“Xenofeminism is gender-abolitionist… Let a hundred sexes bloom! …[And, let’s] construct a society where traits currently assembled under the rubric of gender, no longer furnish a grid for the asymmetric operation of power… You’re not exploited or oppressed because you are a wage labourer or poor; you are a labourer or poor because you are exploited…”

    As author Jody Raphael reveals in Rape Is Rape, the more acquaintance rape is reported and taken seriously by prosecutors, judges, and juries, the louder the clamor of rape denial becomes.Through firsthand interviews with victims, medical and judicial records, social media analysis, and statistics from government agencies, Rape Is Rape exposes the tactics used by the deniers, a group that includes conservatives and right-wing Christians as well as some controversial feminists. The personal stories of young acquaintance rape victims whom Raphael interviewed demonstrate how assaults on their credibility, buttressed by claims of low prevalence, prevent many from holding their rapists accountable, enabling them to rape others with impunity.Rape Is Rape is an exposé of those using rape denial to further their political agendas, and it is a call to action to protect the rights of women and girls, making it safe for victims to come forward, and end the acquaintance rape crisis. A resources section is included for those seeking help, advice, or hoping to get involved.

    "Horror stories of eating disorders, self-mutilation, abusive relationships floated across the page," Shandler writes of Pipher's book on adolescent girls. "Pipher equated our contemporary adolescent experiences to Shakespeare's ill-fated Ophelia." Shandler identified with the emotional experiences described in the book. "However," she explains, "I did not feel simply spoken to, I felt spoken for."With courage and unselfconscious audacity, Shandler decided to speak for herself. She had her friends write reflections on subjects such as eating disorders, sex, drugs, and child abuse, and scored a book deal. With the help of her publisher, HarperPerennial, Shandler sent queries for firsthand adolescent accounts to high school principals across the country, asking them to enlist the help of English teachers, parents associations, school psychologists, etc. (This letter appears as Appendix A in the book.) Not too shabby for a kid who only recently started getting serious about studying, and drinking lots of coffee.Ophelia Speaks: Adolescent Girls Write About Their Search for Self is the result of Sara Shandler's crusade. Her goal was to bring real voice to Reviving Ophelia. She succeeds. The voices are raw and young and jarring -- sometimes adult-like, sometimes childlike, and more often both, like Shandler's voice.Shandler introduces each chapter -- "Intoxication," "Rape and Sexual Abuse," "Questions of Faith," "Diverse Sexualities," "Mothers, Feminist Pride," etc.-- with personal anecdotes of her own. Through these introductions, it becomes clear that Shandler is like any modern American teenager: She has experimented lightly with drugs, had sex at an early age (one month shy of 15), is mildly infatuated with her weight, and was at one point pretty depressed (as in, the thought of suicide once crossed her mind). Pretty run-of-the-mill teen stuff. Somehow it is surprising that nothing "worse" ever happened to Shandler. It seems too simple that her only motivation to complete this project was to help other teens feel less alone. Then again, maybe it is too simple to think that all books of this kind must be written by damaged teens or once-damaged teens.By definition, Shandler's carefully selected contributions are young words for young ears. But they are also an intense reminder for older ears: When all you have lived is 16 years, thinking once of suicide feels like the biggest thing ever. This is not to belittle Shandler's impressive compilation or her honesty. She is very, very honest. In a chapter entitled "Broken-Hearted Independence," she explains how she got through the tragedy of breaking up with her first love. "[W]ith our separation I forced myself to face the dependence that left me alone and broken with our breakup. That confrontation was frightening. I was not brave in the usual sense. I cried often and hard. But instead of lonely isolation, I read and wrote and thought and thought. I buried myself in Virginia Woolf and Alice Walker, Margaret Atwood and Maya Angelou, Sylvia Plath and Toni Morrison, and I wondered why women I had never met knew me so well. With these women I was not so alone anymore."Each entry in this book is this bare, this open. Which is why Ophelia Speaks works as a book for teens by teens, but also as a tool for parents who want to know -- or remind themselves -- of what lies just around the corner. (Alexandra Zissu)

    When Jill's parent came out as transgender, Jill pushed through the male-dominated landscape of Hollywood to create the groundbreaking and award-winning Amazon TV series Transparent. Exploring identity, love, sexuality, and the blurring of boundaries through the dynamics of a complicated and profoundly resonant American family, Transparent gave birth to a new cultural consciousness. While working on the show and exploding mainstream ideas about gender, Jill began to erase the lines on their own map, finding their voice as a director, show creator, and activist. She Wants It: Desire, Power, and Toppling the Patriarchy moves with urgent rhythms, wild candor, and razor-edged humor to chart Jill's evolution from straight, married mother of two to identifying as queer and nonbinary. This intense and revelatory metamorphosis challenges the status quo and reflects the shifting power dynamics that continue to shape our collective worldview. With unbridled insight that offers a rare front seat to the inner workings of the #metoo movement and its aftermath, Jill captures the zeitgeist of a generation with thoughtful and revolutionary ideas about gender, inclusion, desire, and consent.

    The women just don't ask. It turns out that whether they want higher salaries or more help at home, women often find it hard to ask. Sometimes they don't know that change is possible--they don't know that they can ask. Sometimes they fear that asking may damage a relationship. And sometimes they don't ask because they've learned that society can react badly to women asserting their own needs and desires.By looking at the barriers holding women back and the social forces constraining them, Women Don't Ask shows women how to reframe their interactions and more accurately evaluate their opportunities. It teaches them how to ask for what they want in ways that feel comfortable and possible, taking into account the impact of asking on their relationships. And it teaches all of us how to recognize the ways in which our institutions, child-rearing practices, and unspoken assumptions perpetuate inequalities--inequalities that are not only fundamentally unfair but also inefficient and economically unsound.With women's progress toward full economic and social equality stalled, women's lives becoming increasingly complex, and the structures of businesses changing, the ability to negotiate is no longer a luxury but a necessity. Drawing on research in psychology, sociology, economics, and organizational behavior as well as dozens of interviews with men and women from all walks of life, Women Don't Ask is the first book to identify the dramatic difference between men and women in their propensity to negotiate for what they want. It tells women how to ask, and why they should.

    Pollack challenges conventional expectations about manhood and masculinity that encourage parents to treat boys as little men, raising them through a toughening process that drives their true emotions underground. Only when we understand what boys are really like, says Pollack, can we help them develop more self-confidence and the emotional savvy they need to deal with issues such as depression, love and sexuality, drugs and alcohol, divorce, and violence.

    Indignant at the silence on the issue in India, she wrote an article for an Indian women’s magazine questioning how we perceive rape and rape victims. Thirty years later her story went viral in the wake of the 2012 fatal gang rape in Delhi and the global outcry that followed. In 2013, Abdulali published an op-ed in the New York Times called “After Being Raped, I Was Wounded; My Honor Wasn’t” that was widely circulated. Now, as the #metoo and #timesup movements blow open the topic of sexual assault and rape, What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape is a brilliant and entirely original contribution to our understanding.Drawing on her own experience, her research, her work with hundreds of survivors as the head of a rape crisis center in Boston, and three decades of grappling with the issue as a feminist intellectual and writer, Abdulali examines the contemporary discourse about rape and rape culture, questioning our assumptions and asking how we want to raise the next generation. She interviews survivors whose moving personal stories of hard-won strength, humor, and wisdom collectively tell the larger story of how societies may begin to heal.Abdulali also explores what we don’t say. Is rape always a life-defining event? Does rape always symbolize something? Is rape worse than death? Is rape related to desire? Who gets raped? Is rape inevitable? Is one rape worse than another? How does one recover a sense of safety and joy? How do we raise sons? Is a world without rape possible? Both deeply personal and meticulously researched, What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape is a rallying cry and required reading for us all.

    In the bestselling tradition of bell hooks and Roxane Gay, McMillan Cottom’s freshman collection illuminates a particular trait of her tribe: being thick. In form, and in substance.This bold compendium, likely to find its place on shelves alongside Lindy West, Rebecca Solnit, and Maggie Nelson, dissects everything from beauty to Obama to pumpkin spice lattes. Yet Thick will also fill a void on those very shelves: a modern black American female voice waxing poetic on self and society, serving up a healthy portion of clever prose and southern aphorisms in a style uniquely her own.McMillan Cottom has crafted a black woman’s cultural bible, as she mines for meaning in places many of us miss and reveals precisely how—when you’re in the thick of it—the political, the social, and the personal are almost always one and the same.Thick --In the name of beauty --Dying to be competent --Know your whites --Black is over (or, special black) --The price of fabulousness --Black girlhood, interrupted --Girl 6 --Notes

    No social movement has brought change so quickly and with such dramatically mixed results. While same-sex marriage and gender transition is celebrated in some parts of the world, laws are being strengthened to criminalize homosexuality and gender nonconformity in others. A new Pink Line, Gevisser argues, has been drawn across the world, and he takes readers to its frontiers.In between sharp analytical chapters about culture wars, folklore, gender ideology, and geopolitics, Gevisser provides sensitive and sometimes startling profiles of the queer folk he’s encountered on the Pink Line’s front lines across nine countries. They include a trans Malawian refugee granted asylum in South Africa and a gay Ugandan refugee stuck in Nairobi; a lesbian couple who started a gay café in Cairo after the Arab Spring, a trans woman fighting for custody of her child in Moscow, and a community of kothis—“women’s hearts in men’s bodies”—who run a temple in an Indian fishing village.Eye-opening, moving, and crafted with expert research, compelling narrative, and unprecedented scope, The Pink Line is a monumental—and vital—journey through the border posts of the world’s new LGBTQ+ frontiers.

    It took her more than a decade to realize what she was actually trying to write: how this affected her relationship with her mother. When it was finally published, the essay went viral, shared on social media by Anne Lamott, Rebecca Solnit, and many others. The outpouring of responses gave Filgate an idea, and the resulting anthology offers a candid look at our relationships with our mothers. While some of the writers in this book are estranged from their mothers, others are extremely close. Leslie Jamison writes about trying to discover who her seemingly perfect mother was before ever becoming a mom. In Cathi Hanauer’s hilarious piece, she finally gets a chance to have a conversation with her mother that isn’t interrupted by her domineering (but lovable) father. André Aciman writes about what it was like to have a deaf mother. Melissa Febos uses mythology as a lens to look at her close-knit relationship with her psychotherapist mother. And Julianna Baggott talks about having a mom who tells her everything. As Filgate writes, “Our mothers are our first homes, and that’s why we’re always trying to return to them.” There’s relief in breaking the silence. Acknowledging what we couldn’t say for so long is one way to heal our relationships with others and, perhaps most important, with ourselves. Contributors include Cathi Hanauer, Melissa Febos, Alexander Chee, Dylan Landis, Bernice L. McFadden, Julianna Baggott, Lynn Steger Strong, Kiese Laymon, Carmen Maria Machado, André Aciman, Sari Botton, Nayomi Munaweera, Brandon Taylor, and Leslie Jamison.

    No one seems to be scared that their sons might be the ones to do it … This book … is the culmination of many years of writing about power, abuse, privilege, male entitlement and rape culture. After all that, here’s what I’ve learned: we should be f*cking terrified.’ Clementine Ford, from the introductionFearless feminist heroine Clementine Ford is a beacon of hope and inspiration to hundreds of thousands of Australian women and girls. Her incendiary first book, Fight Like A Girl, is taking the world by storm, galvanising women to demand and fight for real equality and not merely the illusion of it.Now Boys Will Be Boys examines what needs to change for that equality to become a reality. It answers the question most asked of Clementine: ‘How do I raise my son to respect women and give them equal space in the world? How do I make sure he’s a supporter and not a perpetrator?’All boys start out innocent and tender, but by the time they are adolescents many of them will subscribe to a view of masculinity that is openly contemptuous of women and girls. Our world conditions boys into entitlement, privilege and power at the expense not just of girls’ humanity but also of their own. Ford demolishes the age-old assumption that superiority and aggression are natural realms for boys, and demonstrates how toxic masculinity creates a disturbingly limited and potentially dangerous idea of what it is to be a man. Crucially, Boys Will Be Boys reveals how the patriarchy we live in is as harmful to boys and men as it is to women and girls, and asks what we have to do to reverse that damage. The world needs to change and this book shows the way.

    However, in the last two decades the brutality of western beauty practices seems to have become much more severe, requiring the breaking of skin, spilling of blood and rearrangement or amputation of body parts. Beauty and Misogyny seeks to make sense of why beauty practices are not only just as persistent, but in many ways more extreme. It examines the pervasive use of makeup, the misogyny of fashion and high-heeled shoes, and looks at the role of pornography in the creation of increasingly popular beauty practices such as breast implants, genital waxing and surgical alteration of the labia. It looks at the cosmetic surgery and body piercing/cutting industries as being forms of self-mutilation by proxy, in which the surgeons and piercers serve as proxies to harm women s bodies, and concludes by considering how a culture of resistance to these practices can be created.This essential work will appeal to students and teachers of feminist psychology, gender studies, cultural studies, and feminist sociology at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and to anyone with an interest in feminism, women and beauty, and women s health.

    The author's selection of very accessible articles show how race, class, and gender shape people's experiences, and help students to see the issues in an analytic, as well as descriptive way. The book also provides conceptual grounding in understanding race, class, and gender; has a strong historical and sociological perspective; and is further strengthened by conceptual introductions by the authors.Students will find the readings engaging and accessible, but may gain the most from the introduction sections that highlight key points and relate the essential concepts. Included in the collection of readings are narratives aimed at building empathy, and articles on important social issues such as prison, affirmative action, poverty, immigration, and racism, among other topics.IncludesWhy race, class, and gender still matter by M.L. Andersen and P.H. CollinsMissing people and others, joining together to expand the circle by A. MadridSystems of power and inequality by M.L. Andersen and P.H. CollinsRace and racism, Racism without "racists" by E. Bonilla-SilvaClass and inequality, Growing gulf between rich and the rest of us by H. SklarGender and sexism, Sex and gender through the prism of difference by M.B. Zinn, P. Hondahneu-Sotelo, and M. MessnerEthnicity and nationality, Is this a white country, or what? by L. RubinSexuality and heterosexism, "You talkin' to me?" by J. KilbourneStructure of social institutions by M.L. Andersen and P.H. CollinsWork and economic transformation, Race, class, gender, and women's works by T. Amott and J. MatthaeiFamilies, Our mothers' grief, racial-ethnic women and the maintenance of families by B.T. DillMedia and culture, Racist stereotyping in the English language by R.B. MooreHealth and social welfare, Can education eliminate race, class, and gender inequality? by R.A. Mickelson and S.S. SmithState institutions and violence, First Americans, American Indians by C.M. SnippSocial change and sites of change by M.L. Andersen and P.H. CollinsSites of change, Starbucks paradox by K. FellnerProcesses of change, How the new working class transform urban America by R.D.G. Kelley

    The work is engaging, filled with interesting anecdotes and stories, and is an incredibly lively read on a thoroughly interesting subject much in need of a closer look. In breadth, the book ranges from biblical times to the present, and in sheer scale it attempts to present a unified series of images of the Western wife over the course of some 2,000 years. In doing so, Professor Yalom has presented us an interesting grid, well conceived and wonderfully written, with which we can begin to examine this cultural phenomenon.One of the main strengths of the work is its method: Yalom draws heavily on diaries, newspapers, journals, and personal letters, and she interweaves these with citations from the laws, general customs of the times, religious rites, and civic procedure. By moving in a very fluid way from the abstract to the particular, what we see emerging, in each era, is a lively picture of how the general affected the individual. The book makes it real, makes us wonder, and helps to recover for us so many of the lost voices of women over the centuries, silenced by the overshadowing "great men" approach to history. These are not so much the stories of "great women" as they are the telling of everyday life. In reading them we get a fuller sense of what the time and place may have been like for the women whose voices we are listening to. It is the dignity of these everyday voices that holds us, intrigues us, and invites us to read further. A History of the Wife links the ancient, the medieval, the Victorian, and the modern, and makes a strong historical and narrative case for its subject.Along the way, we are treated to many interesting insights, observations, and historical facts: Nero was officially married five times -- three times to women, twice to boys; until the Middle Ages, marriages in Catholic Europe often did not involve any ceremony at all, and "church weddings" do not appear on the scene until well into the evolution of Christian Europe. The role of women changes slowly in the West, and the role of religion, from the biblical period through early Christianity to the changes brought by the Reformation and the voyages to the New World, are mapped for us in a sweeping overview.A particularly strong section of the book is the documentation of the last 50 years of the cultural institution of marriage, and the vast changes brought by World War II and the cultural ferment of the '60s. This is made more impressive because of the compelling histories that the work recounts for us in the 2,000 years before our own era.An old adage maintained that "everyone needs a wife"; this lively book tells us who followed that adage, why and how they did so, and how we got to where we are now.

    First came hot flashes. Then insomnia. Then depression. As she struggled to express what was happening to her, she came up against a culture of silence. Throughout history, the natural physical transition of menopause has been viewed as something to deny, fear, and eradicate. Menstruation signals fertility and life, and childbirth is revered as the ultimate expression of womanhood. Menopause is seen as a harbinger of death. Some books Steinke found promoted hormone replacement therapy. Others encouraged acceptance. But Steinke longed to understand menopause in a more complex, spiritual, and intellectually engaged way.In Flash Count Diary, Steinke writes frankly about aspects of Menopause that have rarely been written about before. She explores the changing gender landscape that comes with reduced hormone levels, and lays bare the transformation of female desire and the realities of prejudice against older women. Weaving together her personal story with philosophy, science, art, and literature, Steinke reveals that in the seventeenth century, women who had hot flashes in front of others could be accused of being witches; that the model for Duchamp's famous �tant donn�s was a post-reproductive woman; and that killer whales--one of the only other species on earth to undergo menopause--live long post-reproductive lives.Flash Count Diary, with its deep research, open play of ideas, and reverence for the female body, will change the way you think about menopause. It's a deeply feminist book--honest about the intimations of mortality that menopause brings while also arguing for the ascendancy, beauty, and power of the post-reproductive years.