Insatiable Porn—A Love Story (5/2014)By Asa Akira
Asa Akira (28) has already had an extremely unusual life. Educated at the United Nations International School in Manhattan, she soon was earning a good living by stripping and working as a dominatrix at a sex dungeon. Akira has now built up a reputation for being of the most popular, hardworking, and extreme actors in the business, winning dozens of awards for her 330+ movies, including her #1 bestselling series “Asa Akira Is Insatiable”. In Insatiable, Akira recounts her extraordinary life in chapters that are hilarious, shocking, and touching. In a wry, conversational tone, she talks about her experiences shoplifting and doing drugs while in school, her relationship with other porn stars (she is married to one) and with the industry at large, and her beliefs about women and sexuality. Insatiable is filled with Akira’s unusual and often highly amusing anecdotes, including her visit to a New Hampshire sex shop run by a mother and son. In a world where porn is increasingly becoming part of the mainstream, Akira is one of very few articulate voices writing from the inside. She something important, controversial, and astonishingly interesting to say about sex and its central role in our lives and culture.
American Savage: Insights, Slights, and Fights on Faith, Sex, Love, and Politics (5/27/2014)
by Dan Savage
From the moment he began writing his syndicated sex-advice column, Savage Love, Dan Savage has never been shy about expressing his opinion on controversial topics—political or otherwise. Now, he addresses issues ranging from parenting and the gay agenda to the Catholic Church and health care. Among them: Why straight people should have straight “pride” parades, too; Why Obamacare, as good as it is, is “still kinda evil”; Why what passes for sex-ed in America is more like “sex dread”; Why the Bible is “only as good and decent as the person reading it”...
Gaysia: Adventures in the Queer East (5/13/2014)
by Benjamin Law
Benjamin Law spent nearly a year skipping between seven Asian countries, sitting backstage with Bangkok ladyboys before their beauty pageants, talking to Tokyo’s superstar drag queens, marching in the heat with Mumbai’s fierce queer rights activists, listening to Melaka preachers who claim they can heal homosexuality and hanging out with Bali’s moneyboys and the foreigners who hire them. At once entertaining and moving, Gaysia is a wild ride and a fascinating quest by a leading travel writer. See Indonesia, Thailand, China, Japan, Malaysia, Myanmar and India as never before through the eyes of gonzo anthropologist and journalist Benjamin Law.
Nature's Nether Regions: What the Sex Lives of Bugs, Birds, and Beasts Tell Us About Evolution, Biodiversity, and Ourselves (5/1/2014)
by Menno Schilthuizen
What’s the easiest way to tell species apart? Check their genitals. Researching private parts was long considered taboo, but scientists are now beginning to understand that the wild diversity of sex organs across species can tell us a lot about evolution. Menno Schilthuizen invites readers to join him as he uncovers the ways the shapes and functions of genitalia have been molded by complex Darwinian struggles: penises that have lost their spines but evolved appendages to displace sperm; female orgasms that select or reject semen from males, in turn subtly modifying the females’ genital shape. We learn why spiders masturbate into miniature webs, discover she dungflies that store sperm from attractive males in their bellies, and see how, when it comes to outlandish appendages and bizarre behaviors, humans are downright boring.
Slave Girls: Erotic Stories of Submission (5/13/2014)
by D. L. King (Editor)
Forever in an electric dance of give and take, pleasure and power are inextricably linked. In Slave Girls, award-winning eroticist D. L. King pulls back the velvet curtain to reveal a world where every sexual fantasy is realized, a world driven by women devoted to their own desires and their dominants. These Slave Girls want nothing more than to willingly relinquish control to the capable hands of the right Master. Trained and tested to suit every sexual taste, these women learn the ropes—literally. A hassle-filled day turns on a dime when a strong Dom takes charge in Victoria Behn’s “Hell-Bent for Leather.” In Giselle Renarde’s “Postcards from Paris,” one good girl lives for her daily dose of discipline and tough love. The thrill of being in service to a stranger compels the lust-filled sub in Rachel Kramer Bussel’s “Out of Sight.” Your own desires may surprise you after finishing the submissive exploits of Slave Girls.
Slavery Inc: The Untold Story of International Sex Trafficking (5/13/2014)
by Lydia Cacho
Illegal, inhuman, and impervious to recession, there is one trade that continues to thrive, just out of sight. The international sex trade criss-crosses the entire globe, a sinister network made up of criminal masterminds, local handlers, corrupt policemen, willfully blind politicians, eager consumers, and countless hapless women and children. In this ground-breaking work of investigative reporting, the celebrated journalist Lydia Cacho follows the trail of the traffickers and their victims from Mexico to Turkey, Thailand to Iraq, Georgia to the UK, to expose the trade's hidden links with the tourist industry, internet pornography, drugs and arms smuggling, the selling of body organs, money laundering, and even terrorism. This is an underground economy in which a sex slave can be bought for the price of a gun, but Cacho's powerful first-person interviews with mafiosi, pimps, prostitutes, and those who managed to escape from captivity makes it impossible to ignore the terrible human cost of this lucrative exchange.
Sex Work: Labour, Mobility and Sexual Services (5/13/2014)
by JaneMaree Maher
This volume examines the working lives of contemporary sex workers; their practices, their labour market conditions and their engagement with domestic and international regulatory frameworks. It locates the voices and experiences of workers in Melbourne, Australia, at the centre of the sexual services industry as they reflect on brothels and independent escort work, on working conditions and managers, and on the relationships they form with clients. It offers a new account of sex work where women’s labour and mobility is understood as central in local and global imperatives to offer sexual services and examines how these new imperatives intersect with, challenge and exceed existing regulatory frameworks for sex work.
Sex, Love and Abuse: Discourses on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault (5/16/2014)
by Sharon Hayes
Sex, Love and Abuse intervenes in a timely way on some important issues that have become 'elephants in the room' for academic and policy considerations around sexual violence and abuse. In so doing, this book draws upon a range of literatures and novel empirical sources to encourage critical thinking about the relationship between sex, love and abuse, examining crimes including sexual assault, pornography, child sexual abuse and domestic violence. This provocative book seeks to destabilize essentialist understandings of these phenomena with a view to identifying the subtle and complex nature of relationships, which often defy easy explanation and categorization. Focusing on theories, public discourses and moral ideals, Hayes connects romantic love, intimacy and harm in a unique philosophical analysis, exploring abuse in relationships and how such abuse is fostered.
The Politics of Sex: Public Opinion, Parties, and Presidential Elections (5/13/2014)
by Susan B. Hansen
The American cultural landscape has shifted considerably since the 1990s. As church attendance has declined, seculars have increased in number and in political involvement. The economy was supposed to be the most important issue in the 2008 and 2012 elections, but social issues such as gay rights and the status of women actually had a greater impact on vote choice. Moral issues and perceptions of candidate morality had less effect on voters in 2004 than in 2008. These arguments directly challenge the conventional wisdom concerning the 2004 and 2008 elections, which were supposedly decided on the basis of moral values and the economy respectively. Yet in The Politics of Sex, Susan B. Hansen justifies these claims theoretically based on evidence about how voters actually evaluate candidates. Hansen explores trends in public opinion on abortion, gay rights, and the status of women and finds that "values voters" are still crucial in presidential elections, even those supposedly fought over economic or foreign-policy issues. She then analyzes campaign strategies and vote choice to show how Barack Obama made effective use of the liberal trends in public opinion on social issues in 2008 and 2012. Hansen also examines trends in demographics, religious involvement, the institutional setting, and public opinion to predict who in future years benefit from the politics of sex.
Sex, Violence, and Justice: Contraception and the Catholic Church (5/15/2014)
by Aline H. Kalbian
Kalbian contends that official Catholic Church teaching on contraception, articulated in the 1968 papal encyclical Humanae vitae, is rooted in appeals to three biblical commandments: though shall not kill, given that contraception interferes with potential life; thou shall not commit adultery, given that contraception enables lust and prevents procreation as the proper end of marriage; and thou shall not steal, given that contraception aims to restrain population and the potential economic development that everyone deserves. In short, Catholic teaching justifies its prohibition to contraception by invoking three social values: sex, violence, and justice. After offering a history of the Catholic Church and contraception and then analyzing these three values from a feminist perspective, Kalbian suggests that three recent phenomena challenge this three-pronged justification in profound ways: the use of condoms in the HIV/AIDS epidemic; the emergency contraception pill; and the urgent need for population control. Taking these issues seriously, Kalbian claims, might both challenge and help transform Catholic discourse on contraception.
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