Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both


Laura Sessions Stepp - 2007
    We're living in an increasingly sexualized world, and it's the young-particularly young women-who must deal with the consequences. Kids are having more sexual contact than ever, and at an earlier age. They call it "hooking up." But what is "hooking up"? According to Laura Sessions Stepp, a reporter at "The Washington Post," hooking up eludes a neat definition. It can be anything from an innocent kiss to sexual. In "Unhooked," Stepp follows three groups of young women (one in high school, one each at Duke and George Washington universities). She sat with them in class, socialized with them, listened to them talk, and came away with some disturbing insights, including that hooking up carries with it no obligation on either side. Relationships and romance are seen as messy and time-consuming, and love is postponed-or worse, seen as impossible. Some young women can handle this, but many can't, and they're being battered-physically and emotionally-by the new dating landscape. The result is a generation of young people stymied by relationships and unsure where to turn for help. "The need to be connected intimately to others is as central to our well-being as food and shelter," Stepp writes in "Unhooked." "In my view, if we don't get it right, we're probably not going to get anything else in life right."

The Game of Desire: 5 Surprising Secrets to Dating with Dominance - and Getting What You Want


Shannon Boodram - 2019
    Apps like Tinder and Bumble are supposed to foster connection, but instead serve as a reminder of how painfully single we are. Certified sexologist and intimacy coach Shan Boodram—the most sought-after sex educator on the internet—is about to change all that. In this essential how-to guide, she addresses the realities of life today—when the rules of love and attraction are fluid—and teaches a group of young women how to become master daters in just sixty days.It starts with you. Shan makes clear that love and self-discovery go hand in hand—your dating life is just as much about you as it is about other people. She challenges you to look inside yourself for what you want out of a partner, a relationship and, most important, yourself. Once you figure out what you want from dating, she shows you exactly how to get it. The Game of Desire empowers you to take the lead, learn your strengths, and identify and correct your weaknesses, all the while getting inspired watching a group of women learn how to succeed in today’s dating pool.While many books tell women why they can’t get a date, Shan teaches you the skills and techniques necessary to take charge in today’s competitive and often confusing dating scene, providing the tools essential to attract—and retain—the partner(s) you want. From learning love languages to debunking dating myths, she helps women build knowledge and confidence. Featuring conversational case studies, comprehensive facts about the psychology of sex and romance, and expert insight into sex culture, and written with her trademark humor and charm, The Game of Desire is a must for all of Shan’s fans and for every woman struggling to feel loved and desired.

My Story


Ronnie Kray - 1993
    Following on from Our Story, Ron Kray fills in the gaps and gives his version of the murders of Jack The Hat McVitie and George Cornell, describing his bisexuality and his marriage in Broadmoor and clarifying many of the misconceptions about the years when he and Reg ruled the London underworld, shot enemies at will and simultaneously socialized with some of the most glittering politicians, celebrities and hostesses of the time.

Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow into Troublesome Gaps — and What We Can Do About It


Lise Eliot - 2009
    As a result, we've come to accept that boys can't focus in a classroom and girls are obsessed with relationships. That's just the way they're built. In Pink Brain Blue Brain, neuroscientist Lise Eliot turns that thinking on its head. Based on years of exhaustive research and her own work in the new field of plasticity, Eliot argues that infant brains are so malleable that a few small differences at birth become amplified over time, as parents and teachers—and the culture at large—unwittingly reinforce gender stereotypes. Perhaps surprisingly, children themselves exacerbate the differences, by playing to their modest strengths. They constantly exercise those “ball-throwing” or “doll-cuddling” circuits, rarely straying from their comfort zones. But this, says Eliot, is just what they need to do. And parents can help, if they know how and when to intervene. Presenting the latest science at every developmental stage, from birth to puberty, she zeroes in on the precise differences between boys and girls, erasing harmful stereotypes. Boys are not, in fact, “better at math” but at certain kinds of spatial reasoning. Girls are not naturally more empathetic, they’re just encouraged to express their feelings. By appreciating how sex differences emerge—rather than assuming them to be fixed biological facts—we can help all children reach their fullest potential, close the troubling gaps between boys and girls, and ultimately end the gender wars that currently divide us.

The Man's Guide to Women: Scientifically Proven Secrets from the "Love Lab" About What Women Really Want


John M. Gottmanسارا فیض - 2016
    Based on 40 years of research, The Man’s Guide to Women unlocks the mystery of how to attract, satisfy, and succeed with a woman for a lifetime. For the first time ever, there is a science-based answer to the age-old question: What do women really want in a man?Dr. Gottman, author of the New York Times bestseller The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, and his wife and collaborator, clinical psychologist Julie Schwartz Gottman, PhD, have pored over the research along with bestselling coauthors Douglas Abrams and Rachel Carlton Abrams, MD. Together, they have written this definitive guide for men, providing answers on everything from how to approach a woman and build a connection with her to how to truly satisfy her in bed and know when the relationship is on the right track. The Man’s Guide to Women is a must-have playbook for how to play—and win—the game of love.

The Rational Male


Rollo Tomassi - 2013
    The book is the compiled, ten-year core writing of author/blogger Rollo Tomassi from therationalmale.com. Rollo Tomassi is one of the leading voices in the globally growing, male-focused online consortium known as the "Manosphere". Outlined are the concepts of positive masculinity, the feminine imperative, plate theory, operative social conventions and the core psychological theory behind Game awareness and "red pill" ideology. Tomassi explains and outlines the principles of intergender social dynamics and foundational reasoning behind them.

Sexual Politics


Kate Millett - 1969
    Her work rocked the foundations of the literary canon by castigating time-honored classics for their use of sex to degrade women.

The Naughty Nineties: The Triumph of the American Libido


David Friend - 2017
    A definitive look at the captains of the culture wars -- and an indispensable road map for understanding how we got to the Trump Teens.THE NAUGHTY NINETIES: The Triumph of the American Libido examines the scandal-strafed decade when our public and private lives began to blur due to the rise of the web, reality television, and the wholesale tabloidization of pop culture.In this comprehensive and often hilarious time capsule, David Friend combines detailed reporting with first-person accounts from many of the decade's singular personalities, from Anita Hill to Monica Lewinsky, Lorena Bobbitt to Heidi Fleiss, Alan Cumming to Joan Rivers, Jesse Jackson to key members of the Clinton, Dole, and Bush teams.THE NAUGHTY NINETIES also uncovers unsung sexual pioneers, from the enterprising sisters who dreamed up the Brazilian bikini wax to the scientists who, quite by accident, discovered Viagra.

The Evolution Of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating


David M. Buss - 1994
    Based on the most massive study of human mating ever undertaken, encompassing more than 10,000 people of all ages from thirty-seven cultures worldwide, The Evolution of Desire is the first book to present a unified theory of human mating behavior.Now in an updated edition with two new chapters by the author, The Evolution of Desire presents the latest research in the field, including starting new discoveries about the evolutionary advantages of infidelity, orgasm, and physical attractiveness.

Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation


Eva Illouz - 2011
    They come in many shapes: loving a man or a woman who will not commit to us, being heartbroken when we're abandoned by a lover, engaging in Sisyphean internet searches, coming back lonely from bars, parties, or blind dates, feeling bored in a relationship that is so much less than we had envisaged - these are only some of the ways in which the search for love is a difficult and often painful experience.Despite the widespread and almost collective character of these experiences, our culture insists they are the result of faulty or insufficiently mature psyches. For many, the Freudian idea that the family designs the pattern of an individual's erotic career has been the main explanation for why and how we fail to find or sustain love. Psychoanalysis and popular psychology have succeeded spectacularly in convincing us that individuals bear responsibility for the misery of their romantic and erotic lives. The purpose of this book is to change our way of thinking about what is wrong in modern relationships. The problem is not dysfunctional childhoods or insufficiently self-aware psyches, but rather the institutional forces shaping how we love.The argument of this book is that the modern romantic experience is shaped by a fundamental transformation in the ecology and architecture of romantic choice. The samples from which men and women choose a partner, the modes of evaluating prospective partners, the very importance of choice and autonomy and what people imagine to be the spectrum of their choices: all these aspects of choice have transformed the very core of the will, how we want a partner, the sense of worth bestowed by relationships, and the organization of desire.This book does to love what Marx did to commodities: it shows that it is shaped by social relations and institutions and that it circulates in a marketplace of unequal actors.

Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art


Camille Paglia - 1995
    With her brilliant bestsellers Sexual Pcrsonae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson and Sex, Art and American Culture she became America's first internationally recognized public thinker since the 1960s. Her new collection, Vamps and Tramps, is forthcoming in Penguin and covers subjects from pop to politics to pagan sexuality.

Where's My Happy Ending?: Happily ever after and how the heck to get there


Anna Whitehouse - 2020
    Either way, it’s hard to know if they’re really meant to be by your side until you both wear dentures. In Where's My Happy Ending? Anna Whitehouse and Matt Farquharson, authors of the Sunday Times bestseller Parenting the Sh*t Out of Life, set out to discover what it takes to make it to forever, by asking our greatest questions about love.They ask a former sex-worker and her ex-gigolo husband, celibate monks and free-loving hippies. They ask people who never wanted kids and people who have loads of them. They ask porn-makers and feminist academics, neurologists, psychologists and romance novelists. They ask a whelk fisherman and a lollipop lady. They speak to couples, throuples and singles; gay, straight and anywhere in-between.And in asking these questions, they are forced to confront their own relationship after a decade of marriage. Through tears, laughter, and one improperly discarded toenail clipping, Where’s My Happy Ending? gets answers for anyone who’s ever wondered ‘what’s next?’ Join Anna and Matt on a searingly honest, belly-laugh inducing journey through love and relationships, social media and small children, expert advice and everyday exasperation, as they navigate the muddy waters of modern romance.Discover whether love and relationships could be simpler – or more complex – than we think in this study on what it really means to find and keep love today.

The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love


bell hooks - 2003
    But to know love, men must be able to look at the ways that patriarchal culture keeps them from knowing themselves, from being in touch with their feelings, from loving. In The Will to Change, bell hooks gets to the heart of the matter and shows men how to express the emotions that are a fundamental part of who they are -- whatever their age, marital status, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. With trademark candor and fierce intelligence, hooks addresses the most common concerns of men, such as fear of intimacy and loss of their patriarchal place in society, in new and challenging ways. She believes men can find the way to spiritual unity by getting back in touch with the emotionally open part of themselves -- and lay claim to the rich and rewarding inner lives that have historically been the exclusive province of women. A brave and astonishing work, The Will to Change is designed to help men reclaim the best part of themselves

The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature


Geoffrey Miller - 2000
    Psychologist Geoffrey Miller offers the most convincing-and radical-explanation for how and why the human mind evolved.Consciousness, morality, creativity, language, and art: these are the traits that make us human. Scientists have traditionally explained these qualities as merely a side effect of surplus brain size, but Miller argues that they were sexual attractors, not side effects. He bases his argument on Darwin's theory of sexual selection, which until now has played second fiddle to Darwin's theory of natural selection, and draws on ideas and research from a wide range of fields, including psychology, economics, history, and pop culture. Witty, powerfully argued, and continually thought-provoking, The Mating Mind is a landmark in our understanding of our own species.

The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private


Susan Bordo - 1999
    In chapters on the penis (in all its incarnations), fifties Hollywood, male beauty standards, and sexual harassment, and in discussions of topics ranging from Marlon Brando and Boogie Nights to Philip Roth and Lady Chatterley's Lover, Bordo offers fresh and unexpected insights. Always--whether she is examining Michael Jordan or Humbert Humbert, the butch phallus or her own grade-school experiences--she rejects rigid categories in favor of an honest, nuanced version of men as flesh-and-blood human beings.