Congressman Todd Akin’s “legitimate” gaffe. The alleged rape crew of Steubenville, Ohio. Sexual violence has been so prominent in recent years that the feminist term “rape culture” has finally entered the mainstream. But what, exactly, is it? And how do we change it? In Asking for It, Kate Harding answers those questions in the same blunt, bullshit-free voice that’s made her a powerhouse feminist blogger. Combining in-depth research with practical knowledge, Asking for It makes the case that twenty-first century America—where it’s estimated that out of every 100 rapes only 5 result in felony convictions—supports rapists more effectively than victims. Harding offers ideas and suggestions for addressing how we as a culture can take rape much more seriously without compromising the rights of the accused.

    Khaled El-Rouayheb argues that this apparent paradox is based on the anachronistic assumption that homosexuality is a timeless, self-evident fact to which a particular culture reacts with some degree of tolerance or intolerance. Drawing on poetry, biographical literature, medicine, dream interpretation, and Islamic texts, he shows that the culture of the period lacked the concept of homosexuality.

    To clear my way, I must be allowed to ask some plain questions, and the answers will probably appear as unequivocal as the axioms on which reasoning is built; though, when entangled with various motives of action, they are formally contradicted, either by the words or conduct of men.In what does man's pre-eminence over the brute creation consist?The answer is as clear as that a half is less than the whole; inReason.

     This long-awaited new edition reinstates significant portions of the original French text that were cut in the first English translation. Vital and groundbreaking, Beauvoir’s pioneering and impressive text remains as pertinent today as it was back then, and will continue to provoke and inspire generations of men and women to come.

    They told you to wear longer skirts, avoid going out late at night and move in groups - never accept drinks from a stranger, and wear shoes you can run in more easily than heels. They told you to wear just enough make-up to look presentable but not enough to be a slut; to dress to flatter your apple, pear, hourglass figure, but not to be too tarty. They warned you that if you try to be strong, or take control, you'll be shrill, bossy, a ballbreaker. Of course it's fine for the boys, but you should know your place. They told you 'that's not for girls' - 'take it as a compliment' - 'don't rock the boat' - 'that'll go straight to your hips'. They told you 'beauty is on the inside', but you knew they didn't really mean it. Well screw that. I'm here to tell you something else. Hilarious, jaunty and bold, GIRL UP exposes the truth about the pressures surrounding body image, the false representations in media, the complexities of a sex and relationships, the trials of social media and all the other lies they told us. 'Bates takes a myth-busting approach to body image, food, sex and advertising, and is particularly good at boiling down feminist language into a snappy, everyday vernacular without diluting its power.' Metro 'Essential reading for young women and girls, Girl Up is set to become a key guiding text for the next generation like The Beauty Myth and The Feminine Mystique have for preceding generations. Morning Star Online It's hardly headline news that feminism can be funny. But, heavens, is it refreshing to see it done as well as it is [in this book]. Telegraph 'Girl Up is something between a self-help book and a bracing love letter to today's teenage girls...I wish I'd had Girl Up when I was growing up. I could have used such no-nonsense survival g

    When the Egyptian journalist Mona Eltahawy published an article in Foreign Policy magazine in 2012 titled Why Do They Hate Us it provoked a firestorm of controversy. The response it generated, with more than four thousand posts on the website, broke all records for the magazine, prompted dozens of follow-up interviews on radio and television, and made it clear that misogyny in the Arab world is an explosive issue, one that engages and often enrages the public. In Headscarves and Hymens, Eltahawy takes her argument further. Drawing on her years as a campaigner and commentator on women's issues in the Middle East, she explains that since the Arab Spring began, women in the Arab world have had two revolutions to undertake one fought with men against oppressive regimes, and another fought against an entire political and economic system that treats women in countries from Yemen and Saudi Arabia to Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya as second-class citizens. Eltahawy has traveled across the Middle East and North Africa, meeting with women and listening to their stories. Her book is a plea for outrage and action on their behalf, confronting the toxic mix of culture and religion that few seem willing or able to disentangle lest they blaspheme or offend. A manifesto motivated by hope and fury in equal measure, Headscarves and Hymens is as illuminating as it is incendiary.

    By turns heartbreaking and hilarious, SLUT captures the real lives of teens and young adults as they negotiate sex and the cruel scapegoating that still hobbles female sexuality and power. This groundbreaking play, written in collaboration with New York City high school students, and guidebook offers communities and individuals concrete tools to inspire change and stop slut. The guidebook includes production notes, a guide for talk-backs, and provocative essays by Leora Tanenbaum, Jennifer Baumgardner, Farah Tanis, Jamia Wilson, among others, providing the resources to inspire change within our communities and ourselves.

    How did a religion whose founding proponents advocated a shocking disregard of earthly ties come to extol the virtues of the "traditional" family? In this richly textured history of the relationship between Christianity and the family Rosemary Radford Ruether traces the development of these centerpieces of modern life to reveal the misconceptions at the heart of the "family values" debate.

    Obedient Wife. Porn Slave. Deep Throat Was Only The Beginning… Linda Boreman was just twenty-one when she met Chuck Traynor, the man who would change her life. Less than two years later, the girl who wouldn't let her high school dates get past first base was catapulted to fame she could never have imagined in her wildest dreams--or worst nightmares. Linda Boreman of Yonkers, New York, had become Linda Lovelace, international adult film superstar. The unprecedented success of Deep Throat made porn popular with the mainstream and made Lovelace a household name. But nobody, from the A-list celebrities who touted the movie to the audiences that lined up to see it, knew the truth about what went on behind the scenes. Enslaved by the man who would eventually force her into marriage so that he could control her completely, Linda was beaten savagely with regularity, hypnotized, and raped. She was threatened with disfigurement and death. She was terrorized into prostitution at gun and knifepoint. She was forced to perform unspeakable perversions on film. She made Deep Throat under unimaginable duress. Years later, Linda would come out of hiding to relate her side of the story--a modern horror tale of humiliation, betrayal, and violence that would rock the porn industry and put its teller in fear for her life... Ordeal Linda Lovelace became a household name in 1972, when Deep Throat became the first pornographic movie ever to cross over into the mainstream. Due to the success of Deep Throat, she appeared in Playboy, Bachelor, and even Esquire between 1973 and 1974. Soon after, Lovelace joined in with anti-pornography feminists led by Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, and she testified before Attorney General Meese's Commission on Pornography in 1986. She died in Denver on April 22, 2002, due to severe injuries in a car accident.

    Now, however, conversation has turned to whether it's necessary to have it all or, perhaps more controversial, whether children are really a requirement for a fulfilling life. The idea that some women and men prefer not to have children is often met with sharp criticism and incredulity by the public and mainstream media.In this provocative and controversial collection of essays, curated by writer Meghan Daum, sixteen acclaimed writers explain why they have chosen to eschew parenthood. Contributors Lionel Shriver, Sigrid Nunez, Kate Christiensen, Elliott Holt, Geoff Dyer, and Tim Kreider, among others, offer a unique perspective on the overwhelming cultural pressure of parenthood.Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed makes a thoughtful and passionate case for why parenthood is not the only path in life, taking our parent-centric, kid-fixated, baby-bump-patrolling culture to task in the process. What emerges is a more nuanced, diverse view of what it means to live a full, satisfying life.

    Formations of Class & Gender demonstrates why class should be featured more prominently in theoretical accounts of gender, identity and power. Beverley Skeggs identifies the neglect of class, and shows how class and gender must be fused together to produce an accurate representation of power relations in modern society.The book questions how theoretical frameworks are generated for understanding how women live and produce themselves through social and cultural relations. It uses detailed ethnographic research to explain how `real′ women inhabit and occupy the social and cultural posit

    But what is missing from the picture--sexual difference--can be as instructive as what is present. In this ambitious work, Roderick A. Ferguson reveals how the discourses of sexuality are used to articulate theories of racial difference in the field of sociology. He shows how canonical sociology--Gunnar Myrdal, Ernest Burgess, Robert Park, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and William Julius Wilson--has measured African Americans' unsuitability for a liberal capitalist order in terms of their adherence to the norms of a heterosexual and patriarchal nuclear family model. In short, to the extent that African Americans' culture and behavior deviated from those norms, they would not achieve economic and racial equality. Aberrations in Black tells the story of canonical sociology's regulation of sexual difference as part of its general regulation of African American culture. Ferguson places this story within other stories--the narrative of capital's emergence and development, the histories of Marxism and revolutionary nationalism, and the novels that depict the gendered and sexual idiosyncrasies of African American culture--works by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and Toni Morrison. In turn, this book tries to present another story--one in which people who presumably manifest the dys-functions of capitalism are reconsidered as indictments of the norms of state, capital, and social science. Ferguson includes the first-ever discussion of a new archival discovery--a never-published chapter of Invisible Man that deals with a gay character in a way thatcomplicates and illuminates Ellison's project. Unique in the way it situates critiques of race, gender, and sexuality within analyses of cultural, economic, and epistemological formations, Ferguson's work introduces a new mode of discourse--which Ferguson calls queer of color analysis--that helps to lay bare the mutual distortions of racial, economic, and sexual portrayals within sociology. A hard-hitting look at the regulation of sexual difference and its role in circumscribing African American culture.

    So says the Marquis de Sade, philosopher and pornographer. His virtuous Justine, who keeps to the rules, is rewarded with rape and humiliation; his Juliette, Justine's triumphantly monstrous antithesis, viciously exploits her sexuality.With brilliance and wit, Angela Carter takes on these outrageous figments of de Sade's extreme imagination and transforms them into symbols of our time: The Hollywood sex goddesses, mothers and daughters, pornography, even the sacred shrines of sex and marriage lie devastatingly exposed before our eyes.Author Bio: Angela Carter (1940-1992) was best known for her subversive short stories, including her most famous collection, The Bloody Chamber. Carter translated the fairy tales of Charles Perrault, and wrote the screenplay for Neil Jordan's 1984 film, The Company of Wolves, based on her short story.

    It ultimately challenges the cultural assumptions of both conservatives and traditional liberals. 47 photographs.

    A new word burst into popular usage to describe these descents into the precincts of poverty to see how the poor lived: slumming. In this captivating book, Seth Koven paints a vivid portrait of the practitioners of slumming and their world: who they were, why they went, what they claimed to have found, how it changed them, and how slumming, in turn, powerfully shaped both Victorian and twentieth-century understandings of poverty and social welfare, gender relations, and sexuality.The slums of late-Victorian London became synonymous with all that was wrong with industrial capitalist society. But for philanthropic men and women eager to free themselves from the starched conventions of bourgeois respectability and domesticity, slums were also places of personal liberation and experimentation. Slumming allowed them to act on their irresistible attraction of repulsion for the poor and permitted them, with society's approval, to get dirty and express their own dirty desires for intimacy with slum dwellers and, sometimes, with one another.Slumming elucidates the histories of a wide range of preoccupations about poverty and urban life, altruism and sexuality that remain central in Anglo-American culture, including the ethics of undercover investigative reporting, the connections between cross-class sympathy and same-sex desire, and the intermingling of the wish to rescue the poor with the impulse to eroticize and sexually exploit them.By revealing the extent to which politics and erotics, social and sexual categories overflowed their boundaries and transformed one another, Koven recaptures the ethical dilemmas that men and women confronted--and continue to confront--in trying to love thy neighbor as thyself.