Heralded by Publishers Weekly as one of the best science books of the year, it is a provocative and deeply engaging book that elucidates the ties between a woman's experience of her vagina and her sense of self; her impulses, dreams, and courage; and her role in love and in society in completely new and revelatory ways sure to provoke impassioned conversation.A brilliant and nuanced synthesis of physiology, history, and cultural criticism, Vagina: A New Biography explores the physical, political, and spiritual implications of this startling series of new scientific breakthroughs for women and for society as a whole, from a writer whose conviction and keen intelligence have propelled her works to the tops of bestseller lists, and firmly into the realms of modern classics.

    In defense of human rights and equality, she assails the corrupt and educates the misguided with compassion, Swiftian wit, and complete literary authority.In this compelling collection, Pollitt skewers one hypocrite after another. She suggests, for example, that creationists be permitted to oppose the teaching of evolution only so long as they agree to forgo the benefits of the theory–such as flu vaccines. She gently wonders if those who denounced the decision to allow Terri Schiavo to die in peace would themselves be satisfied to be video-diagnosed by Senator Bill Frist. And in the title essay about fundamentalists’ antagonism toward sex education and STD prevention, she asks, “What is it with these right-wing Christians? Faced with a choice between sex and death, they choose death every time.”Pollitt is one of the most eloquent and persuasive voices in American political conversation of this or any other era, and Virginity or Death! Is a marvelous demonstration of her keen insight, mordant humor, and sense of justice.“Katha Pollitt has long and rightly been hailed for her brilliance, wit, and great insight into politics, social issues, and women’s rights. As with all of her work, I am enormously grateful for Virginity or Death!, and also deeply jealous.”–Anne Lamott, author of Traveling Mercies

    For the profession of psychoanalysis, Irigaray believes, female sexuality has remained a "dark continent," unfathomable and unapproachable; its nature can only be misunderstood by those who continue to regard women in masculine terms. In the first section of the book, "The Blind Spot of an Old Dream of Symmetry," Irigaray rereads Freud's essay "Femininity," and his other writings on women, bringing to the fore the masculine ideology implicit in psychoanalytic theory and in Western discourse in general: woman is defined as a disadvantaged man, a male construct with no status of her own.In the last section, "Plato's Hystera," Irigaray reinterprets Plato's myth of the cave, of the womb, in an attempt to discover the origins of that ideology, to ascertain precisely the way in which metaphors were fathered that henceforth became vehicles of meaning, to trace how woman came to be excluded from the production of discourse. Between these two sections is "Speculum"--ten meditative, widely ranging, and freely associational essays, each concerned with an aspect of the history of Western philosophy in its relation to woman, in which Irigaray explores woman's essential difference from man.

    GOOP editors introduce the experts they rely on, and dive into Q&A's on the ins and outs of sexual health, pleasure, and ways to evolve the conversations we have with ourselves, our partners, and each other. Part 1, Seduction: Mines the deeper layers of seduction-with suggestions for assessing attraction, reigniting the flame once it's gone out, and navigating dating, unconventional relationship scenarios, the sex toy aisle, and more. Part 2, Sexuality: Different takes on what sexuality means, looks, and feels like today, and options for tapping into sexual power-including a chapter on strengthening libido and tantric practices to up sexual energy. Part 3: Doing It: Antidotes to bedroom boredom, the psychology behind oral sex, how to figure out and pursue what you want-and play out fantasies that may seem beyond reach. Part 4, Orgasm: A closer look at enduring sex myths, with expert advice on closing the orgasm gap, doing away with the pressure to perform, and the benefits of self-pleasure. Part 5, Sex Ed: Covers the essentials (like clean lube and condoms), hormone health, and how to talk to your partner when something is up-all with an eye toward pleasure (as opposed to just avoiding calamity). Throughout the book you'll find goopasutra-style takes on the reality of experiences ranging from plain vanilla to menage a trois, plus personal anecdotes from the GOOP team.

    She was also a compulsive seductress with a reputation as a slut and heartbreaker. One day, while working a low-paying retail job, she had a revelation: why not embrace her salacious image and make some money off of it?She began stripping, dancing, masturbating, playing games, making art––and broadcasting it all online for money as a camgirl. In her first month, she racked up hundreds of nightly viewers, and within a year she ranked in the top fifty girls on a site featuring tens of thousands of performers. Over the course of her career, Isa built her own business, explored BDSM, attended a porn convention, slept with a fan, and pushed herself further than she thought possible. And yet, despite her success, she struggled to fit into the community she so desperately wanted to belong to.Camgirl is a relatable look at confronting our past traumas and accepting ourselves for who we are. It masterfully explores the complexities of digital life, sexuality and the tensions between our private and public selves. Mazzei’s biting humor and raw vulnerability ensure you’ll never think about sex work―or sex―the same way again.

    Joanne Meyerowitz tells a powerful human story about people who had a deep and unshakable desire to transform their bodily sex. In the last century when many challenged the social categories and hierarchies of race, class, and gender, transsexuals questioned biological sex itself, the category that seemed most fundamental and fixed of all.From early twentieth-century sex experiments in Europe, to the saga of Christine Jorgensen, whose sex-change surgery made headlines in 1952, to today’s growing transgender movement, Meyerowitz gives us the first serious history of transsexuality. She focuses on the stories of transsexual men and women themselves, as well as a large supporting cast of doctors, scientists, journalists, lawyers, judges, feminists, and gay liberationists, as they debated the big questions of medical ethics, nature versus nurture, self and society, and the scope of human rights.In this story of transsexuality, Meyerowitz shows how new definitions of sex circulated in popular culture, science, medicine, and the law, and she elucidates the tidal shifts in our social, moral, and medical beliefs over the twentieth century, away from sex as an evident biological certainty and toward an understanding of sex as something malleable and complex. How Sex Changed is an intimate history that illuminates the very changes that shape our understanding of sex, gender, and sexuality today.

    Where women not only stop apologizing, but seize—and enjoy—control. This is the quickly mainstreaming world of BDSM (bondage, discipline, sadism, masochism)—and it has a lot to teach women about empowerment, negotiation, open-mindedness, and more. Journalist Lindsay Goldwert, intrigued by this seismic cultural shift, traveled across the United States to meet the stars of the subculture, who spoke frankly with her about their lives and work. In this “lively, funny, thoughtful channeling of wisdom” (Sara Benincasa, author of Real Artists Have Day Jobs), these Alpha women show you how you can reset the power dynamic in any situation to get what you want—whether it’s from a husband, a boss, or partner. They share strategies for revolutionizing not only your sex life, but your career, your relationships, and most importantly, your inner foundations. With bondage gear popping up on the big screen, the runway, the red carpet, and in celebrity lingerie lines, BDSM is officially moving out of the dungeon and into the sun. Let Bow Down help you learn how to use it. “Whether your fantasies lie in the bedroom or the boardroom, Lindsay will give you the courage to go forth and dominate.” (Sarah Cooper, author of How to Be Successful without Hurting Men’s Feelings).

    Drawing on the black feminist tradition, including Audre Lourde’s invitation to use the erotic as power and Toni Cade Bambara’s exhortation that we make the revolution irresistible, the contributors to this volume take up the challenge to rethink the ground rules of activism. Writers including Cara Page of the Astraea Lesbian Foundation For Justice, Sonya Renee Taylor, founder of This Body Is Not an Apology, and author Alexis Pauline Gumbs cover a wide array of subjects— from sex work to climate change, from race and gender to sex and drugs—creating new narratives about how politics can feel good and how what feels good always has a complex politics of its own.Building on the success of her popular Emergent Strategy, brown launches a new series of the same name with this volume, bringing readers books that explore experimental, expansive, and innovative ways to meet the challenges that face our world today. Books that find the opportunity in every crisis!

    Judith Halberstam proposes “low theory” as a mode of thinking and writing that operates at many different levels at once. Low theory is derived from eccentric archives. It runs the risk of not being taken seriously. It entails a willingness to fail and to lose one’s way, to pursue difficult questions about complicity, and to find counterintuitive forms of resistance. Tacking back and forth between high theory and low theory, high culture and low culture, Halberstam looks for the unexpected and subversive in popular culture, avant-garde performance, and queer art. She pays particular attention to animated children’s films, revealing narratives filled with unexpected encounters between the childish, the transformative, and the queer. Failure sometimes offers more creative, cooperative, and surprising ways of being in the world, even as it forces us to face the dark side of life, love, and libido.

    Even though the glass ceiling is cracked, most women stay comfortably beneath it, and everywhere we hear about vitally important “hardwired” differences between male and female brains. The neuroscience we read about in magazines, newspaper articles, books, and sometimes even scientific journals increasingly tells a tale of two brains, and the result is more often than not a validation of the status quo. Women, it seems, are just too intuitive for math, men too focused for housework.Drawing on the latest research in neuroscience and psychology, Cordelia Fine debunks the myth of hardwired differences between men’s and women’s brains, unraveling the evidence behind such claims as men’s brains aren’t wired for empathy, and women’s brains aren’t made to fix cars. She then goes one step further, offering a very different explanation of the dissimilarities between men’s and women’s behavior. Instead of a “male brain” and a “female brain,” Fine gives us a glimpse of plastic, mutable minds that are continuously influenced by cultural assumptions about gender.Delusions of Gender provides us with a much-needed corrective to the belief that men’s and women’s brains are intrinsically different--a belief that, as Fine shows with insight and humor--all too often works to the detriment of ourselves and our society.

    Transmuting the tensions between feminism and Capitalism, Proposals for the Feminine Economy gives us a roadmap forward by insisting that business can be a site of feminist practice if we embody our values, create new economies, and experiment with redistributions of power & resources. Practical, poetic prescriptions for feminism’s fourth wave.

       Was murder part of the game?   Seventeen-year-old Kat McDonough grew up with theater in her blood—and a penchant for make-believe. More than a decade older, Seth Mazzaglia was well known in the community theater circle of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. He, too, had a rich inner life—and he soon had Kat convinced that they were soul mates.   To intensify their bond, Seth lured Kat into a world of violent sex and role-playing, where she was his slave. But even that wasn’t enough to satisfy his ravenous appetites.   Enter Lizzi Marriott, the new girl in town. And when she accepts an invitation to Kat and Seth’s apartment, she will never be seen again...INCLUDES PHOTOS *Robert Scott, author of The Girl in the Leaves

    Corporate manifestos by women who already fit in (or who are able to convincingly fake it) aren’t helping. There is a high cost for the generation of young women and transgender people currently navigating the harsh realities of the tech industry, who gave themselves to their careers only to be ignored, harassed and disrespected.Not everyone can be a CEO; not everyone is able to embrace a workplace culture that diminishes the contributions of women and ignores real complaints. The very culture of high tech, where foosball tables and endless supplies of beer are de facto perks, but maternity leave and breast-feeding stations are controversial, is designed to appeal to young men. Lean Out collects 25 stories from the modern tech industry, from people who fought GamerGate and from women and transgender artists who have made their own games, from women who have started their own companies and who have worked for some of the most successful corporations in America, from LGBTQ women, from women of color, from transgender people and people who do not ascribe to a gender. All are fed up with the glacial pace of change in America’s tech industry.Included are essays by Anna Anthropy, Leigh Alexander, Lauren Bacon, Katherine Cross, Dom DeGuzman, Fakegrimlock, Krys Freeman, Gesche Haas, Ash Huang, Jenni Lee, Katy Levinson, Leanne Pittsford, Brook Shelly, Elissa Shevinsky, and Squinky. Edited and selected by entrepreneur and tech veteran Elissa Shevinsky, Lean Out sees a possible way forward that uses tech and creative disengagement to jettison 20th century corporate culture: “I’ve figured out a way to create safe space for myself in tech,” writes Shevinsky. “I’ve left Silicon Valley, and now work remotely from home. I adore everyone on my team, because I hired them myself.”

    Most of us associate nihilism with destructiveness and violence. Nihilism means, literally, "an ideology of nothing. " Is nihilism, then, believing in nothing? Or is it the belief that life is nothing? Or the belief that the beliefs we have amount to nothing? If we can learn to recognize the many varieties of nihilism, Nolen Gertz writes, then we can learn to distinguish what is meaningful from what is meaningless. In this addition to the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Gertz traces the history of nihilism in Western philosophy from Socrates through Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre.Although the term "nihilism" was first used by Friedrich Jacobi to criticize the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, Gertz shows that the concept can illuminate the thinking of Socrates, Descartes, and others. It is Nietzsche, however, who is most associated with nihilism, and Gertz focuses on Nietzsche's thought. Gertz goes on to consider what is not nihilism--pessimism, cynicism, and apathy--and why; he explores theories of nihilism, including those associated with Existentialism and Postmodernism; he considers nihilism as a way of understanding aspects of everyday life, calling on Adorno, Arendt, Marx, and prestige television, among other sources; and he reflects on the future of nihilism. We need to understand nihilism not only from an individual perspective, Gertz tells us, but also from a political one.

    Women on Top looks at a new generation of women and asks: what are women's sexual fantasies today? How have they responded to the changes brought about by feminism? In a world wallpapered with erotic images, but which still denies them full sexual freedom, women are more determined than ever that they'll be 'nice girls' no longer. Explicit, iconoclastic, often shocking, these erotic daydreams - angry, lustful, tender and dark - blow apart the old taboos. Nothing is forbidden.