Showing titles in Gender Studies

For much of the 20th and 21st centuries, women’s sexuality was an uncharted territory in science, studied far less frequently - and far less seriously - than its male counterpart. That is, until Emily Nagoski’s Come As You Are, which used groundbreaking science and research to prove that the most important factor in creating and sustaining a sex life filled with confidence and joy is not what the parts are or how they’re organized but how you feel about them.

First published in 1991, Backlash made headlines and became a best-selling classic for its thoroughgoing debunking of a decade-long antifeminist backlash against women’s advances. As Faludi writes in a new preface for this edition, much has changed in the intervening years. This startling and essential book helps explain why women’s freedoms are still so demonized and threatened - and urges us to choose a different future.

It's no surprise that our fast-paced, overly self-analytical culture is pushing many people—especially women—to spend countless hours thinking about negative ideas, feelings, and experiences. Renowned psychologist and award-winning researcher Dr Susan Nolen-Hoeksema calls this overthinking, and her groundbreaking research shows you how to break free of it and reclaim your life.

Practicing New Worlds explores how principles of emergence, adaptation, iteration, resilience, transformation, interdependence, decentralization, and fractalization can shape organizing toward a world without the violence of surveillance, police, prisons, jails, or cages of any kind, in which we collectively have everything we need to survive and thrive.

In his classic guide to understanding the opposite sex, Dr. John Gray provides a practical and proven way for men and women to improve their communication and relationships by acknowledging the differences between them. Once upon a time Martians and Venusians met, fell in love, and had happy relationships together because they respected and accepted their differences. Then they came to Earth and amnesia set in: They forgot they were from different planets.

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells - taken without her knowledge - became one of the most important tools in medicine: The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, which are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than 60 years. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects.

Drew Afualo is best known as the internet’s “Crusader for Women” and is at the head of a new generation of entertainment’s rising stars. Loud is part manual, part manifesto, and part memoir. It makes it clear that behind her fearsome laugh is a mission and a life philosophy, a strategy for self-confidence from the inside out, and a pathway to once and for all remove men from the center of how women and femmes think about themselves.

Too many of us are living on autopilot. We believe we’re too old, too busy, or too inexperienced to go after what we really want. Shannon Watts needs you to know: you couldn’t be more wrong. For women ready to stop playing it small, Fired Up invites you to shatter your self-imposed limitations and unleash your potential so you can finally start living the life you deserve.

We live in a world obsessed with drinking. We drink at baby showers and work events, brunch and book club, graduations and funerals. Yet no one ever questions alcohol’s ubiquity—in fact, the only thing ever questioned is why someone doesn’t drink. It is a qualifier for belonging and if you don’t imbibe, you are considered an anomaly. As a society, we are obsessed with health and wellness, yet we uphold alcohol as some kind of magic elixir, though it is anything but.

Mandii B and WeezyWTF, hosts of the Decisions, Decisions (formerly WHOREible Decisions) podcast, deliver a bold, unfiltered, and raw, sex-positive collection of relatable tales. They tackle everything from pleasure to pain and the journey of healing through progression to reclaim your personal and sexual power.

A Room of One's Own is an extended essay, originally delivered in 1928 as two lectures at two of Cambridge University's women's colleges—Newnham College and Girton College. Through the use of several metaphors, lauded author Virginia Woolf explores the social injustices and structures that prevent women from engaging in free expression and contributing to literature.

A reproduction of the classic text, unavailable now for more than a decade, with a new introduction by the author. The Hite Report, first published in 1976, was a sexual revolution in six hundred pages. To answer sensitive questions dealing with the most intimate details of women's sexuality, Hite's innovation was simple: she asked women, a lot of them, everything--and published the results. One hundred thousand women, ages fourteen to seventy-eight, were asked what they do and don't like about sex; how orgasm really feels, with and without intercourse.

1860: As the clash between the states rolls slowly to a boil, Elizabeth Packard, housewife and mother of six, is facing her own battle. The enemy sits across the table and sleeps in the next room. Her husband of 21 years is plotting against her because he feels increasingly threatened - by Elizabeth’s intellect, independence, and unwillingness to stifle her own thoughts. So Theophilus makes a plan to put his wife back in her place. One summer morning, he has her committed to an insane asylum.

Everyone needs to love and be loved - even men. But to know love, men must be able to look at the ways that patriarchal culture keeps them from knowing themselves, from being in touch with their feelings, from loving. In The Will to Change, bell hooks gets to the heart of the matter and shows men how to express the emotions that are a fundamental part of who they are - whatever their age, marital status, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.

In Gay Girl, Good God, author Jackie Hill Perry shares her own story, offering practical tools that helped her in the process of finding wholeness. Jackie grew up fatherless and experienced gender confusion. She embraced masculinity and homosexuality with every fiber of her being. She knew that Christians had a lot to say about all of the above. But was she supposed to change herself? How was she supposed to stop loving women, when homosexuality felt more natural to her than heterosexuality ever could?

There is a war on masculinity, and everywhere we look—on every front we hold sacred—we can see the painful reminders of this collapsing order. The chaos and crisis we are experiencing today should be a signal for men everywhere to rise up; to fight to preserve our way of life by once again walking the ancient paths. But this isn’t a journey that need be taken alone.

The Tudor period conjures up images of queens and noblewomen in elaborate court dress, of palace intrigue and dramatic politics. But if you were a woman, it was also a time when death during childbirth was rife, when marriage was usually a legal contract, not a matter for love, and the education you could hope to receive was minimal at best. Yet the Tudor century was also dominated by powerful and dynamic women in a way that no era had been before.

Drawing from her work as a psychoanalyst and cantadora (keeper of old stories), Dr. Estes uses myths and folktales to illustrate how societies systematically strip away the feminine spirit. Through an exploration into the nature of the wild woman archetype, Dr. Estes helps listeners rediscover and free their own wild nature.

Throughout her childhood, Safiya Sinclair’s father, a volatile reggae musician and a militant adherent to a strict sect of Rastafari, was obsessed with the ever-present threat of the corrupting evils of the Western world outside their home, and worried that womanhood would make Safiya and her sisters morally weak and impure. For him, a woman’s highest virtue was her obedience.

At the age of 22, Jennifer Worth left her comfortable home to move into a convent and become a midwife in postwar London’s East End slums. The colorful characters she met while delivering babies all over London - from the plucky, warm-hearted nuns with whom she lived to the woman with 24 children who couldn't speak English to the prostitutes and dockers of the city’s seedier side - illuminate a fascinating time in history.