Drawing on conversations with hundreds of women about their genitalia, the author presents a collection of performance pieces from her one-woman show of the same name.
'I am thirty-two years old and all my life I have been told what to do, what to like and who to be. From an early age, I have been taught that if my knees were scarred, I wouldn't find a husband, so I shouldn't run so much. As a teenager, I learnt from girly magazines what to do to please men and later, I discovered that I needed to follow 'the rules' to get a man to marry me. Every day I have been told that I am imperfect and that I should change certain things about myself; how I look, how I dress and who I am. I'm not supposed to fart, shit or even bleed. I'm not allowed to be human.'
Hurt people hurt people. Say there was a novel in which Holden Caulfield was an alcoholic and Lolita was a photographer’s assistant and, somehow, they met in Bright Lights, Big City. He’s blinded by love. She by ambition. Diary of an Oxygen Thief is an honest, hilarious, and heartrending novel, but above all, a very realistic account of what we do to each other and what we allow to have done to us.
Longlisted for the Polari First Book Prize 2020 Life's a drag... Why not be a queen? 'Stories like the one where you shagged a 79-year-old builder and knocked over his sister's ashes while feeding him a Viagra. Or the time you crashed your car because you were giving a hand job in barely moving traffic and took your eye off the car in front. That's the kind of dinner-party ice-breaker I'm talking about.' Northern, working-class and shagging men three times her age, Crystal writes candidly about her search for 'the one'; sleeping with a VIP in an attempt to become a world famous journalist; getting hired and fired by a well-known fashion magazine; being torn between losing weight and gorging on KFC; and her need for constant sexual satisfaction (and where that takes her). Charting her day-to-day adventures over the course of a year, we encounter tucks, twists and sucks, heinous overspending and endless nights spent sprinting from problem to problem in a full face of make-up. This is a place where the previously unspeakable becomes the commendable - a unique portrayal of the queer experience. (c) 2019, Crystal Rasmussen (P) 2019 Penguin Audio
THE FIRST NOVEL IN THE USA TODAY BESTSELLING ALEX CRAFT SERIES! Grave witch Alex Craft can speak to the dead, but that doesn’t mean she likes what they have to say. As a private investigator and consultant for the police, Alex Craft has seen a lot of dark magic. But even though she's on good terms with Death himself, nothing has prepared her for her latest case. When she's raising a "shade" involved in a high profile murder, it attacks her, and then someone makes an attempt on her life. Someone really doesn't want her to know what the dead have to say, and she'll have to work with mysterious homicide detective Falin Andrews to figure out why....
First book devoted to the diagnosis and treatment of sexual pain in women Female Sexual Pain Disorders is a remarkable fusion of clinical and scientific knowledge that will empower women’s healthcare professionals to help their patients in overcoming this common debilitating disorder. Based on the highest level research, it provides state-of-the-art practical guidance that will help you to: Evaluate and distinguish the causes of sexual pain in women Differentiate the many forms of sexual pain Implement multidisciplinary treatments Distilling the experience of world leaders across many clinical, therapeutic and scientific disciplines, with an array of algorithms and diagnostic tools, Female Sexual Pain Disorders is your ideal companion for treating the many millions of women who suffer from this disorder worldwide. All proceeds from this book are being donated to the International Society for the Study of Women’s Sexual Health (ISSWSH).
In The Sex Diaries Australia’s best known sex therapist, Bettina Arndt, uncovers the night-time drama being played out in bedrooms everywhere—the creeping hand and feigning of sleep, the staying up late in the hope that he will doze off. It is one of the great inconvenient truths of relationships that after the first blissful years together, most men want more sex than their female partners. Bettina Arndt recruited ninety-eight couples to keep diaries, revealing their intimate negotiations over sex. Who feels like having sex? Who doesn’t? And how do couples cope if one person wants it more than the other? She draws on her thirty-five years of professional experience to provide a provocative analysis that challenges our basic assumptions about sex. With her characteristic humour and insight, Bettina Arndt proposes a new approach to how couples can enjoy regular sex—and sustain loving relationships.
THE FIRST PSY/CHANGELING NOVEL from the New York Times bestselling author of Shards of Hope, Shield of Winter, and Heart of Obsidian... The book that Christine Feehan called "a must-read for all of my fans." In a world that denies emotions, where the ruling Psy punish any sign of desire, Sascha Duncan must conceal the feelings that brand her as flawed. To reveal them would be to sentence herself to the horror of “rehabilitation”—the complete psychic erasure of everything she ever was…Both human and animal, Lucas Hunter is a Changeling hungry for the very sensations the Psy disdain. After centuries of uneasy coexistence, these two races are now on the verge of war over the brutal murders of several Changeling women. Lucas is determined to find the Psy killer who butchered his packmate, and Sascha is his ticket into their closely guarded society. But he soon discovers that this ice-cold Psy is very capable of passion—and that the animal in him is fascinated by her. Caught between their conflicting worlds, Lucas and Sascha must remain bound to their identities—or sacrifice everything for a taste of darkest temptation…
From South Park to Kathy Acker, and from Lars Von Trier to Sex and the City, women's sexual organs are demonized. Rees traces the fascinating evolution of this demonization, considering how calling the 'c-word' obscene both legitimates and perpetuates the fractured identities of women globally. Rees demonstrates how writers, artists, and filmmakers contend with the dilemma of the vagina's puzzlingly 'covert visibility'. In our postmodern, porn-obsessed culture, vaginas appear to be everywhere, literally or symbolically but, crucially, they are as silenced as they are objectified. The Vagina: A Literary and Cultural History examines the paradox of female genitalia through five fields of artistic expression: literature, film, TV, visual, and performance art. There is a peculiar paradox – unlike any other – regarding female genitalia. Rees focuses on this paradox of what is termed the 'covert visibility' of the vagina and on its monstrous manifestations. That is, what happens when the female body refuses to be pathologized, eroticized, or rendered subordinate to the will or intention of another? Common, and often offensive, slang terms for the vagina can be seen as an attempt to divert attention away from the reality of women's lived sexual experiences such that we don't 'look' at the vagina itself – slang offers a convenient distraction to something so taboo. The Vagina: A Literary and Cultural History is an important contribution to the ongoing debate in understanding the feminine identity