Mainstreaming Sex

From cyber porn to striptease culture, this trailblaising book uncovers the shockingly fascinating new ways that western society is being sexualized. We don't realise how far the 'pornogrification' of culture has reached - this book does and discusses it graphically but responsibly. Media interest in this subject is huge."Mainstreaming Sex" uncovers the significant impact, hitherto only half glimpsed, that striptease culture is having on our media, relationships, educational and working lives. It is a welcome and much needed book.Western culture is exhibiting its fascination with sex in new, often surprising ways. Pole dancing is a form of keep fit, porn stars find work as agony aunts, pornography itself is just 'a mouse click away', and phone sex, email affairs and cybersex are now part of our everyday lives. This sexualization of modern culture is the subject widely discussed here.In original chapters, the contributors confront the reality that in all aspects of social and cultural life, sex is being 'mainstreamed'. They explore film, print and online pornographies; representations of masturbation in film and television, supersexualized advertising, and problem page sex. They also examine young people's views of sex in mainstream media; women's use of sexual media in the home; and, pole dancing as exercise and performance and third wave feminism and the sexualization debate.

From cyber porn to striptease culture, this trailblaising book uncovers the shockingly fascinating new ways that western society is being sexualized. We don't realise how far the 'pornogrification' of culture has reached - this book does and discusses it graphically but responsibly. Media interest in this subject is huge."Mainstreaming Sex" uncovers the significant impact, hitherto only half glimpsed, that striptease culture is having on our media, relationships, educational and working lives. It is a welcome and much needed book.Western culture is exhibiting its fascination with sex in new, often surprising ways. Pole dancing is a form of keep fit, porn stars find work as agony aunts, pornography itself is just 'a mouse click away', and phone sex, email affairs and cybersex are now part of our everyday lives. This sexualization of modern culture is the subject widely discussed here.In original chapters, the contributors confront the reality that in all aspects of social and cultural life, sex is being 'mainstreamed'. They explore film, print and online pornographies; representations of masturbation in film and television, supersexualized advertising, and problem page sex. They also examine young people's views of sex in mainstream media; women's use of sexual media in the home; and, pole dancing as exercise and performance and third wave feminism and the sexualization debate.

Until the 1970s the history of sexuality was a marginalized practice. Today it is a flourishing field, increasingly integrated into the mainstream and producing innovative insights into the ways in which societies shape and are shaped by sexual values, norms, identities and desires. In this book, Jeffrey Weeks, one of the leading international scholars in the subject, sets out clearly and concisely how sexual history has developed, and its implications for our understanding of the ways we live today. The emergence of a new wave of feminism and lesbian and gay activism in the 1970s transformed the subject, heavily influenced by new trends in social and cultural history, radical sociological insights and the impact of Michel Foucault’s work. The result was an increasing emphasis on the historical shaping of sexuality, and on the existence of many different sexual meanings and cultures on a global scale. With chapters on, amongst others, lesbian, gay and queer history, feminist sexual history, the mainstreaming of sexual history, and the globalization of sexual history, What is Sexual History? is an indispensable guide to these developments.

The concept of gender mainstreaming has experienced an unexpected boom in the European Union and beyond since the United Nations World Conference of Women in Beijing in 1995. Starting from the evolution of gender mainstreaming, this book examines the extent to which gender mainstreaming can be regarded as an innovation and as an institution in a complex organisation like the European Commission. By ensuring that the effects on both genders of all policies and organisational processes are taken into account, gender mainstreaming seeks to bring what are often marginalised as ́women ́s concerns ́ into the mainstream of the analysis. Gender mainstreaming is often regarded as a paradigm shift compared to previous concepts of equal treatment and positive action programmes.

Sexual attitudes and behaviour have changed radically in Britain between the Victorian era and the twenty-first century. However, Lesley A. Hall reveals how slow and halting the processes of change have been, and how many continuities have persisted under a façade of modernity. Thoroughly revised, updated and expanded, the second edition of this established text: • explores a wide range of relevant topics including marriage, homosexuality, commercial sex, media representations, censorship, sexually transmitted diseases and sex education • features an entirely new last chapter which brings the narrative right up to the present day • provides fresh insights by bringing together further original research and recent scholarship in the area. Lively and authoritative, this is an essential volume for anyone studying the history of sexual culture in Britain during a period of rapid social change.

Sex work is a subject of significant contestation across academic disciplines, as well as within legal, medical, moral, feminist, political and socio-cultural discourses. A large body of research exists, but much of this focuses on the sale of sex by women to men and ignores other performances, practices, meanings and embodiments in the contemporary sex industry. A queer agenda is important in order to challenge hetero-centric gender norms and to develop new insights into how gender, sex, power, crime, work, migration, space/place, health and intimacy are understood in the context of commercial sexual encounters. Queer Sex Work explores what it might mean to ‘be’, ‘do’ and ‘think’ queer(ly) in the study and practice of commercial sex. It brings together a multiplicity of empirical case studies – including erotic dance venues, online sex working, pornography, grey sexual economies, and BSDM – and offers a variety of perspectives from academic scholars, policy practitioners, activists and sex workers themselves. In so doing, the book advances a queer politics of sex work that aims to disrupt heteronormative logics whilst also making space for different voices in academic and political debates about commercial sex. This unique and multidisciplinary volume will be indispensable for scholars and students of the global sex trade and of gender, sexuality, feminism and queer theory more broadly, as well as policymakers, activists and practitioners interested in the politics and practice of sex work in local, national and international contexts.

Women in Indonesia: gender, equity and development.

David Foster Wallace's Toxic Sexuality: Hideousness, Neoliberalism, Spermatics is the first full-length study of perhaps the most controversial aspect of Wallace's work – male sexuality. Departing from biographical accounts of Wallace's troubled relationship to sex, the book offers new and engaging close readings of this vexed topic in both his fiction and non-fiction. Wallace consistently returns to images of sexual toxicity across his career to argue that, when it comes to sex, men are immutably hideous. He makes this argument by drawing on a variety of neoliberal logics and spermatic metaphors, which in their appeal to apparently neutral economic processes and natural bodily facts, forestall the possibility that men can change. The book therefore provides a revisionist account of Wallace's attitudes towards capitalism, as well as a critical dissection of his approach to masculinity and sexuality. In doing so, David Foster Wallace's Toxic Sexuality shows how Wallace can be considered a neoliberal writer, whose commitment to furthering male sexual toxicity is a disturbing but undeniable part of his literary project.