded legal change. Capturing the complex and dynamic nature of the relationship between the state and the sexualized youthful female body, she highlights how the law both embodies and shapes gendered understandings of normative desire as mediated by considerations of race and class."

Although the Marquis de Sade is often read only for his pornography, it is important to ask why his works have claimed such a persistent reception for the past two centuries, a reception that has grown increasingly more astute and analytical in the past two decades. Iwan Bloch (1872-1922), the founder of Sexualwissenschaft or sexology, taught the 20th century to examine Sade's works in terms of psychology and cultural anthropology in his study of 1899. In a magisterial two-volume biography, 1952-57, Gilbert Lely laid the foundation for every biography that has followed. Lely went on to assemble the first critical/historical edition of Sade, his Oeuvres completes, 16 vols., 1966-67. Alice Laborde extended Lely's work in her three volumes on Sade's relationships, imprisonment, and family history (1988-91). Laborde also edited Sade's letters, Correspondances du marquis de Sade et de ses proches enrichies de documents, notes et commentaries, 27 vols., 1991-98.The study of Sade's literary influence commenced with Mario Praz's account of "the Divine Marquis" (1930). Simone de Beauvoir, in "Faut-il bruler Sade?" (1953; "Must We Burn Sade?" 1955), paved the way for subsequent studies of Sade's relevance to gender issues and sexual behavior. Angela Carter, in The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography (1979) and Camille Paglia, in Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), demonstrate the continuing ramifications of Sade's understanding of the motives of desire. Thanks to the foundational work of Lely and Laborde, recent commentators have been able to attend in more detail to Sade's literary career. Neil Schaeffer, in The Marquis de Sade: A Life (1999) addresses the logic and rhetoric of Sade's prose, his suasory strategies to arouse, his paranoiac strategies to conceal, his philosophy of passion, and the reason in his madness.Responding to current trends and offering new directions, this book examines Sade's reactions to medical theory and practice, to crime and punishment; his attempt to craft a reciprocity of written discourse and sexual intercourse; his involvement in the theater, both as a playwright for the public stage, and as playwright and director for the private theater of the insane asylum.

Sex and the sexual have for far too long been consigned to the dark corners by social scientists in general and tourism and leisure scholars in particular. Sex and the Sexual During People's Leisure and Tourism Experiences seeks to begin to rectify this situation by bringing the position and nature of sex and the sexual into the light of academic debate. As such, this book is designed to highlight cross-disciplinary emerging work on sex and the sexual in leisure and tourism and provide the readers with insights into this social realm. It encompasses a broad array of sex-related issues and tourism and leisure environments from across a variety of countries. The book should appeal to researchers and students across the humanities and social sciences both for the value of the research in its own right and the ability of it to be used as a lens through which to view the position of sex and the sexual as well as tourism and leisure in today's world. Overall, it is argued that sex and the sexual should play a part in the academic discourse, especially if we wish to describe what is actually happening out there as far as tourism and leisure are concerned.