The Pleasure Gap

The Pleasure Gap

Author: Katherine Rowland

Publisher: Seal Press

Published: 2020-02-04

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1580058345

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

American culture is more sexually liberal than ever. But compared to men, women's sexual pleasure has not grown: Up to 40 percent of American women experience the sexual malaise clinically known as low sexual desire. Between this low desire, muted pleasure, and experiencing sex in terms of labor rather than of lust, women by the millions are dissatisfied with their erotic lives. For too long, this deficit has been explained in terms of women's biology, stress, and age. In The Pleasure Gap, Katherine Rowland rejects the idea that women should settle for diminished pleasure; instead, she argues women should take inequality in the bedroom as seriously as we take it in the workplace and understand its causes and effects. Drawing on extensive research and interviews with more than one hundred women and dozens of sexual health professionals, Rowland shows that the pleasure gap is neither medical malady nor psychological condition but rather a result of our culture's troubled relationship with women's sexual expression. This provocative exploration of modern sexuality makes a case for closing the gap for good.


Sexual Fluidity

Sexual Fluidity

Author: Lisa M. Diamond

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 9780674026247

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Is love “blind” when it comes to gender? For women, it just might be. This unsettling and original book offers a radical new understanding of the context-dependent nature of female sexuality. Lisa M. Diamond argues that for some women, love and desire are not rigidly heterosexual or homosexual but fluid, changing as women move through the stages of life, various social groups, and, most important, different love relationships.This perspective clashes with traditional views of sexual orientation as a stable and fixed trait. But that view is based on research conducted almost entirely on men. Diamond is the first to study a large group of women over time. She has tracked one hundred women for more than ten years as they have emerged from adolescence into adulthood. She summarizes their experiences and reviews research ranging from the psychology of love to the biology of sex differences. Sexual Fluidity offers moving first-person accounts of women falling in and out of love with men or women at different times in their lives. For some, gender becomes irrelevant: “I fall in love with the person, not the gender,” say some respondents.Sexual Fluidity offers a new understanding of women’s sexuality—and of the central importance of love.


Women's Sexuality Across the Life Span

Women's Sexuality Across the Life Span

Author: Judith C. Daniluk

Publisher: Guilford Press

Published: 2003-06-09

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 9781572309111

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Moving beyond a traditional focus on sexual functioning, this book emphasizes the complex interaction of psychological, social, cultural and biological influences on womens's sense of themselves as sexual beings. Written for practitioners and educators, its goal is to challenge contradictory messages and meanings that cause many women to feel disconnected from their bodies and from their needs and desires. Themes explored include the development of sexual awareness and sexuality in childhood and adolescence, the critical sexual choices of young adulthood, and the multiple transitions characterizing the middle and later years of life. The book features creative exercises and interventions to help girls and women construct more affirming sexual meanings.


Women's Sexualities

Women's Sexualities

Author: Carol Rinkleib Ellison

Publisher:

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781572241961

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This intriguing collection of stories and experiences from women of all walks of life allows readers to learn how others have handled everything from their first sexual encounter to abusive situations to rekindling romance in a long-term marriage.


Women, Sexuality and the Political Power of Pleasure

Women, Sexuality and the Political Power of Pleasure

Author: Susie Jolly

Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.

Published: 2013-06-13

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 1780325738

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This pioneering collection explores the ways in which positive, pleasure-focused approaches to sexuality can empower women. Gender and development has tended to engage with sexuality only in relation to violence and ill-health. Although this has been hugely important in challenging violence against women, over-emphasizing these negative aspects has dovetailed with conservative ideologies that associate women’s sexualities with danger and fear. On the other hand, the media, the pharmaceutical industry, and pornography more broadly celebrate the pleasures of sex in ways that can be just as oppressive, often implying that only certain types of people - young, heterosexual, able-bodied, HIV-negative - are eligible for sexual pleasure. Women, Sexuality and the Political Power of Pleasure brings together challenges to these strictures and exclusions from both the South and North of the globe, with examples of activism, advocacy and programming which use pleasure as an entry point. It shows how positive approaches to pleasure and sexuality can enhance equality and empowerment for all.


Gender, Pleasure, and Violence

Gender, Pleasure, and Violence

Author: Agnieszka Kościańska

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2021-01-01

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 0253053102

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Behind the Iron Curtain, the politics of sexuality and gender were, in many ways, more progressive than the West. While Polish citizens undoubtedly suffered under the oppressive totalitarianism of socialism, abortion was legal, clear laws protected victims of rape, and it was relatively easy to legally change one's gender. In Gender, Pleasure, and Violence, Agnieszka Kościańska reveals that sexologists—experts such as physicians, therapists, and educators—not only treated patients but also held sex education classes at school, published regular columns in the press, and authored highly popular sex manuals that sold millions of copies. Yet strict gender roles within the home meant that true equality was never fully within reach. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, and archival work, Kościańska shares how professions like sexologists defined the notions of sexual pleasure and sexual violence under these sweeping cultural changes. By tracing the study of sexual human behavior as it was developed and professionalized in Poland since the 1960s, Gender, Pleasure, and Violence explores how the collapse of socialism brought both restrictions in gender rights and new opportunities.


The Governesses

The Governesses

Author: Anne Serre

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 2018-10-30

Total Pages: 76

ISBN-13: 0811228088

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Publishers Weekly Best Books in Fiction 2018 The sensational US debut of a major French writer—an intense, delicious meringue of a novella In a large country house shut off from the world by a gated garden, three young governesses responsible for the education of a group of little boys are preparing a party. The governesses, however, seem to spend more time running around in a state of frenzied desire than attending to the children’s education. One of their main activities is lying in wait for any passing stranger, and then throwing themselves on him like drunken Maenads. The rest of the time they drift about in a kind of sated, melancholy calm, spied upon by an old man in the house opposite, who watches their goings-on through a telescope. As they hang paper lanterns and prepare for the ball in their own honor, and in honor of the little boys rolling hoops on the lawn, much is mysterious: one reviewer wrote of the book’s “deceptively simple words and phrasing, the transparency of which works like a mirror reflecting back on the reader.” Written with the elegance of old French fables, the dark sensuality of Djuna Barnes and the subtle comedy of Robert Walser, this semi-deranged erotic fairy tale introduces American readers to the marvelous Anne Serre.


Sexual Harassment of Women

Sexual Harassment of Women

Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 2018-09-01

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 0309470870

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Over the last few decades, research, activity, and funding has been devoted to improving the recruitment, retention, and advancement of women in the fields of science, engineering, and medicine. In recent years the diversity of those participating in these fields, particularly the participation of women, has improved and there are significantly more women entering careers and studying science, engineering, and medicine than ever before. However, as women increasingly enter these fields they face biases and barriers and it is not surprising that sexual harassment is one of these barriers. Over thirty years the incidence of sexual harassment in different industries has held steady, yet now more women are in the workforce and in academia, and in the fields of science, engineering, and medicine (as students and faculty) and so more women are experiencing sexual harassment as they work and learn. Over the last several years, revelations of the sexual harassment experienced by women in the workplace and in academic settings have raised urgent questions about the specific impact of this discriminatory behavior on women and the extent to which it is limiting their careers. Sexual Harassment of Women explores the influence of sexual harassment in academia on the career advancement of women in the scientific, technical, and medical workforce. This report reviews the research on the extent to which women in the fields of science, engineering, and medicine are victimized by sexual harassment and examines the existing information on the extent to which sexual harassment in academia negatively impacts the recruitment, retention, and advancement of women pursuing scientific, engineering, technical, and medical careers. It also identifies and analyzes the policies, strategies and practices that have been the most successful in preventing and addressing sexual harassment in these settings.


A New View of Women's Sexual Problems

A New View of Women's Sexual Problems

Author: Ellyn Kaschak

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-02-25

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 131778815X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Take a new look at women’s sexuality! This fascinating book looks at the wide-ranging therapeutic, social, and political implications of the new paradigm of women’s sexuality. International in scope and multidisciplinary in approach, A New View of Women’s Sexual Problems examines the theoretical and practical effects of the landmark document produced by the Working Group on a New View of Women’s Sexuality. The book brings together gender theory, psychology, social science, and medicine in a powerful cultural critique of the reigning medical approach to women’s sexual health. International experts from India, Costa Rica, Israel, the US, and many other cultures place this revolutionary idea in cultural and political context, as well as extrapolating fresh new treatment options for dealing with women’s sexual problems. A New View of Women’s Sexual Problems analyzes the new paradigm’s implications in many fields, including: family medicine couples counseling for straight and lesbian partners STD prevention and sexual health issues sex therapy sex education feminist theory developmental psychology


The Gender of Sexuality

The Gender of Sexuality

Author: Virginia Rutter

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 0742570037

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Rev. ed. of: The gender of sexuality / Pepper Schwartz, Virginia Rutter. Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press, c1998.