Sexuality remains a hotly debated subject, nowhere more so than in education. This perceptive and balanced book shows that discussions of sexuality and schooling can be simultaneously polarizing and democratizing. Disputing the Subject of Sex examines controversies over sex, AIDS, and gay-inclusive multicultural education, which offer especially fruitful opportunities to explore instances when community membership, schooling, and sexuality have collided. Rather than choosing sides, this book uses case studies, interviews with queer youth, and analysis of curricular texts to help readers understand how power dynamics play out in educational controversies and how they can guide us to new ideas about students' abilities to learn and relate ethically to one another about the subject of sex.
This book will help you establish a biblical view of sexuality for your kids. Learn how and when to talk with your children about sexual curiosity, physical changes of puberty, dating, chastity, and more.
The digital revolution has ushered in a series of sexual revolutions, all contributing to a perfect storm for modern relationships. Online dating, social media, internet pornography, and the phenomenon of the smartphone generation have created an avalanche of change with far-reaching consequences for sexuality today. The church has struggled to address this new moral ecology because it has focused on clarity of belief rather than quality of formation. The real challenge for spiritual formation lies in addressing the underlying moral intuitions we carry subconsciously, which are shaped by the convictions of our age. In this book, a fresh new voice offers a persuasive Christian vision of sex and relationships, calling young adults to faithful discipleship in a hypersexualized world. Drawing from his pastoral experience with young people and from cutting-edge research across multiple disciplines, Jonathan Grant helps Christian leaders understand the cultural forces that make the church's teaching on sex and relationships ineffective in the lives of today's young adults. He also sets forth pastoral strategies for addressing the underlying fault lines in modern sexuality.
A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERBLACKWELL'S BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021Essential lessons on the world we live in, from one of our greatest young thinkers - a guide to what everybody is talking about today'Unparalleled and extraordinary . . . A bracing revivification of a crucial lineage in feminist writing' JIA TOLENTINO'I believe Amia Srinivasan's work will change the world' KATHERINE RUNDELL'Rigorously researched, but written with such spark and verve. The best non-fiction book I have read this year' PANDORA SYKES-------------------------How should we talk about sex? It is a thing we have and also a thing we do; a supposedly private act laden with public meaning; a personal preference shaped by outside forces; a place where pleasure and ethics can pull wildly apart. To grasp sex in all its complexity - its deep ambivalences, its relationship to gender, class, race and power - we need to move beyond 'yes and no', wanted and unwanted. We need to rethink sex as a political phenomenon. Searching, trenchant and extraordinarily original, The Right to Sex is a landmark examination of the politics and ethics of sex in this world, animated by the hope of a different one.SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2022LONGLISTED FOR THE POLARI FIRST BOOK PRIZE 2022LONGLISTED FOR THE BRITISH ACADEMY BOOK PRIZE 2022
Since Darwin's day, we've been told that sexual monogamy comes naturally to our species. Mainstream science—as well as religious and cultural institutions—has maintained that men and women evolved in families in which a man's possessions and protection were exchanged for a woman's fertility and fidelity. But this narrative is collapsing. Fewer and fewer couples are getting married, and divorce rates keep climbing as adultery and flagging libido drag down even seemingly solid marriages. How can reality be reconciled with the accepted narrative? It can't be, according to renegade thinkers Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethå. While debunking almost everything we "know" about sex, they offer a bold alternative explanation in this provocative and brilliant book. Ryan and Jethå's central contention is that human beings evolved in egalitarian groups that shared food, child care, and, often, sexual partners. Weaving together convergent, frequently overlooked evidence from anthropology, archaeology, primatology, anatomy, and psychosexuality, the authors show how far from human nature monogamy really is. Human beings everywhere and in every era have confronted the same familiar, intimate situations in surprisingly different ways. The authors expose the ancient roots of human sexuality while pointing toward a more optimistic future illuminated by our innate capacities for love, cooperation, and generosity. With intelligence, humor, and wonder, Ryan and Jethå show how our promiscuous past haunts our struggles over monogamy, sexual orientation, and family dynamics. They explore why long-term fidelity can be so difficult for so many; why sexual passion tends to fade even as love deepens; why many middle-aged men risk everything for transient affairs with younger women; why homosexuality persists in the face of standard evolutionary logic; and what the human body reveals about the prehistoric origins of modern sexuality. In the tradition of the best historical and scientific writing, Sex at Dawn unapologetically upends unwarranted assumptions and unfounded conclusions while offering a revolutionary understanding of why we live and love as we do.
Sexuality and Its Disorders explores sexuality from an evolutionary perspective using powerful, real-life case studies to help readers provide effective guidance around issues relating to sexuality. Drawing on his 30 years of clinical experience and research, author Mike Abrams provides a comprehensive, evidence-based, and clinically-oriented text with cutting-edge coverage throughout. Discussions include the physical and psychological development of sexual identity; the social aspects of sexual behavior; the many expressions of sexuality; cognitive behavior treatment of sexual problems; and more. The many perspectives of sexuality are examined with interviews and commentaries from major figures in the field—including David M. Buss, Helen Fisher, C. Sue Carter of Kinsey, Todd K. Shackelford, Ken Zucker, and Gordon Gallup—who discuss such topics as the origins of sexuality, the nature of love, the role of attachment, and the treatment of sexual problems.
What did sex mean for ordinary people before the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, who were often pitied by later generations as repressed, unfulfilled and full of moral anxiety? This book provides the first rounded, first-hand account of sexuality in marriage in the early and mid-twentieth century. These award-winning authors look beyond conventions of silence among the respectable majority to challenge stereotypes of ignorance and inhibition. Based on vivid, compelling and frank testimonies from a socially and geographically diverse range of individuals, the book explores a spectrum of sexual experiences, from learning about sex and sexual practices in courtship, to attitudes to the body, marital ideals and birth control. It demonstrates that while the era's emphasis on silence and strict moral codes could for some be a source of inhibition and dissatisfaction, for many the culture of privacy and innocence was central to fulfilling and pleasurable intimate lives.
In eleven acute and widely ranging essays, Irigaray reconsiders the question of female sexuality in a variety of contexts that are relevant to current discussion of feminist theory and practice.
A Wall Street Journal Best Book of 2017 From a highly regarded feminist cultural critic and professor comes a polemic arguing that the stifling sense of sexual danger sweeping American campuses doesn’t empower women, it impedes the fight for gender equality. Feminism is broken, argues Laura Kipnis, if anyone thinks the sexual hysteria overtaking American campuses is a sign of gender progress. A committed feminist, Kipnis was surprised to find herself the object of a protest march by student activists at her university for writing an essay about sexual paranoia on campus. Next she was brought up on Title IX complaints for creating a "hostile environment." Defying confidentiality strictures, she wrote a whistleblowing essay about the ensuing seventy-two-day investigation, which propelled her to the center of national debates over free speech, "safe spaces," and the vast federal overreach of Title IX. In the process she uncovered an astonishing netherworld of accused professors and students, campus witch hunts, rigged investigations, and Title IX officers run amuck. Drawing on interviews and internal documents, Unwanted Advances demonstrates the chilling effect of this new sexual McCarthyism on intellectual freedom. Without minimizing the seriousness of campus assault, Kipnis argues for more honesty about the sexual realities and ambivalences hidden behind the notion of "rape culture." Instead, regulation is replacing education, and women’s hard-won right to be treated as consenting adults is being repealed by well-meaning bureaucrats. Unwanted Advances is a risk-taking, often darkly funny interrogation of feminist paternalism, the covert sexual conservatism of hook-up culture, and the institutionalized backlash of holding men alone responsible for mutually drunken sex. It’s not just compulsively readable, it will change the national conversation.
A provocative, elegantly written analysis of female desire, consent, and sexuality in the age of MeToo Women are in a bind. In the name of consent and empowerment, they must proclaim their desires clearly and confidently. Yet sex researchers suggest that women’s desire is often slow to emerge. And men are keen to insist that they know what women—and their bodies—want. Meanwhile, sexual violence abounds. How can women, in this environment, possibly know what they want? And why do we expect them to? In this elegant, searching book—spanning science and popular culture; pornography and literature; debates on Me-Too, consent and feminism—Katherine Angel challenges our assumptions about women’s desire. Why, she asks, should they be expected to know their desires? And how do we take sexual violence seriously, when not knowing what we want is key to both eroticism and personhood? In today’s crucial moment of renewed attention to violence and power, Angel urges that we remake our thinking about sex, pleasure, and autonomy without any illusions about perfect self-knowledge. Only then will we fulfil Michel Foucault’s teasing promise, in 1976, that “tomorrow sex will be good again.”
