You often hear, "There should be a law against it!" Or, perhaps just against the buyers. What do sex workers want? That's not something you hear asked very often. In this accessible manifesto, the strong argument for full decriminalization of sex work is explored through personal experience and looking at laws around the world.In some places, like New York, selling sex is illegal. In others, like Sweden, only buying it is. In some, like the UK and France, it's legal to sell sex and to buy it, but not to run a brothel or solicit a sale. In New Zealand, it's not illegal at all. In What Do Sex Workers Want?, Juno Mac and Molly Smith - both sex workers - explain what each of these laws do in practice to those doing the work. Addressing each model in turn, they show that prohibiting the sex industry actually exacerbates every harm that sex workers are vulnerable to.

    By examining the perilous intersections of identity, categorization, and community, contributors challenge societal mores and countercultural norms. Nobody Passes explores and critiques the various systems of power seen (or not seen) in the act of “passing.” In a pass-fail situation, standards for acceptance may vary, but somebody always gets trampled on. This anthology seeks to eliminate the pressure to pass and thereby unearth the delicious and devastating opportunities for transformation that might create.Mattilda, aka Matt Bernstein Sycamore, has a history of editing anthologies based on brazen nonconformity and gender defiance. Mattilda sets out to ask the question, “What lies are people forced to tell in order to gain acceptance as 'real'.” The answers are as varied as the life experiences of the writers who tackle this urgent and essential topic.

    Cynthia Enloe pulls back the curtain on the familiar scenes—governments promoting tourism, companies moving their factories overseas, soldiers serving on foreign soil—and shows that the real landscape is not exclusively male. She describes how many women's seemingly personal strategies—in their marriages, in their housework, in their coping with ideals of beauty—are, in reality, the stuff of global politics. In exposing policymakers' reliance on false notions of "femininity" and "masculinity," Enloe dismantles an apparently overwhelming world system, revealing it to be much more fragile and open to change than we think.

    Cultural critic and bestselling author Roxane Gay has edited a collection of essays that explore what it means to live in a world where women are frequently belittled and harassed due to their gender, and offers a call to arms insisting that "not that bad" must no longer be good enough.

    But all rage isn't created equal. Who gets to be angry? (If there's now space for cis white women's anger, what about black women? Trans women?) How do women express their anger? And what will they do with it-individually and collectively? In Burn It Down, a diverse group of women authors explore their rage-from the personal to the systemic, the unacknowledged to the public. One woman describes her rage at her own body when she becomes ill with no explanation. Another writes of the anger she inherits from her father. One Pakistani American writes, "To openly express my anger would be too American," and explains why. Broad-ranging and cathartic, Burn It Down is essential reading for any woman who has burned with rage but questioned if she is entitled to express it.

    For many, filing the suit was a radicalizing act that empowered them to "find themselves" and stake a claim. Others lost their way in a landscape of opportunities, pressures, discouragements, and hostilities they weren't prepared to navigate.With warmth, humor, and perspective, the book also explores why changes in the law did not change everything for today's young women.

    R. Reid shows how all the other industrialized democracies have achieved something the United States can’t seem to do: provide health care for everybody at a reasonable cost. In his global quest to find a possible prescription, Reid visits wealthy, free market, industrialized democracies like our own—including France, Germany, Japan, the U.K., and Canada—where he finds inspiration in example. Reid sees problems too: He finds poorly paid doctors in Japan, endless lines in Canada, mistreated patients in Britain, spartan facilities in France. In addition to long-established systems, Reid also studies countries that have carried out major health care reform. The first question facing these countries—and the United States, for that matter—is an ethical issue: Is health care a human right?The Healing of America lays bare the moral question at the heart of our troubled system, dissecting the misleading rhetoric surrounding the health care debate: Is health care a human right?

    In the essays, which feature original, lively and accessible prose, anti-sexist men make sense of their gendered experiences in today's culture.The authors tackle the issues of feminism, growing up male, recognizing masculine privilege, taking action to change the imbalance of power and privilege and the constraints that men experience in confronting sexism. They describe their successes and challenges in bucking patriarchal systems in a culture that can be unsupportive of - or downright hostile to - a pro-feminist perspective.In these chapters, a diverse group of men reflect on growing up, share moments in their day-to-day lives, and pose serious questions about being a pro-feminist male living, working, thinking, and learning in a sexist society.

    We have no hereditary aristocracy or landed gentry, and even the poorest among us feel that they can become rich through education, hard work, or sheer gumption. And yet social class remains a powerful force in American life.In Class Matters, a team of New York Times reporters explores the ways in which class--defined as a combination of income, education, wealth, and occupation--influences destiny in a society that likes to think of itself as a land of opportunity. We meet individuals in Kentucky and Chicago who have used education to lift themselves out of poverty and others in Virginia and Washington whose lack of education holds them back. We meet an upper-middle-class family in Georgia who moves to a different town every few years, and the newly rich in Nantucket whose mega-mansions have driven out the longstanding residents. And we see how class disparities manifest themselves at the doctor's office and at the marriage altar.For anyone concerned about the future of the American dream, Class Matters is truly essential reading.Class Matters is a beautifully reported, deeply disturbing, portrait of a society bent out of shape by harsh inequalities. Read it and see how you fit into the problem or--better yet--the solution!--Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch

    A generation of smart, highly educated young people are spending their time knitting, canning jam, baking cupcakes, gardening, and more (and blogging about it, of course), embracing the labor-intensive domestic tasks their mothers and grandmothers eagerly shrugged off. They’re questioning whether regular jobs are truly fulfilling and whether it’s okay to turn away from the ambitions of their parents’ generation.How did this happen? And what does it all mean? In Homeward Bound, acclaimed journalist Emily Matchar takes a long, hard look at both the inspiring appeal and the potential dangers of this trend she calls the New Domesticity, exploring how it could be reshaping the role of women in society and what the consequences may be for all of us.This groundbreaking reporting on the New Domesticity is guaranteed to transform our notions of women in today’s society and add a new layer to the ongoing discussion of whether women can—or should—have it all.

    They’re taboo. They’re embarrassing. They’re gross. And due to a crumbling or nonexistent national sex ed program, they are misunderstood. Because of these stigmas, a status quo has been established to exclude people who menstruate from the seat at the decision-making table, creating discriminations like the tampon tax, medicines that favor male biology, and more.Power to the Period aims to explain what menstruation is, shed light on the stigmas and resulting biases, and create a strategy to end the silence and prompt conversation about periods.

    Others are sure it's the environment we experience in childhood. But could it be that many of our individual characteristics—our health, our intelligence, our temperaments—are influenced by the conditions we encountered before birth? That's the claim of an exciting and provocative field known as fetal origins. Over the past twenty years, scientists have been developing a radically new understanding of our very earliest experiences and how they exert lasting effects on us from infancy well into adulthood. Their research offers a bold new view of pregnancy as a crucial staging ground for our health, ability, and well-being throughout life.Author and journalist Annie Murphy Paul ventures into the laboratories of fetal researchers, interviews experts from around the world, and delves into the rich history of ideas about how we're shaped before birth. She discovers dramatic stories: how individuals gestated during the Nazi siege of Holland in World War II are still feeling its consequences decades later; how pregnant women who experienced the 9/11 attacks passed their trauma on to their offspring in the womb; how a lab accident led to the discovery of a common household chemical that can harm the developing fetus; how the study of a century-old flu pandemic reveals the high personal and societal costs of poor prenatal experience. Origins also brings to light astonishing scientific findings: how a single exposure to an environmental toxin may produce damage that is passed on to multiple generations; how conditions as varied as diabetes, heart disease, and mental illness may get their start in utero; why the womb is medicine's latest target for the promotion of lifelong health, from preventing cancer to reducing obesity. The fetus is not an inert being, but an active and dynamic creature, responding and adapting as it readies itself for life in the particular world it will enter. The pregnant woman is not merely a source of potential harm to her fetus, as she is so often reminded, but a source of influence on her future child that is far more powerful and positive than we ever knew. And pregnancy is not a nine-month wait for the big event of birth, but a momentous period unto itself, a cradle of individual strength and wellness and a crucible of public health and social equality.With the intimacy of a personal memoir and the sweep of a scientific revolution, Origins presents a stunning new vision of our beginnings that will change the way you think about yourself, your children, and human nature itself.

    Packed with fresh ideas and no-nonsense practical advice, this travel-sized career handbook is guaranteed to become your go-to resource when it comes to building the career you want.Writer Otegha Uwagba (one of Forbes European 30 Under 30) takes you through everything you need to build a successful self-made career: from how to negotiate a payrise to building a killer personal brand, via a crash course in networking like a pro, and tips for overcoming creative block. Plus Little Black Book is full of indispensable advice on how to thrive as a freelancer, and an entire chapter dedicated to helping you master the tricky art of public speaking.With contributions from trailblazing creative women including acclaimed author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Refinery29 co-founder Piera Gelardi, The Gentlewoman's Editor in Chief Penny Martin, and many more, Little Black Book is a curation of career insights.

    . . or so the feminists keep insisting. But somewhere along the way, the movement for female liberation sacrificed meaning for acceptance, and left us with a banal, polite, ineffectual pose that barely challenges the status quo. In this bracing, fiercely intelligent manifesto, Jessa Crispin demands more.Why I Am Not A Feminist is a radical, fearless call for revolution. It accuses the feminist movement of obliviousness, irrelevance, and cowardice—and demands nothing less than the total dismantling of a system of oppression.

    It features a stunning array of personalities, from the women peering worriedly over the side of the Mayflower to feminists having a grand old time protesting beauty pageants and bridal fairs. Courageous, silly, funny, and heartbreaking, these women shaped the nation and our vision of what it means to be female in America. By culling the most fascinating characters — the average as well as the celebrated — Gail Collins, the editorial page editor at the New York Times, charts a journey that shows how women lived, what they cared about, and how they felt about marriage, sex, and work. She begins with the lost colony of Roanoke and the early southern "tobacco brides" who came looking for a husband and sometimes — thanks to the stupendously high mortality rate — wound up marrying their way through three or four. Spanning wars, the pioneering days, the fight for suffrage, the Depression, the era of Rosie the Riveter, the civil rights movement, and the feminist rebellion of the 1970s, America's Women describes the way women's lives were altered by dress fashions, medical advances, rules of hygiene, social theories about sex and courtship, and the ever-changing attitudes toward education, work, and politics. While keeping her eye on the big picture, Collins still notes that corsets and uncomfortable shoes mattered a lot, too. "The history of American women is about the fight for freedom," Collins writes in her introduction, "but it's less a war against oppressive men than a struggle to straighten out the perpetually mixed message about women's roles that was accepted by almost everybody of both genders." Told chronologically through the compelling stories of individual lives that, linked together, provide a complete picture of the American woman's experience, America's Women is both a great read and a landmark work of history.