Sexual Outsiders: Understanding BDSM Sexualities and Communities


David M. Ortmann - 2012
    While misunderstandings surrounding these communities prevail, BDSM sexuality cuts across race, gender, nationality, and sexual orientation. BDSM describes forms of sexuality that incorporate restraint, pressure, sensation, training, and elements of both erotic and non-erotic power exchange between the engaged parties. Some BDSM "scenes" include role-playing, spanking, blindfolds, ropes, and erotic costuming. Sexual Outsiders is designed as a guide for BDSM community members who must wade through the quagmire of unique problems they face: coming out to family, friends and partners; distinguishing abusive relationships from healthy consensual ones; finding and developing community; overcoming shame and denial; exploring whether BDSM sexuality can be a healing tool; gaining access to quality, culturally competent psychotherapy; and finding strategies to develop a healthy sexual self-esteem in the face of current medical and social standards that view them as sick or pathological. The book also serves as an educational primer for those whose partners, friends, and family members are involved in BDSM. In terms of challenges faced by BDSM communities, the most significant is living with a stigmatized sexuality shame, prejudice, discrimination, isolation, depression, and a lack of adequate, competent mental health care. Issues such as coming out as a sexual minority, finding community and partners, and dealing with scenes and relationships that go wrong are some the common experiences shared by members of BDSM communities. Sexual Outsiders employs common sense, good humor, and vivid anecdotes while incorporating basic ideas about human behavior, psychology, philosophy, interviews, history, and clinical case studies to illustrate the real lives and experiences of men and women in BDSM communities. Anyone wanting to learn more about this unique, and more-common-than-you-think expression of sexuality, will find in these pages insight into the various challenges BDSM practitioners face, and the many strengths that people in the BDSM communities have developed in the face of social stigma and prejudice.

The Sixties Unplugged: A Kaleidoscopic History of a Disorderly Decade


Gerard J. DeGroot - 2008
    That was, of course, an oblique reference to the mind-bending drugs that clouded perception--yet time has proven an equally effective hallucinogen. This book revisits the Sixties we forgot or somehow failed to witness. In a kaleidoscopic global tour of the decade, Gerard DeGroot reminds us that the Ballad of the Green Beret outsold Give Peace a Chance, that the Students for a Democratic Society were outnumbered by Young Americans for Freedom, that revolution was always a pipe dream, and that the Sixties belong to Reagan and de Gaulle more than to Kennedy and Dubcek. The Sixties Unplugged shows how opportunity was squandered, and why nostalgia for the decade has obscured sordidness and futility. DeGroot returns us to a time in which idealism, tolerance, and creativity gave way to cynicism, chauvinism, and materialism. He presents the Sixties as a drama acted out on stages around the world, a theater of the absurd in which China's Cultural Revolution proved to be the worst atrocity of the twentieth century, the Six-Day War a disaster for every nation in the Middle East, and a million slaughtered Indonesians martyrs to greed. The Sixties Unplugged restores to an era the prevalent disorder and inconvenient truths that longing, wistfulness, and distance have obscured. In an impressionistic journey through a tumultuous decade, DeGroot offers an object lesson in the distortions nostalgia can create as it strives to impose order on memory and value on mayhem.

The 30-Day Love Detox: Cleanse Yourself of Bad Boys, Cheaters, and Men Who Won't Commit - And Find a Real Relationship


Wendy Walsh - 2013
    We can do what we want and date who we want, but do we have the tools to navigate our hard-won sexual freedom? Now, from the dating doyenne of the Sex and the City generation comes a groundbreaking prescription for smart, savvy, slow-love. Dr. Wendy Walsh's outside-the-box approach to relationships turns traditional thinking on its head by using evolutionary psychology to offer advice that is both empowering and practical.In The 30-Day Love Detox, Walsh offers a step-by-step, five-part attachment strategy with a 30-day "detox" that helps weed out the bad boys and sets you up to meet the right guy, including:- The five sexual myths that keep women single- When to say yes to sex in a new relationship- How to use technology to bring your crush closer- How to spot a commitment-oriented man at his peak readinessMelding scientific research, anthropological truths, and proven techniques, The 30-Day Love Detox is a revolutionary road map to finding lasting love in a modern world.

Sugar Brain Fix: The 28-Day Plan to Quit Craving the Foods That Are Shrinking Your Brain and Expanding Your Waistline


Mike Dow - 2020