The Pornography Industry: What Everyone Needs to Know


Shira Tarrant - 2016
    Reliable figures about the industry are difficult to come by and widely disputed, but one matter that is hardly debatable is that pornography is a major and ubiquitous enterprise. Pornallegedly accounts for one-third of all internet traffic currently, though the data about actual consumption is unclear. Reports in recent years have suggested that 70 million individuals visit porn sites every week; that among viewers aged 18-24, women watch more porn than men; and that amongmiddle-aged, white-collar workers, three-quarters of men and half of women have admitted to looking at pornography websites while at work.While debates and emotions around porn can run high, there is a crucial need for reliable information and rational conversation. In this book, Shira Tarrant parses the wide range of statistics that we have on the pornography industry, sorting myth from reality in an objective, fascinating andknowledgeable fashion. She looks at ongoing political controversies around the industry, the feminist porn wars, the views of the religious right, the history of pornography, landmark legal cases, and the latest in medical research. The Pornography Industry also explains the industry basics -whoworks in porn, why people become performers, how much they earn, and what happens on a porn set. It further delves into important questions such as: how many teenagers watch porn and should we worry about it? What is porn piracy and can it be stopped? What can the industry do about sexist and racistpornography? Does porn cause violence against women? Can people become addicted to porn? Is watching porn the same as infidelity? By presenting competing perspectives in an even-handed way, The Pornography Industry will enable readers to explore these provocative issues and make their own bestdecisions about the debates.

Like She Owns the Place: Give Yourself the Gift of Confidence and Ignite Your Inner Magic


Cara Alwill Leyba - 2018
    The truth is that confidence isn't about living up to anyone's expectations--it's about affirming, every day, that you're an effing boss. It's not the result of being skinny, making a six figure salary, finding your dream partner, or drinking a green juice every day. It requires patience, dedication, forgiveness, bravery, and an incredible amount of self-compassion.You've probably read that "confidence is a choice," and while that's true, it's more accurate to say that confidence is a series of repeated choices to accept yourself. To choose pride over insecurity. And to fearlessly show up in the world as the truest expression of yourself.It took me a long time to overcome all the BS. It took me a longer time to develop a rock-solid sense of inner-peace and become intimate with my intuition. To achieve real confidence that lasted longer than a sugar rush.My goal with this book is to share with you how I have arrived here, how I've helped my clients arrive here, and hopefully save you years of pain, shame, and uncertainty. Because, girl, I know how rocky this road can be. I'm going to show you how to block out all the noise around you, and how to free yourself from the opinions and judgment of others. I'm going to teach you how to trust your gut, reclaim your life, and rock what you've got.I'm going to show you how to own the place.

Things You Can't Ask Yer Mom


Lindsey Holland - 2021
    Lizzy and Lindsey share the twists and turns of their own experiences in their usual hilariously honest style, offering reassurance for all the questions you just might not be able to ask your Mom. The book embodies what Lindsey and Lizzy have had through their friendship; the ability to honestly pass on their own experiences in life in order to help the other. With never-before-heard anecdotes and bite-sized chunks of content to return to, this valuable book will be a friend to you - one that shares reassuring stories of losing virginity using a blueberry-flavored condom, losing friends and losing inhibitions. It's a book for anyone, at any stage of life.

Prayers of Honoring Voice


Pixie Lighthorse - 2016
    Play with me for a moment: if you were to consider the mind a machine, say, a telegraph in service to the heart, then the heart gives the first dictation. The mind then translates vital information in the form of language to the speaker system of voice, which will hopefully transmit the communications as the heart intended, if that is the priority. It is a good time to ask yourself what your priorities of communication are. What is motivating you?A short journey from heart to mind and back down to the throat takes mere seconds, but a mighty many detours are taken en route. This may be because the fear residing in the mind is like a highwayman, waylaying our genuine matters of the heart and causing havoc as it tries to make its simple way out of the human body. There are other desperados who lure the vulnerable traveler off-path: insecurity, anxiety, self-consciousness, the fragile ego-but nearly all are unmasked first cousins to fear when flushed out of the shadows. Some fears are linked to primal traumas which may yet be unearthed. These deserve special attention when working with voice.I think the greatest of all distractions between heart and throat might be faithlessness, because reigning religious institutions have effectively redirected the focus from faith to matters of righteousness, wrongness and "policies". Faith in love, and what it can do, has taken a particularly destructive back seat to the priorities of massive organizations with other things in mind than loving kindness, peaceful communication, fair resolutions, wellness and the expressive voices of living, breathing people.For today's spiritually traumatized, broken-hearted and soul-wounded, the process of revealing what rests on the heart can be a paralyzing challenge. To clear the path of negative imprint, one must declare the intention to speak to what matters most and set about the task of discerning what that is. One can make a choice now to stand up to the fears that mangle the truth into expressions more palatable for others, cause explosions of rage, freezing up, or cut-and-run behavior.To love the truth more than anything else is a tall order.

Toni Morrison: The Bluest Eye


GRIN Publishing - 1994
    Toni Morrison uses modernist techniques of stream-of-consciousness, multiple perspectives, and deliberate fragmentation. Two different narrators tell the story. The first is Claudia MacTeer, who narrates in a mixture of a child’s and an adult’s perspectives, and the second is an omniscient narrator. Claudia’s and Pecola’s points of view are dominant, but the reader also sees things from other character’s points of view.The subtext of the first part of the novel ('Autumn' and 'Winter') suggests various topics. In my presentation, I mainly focus on the “Dick and Jane narrative” by means of which the novel opens. Furthermore, I will explore the themes “whiteness as the standard of beauty” and “seeing versus being seen” which are sometimes closely connected.'The Bluest Eye' provides an extended depiction of the ways in which internalized white beauty standards deform the lives of black girls and women. Implicit messages that whiteness is superior are everywhere, including the white baby doll given to Claudia, the idealization of Shirley Temple, the consensus that light-skinned Maureen is cuter than the other black girls, and the idealization of white beauty in the movies. Pecola eventually desires blue eyes in order to conform with these white beauty standards imposed on her.However, by wishing for blue eyes, Pecola indicates that she wishes to see things differently as much as she wishes to be seen differently.

Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America


Kathleen M. Brown - 2009
    Starting with the shake-up of European practices that coincided with Atlantic expansion, she traces attitudes toward “dirt” through the mid-nineteenth century, demonstrating that cleanliness—and the lack of it—had moral, religious, and often sexual implications. Brown contends that care of the body is not simply a private matter but an expression of cultural ideals that reflect the fundamental values of a society.The book explores early America’s evolving perceptions of cleanliness, along the way analyzing the connections between changing public expectations for appearance and manners, and the backstage work of grooming, laundering, and housecleaning performed by women. Brown provides an intimate view of cleanliness practices and how such forces as urbanization, immigration, market conditions, and concerns about social mobility influenced them. Broad in historical scope and imaginative in its insights, this book expands the topic of cleanliness to encompass much larger issues, including religion, health, gender, class, and race relations.

Every Woman's Guide To Saving The Planet


Natalie Isaacs - 2018
    But when she set out to reduce her power bill by 20 per cent and achieved it easily, she had an epiphany. Realising that women make most of the purchasing decisions in the home and so have genuine power to make a difference, she went on to found 1 Million Women. With members and followers now numbering more than 700,000 and counting, the community is a global movement that actively empowers women to engage with and take action on climate change by making simple changes to the ways they and their families live their lives. Every Woman's Guide to Saving the Planet is Natalie Isaacs' inspiring story combined with a practical tool kit for reducing your carbon footprint and mobilising your community around the biggest issue of our time - climate change. With loads of tips, tricks, easy-to-understand info graphics and an inspiring can-do message, this book is for every woman who wants to make a difference but just isn't sure how.Find out more at 1millionwomen.com.au

Unsettled


Rosaleen McDonagh - 2021
    Unsettled explores racism, ableism, abuse and resistance as well as the bonds of community, family and friendship. As an Irish Traveller writing from a feminist perspective, McDonagh’s essays are rich and complex, raw and honest, and, above all else, uncompromising.Praise for UnsettledDon’t read this memoir in sorrow and outrage, read it because Rosaleen McDonagh is so proud, smart and ingenious, she will make you feel more properly alive. Beautifully written, this book beats back the darkness. It brings us all further on. — Anne EnrightMoving and eloquent, this collection is both the story of one woman’s life and a work of profound literary activism. — Emilie PineRosaleen’s story is her story. It’s a very important story and she has a right to tell it. Rosaleen demonstrates, contrary to some settled people’s opinion, that our community is matriarchal, our mothers are so resourceful, and we are not victims. The book is a testimony to the importance of identity and belonging. — Anne BurkeLike James Baldwin before her, this work is a ferociously honest exploration of the intricacies of racism, identity, sexuality, disability, grief, sensuality and marginalisation. It is also a beautiful piece of prose; honest and difficult and deeply moving. This book sees Rosaleen McDonagh masterfully taking all the parts of her life and fitting them together brilliantly for us. A must read. — Mark O’HalloranEmotive, honest and raw. Rosaleen McDonagh takes us on a journey of self acceptance, a journey that sees her face challenging obstacles and setbacks; as well as meeting friends and allies who help her to carve out a place in which she belongs. Unsettled is not only the recount of personal experiences but an authentic glimpse of Traveller life and culture as well as Rosaleen’s very sense of identity. — Michael Power

Can I Speak to Someone in Charge?


Emily Clarkson - 2017
    I hope this book will speak to a range of women, and men actually, I hope it will make people laugh, but more importantly I hope it will open people's eyes to the fact that we've got a lot to do if we want to make growing up in a good and kind world a possibility for our daughters.’In her series of open letters, Em Clarkson addresses all manner of subjects and absurdities that impact on our modern-day lives. She unpicks the validity of notions such as ‘the thigh gap’; writes a letter to the cellulite on her upper thigh; questions the merciless quotidian scrutiny of the Daily Mail; ponders the etymology of the term ‘plus size’; considers our unshakeable obsession with dieting and assesses why some of us are still crying in changing rooms. Writing with gumption, fearlessness and sharp wit, CAN I SPEAK TO SOMEONE IN CHARGE? is a window into the ridiculous ideologies and the remarkable expectations that shape women’s lives today.

The Bad Wife Handbook


Rachel Zucker - 2007
    Formally innovative and blazingly direct, The Bad Wife Handbook cross-examines marriage, motherhood, monogamy, and writing itself. Rachel Zucker's upending of grammatical and syntactic expectations lends these poems an urgent richness and aesthetic complexity that mirrors the puzzles of real life. Candid, subversive, and genuinely moving, The Bad Wife Handbook is an important portrait of contemporary marriage and the writing life, of emotional connection and disconnection, of togetherness and aloneness.

Tracey Emin: My Life in a Column


Tracey Emin - 2011
    Collected here for the first time is an anthology of pieces artist Tracey Emin wrote for The Independent newspaper in London-a weekly column that ran to great acclaim between 2005 and 2009-that touch on everything from the themes behind her work to her process, inspirations, and her alternately humorous and profound observations of daily life. Moving from diatribes on contemporary art and culture to confessional pieces chronicling her travels abroad and reflecting on her private life in London, the columns bring together elements of essay and diary that present a unique perspective on life and the work of the queen of the Young British Artists. Edited and introduced by the artist, and illustrated with forty reproductions of photographs that recall the original format of the columns, Tracey Emin: My Life in a Column makes a giant of the art world at once more familiar and more profound.

How to be a Grrrl: by Lucy van Pelt (Canons)


Charles M. Schulz - 2015
    Never one to suffer in silence, in this brand new book she is presented as the role model she has always wanted to be. Packed with tips on how to stick up for yourself, how to make yourself heard, how to stand up for what you believe in and much more besides, How to be a Grrrl is Lucy's guide to making the most of being a girl.

Thinking Class: Sketches from a Cultural Worker


Joanna Kadi - 1996
    Examining the elite's supposed hegemony over intellectual work, Thinking Class rejects the ideaa that working class people are not thinkers, and affirms the culture that springs up, beautiful and honest, from this society's true base.

Modestly


Dina Torkia - 2018
    It’s about me as a Muslim Brit embracing dual identities, surviving the turbulent teens and transitioning from self-doubt to self-belief. There is a little bit of drama, lots of laughs, plenty of practical advice and a shedload of bold statements. You can’t get a Muslim woman in a hijab with no opinion, am I right?!' Dina x Guys, get ready. YouTuber and social media sensation Dina Torkia is giving you a never-seen-before look into her world. From advice on fashion, beauty and style, to frank opinions on family, career and faith, this is everything that Dina has ever wanted to share with you. So let Dina tell you how it really is, living and loving life as a modern Muslim Brit. @dinatokio

The Motherhood Manifesto: What America's Moms Want -- and What To Do About It


Joan Blades - 2006
    From professional women who hit the maternal wall, to childcare workers who can't afford quality care for their own children, this book captures what it means to be a mother in America today. This groundbreaking book also celebrates the successes of companies that have discovered the value of good family policies, families who are making it work, model childcare programs, and legislation that supports families.