Josephine’s life takes a new turn when her husband, Robert—Bobby among close friends—is elected minister of finance. She soon realizes that the questionable relationships he has are becoming more frequent and that his values and principles are losing ground. To add to that, Josephine makes a discovery that scandalizes her: her youngest son smokes pot! First shocked, she then tries it herself and gets great pleasure out of it. Seeing that her marriage is going downhill since her husband is minister, this gives her an idea. With the complicity of her best friend, Lilly, and her domestic workers, Mamadou and Ping, she prepares a special meal that her husband will host in honor of several influential public personalities. If she wanted to spice up her everyday life, Josephine will have reached her goal. But the discoveries she will make will change her life . . . and that of the planet.
Almost wherever we look, depictions of sexuality, both subtle and not-so-subtle, are omnipresent. Whatever the medium, popular culture representations tell us something about ourselves and about the ideologies of which they are symptomatic. These essays examine the strategies of power implicit in popular representations of sexuality. The authors--scholars in fields such as sociology, philosophy, biology, political science, history, and English literature-- eschew rigid disciplinary boundaries.
Sex Wars is a collection of writings by Duggan and Hunter that brings together the best of the important work they have done on sexual politics in America over the past decade. Sex Wars traces the development of this politics and its deployment in three different arenas--speech and representation, legal regulation, and scholarship.
The Religious Right has fractured, the pundits tell us, and its power is waning. Is it true - have evangelical Christians lost their political clout? When the subject is sex, the answer is definitively no. Only three decades after the legalization of abortion, the broad gains of the feminist movement, and the emergence of the gay rights movement, Americans appear to be doing the time warp again. It's 1950s redux. Politicians--including many Democrats--insist that abstinence is the only acceptable form of birth control. Fully fifty percent of American high schools teach a "sex education" curriculum that includes deceptive information about the prevalence of STDs and the failure rates of condoms. Students are taught that homosexuality is curable, and that premarital sex ruins future marital happiness. Afraid of sounding godless, American liberals have failed to challenge these retrograde orthodoxies. The truth is Americans have not become anti-sex, but they have become increasingly anxious about sex--not least due to the stratagems of the Religious Right. There has been a war on sex in America--a war conservative evangelicals have in large part already won. How did the Religious Right score so many successes? Historian Dagmar Herzog argues that conservative evangelicals appropriated the lessons of the first sexual revolution far more effectively than liberals. With the support of a multimillion-dollar Christian sex industry, evangelicals crafted an astonishingly graphic and effective pitch for the pleasures of "hot monogamy"--for married, heterosexual couples only. This potent message enabled them to win elections and seduce souls, with disastrous political consequences. Fierce, witty, and brilliant, Sex in Crisis challenges America's culture of sexual dysfunction and calls for a more sophisticated national conversation about the facts of life.
The American cultural landscape has shifted considerably since the 1990s. As church attendance has declined, seculars have increased in number and in political involvement. The economy was supposed to be the most important issue in the 2008 and 2012 elections, but social issues such as gay rights and the status of women actually had a greater impact on vote choice. Moral issues and perceptions of candidate morality had less effect on voters in 2004 than in 2008. These arguments directly challenge the conventional wisdom concerning the 2004 and 2008 elections, which were supposedly decided on the basis of moral values and the economy respectively. Yet in The Politics of Sex, Susan B. Hansen justifies these claims theoretically based on evidence about how voters actually evaluate candidates. Hansen explores trends in public opinion on abortion, gay rights, and the status of women and finds that "values voters" are still crucial in presidential elections, even those supposedly fought over economic or foreign-policy issues. She then analyzes campaign strategies and vote choice to show how Barack Obama made effective use of the liberal trends in public opinion on social issues in 2008 and 2012. Hansen also examines trends in demographics, religious involvement, the institutional setting, and public opinion to predict who in future years benefit from the politics of sex. By providing an historical perspective on the changing impact of morality politics on presidential elections, this book will show how and why the politics of sex now favors the Democratic Party.
New York Times Bestselling Author! In this groundbreaking book – for the first time in paperback and fully-updated with all the latest legal information - outspoken freethinker Jesse Ventura lays out his philosophy. Now more than ever before, our country needs full legalization of medical/recreational marijuana and hemp. Seemingly with every day that goes by we find out more positive things about marijuana, a medicinal plant in abundant supply, yet legalization finds stronger resistance from government agencies and big business. Find out why the US government patented CBD and what Big Pharma companies have exclusive rights to create marijuana medication and why the DEA can’t be trusted. Jesse Ventura’s Marijuana Manifesto calls for an end to the War on Drugs. Legalizing marijuana will serve to rejuvenate our pathetic economy and just might make people a little happier. Ventura’s book will show us all how we can take our country back. “More celebs than ever are jumping on the ‘Legalize’ bandwagon. Why? Because it’s safe now. It won’t impact your career anymore. But Jesse Ventura has been a solid proponent of legal cannabis for decades. In Jesse Ventura’s Marijuana Manifesto, he lays out the good sense of legalization, as well as the sheer insanity of prohibition. As a proud American, he pulls no punches calling out the political elite. - Dan Skye, High Times editor-in-chief “Ventura is ultimately quite convincing about the ineffectuality of the War on Drugs, and on the contradictions and corruptions of the Drug Enforcement Administration, a particular bugbear of his.” - Michael Lindgren, The Washington Post
In San Francisco, the St. James Infirmary (SJI) and the California Prostitutes Education Project (CAL-PEP) provide free, nonjudgmental medical care, counseling, and other health and social services by and for sex workers—a radical political commitment at odds with government policies that criminalize prostitution. To maintain and expand these much-needed services and to qualify for funding from state, federal, and local authorities, such organizations must comply with federal and state regulations for nonprofits. In Sex Work Politics, Samantha Majic investigates the way nonprofit organizations negotiate their governmental obligations while maintaining their commitment to outreach and advocacy for sex workers' rights as well as broader sociopolitical change. Drawing on multimethod qualitative research, Majic outlines the strategies that CAL-PEP and SJI employ to balance the conflicting demands of service and advocacy, which include treating sex work as labor with legitimate occupational health and safety concerns, empowering their clients with civic skills to advance their political commitments outside the nonprofit organization, and conducting and publishing research and analysis to inform the public and policymakers of their constituents' needs. Challenging the assumption that activists must "sell out" and abandon radical politics to manage formal organizations, Majic comes to the surprising conclusion that it is indeed possible to maintain effective advocacy and key social movement values, beliefs, and practices, even while partnering with government agencies. Sex Work Politics significantly contributes to studies of transformational politics with its nuanced portrait of nonprofits as centers capable of sustaining political and social change.
Banning boobs, booty, bongs and ass for cash. A humorous and brutally honest look at the failed drug, pornography and prostitution policies of the U.S. which are bankrupting and incarcerating Americans for political gain. {Excerpt}...Rather than keeping the murderers, rapists, serial killers and pedophiles jailed, due to chronic overcrowding, potheads, hookers, and adult entertainers are occupying that same space. This situation is bankrupting our counties, cities and ultimately our whole country. Our penal system can not continue to maintain the massive numbers of revolving 'criminals' that are, to a certain extent, only considered criminals because they offend the religious notions of certain people. {Excerpt}...Our society, politicians and judicial system love to declare war on things. War on illiteracy. War on drugs. War on porn. War on obesity. War on pollution. War on prostitution. War on drinking and driving. War on smoking. War on crime. War on pre-marital sex. War on post-marital sex. War on fun and kinky sex. (Ok I made the last couple up, but you get my point). {Excerpt}...While one is standing in line having their I.D.s checked and photocopied by pharmacy staff, there is an abundance of alcohol right next to the pharmacy, where one can purchase quantities that can kill not only themselves, but a herd of elephants, plus fuel a cross country trip in a vehicle. {Excerpt}... Regardless of a substance, used in excess, prescribed or not, driving under the influence is a threat to society. Anyone doing so should be arrested and appropriate steps taken. However, studies prove that using cell phones while driving, or women (or metro-sexual man-scapers) applying makeup, people changing Cd's, messing with iPods, eating lunch, or masturbating cause wrecks, and are certainly more of a danger than someone that smoked some weed. I've never heard nor known of anyone getting into a traffic accident as a result of being stoned. {Excerpt}...People get arrested for having Marijuana seeds in their ashtray, or paraphernalia in their cars such as roach clips (leads for electronic testing equipment), razor blades, a straw, and even baggies. Baggies? Are you serious? How many baggies am I allowed to own before it is deemed by some "Barney Fife" that my buying in bulk is proof of my being a drug dealer? If someone gets busted for having seeds and baggies in their car during a routine traffic stop (you know, where someone is pulled over and they search his/her car and person for no reason, no probable cause, no reasonable suspicion and are arrested), why am I, as a taxpayer, paying for them to sit in jail over a four day holiday weekend? Why am I picking up the tab because someone wants to get high and relax fully on a weekend? Take the seized marijuana and donate it to cancer patients, wounded military members, etc.{Excerpt}...The "pillars" of the community not only frown on her opting to make a gainful living by engaging in adult entertainment, they make every attempt to outlaw it. Ironically these same jackasses are the first to hit the D.C. strip clubs after their brutal 2 hour workday.America has millions of full time workers with no health insurance, we have a couple million homes without phone service, and hundreds of thousands without plumbing and every day thousands of babies are born and go immediately into the poverty bracket.Women are expected to be mothers and role models, while the males running this country are out getting blowjobs from interns (or in airport restrooms), screwing around on their wives, raping and robbing your pension plans, giving themselves raises every other day, all the while laying guilt trips, and making laws against a woman using her body to make a decent living to provide for herself and her family.Apparently "using her body" only applies to the sexual occupations. As if spending 45 years as a waitress, a seamstress, a store clerk, and hundreds of other jobs is not "using her body".
