Fierce Desires: A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America PDF Download
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Author: Rebecca L. Davis
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1631496581
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 488
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Book Description
From an esteemed scholar, a richly textured, authoritative history of sex and sexuality in America—the first major account in three decades. Our era is one of sexual upheaval. Roe v. Wade was overturned in the summer of 2022, school systems across the country are banning books with LGBTQ+ themes, and the notion of a “tradwife” is gaining adherents on the right while polyamory wins converts on the left. It may seem as though debates over sex are more intense than ever, but as acclaimed historian Rebecca L. Davis demonstrates in Fierce Desires, we should not be too surprised, because Americans have been arguing over which kinds of sex are “acceptable”—and which are not—since before the founding itself. From the public floggings of fornicators in early New England to passionate same-sex love affairs in the 1800s and the crackdown on abortion providers in the 1870s, and from the movements for sexual liberation to the recent restrictions on access to gender affirming care, Davis presents a sweeping, engrossing, illuminating four-hundred-year account of this nation’s sexual past. Drawing on a wealth of sources, including legal records, erotica, and eighteenth-century romance novels, she recasts important episodes—Anthony Comstock’s crusade against smut among them—and, at the same time, unearths stories of little-remembered pioneers and iconoclasts, such as an indentured servant in colonial Virginia named Thomas/Thomasine Hall, Gay Liberation Front cofounder Kiyoshi Kuromiya, and postwar female pleasure activist Betty Dodson. At the heart of the book is Davis’s argument that the concept of sexual identity is relatively novel, first appearing in the nineteenth century. Over the centuries, Americans have shifted from understanding sexual behaviors as reflections of personal preferences or values, such as those rooted in faith or culture, to defining sexuality as an essential part of what makes a person who they are. And at every step, legislators, police, activists, and bureaucrats attempted to regulate new sexual behaviors, transforming government in the process. The most comprehensive account of America’s sexual past since John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman’s 1988 classic, Intimate Matters, Davis’s magisterial work seeks to help us understand the turmoil of the present. It demonstrates how fiercely we have always valued our desires, and how far we are willing to go to defend them.
Author: Rebecca L. Davis
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1631496581
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 488
Get Book Here
Book Description
From an esteemed scholar, a richly textured, authoritative history of sex and sexuality in America—the first major account in three decades. Our era is one of sexual upheaval. Roe v. Wade was overturned in the summer of 2022, school systems across the country are banning books with LGBTQ+ themes, and the notion of a “tradwife” is gaining adherents on the right while polyamory wins converts on the left. It may seem as though debates over sex are more intense than ever, but as acclaimed historian Rebecca L. Davis demonstrates in Fierce Desires, we should not be too surprised, because Americans have been arguing over which kinds of sex are “acceptable”—and which are not—since before the founding itself. From the public floggings of fornicators in early New England to passionate same-sex love affairs in the 1800s and the crackdown on abortion providers in the 1870s, and from the movements for sexual liberation to the recent restrictions on access to gender affirming care, Davis presents a sweeping, engrossing, illuminating four-hundred-year account of this nation’s sexual past. Drawing on a wealth of sources, including legal records, erotica, and eighteenth-century romance novels, she recasts important episodes—Anthony Comstock’s crusade against smut among them—and, at the same time, unearths stories of little-remembered pioneers and iconoclasts, such as an indentured servant in colonial Virginia named Thomas/Thomasine Hall, Gay Liberation Front cofounder Kiyoshi Kuromiya, and postwar female pleasure activist Betty Dodson. At the heart of the book is Davis’s argument that the concept of sexual identity is relatively novel, first appearing in the nineteenth century. Over the centuries, Americans have shifted from understanding sexual behaviors as reflections of personal preferences or values, such as those rooted in faith or culture, to defining sexuality as an essential part of what makes a person who they are. And at every step, legislators, police, activists, and bureaucrats attempted to regulate new sexual behaviors, transforming government in the process. The most comprehensive account of America’s sexual past since John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman’s 1988 classic, Intimate Matters, Davis’s magisterial work seeks to help us understand the turmoil of the present. It demonstrates how fiercely we have always valued our desires, and how far we are willing to go to defend them.
Author: John D'Emilio
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 9780060915506
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 428
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Book Description
Traces changing American attitudes towards human sexuality, discusses social issues involving race, gender, class, and sexual preference, and looks at crusaders for sexual change
Author: Dagmar Herzog
Publisher:
ISBN: 0465012450
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
The Religious Right has fractured, the pundits tell us, and its power is waning. Is it true - have evangelical Christians lost their political clout? When the subject is sex, the answer is definitively no. Only three decades after the legalization of abortion, the broad gains of the feminist movement, and the emergence of the gay rights movement, Americans appear to be doing the time warp again. It's 1950s redux. Politicians--including many Democrats--insist that abstinence is the only acceptable form of birth control. Fully fifty percent of American high schools teach a "sex education" curriculum that includes deceptive information about the prevalence of STDs and the failure rates of condoms. Students are taught that homosexuality is curable, and that premarital sex ruins future marital happiness. Afraid of sounding godless, American liberals have failed to challenge these retrograde orthodoxies. The truth is Americans have not become anti-sex, but they have become increasingly anxious about sex--not least due to the stratagems of the Religious Right. There has been a war on sex in America--a war conservative evangelicals have in large part already won. How did the Religious Right score so many successes? Historian Dagmar Herzog argues that conservative evangelicals appropriated the lessons of the first sexual revolution far more effectively than liberals. With the support of a multimillion-dollar Christian sex industry, evangelicals crafted an astonishingly graphic and effective pitch for the pleasures of "hot monogamy"--for married, heterosexual couples only. This potent message enabled them to win elections and seduce souls, with disastrous political consequences. Fierce, witty, and brilliant, Sex in Crisis challenges America's culture of sexual dysfunction and calls for a more sophisticated national conversation about the facts of life.
Author: Rebecca L. Davis
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469664887
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
Personal reinvention is a core part of the human condition. Yet in the mid-twentieth century, certain private religious choices became lightning rods for public outrage and debate. Public Confessions reveals the controversial religious conversions that shaped modern America. Rebecca L. Davis explains why the new faiths of notable figures including Clare Boothe Luce, Whittaker Chambers, Sammy Davis Jr., Marilyn Monroe, Muhammad Ali, Chuck Colson, and others riveted the American public. Unconventional religious choices charted new ways of declaring an "authentic" identity amid escalating Cold War fears of brainwashing and coercion. Facing pressure to celebrate a specific vision of Americanism, these converts variously attracted and repelled members of the American public. Whether the act of changing religions was viewed as selfish, reckless, or even unpatriotic, it provoked controversies that ultimately transformed American politics. Public Confessions takes intimate history to its widest relevance, and in so doing, makes you see yourself in both the private and public stories it tells.
Author: Pamela C. Regan
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 0761917934
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 186
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Book Description
Accessibly written, this interdisciplinary book reviews theory and research on the characteristics of sexual desire, the individual physical and mental factors that influence the experience of sexual desire (hormones, age, gender, beliefs, mood), the various partner characteristics that incite sexual desire (attractiveness) and the association between sexual desire and interpersonal, relational events and experiences (romantic love). The book concludes with an examination of the personal, interpersonal and societal implications of sexual desire. Throughout, the authors draw on findings from their own body of research on sexual and romantic attraction, as well as on an extensive review of the relevant social, behavioural and medical science
Author: Joe S. McIlhaney, Jr., MD
Publisher: Moody Publishers
ISBN: 0802477720
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 183
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Book Description
Any parent can identify with the feeling that girls growing up in America face a treacherous future; Girls Uncovered unveils the facts. In a follow up to their eye-opening release Hooked, obstetricians Joe McIlhaney and Freda Bush present stunning scientific research on the development of young girls in America's increasingly reckless sexual culture. They survey the reality of prevalent sexual behaviors and attitudes as well as their psychological, social, physical, and spiritual effects. Despite the harrowing facts revealed by their studies, McIlhaney and Bush give us hope through their expertise as physicians and parents of daughters. Girls Uncovered provides fundamental wisdom and practical advice to help parents, counselors, and church leaders guide young girls safely through the challenges they will face so they can achieve their potential and enjoy full health, hope, and happiness.
Author: Steven Seidman
Publisher: Other
ISBN:
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
In the 1990s Americans are divided on virtually every issue surrounding sexuality. Emotion and political passion have come to dominate sexual matters, and the debates on teenage pregnancy, pornography, homosexuality, abortion, and AIDS reveal deep social conflicts. The sexual sphere is so entangled that it defies analysis or even description. In Embattled Eros Steven Seidman seeks to clarify some of the major dynamics and patterns of contemporary American intimate culture. He shows that at the root of the major conflicts are two sexual ideologies, the libertarian and the romanticist. Examining the strengths and limits of each ideology, he suggests broad outlines for a sexual ethic that goes beyond the current polarization. In part one Seidman argues that we should reject our usual way of looking at recent history--a sexual revolution in the '60s followed by a conservative backlash in the '80s, an ongoing struggle between the forces of freedom and the forces of repression. Between the '60s and the '80s he argues, there transpired neither a sexual revolution nor counter-revolution but a heightened conflict over the meaning of sex, its relation to pleasure, romance, and self-identity, its proper moral role in private and public life. In part two Seidman's primary purpose is to analyze moral arguments over sexual norms and practices. He chooses the sex debates that occurred within feminism and the gay male community in the late '70s through the '80s as his sites for moral engagement, as it is here that the debate over sexual ethics has been given its fullest elaboration. In conclusion, Seidman offers a pragmatic ethic that revolves around the concept of sexual and social responsibility as a bridge between libertarians and romanticists. The main issue is how to preserve the expansive notion of sexual choice, diversity, and pleasure contained in the libertarian ethic yet also retain standards that allow us to offer social and personal criticisms of intimate life. Building on the work presented in Romantic Longings, the author's history of intimacy in the United States, Embattled Eros presents a sophisticated yet accessible analysis of contemporary sexual life and its moral conflicts. Emphasizing feminist and lesbian and gay issues, the book is for all readers interested in contemporary sexuality.
Author: Kelsy Burke
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1635577373
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
For readers of Peggy Orenstein and Rebecca Traister, an authoritative, big think look at pornography in all its facets - historical, religious, and cultural. In the 1960s, sex researchers Masters and Johnson declared the end of the fake orgasm. Nearly two decades later, in 1982, evangelical activist Tim LaHaye foretold that the entire pornography industry would soon be driven out of business. Neither prediction proved true. Instead, with the rise of the internet, pornography saturates the American conscience more than ever and has reshaped our understanding of sexuality, relationships, media, and even the nature of addiction. Dr. Kelsy Burke has spent the last five years researching and interviewing internet pornography's opponents and its sympathizers. In The Pornography Wars, Burke does a deep dive into the long history of pornography in America and then turns her gaze on our present society to examine the ways this industry touches on the most intimate parts of American lives. She offers a complete understanding of the major players in the debates around porn's place in society: everyone from sex workers, activists, therapists, religious leaders, and consumers. In doing so, she addresses and debunks the myths that surround porn and porn usage while showing how everything from the way we teach children about sex to the legal protections for what can be published is tied up in the deeply complicated battles over pornography. Sweeping, savvy, and deeply researched, The Pornography Wars is a necessary and comprehensive new look at pornography and American life.
Author: Lisa M. Diamond
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674026247
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
Is love “blind” when it comes to gender? For women, it just might be. This unsettling and original book offers a radical new understanding of the context-dependent nature of female sexuality. Lisa M. Diamond argues that for some women, love and desire are not rigidly heterosexual or homosexual but fluid, changing as women move through the stages of life, various social groups, and, most important, different love relationships.This perspective clashes with traditional views of sexual orientation as a stable and fixed trait. But that view is based on research conducted almost entirely on men. Diamond is the first to study a large group of women over time. She has tracked one hundred women for more than ten years as they have emerged from adolescence into adulthood. She summarizes their experiences and reviews research ranging from the psychology of love to the biology of sex differences. Sexual Fluidity offers moving first-person accounts of women falling in and out of love with men or women at different times in their lives. For some, gender becomes irrelevant: “I fall in love with the person, not the gender,” say some respondents.Sexual Fluidity offers a new understanding of women’s sexuality—and of the central importance of love.
Author: Linda E. Savage
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780975336908
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
Women seek individual self-expression and yearn for intimacy in relationships, yet they do not want to have to choose between the two. The desire to know and be known intimately by a partner is intrinsic to the feminine way. This fascinating self help book brings you a road map to finding your uniquely female sexual expression, creating deeply satisfying and balanced relationships. It blends the ancient wisdom of the Goddess cultures with current clinical findings to create a new model of female sexuality. The ancient matrilineal societies offer valuable insights into the mysteries of sexuality that can result in renewed sexual interest for contemporary women. It presents a clear step-by step guide to building new pathways towards true sexual partnership.
