Part Time Perverts

This book offers an erudite yet highly accessible exploration of the presence of sexual perversion in popular culture and its manifestation in everyday life. An interdisciplinary exploration of sexual perversion in everyday life, Part-Time Perverts: Sex, Pop Culture, and Kink Management starts from the premise that, for better or worse, everyone is exposed to a continual barrage of representations of sexual perversion, both subliminal and overt. Our involvement, Dr. Lauren Rosewarne contends, is universal, but our management strategies cover a spectrum of behavioral possibilities from total repression to total immersion. It is those strategies that she examines here. Drawing on her own experience, as well as on pop culture and a multidisciplinary mix of theory, Rosewarne shifts the discussion of perversion away from the traditional psychological and psychiatric focus and instead explores it through a feminist lens as a social issue that affects everyone. Her book examines representations of perversion—from suppression to dabbling to full-body immersion—and proposes a classification for perversion management, and charts the diverse strategies we use to manage, and perhaps enjoy, exposure.

Through reference to over six hundred scenes from film and television—as well as a diverse and cross-disciplinary academic bibliography—Masturbation in Pop Culture investigates the role that masturbation serves within narratives while simultaneously mirroring our complicated relationship with the practice in real life and sparking discussions about a broad range of hot-button sexual subjects. From sitcoms to horror movies, teen comedies to erotic thrillers, autoeroticism is easily detected on screen. The portrayal, however, is not a simple one. Just as in real life a paradox exists where most of us masturbate and accept it as normal and natural, there simultaneously exists a silence about it; that we do it, but we don’t talk about it; that we enjoy it but we laugh about it. The screen reflects this conflicted relationship. It is there—hundreds and hundreds of times—but it is routinely whispered about, mocked and presented as a punchline, and is inevitably portrayed as controversial at the very least. Masturbation in Pop Culture investigates the embarrassment and squeamishness, sexiness and inappropriateness of masturbation, showcasing and analyzing how our complex off screen relationship is mirrored in film and television.

America's often-unspoken morality codes make many topics taboo in "the land of the free." This book analyzes hundreds of popular culture examples to expose how the media both avoids and alludes to how we derive pleasure from our bodies. Flatulence ... male nudity ... abortion ... masturbation: these are just a few of the taboo topics in the United States. What do culturally enforced silences about certain subjects say about our society—and our latent fears? This work provides a broad yet detailed overview of popular culture's most avoided topics to explain why they remain off-limits and examines how they are presented in contemporary media—or, in many cases, delicately explored using euphemism and innuendo. The author offers fascinating, in-depth analysis of the meaning behind these portrayals of a variety of both mundane and provocative taboos, and identifies how new television programs, films, and advertising campaigns intentionally violate longstanding cultural taboos to gain an edge in the marketplace.

Written by an expert in media, popular culture, gender, and sexuality, this book surveys the common archetypes of Internet users—from geeks, nerds, and gamers to hackers, scammers, and predators—and assesses what these stereotypes reveal about our culture's attitudes regarding gender, technology, intimacy, and identity. The Internet has enabled an exponentially larger number of people—individuals who are members of numerous and vastly different subgroups—to be exposed to one other. As a result, instead of the simple "jocks versus geeks" paradigm of previous eras, our society now has more detailed stereotypes of the undesirable, the under-the-radar, and the ostracized: cyberpervs, neckbeards, goths, tech nerds, and anyone with a non-heterosexual identity. Each chapter of this book explores a different stereotype of the Internet user, with key themes—such as gender, technophobia, and sexuality—explored with regard to that specific characterization of online users. Author Lauren Rosewarne, PhD, supplies a highly interdisciplinary perspective that draws on research and theories from a range of fields—psychology, sociology, and communications studies as well as feminist theory, film theory, political science, and philosophy—to analyze what these stereotypes mean in the context of broader social and cultural issues. From cyberbullies to chronically masturbating porn addicts to desperate online-daters, readers will see the paradox in popular culture's message: that while Internet use is universal, actual Internet users are somehow subpar—less desirable, less cool, less friendly—than everybody else.

Cruising the Library offers a highly innovative analysis of the history of sexuality and categories of sexual perversion through a critical examination of the Library of Congress and its cataloging practices. Taking the publication of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemologies of the Closet as emblematic of the Library’s inability to account for sexual difference, Melissa Adler embarks upon a detailed critique of how cataloging systems have delimited and proscribed expressions of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and race in a manner that mirrors psychiatric and sociological attempts to pathologize non-normative sexual practices and civil subjects. Taking up a parallel analysis, Adler utilizes Roderick A. Ferguson’s Aberrations in Black as another example of how the Library of Congress fails to account for, and thereby “buries,” difference. She examines the physical space of the Library as one that encourages forms of governmentality as theorized by Michel Foucault while also allowing for its utopian possibilities. Finally, she offers a brief but highly illuminating history of the Delta Collection. Likely established before the turn of the twentieth century and active until its gradual dissolution in the 1960s, the Delta Collection was a secret archive within the Library of Congress that housed materials confiscated by the United States Post Office and other federal agencies. These were materials deemed too obscene for public dissemination or general access. Adler reveals how the Delta Collection was used to regulate difference and squelch dissent in the McCarthy era while also linking it to evolving understandings of so-called perversion in the scientific study of sexual difference. Sophisticated, engrossing, and highly readable, Cruising the Library provides us with a critical understanding of library science, an alternative view of discourses around the history of sexuality, and an analysis of the relationship between governmentality and the cataloging of research and information—as well as categories of difference—in American culture.

The focus of this book is on the media representations of the use of the Internet in seeking intimate connections—be it a committed relationship, a hook-up, or a community in which to dabble in fringe sexual practices. Popular culture (film, narrative television, the news media, and advertising) present two very distinct pictures of the use of the Internet as related to intimacy. From news reports about victims of online dating, to the presentation of the desperate and dateless, the perverts and the deviants, a distinct frame for the intimacy/Internet connection is negativity. In some examples however, a changing picture is emerging. The ubiquitousness of Internet use today has meant a slow increase in comparatively more positive representations of successful online romances in the news, resulting in more positive-spin advertising and a more even-handed presence of such liaisons in narrative television and film. Both the positive and the negative media representations are categorised and analysed in this book to explore what they reveal about the intersection of gender, sexuality, technology and the changing mores regarding intimacy.

Menstruation seldom gets a starring role on screen despite being experienced regularly by nearly all women for a good many decades of their lives. Periods in Pop Culture: Menstruation in Film and Television, by Lauren Rosewarne, turns the spotlight on period portrayals in media, examining the presence of menstruation in a broad range of contemporary pop culture. Drawing on a vast collection of menstruation scenes from film and television, this study examines and categorizes representations to unearth what they reveal about society and about our culture’s continuingly fraught relationship with female biology. Written from a feminist perspective, menstrual representations are analyzed for what they reveal about sexual politics and society. Rosewarne’s thorough investigation covers a range of topics including menstrual taboos, stigmas and fears, as well as the inextricable link between periods and femininity, sexuality, ageing, and identity. Periods in Pop Culture highlights that the treatment of menstruation in the media remains an area of persistent gender inequality.

In this eye-opening book, psychologist Jesse Bering argues that we are all sexual deviants on one level or another. He introduces us to the young woman who falls madly in love with the Eiffel Tower, a young man addicted to seductive sneezes, and a pair of deeply affectionate identical twins, among others. He challenges us to move beyond our attitudes towards ‘deviant’ sex and consider the alternative: what would happen if we rise above our fears and revulsions and accept our true natures? With his signature wit and irreverent style, Bering pulls back the curtains on the history of perversions, the biological reasons behind our distaste for unusual sexual proclivities and the latest research on desire. Armed with reason, science and an insatiable appetite for knowledge, he humanises deviants while asking some provocative questions about the nature of hypocrisy, prejudice and when sexual desire can lead to harm. A groundbreaking look at our complex relationship with our carnal urges and the ways in which we disguise, deny and shame the sexual deviant in all of us, Perv brings hidden desires into the spotlight.