Sexual Fluidity

Sexual Fluidity PDF 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.

Sexual Fluidity

Sexual Fluidity PDF Author: Lisa M. Diamond
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674026247
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Get Book Here

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.

The Pleasure Gap

The Pleasure Gap PDF Author: Katherine Rowland
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1580058345
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
American culture is more sexually liberal than ever. But compared to men, women's sexual pleasure has not grown: Up to 40 percent of American women experience the sexual malaise clinically known as low sexual desire. Between this low desire, muted pleasure, and experiencing sex in terms of labor rather than of lust, women by the millions are dissatisfied with their erotic lives. For too long, this deficit has been explained in terms of women's biology, stress, and age. In The Pleasure Gap, Katherine Rowland rejects the idea that women should settle for diminished pleasure; instead, she argues women should take inequality in the bedroom as seriously as we take it in the workplace and understand its causes and effects. Drawing on extensive research and interviews with more than one hundred women and dozens of sexual health professionals, Rowland shows that the pleasure gap is neither medical malady nor psychological condition but rather a result of our culture's troubled relationship with women's sexual expression. This provocative exploration of modern sexuality makes a case for closing the gap for good.

Women's Conflicts About Eating and Sexuality

Women's Conflicts About Eating and Sexuality PDF Author: Ellen Cole
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317823524
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
Women’s Conflicts About Eating and Sexuality explores the strong relationships food and sex have represented to women over the years. No other book has spelled out so clearly the parallels between sex and eating nor integrated the relationship of these to women’s basic need to be loved. Today’s dilemma for women--be fat or go hungry--and the endless variations and unsatisfying solutions to this problem have contributed to the incidence of anorexia, bulimia, and obesity. The pursuit of slimness, the obsession with having the perfect body, excessive aerobicizing, and diet books ad nauseam are all part of this phenomenon. Authors in Women’s Conflicts About Eating and Sexuality skillfully discuss the parallel between women’s obsession with sex and romance in the fifties and their obsession with food today. An important book for all women, it sheds light on the complex issues facing women and devotes special attention to the career woman and the additional pressures to be slim and stay slim. The woman who reads this potentially life-changing book can examine, question, and change her behavior, using the specific step-by-step program aid included in the book. This book is for every woman who has ever worried about being too fat or too sexual. Women’s Conflicts About Eating and Sexuality will appeal to women of all ages--young women and their mothers will be fascinated by the parallels between sexual obsessions of thirty years ago and the eating obsessions of today. This healing book will particularly attract single career women for whom sex and relationships are fraught with complications. Counselors and therapists will find this book an excellent resource in their work with helping women. It is also a good auxiliary text for courses in Women’s Studies focusing on psychology and history of women and the sociology of women and eating disorders.

Women's Sexuality Across the Life Span

Women's Sexuality Across the Life Span PDF Author: Judith C. Daniluk
Publisher: Guilford Press
ISBN: 9781572309111
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
Moving beyond a traditional focus on sexual functioning, this book emphasizes the complex interaction of psychological, social, cultural and biological influences on womens's sense of themselves as sexual beings. Written for practitioners and educators, its goal is to challenge contradictory messages and meanings that cause many women to feel disconnected from their bodies and from their needs and desires. Themes explored include the development of sexual awareness and sexuality in childhood and adolescence, the critical sexual choices of young adulthood, and the multiple transitions characterizing the middle and later years of life. The book features creative exercises and interventions to help girls and women construct more affirming sexual meanings.

The Governesses

The Governesses PDF Author: Anne Serre
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811228088
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 112

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Book Description
The sensational US debut of a major French writer—an intense, delicious meringue of a novella In a large country house shut off from the world by a gated garden, three young governesses responsible for the education of a group of little boys are preparing a party. The governesses, however, seem to spend more time running around in a state of frenzied desire than attending to the children’s education. One of their main activities is lying in wait for any passing stranger, and then throwing themselves on him like drunken Maenads. The rest of the time they drift about in a kind of sated, melancholy calm, spied upon by an old man in the house opposite, who watches their goings-on through a telescope. As they hang paper lanterns and prepare for the ball in their own honor, and in honor of the little boys rolling hoops on the lawn, much is mysterious: one reviewer wrote of the book’s “deceptively simple words and phrasing, the transparency of which works like a mirror reflecting back on the reader.” Written with the elegance of old French fables, the dark sensuality of Djuna Barnes and the subtle comedy of Robert Walser, this semi-deranged erotic fairy tale introduces American readers to the marvelous Anne Serre.

Women, Sexuality and the Political Power of Pleasure

Women, Sexuality and the Political Power of Pleasure PDF Author: Susie Jolly
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
ISBN: 1780325738
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
This pioneering collection explores the ways in which positive, pleasure-focused approaches to sexuality can empower women. Gender and development has tended to engage with sexuality only in relation to violence and ill-health. Although this has been hugely important in challenging violence against women, over-emphasizing these negative aspects has dovetailed with conservative ideologies that associate women’s sexualities with danger and fear. On the other hand, the media, the pharmaceutical industry, and pornography more broadly celebrate the pleasures of sex in ways that can be just as oppressive, often implying that only certain types of people - young, heterosexual, able-bodied, HIV-negative - are eligible for sexual pleasure. Women, Sexuality and the Political Power of Pleasure brings together challenges to these strictures and exclusions from both the South and North of the globe, with examples of activism, advocacy and programming which use pleasure as an entry point. It shows how positive approaches to pleasure and sexuality can enhance equality and empowerment for all.

Sex, Time, and Power

Sex, Time, and Power PDF Author: Leonard Shlain
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101200391
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description
As in the bestselling The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, Leonard Shlain’s provocative new book promises to change the way readers view themselves and where they came from. Sex, Time, and Power offers a tantalizing answer to an age-old question: Why did big-brained Homo sapiens suddenly emerge some 150,000 years ago? The key, according to Shlain, is female sexuality. Drawing on an awesome breadth of research, he shows how, long ago, the narrowness of the newly bipedal human female’s pelvis and the increasing size of infants’ heads precipitated a crisis for the species. Natural selection allowed for the adaptation of the human female to this environmental stress by reconfiguring her hormonal cycles, entraining them with the periodicity of the moon. The results, however, did much more than ensure our existence; they imbued women with the concept of time, and gave them control over sex—a power that males sought to reclaim. And the possibility of achieving immortality through heirs drove men to construct patriarchal cultures that went on to dominate so much of human history. From the nature of courtship to the evolution of language, Shlain’s brilliant and wide-ranging exploration stimulates new thinking about very old matters.

Pleasure and Danger

Pleasure and Danger PDF Author: Carole S. Vance
Publisher: Pandora Press
ISBN: 9780044408673
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 462

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Book Description
This is a contribution to the discussion of sexuality for women - sexual danger and sexual pleasure.

The Evolutionary Biology of Human Female Sexuality

The Evolutionary Biology of Human Female Sexuality PDF Author: Randy Thornhill
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195340981
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
This title introduces a theoretical framework for understanding women's sexuality based on comparative female sexuality across all vertebrate animals. It shows that estrus is present in human females, contrary to earlier research.

A New View of Women's Sexual Problems

A New View of Women's Sexual Problems PDF Author: Ellyn Kaschak
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131778815X
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
Take a new look at women’s sexuality! This fascinating book looks at the wide-ranging therapeutic, social, and political implications of the new paradigm of women’s sexuality. International in scope and multidisciplinary in approach, A New View of Women’s Sexual Problems examines the theoretical and practical effects of the landmark document produced by the Working Group on a New View of Women’s Sexuality. The book brings together gender theory, psychology, social science, and medicine in a powerful cultural critique of the reigning medical approach to women’s sexual health. International experts from India, Costa Rica, Israel, the US, and many other cultures place this revolutionary idea in cultural and political context, as well as extrapolating fresh new treatment options for dealing with women’s sexual problems. A New View of Women’s Sexual Problems analyzes the new paradigm’s implications in many fields, including: family medicine couples counseling for straight and lesbian partners STD prevention and sexual health issues sex therapy sex education feminist theory developmental psychology