Sex in America

Sex in America PDF Author: Robert T. Michael
Publisher: Little Brown GBR
ISBN: 9780316075244
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
In 1992, highly regarded social scientists Robert T. Michael, John H. Gagnon, and Edward O. Laumann embarked on an unprecedented study of America's sex life. Working through the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, their staff of 220 interviewers spent seven months interviewing 3,432 scientifically selected respondents about all aspects of their sex lives, histories, and beliefs. More important, unlike the famous but inherently flawed reports of Alfred Kinsey, Redbook and Playboy magazines, Shere Hite, Samuel and Cynthia Janus, and others, this survey relied on a random sample of Americans rather than on an unrepresentative group of volunteers. The resulting data reveal not just what we do sexually but how society shapes even our most private sexual experiences. They show not just why we are the way we are, but what it might take to change this behavior.

Sex in America

Sex in America PDF Author: Robert T. Michael
Publisher: Little Brown GBR
ISBN: 9780316075244
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Get Book Here

Book Description
In 1992, highly regarded social scientists Robert T. Michael, John H. Gagnon, and Edward O. Laumann embarked on an unprecedented study of America's sex life. Working through the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, their staff of 220 interviewers spent seven months interviewing 3,432 scientifically selected respondents about all aspects of their sex lives, histories, and beliefs. More important, unlike the famous but inherently flawed reports of Alfred Kinsey, Redbook and Playboy magazines, Shere Hite, Samuel and Cynthia Janus, and others, this survey relied on a random sample of Americans rather than on an unrepresentative group of volunteers. The resulting data reveal not just what we do sexually but how society shapes even our most private sexual experiences. They show not just why we are the way we are, but what it might take to change this behavior.

Premarital Sex in America

Premarital Sex in America PDF Author: Mark Regnerus
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199792836
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
The period of young adulthood, from ages 18 to 23, is popularly considered the most sexualized in life. But is it true? What do we really know about the sexual lives of young people today? Premarital Sex in America combines illuminating personal stories and comprehensive research surveys to provide the fullest portrait of heterosexuality among young adults ever produced. Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker draw upon a wealth of survey data as well as scores of in-depth interviews with young adults from around the country, both in and out of college. Digging underneath stereotypes and unexamined assumptions, the authors offer compelling--and often surprising--answers to such questions as: How do the emotional aspects of sexual relations differ between young men and women? What role do political orientations play in their sexual relations? How have online dating and social networking sites affected the relationships of emerging adults? Why are young people today waiting so much longer to marry? How prevalent are nontraditional forms of sex, and what do people think of them? To better understand what drives the sexual behaviors of emerging adults, Regnerus and Uecker pay special attention to two important concepts: sexual scripts, the unwritten and often unconscious rules that guide sexual behavior and attitudes; and sexual economics, a theory which suggests that the relative scarcity of men on college campuses contributes to the "hookup" culture by allowing men to diminish their level of commitment and thereby lower the "price" they have to "pay" for sex. For anyone wishing to understand how sexual relations between young adults have changed and are changing, Premarital Sex in America will serve as a touchstone for years to come.

The Scientific American Book of Love, Sex and the Brain

The Scientific American Book of Love, Sex and the Brain PDF Author: Judith Horstman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118109538
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Who do we love? Who loves us? And why? Is love really a mystery, or can neuroscience offer some answers to these age-old questions? In her third enthralling book about the brain, Judith Horstman takes us on a lively tour of our most important sex and love organ and the whole smorgasbord of our many kinds of love-from the bonding of parent and child to the passion of erotic love, the affectionate love of companionship, the role of animals in our lives, and the love of God. Drawing on the latest neuroscience, she explores why and how we are born to love-how we're hardwired to crave the companionship of others, and how very badly things can go without love. Among the findings: parental love makes our brain bigger, sex and orgasm make it healthier, social isolation makes it miserable-and although the craving for romantic love can be described as an addiction, friendship may actually be the most important loving relationship of your life. Based on recent studies and articles culled from the prestigious Scientific American and Scientific American Mind magazines, The Scientific American Book of Love, Sex, and the Brain offers a fascinating look at how the brain controls our loving relationships, most intimate moments, and our deep and basic need for connection.

West of Sex

West of Sex PDF Author: Pablo Mitchell
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226532739
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 165

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Book Description
Sex can be an oppressive force, a tool to shame, divide, and control a population. But it can also be a force for change, for the legal and physical challenge of inequity and injustice. In West of Sex, Pablo Mitchell uses court transcripts and criminal cases to provide the first coherent picture of Mexican-American sexuality at the turn of the twentieth century, and a truly revelatory look at sexual identity in the borderlands. As Mexicans faced a rising tide of racial intolerance in the American West, some found cracks in the legal system that enabled them to assert their rights as full citizens, despite institutional hostility. In these chapters, Mitchell offers a rare glimpse into the inner workings of ethnicity and power in the United States, placing ordinary Mexican women and men at the center of the story of American sex, colonialism, and belonging. Other chapters discuss topics like prostitution, same-sex intimacy, sexual violence, interracial romance, and marriage with an impressive level of detail and complexity. Written in vivid and accessible prose, West of Sex offers readers a new vision of sex and race in American history.

Against Sex

Against Sex PDF Author: Kara M. French
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469662159
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
How much sex should a person have? With whom? What do we make of people who choose not to have sex at all? As present as these questions are today, they were subjects of intense debate in the early American republic. In this richly textured history, Kara French investigates ideas about, and practices of, sexual restraint to better understand the sexual dimensions of American identity in the antebellum United States. French considers three groups of Americans—Shakers, Catholic priests and nuns, and followers of sexual reformer Sylvester Graham—whose sexual abstinence provoked almost as much social, moral, and political concern as the idea of sexual excess. Examining private diaries and letters, visual culture and material artifacts, and a range of published works, French reveals how people practicing sexual restraint became objects of fascination, ridicule, and even violence in nineteenth-century American culture. Against Sex makes clear that in assessing the history of sexuality, an expansive view of sexual practice that includes abstinence and restraint can shed important new light on histories of society, culture, and politics.

Sex in Crisis

Sex in Crisis PDF 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.

Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America

Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America PDF Author: Nancy Isenberg
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780807847466
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
With this book, Nancy Isenberg illuminates the origins of the women's rights movement. Rather than herald the singular achievements of the 1848 Seneca Falls convention, she examines the confluence of events and ideas_before and after 1848_that, in her vie

Swinging in America

Swinging in America PDF Author: Curtis R. Bergstrand
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
Drawing on an extensive survey of real people and over 40 years of research, this revealing volume proposes that a nonmonogamous lifestyle may be healthier for marriages than a monogamous one. Based on an exhaustive survey into the lives of real people, Swinging in America: Love, Sex, and Marriage in the 21st Century concludes that nonmonogamous relationships such as swinging and polyamory offer a new blueprint for combining sex and love—one that may prove more in line with the way people actually live their lives in our society. Swinging in America begins with what we know about swingers and the swinging lifestyle, based on personal narratives and over 40 years of sociological research comparing swinging and non-swinging couples on factors such as personal happiness, marital satisfaction, psychological stability, and personal values. The second half of the book explores the historical rise and contemporary decline of monocentrism—the sexually monogamous marriage as the organizing principle underlying our culture—and the implications of this decline for new nonmonogamous relationships and marriages.

Sex and the Eighteenth-Century Man

Sex and the Eighteenth-Century Man PDF Author: Thomas Foster
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 9780807050392
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
With few exceptions, sex is noticeably absent from popular histories chronicling colonial and Revolutionary America. Moreover, it is rarely associated specifically with early American men. This is in part because sex and family have traditionally been associated with women, while politics and business are the historic province of men. But Thomas Foster turns this conventional view on its head. Through the use of court records, newspapers, sermons, and private papers from Massachusetts, he vividly shows that sex—the behaviors, desires, and identities associated with eroticism —was a critical component of colonial understanding of the qualities considered befitting for a man. Sex and the Eighteenth-Century Man begins by examining how men, as heads of households, held ultimate responsibility for sex—not only within their own marriages but also for the sexual behaviors of dependents and members of their households. Foster then examines the ways sex solidified bonds in the community, including commercial ties among men, and how sex operated in courtship and social relations with women. Starkly challenging current views about the development of sexuality in America, the book details early understandings of sexual identity and locates a surprising number of stereotypes until now believed to have originated a century later, among them the black rapist and the unmanly sodomite, figures that serve to reinforce cultural norms of white male heterosexuality. As this engrossing and surprising study shows, we cannot understand manliness today or in our early American past without coming to terms with the oft-hidden relationship between sex and masculinity.

A Guide to America's Sex Laws

A Guide to America's Sex Laws PDF Author: Richard A. Posner
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226675640
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Sex, although considered by many in our culture the quintessential private activity, is blanketed by a staggering number and variety of laws. This first concise compendium of the nation's sex laws brings together in one place and summarizes the laws regulating personal sexual activity. In doing so, it reveals gaps, anachronisms, anomalies, inequalities, and irrationalities, and provides an empirical basis for studies of sexual regulation. From Alabama to Wyoming, this informative and fascinating reference book will be an essential resource to a wide range of persons both within and outside the legal profession - specialists in the regulation of sexual behavior, students of the legislative process, lawyers involved in family and sex law, and anyone interested in social and political issues involving sexual orientation and sexual morality.