Why We Lost the Sex Wars
Why We Lost the Sex Wars

Author: LORNA N. BRACEWELL

Publisher:

Published: 2021-03-23

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 9781517906740

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Reexamining feminist sexual politics since the 1970s--the rivalries and the remarkable alliances Since the historic #MeToo movement materialized in 2017, innumerable survivors of sexual assault and misconduct have broken their silence and called out their abusers publicly--from well-known celebrities to politicians and high-profile business leaders. Not surprisingly, conservatives quickly opposed this new movement, but the fact that "sex positive" progressives joined in the opposition was unexpected and seldom discussed. Why We Lost the Sex Wars explores how a narrow set of political prospects for resisting the use of sex as a tool of domination came to be embraced across this broad swath of the political spectrum in the contemporary United States. To better understand today's multilayered sexual politics, Lorna N. Bracewell offers a revisionist history of the "sex wars" of the 1970s, '80s, and '90s. Rather than focusing on what divided antipornography and sex-radical feminists, Bracewell highlights significant points of contact and overlap between these rivals, particularly the trenchant challenges they offered to the narrow and ambivalent sexual politics of postwar liberalism. Bracewell leverages this recovered history to illuminate in fresh and provocative ways a range of current phenomena, including recent controversies over trigger warnings, the unimaginative politics of "sex-positive" feminism, and the rise of carceral feminism. By foregrounding the role played by liberal concepts such as expressive freedom and the public/private divide as well as the long-neglected contributions of Black and "Third World" feminists, Bracewell upends much of what we think we know about the sex wars and makes a strong case for the continued relevance of these debates today. Why We Lost the Sex Wars provides a history of feminist thinking on topics such as pornography, commercial sex work, LGBTQ+ identities, and BDSM, as well as discussions of such notable figures as Patrick Califia, Alan Dershowitz, Andrea Dworkin, Elena Kagan, Audre Lorde, Catharine MacKinnon, Cherríe Moraga, Robin Morgan, Gayle Rubin, Nadine Strossen, Cass Sunstein, and Alice Walker.

Why We Lost the Sex Wars
Why We Lost the Sex Wars

Author: Lorna N. Bracewell

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2021-03-23

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 145295979X

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Reexamining feminist sexual politics since the 1970s—the rivalries and the remarkable alliances Since the historic #MeToo movement materialized in 2017, innumerable survivors of sexual assault and misconduct have broken their silence and called out their abusers publicly—from well-known celebrities to politicians and high-profile business leaders. Not surprisingly, conservatives quickly opposed this new movement, but the fact that “sex positive” progressives joined in the opposition was unexpected and seldom discussed. Why We Lost the Sex Wars explores how a narrow set of political prospects for resisting the use of sex as a tool of domination came to be embraced across this broad swath of the political spectrum in the contemporary United States. To better understand today’s multilayered sexual politics, Lorna N. Bracewell offers a revisionist history of the “sex wars” of the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. Rather than focusing on what divided antipornography and sex-radical feminists, Bracewell highlights significant points of contact and overlap between these rivals, particularly the trenchant challenges they offered to the narrow and ambivalent sexual politics of postwar liberalism. Bracewell leverages this recovered history to illuminate in fresh and provocative ways a range of current phenomena, including recent controversies over trigger warnings, the unimaginative politics of “sex-positive” feminism, and the rise of carceral feminism. By foregrounding the role played by liberal concepts such as expressive freedom and the public/private divide as well as the long-neglected contributions of Black and “Third World” feminists, Bracewell upends much of what we think we know about the sex wars and makes a strong case for the continued relevance of these debates today. Why We Lost the Sex Wars provides a history of feminist thinking on topics such as pornography, commercial sex work, LGBTQ+ identities, and BDSM, as well as discussions of such notable figures as Patrick Califia, Alan Dershowitz, Andrea Dworkin, Elena Kagan, Audre Lorde, Catharine MacKinnon, Cherríe Moraga, Robin Morgan, Gayle Rubin, Nadine Strossen, Cass Sunstein, and Alice Walker.

The Sex Factor
The Sex Factor

Author: Victoria Bateman

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2019-07-01

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 1509526803

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Why did the West become so rich? Why is inequality rising? How ‘free’ should markets be? And what does sex have to do with it? In this passionate and skilfully argued book, leading feminist Victoria Bateman shows how we can only understand the burning economic issues of our time if we put sex and gender – ‘the sex factor’ – at the heart of the picture. Spanning the globe and drawing on thousands of years of history, Bateman tells a bold story about how the status and freedom of women are central to our prosperity. Genuine female empowerment requires us not only to recognize the liberating potential of markets and smart government policies but also to challenge the double-standard of many modern feminists when they celebrate the brain while denigrating the body. This iconoclastic book is a devastating exposé of what we have lost from ignoring ‘the sex factor’ and of how reversing this neglect can drive the smart economic policies we need today.

Sex Matters
Sex Matters

Author: Mona Charen

Publisher: Forum Books

Published: 2018-06-26

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 0451498402

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Author of the New York Times bestseller Useful Idiots and popular columnist Mona Charen takes a close, reasoned look at the aggressive feminist agenda undermining the success and happiness of men and women across the country In this smart, deeply necessary critique, Mona Charen unpacks the ways feminism fails us at home, in the workplace, and in our personal relationships--by promising that we can have it all, do it all, and be it all. Here, she upends the feminist agenda and the liberal conversation surrounding women's issues by asking tough and crucial questions, such as: Did women's full equality require the total destruction of the nuclear family? Did it require a sexual revolution that would dismantle traditions of modesty, courtship, and fidelity that had characterized relations between the sexes for centuries? Did it cause the broken dating culture and the rape crisis on our college campuses? Did it require war between the sexes that would deem men the "enemy" of women? Have the strides of feminism made women happier in their home and work life. (The answer is No.) Sex Matters tracks the price we have paid for denying sex differences and stoking the war of the sexes--family breakdown, declining female happiness, aimlessness among men, and increasing inequality. Marshaling copious social science research as well as her own experience as a professional as well as a wife and mother, Mona Charen calls for a sexual ceasefire for the sake of women, men, and children.

Sex Wars
Sex Wars

Author: Marge Piercy

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2005-11-22

Total Pages: 419

ISBN-13: 0060789832

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Post–Civil War New York City is the battleground of the American dream. In this era of free love, emerging rights of women, and brutal sexual repression, Freydeh, a spirited young Jewish immigrant, toils at different jobs to earn passage to America for her family. Learning that her younger sister is adrift somewhere in the city, she begins a determined search that carries her from tenement to brothel to prison—as her story interweaves with those of some of the epoch's most notorious figures: Elizabeth Cady Stanton; Susan B. Anthony; sexual freedom activist Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president; and Anthony Comstock, founder of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, whose censorship laws are still on the books. In the tradition of her bestselling World War II epic Gone to Soldiers, Marge Piercy once again re-creates a turbulent period in American history and explores changing attitudes in a land of sacrifice, suffering, promise, and reward.

Sex Wars
Sex Wars

Author: Lisa Duggan

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-01-27

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 1317721365

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This book is a collection of essays written during the 1980s and 1990s, generated as parts of other, larger activist efforts going on at the time. Read together, the essays trace the progress of the conversations between different activist groups, and between the authors of the pieces, Lisa Duggan and Nan Hunter, creating a bridge between feminists, gay activists, those in politics, and those in the law. Since the 1995 publication of Sex Wars, the political landscape has altered significantly. Yet the issues (and essays) are still relevant today. The anniversary edition contains a new chapter dealing with the changes in the law since the book's publication (Lawrence v. Texas, for example).

Men Explain Things to Me
Men Explain Things to Me

Author: Rebecca Solnit

Publisher: Haymarket Books

Published: 2014-04-14

Total Pages: 145

ISBN-13: 1608464571

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The National Book Critics Circle Award–winning author delivers a collection of essays that serve as the perfect “antidote to mansplaining” (The Stranger). In her comic, scathing essay “Men Explain Things to Me,” Rebecca Solnit took on what often goes wrong in conversations between men and women. She wrote about men who wrongly assume they know things and wrongly assume women don’t, about why this arises, and how this aspect of the gender wars works, airing some of her own hilariously awful encounters. She ends on a serious note— because the ultimate problem is the silencing of women who have something to say, including those saying things like, “He’s trying to kill me!” This book features that now-classic essay with six perfect complements, including an examination of the great feminist writer Virginia Woolf’s embrace of mystery, of not knowing, of doubt and ambiguity, a highly original inquiry into marriage equality, and a terrifying survey of the scope of contemporary violence against women. “In this series of personal but unsentimental essays, Solnit gives succinct shorthand to a familiar female experience that before had gone unarticulated, perhaps even unrecognized.” —The New York Times “Essential feminist reading.” —The New Republic “This slim book hums with power and wit.” —Boston Globe “Solnit tackles big themes of gender and power in these accessible essays. Honest and full of wit, this is an integral read that furthers the conversation on feminism and contemporary society.” —San Francisco Chronicle “Essential.” —Marketplace “Feminist, frequently funny, unflinchingly honest and often scathing in its conclusions.” —Salon

The Feminist War on Crime
The Feminist War on Crime

Author: Aya Gruber

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2020-05-26

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 0520973143

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Many feminists grapple with the problem of hyper-incarceration in the United States, and yet commentators on gender crime continue to assert that criminal law is not tough enough. This punitive impulse, prominent legal scholar Aya Gruber argues, is dangerous and counterproductive. In their quest to secure women’s protection from domestic violence and rape, American feminists have become soldiers in the war on crime by emphasizing white female victimhood, expanding the power of police and prosecutors, touting the problem-solving power of incarceration, and diverting resources toward law enforcement and away from marginalized communities. Deploying vivid cases and unflinching analysis, The Feminist War on Crime documents the failure of the state to combat sexual and domestic violence through law and punishment. Zero-tolerance anti-violence law and policy tend to make women less safe and more fragile. Mandatory arrests, no-drop prosecutions, forced separation, and incarceration embroil poor women of color in a criminal justice system that is historically hostile to them. This carceral approach exacerbates social inequalities by diverting more power and resources toward a fundamentally flawed criminal justice system, further harming victims, perpetrators, and communities alike. In order to reverse this troubling course, Gruber contends that we must abandon the conventional feminist wisdom, fight violence against women without reinforcing the American prison state, and use criminalization as a technique of last—not first—resort.

Histories of the Transgender Child
Histories of the Transgender Child

Author: Jules Gill-Peterson

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2018-10-23

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 1452958157

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A groundbreaking twentieth-century history of transgender children With transgender rights front and center in American politics, media, and culture, the pervasive myth still exists that today’s transgender children are a brand new generation—pioneers in a field of new obstacles and hurdles. Histories of the Transgender Child shatters this myth, uncovering a previously unknown twentieth-century history when transgender children not only existed but preexisted the term transgender and its predecessors, playing a central role in the medicalization of trans people, and all sex and gender. Beginning with the early 1900s when children with “ambiguous” sex first sought medical attention, to the 1930s when transgender people began to seek out doctors involved in altering children’s sex, to the invention of the category gender, and finally the 1960s and ’70s when, as the field institutionalized, transgender children began to take hormones, change their names, and even access gender confirmation, Julian Gill-Peterson reconstructs the medicalization and racialization of children’s bodies. Throughout, they foreground the racial history of medicine that excludes black and trans of color children through the concept of gender’s plasticity, placing race at the center of their analysis and at the center of transgender studies. Until now, little has been known about early transgender history and life and its relevance to children. Using a wealth of archival research from hospitals and clinics, including incredible personal letters from children to doctors, as well as scientific and medical literature, this book reaches back to the first half of the twentieth century—a time when the category transgender was not available but surely existed, in the lives of children and parents.

Beyond Explicit
Beyond Explicit

Author: Helen Hester

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 2014-02-01

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 1438449615

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Develops a novel characterization of the pornographic as a cultural concept. This original contribution to porn studies aims to interrogate previously untheorized changes in contemporary understandings of the pornographic. Helen Hester argues that the words “porn” and “pornographic” are currently being applied to an ever-expanding range of material and that this change in language usage reflects a wider shift in perception. She suggests that we are witnessing a seemingly paradoxical move away from sex within contemporary understandings of porn, as a range of other factors come to influence the concept. Using examples from media, literature, and culture, and discussing the rise of notions such as “torture porn” and “misery porn,” Hester’s argument ranges from sexually explicit German novels and British policy documents to a discussion of the differences between European and American editions of pornographic films. She concludes that four factors in particular—transgression, intensity, prurience, and authenticity—can be seen to influence the way that we think about porn.