Sexual Health and Wellness E-Resources: Ebooks

Humans are a varied and divergent bunch with all manner of beliefs, morals, and bodies. Systems of oppression thrive off our inability to make peace with difference and injure the relationship we have with our own bodies.The Body Is Not an Apology offers radical self-love as the balm to heal the wounds inflicted by these violent systems. World-renowned activist and poet Sonya Renee Taylor invites us to reconnect with the radical origins of our minds and bodies and celebrate our collective, enduring strength. As we awaken to our own indoctrinated body shame, we feel inspired to awaken others and to interrupt the systems that perpetuate body shame and oppression against all bodies. When we act from this truth on a global scale, we usher in the transformative opportunity of radical self-love, which is the opportunity for a more just, equitable, and compassionate world—for us all.

Based on the New York Times bestseller The Body Is Not an Apology, this is an action guide to help readers practice the art of radical self-love both for themselves and to transform our society. Readers of The Body Is Not an Apology have been clamoring for guidance on how to do the work of radical self-love. After crowdsourcing her community, Sonya Renee Taylor found her readers wanted more concrete ideas on how to apply this work in a larger social and structural context. Your Body Is Not an Apology is the action guide that gives them just that-tools and structured frameworks they can apply immediately to start changing the world. Taylor guides readers with concrete ideas and, as always, practical applications that move us beyond theory and into doing and being radical self-love change agents in the world. This workbook, along with the new edition of the book, will put people in action in their organizations, in politics, in their doctor's offices, and at their jobs.

"The body is where our instincts reside and where we fight, flee, or freeze, and it endures the trauma inflicted by the ills that plague society. In this groundbreaking work, therapist Resmaa Menakem examines the damage caused by racism in America from the perspective of body-centered psychology. He argues this destruction will continue until Americans learn to heal the generational anguish of white supremacy, which is deeply embedded in all our bodies. Our collective agony doesn't just affect African Americans. White Americans suffer their own secondary trauma as well. So do blue Americans -- our police. My Grandmother's Hands is a call to action for all of us to recognize that racism is not about the head, but about the body, and introduces an alternative view of what we can do to grow beyond our entrenched racialized divide."

The United States is obsessed with virginity ? from the media to schools to government agencies. In The Purity Myth Jessica Valenti argues that the country's intense focus on chastity is damaging to young women. Through in-depth cultural and social analysis, Valenti reveals that powerful messaging on both extremes ? ranging from abstinence curriculum to ?Girls Gone Wild" infomercials ? place a young woman's worth entirely on her sexuality. Morals are therefore linked purely to sexual behavior, rather than values like honesty, kindness, and altruism.

As an undergraduate, Michele Filgate started writing an essay about being abused by her stepfather. It took her more than a decade to realize that she was actually trying to write about how this affected her relationship with her mother. When it was finally published, the essay went viral, shared on social media by Anne Lamott, Rebecca Solnit, and many others. This gave Filgate an idea, and the resulting anthology offers a candid look at our relationships with our mothers. Leslie Jamison writes about trying to discover who her seemingly perfect mother was before ever becoming a mom. In Cathi Hanauer's hilarious piece, she finally gets a chance to have a conversation with her mother that isn't interrupted by her domineering (but lovable) father. André Aciman writes about what it was like to have a deaf mother. Melissa Febos uses mythology as a lens to look at her close-knit relationship with her psychotherapist mother. And Julianna Baggott talks about having a mom who tells her everything. As Filgate writes, "Our mothers are our first homes, and that's why we're always trying to return to them." There's relief in acknowledging how what we couldn't say for so long is a way to heal our relationships with others and, perhaps most important, with ourselves.

A simple guide to empower women to reclaim their desires and overcome whatever challenges they face with sex so they can enjoy it. Living an Orgasmic Life is for those who find sex challenging and are uncomfortable with their sex life. Women who are alienated from their erotic side due to sexual abuse or trauma will find healing balm in these pages. Women who can't surrender into pleasure, can't sustain intimacy, or want to reclaim and feel empowered in their sexuality will greatly benefit from this book. Challenges with sexuality are common and infrequently discussed. Sex and intimacy coach Xanet Pailet explores the reasons that cause women to disconnect from their sexuality including shame, body image issues, sexual abuse and trauma, physical wounding, and fears of intimacy. She provides practical advice and tools to help women awaken to their sexuality in a healthy way and reclaim their libido. According to the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior, 20% of married couples are only having sex once a month--a sexless marriage. And the number of reported sexless marriages has quadrupled in the last twenty years. Living an Orgasmic Life is filled with lessons and practical exercises to take your sex life from non-existent or mediocre to fulfilling.

Most of us assume that sexuality is fixed: either you're straight, gay, or bisexual. Yet an increasing number of young men today say that those categories are too rigid. They are, they insist, "mostly straight." They're straight, but they feel a slight but enduring romantic or sexual desire for men. To the uninitiated, this may not make sense. How can a man be "mostly" straight? Ritch Savin-Williams introduces us to this new world by bringing us the stories of young men who consider themselves to be mostly straight or sexually fluid.

The re-issue of the first ever sex guide for people who live with disablities, pain, illness or chronic conditions. Expertly written by a medical doctor, a sex educator and a disablity activist, The Ultimate Guide to Sex and Disability provides readers with encouragement, support and all the information they could ever need to create an enjoyable and successful sex life.

Researchers have spent the last decade trying to develop a 'pink pill' for women to function like Viagra does for men. So where is it? Well, for reasons this book makes crystal clear, that pill will never exist -- but as a result of the research that's gone into it, scientists in the last few years have learned more about how women's sexuality works than we ever thought possible. The first lesson in this book is that every woman has her own unique sexuality, like a fingerprint, and that women vary more than men in their anatomy, their sexual response mechanisms, and the way their bodies respond to the sexual world. Second lesson: sex happens in a context. And all the complications of everyday life influence the context surrounding a woman's arousal, desire, and orgasm. Research across multiple disciplines tells us that the most important factor for women in creating and sustaining a fulfilling sex life, is not what you do in bed or how you do it, but how you feel about it. Which means that stress, mood, trust, and body image are not peripheral factors in a woman's sexual wellbeing; they are central to it.

What's the weirdest thing you've ever wanted to know about the penis but were afraid to ask? Dr. Aaron Spitz has that answer-and many more. Let Dr. Spitz? who served as assistant clinical professor at UC Irvine's Department of Urology for 15 years and who is a regularly featured guest on The Doctors'become your best friend as he fearlessly guides you through the hairiest and the scariest questions in The Penis Book.

It's socially acceptable to spend a day watching sports or sitcoms, but it's shameful and embarrassing to admit to the same about erotic media. Why is it that sex is so often deemed "inappropriate" and considered something we must keep private or even ignore? Our culture is afraid of sex. We feel the need to label what is normal and what isn't, and as a result, we live in a relational and sexually unhealthy culture. In reality, far more harm is caused by labeling sexual expression as "obscene" than by celebrating it.

How can you keep sexual desire alive over the long term? More and more people are finding it difficult to maintain a relationship that is both emotionally and sexually gratifying. In a book that will challenge and forever change how you think about love and sex, clinical psychologist and sex therapist Stella Resnick, PhD, draws on the latest scientific research to explore the love-lust dilemma. Dr. Resnick reveals how early programming can inhibit sexual desire as lovers become committed partners and begin to treat each other less like lovers and more like family.

Western culture has long regarded black female sexuality with a strange mix of fascination and condemnation, associating it with everything from desirability, hypersexuality, and liberation to vulgarity, recklessness, and disease. Yet even as their bodies and sexualities have been the subject of countless public discourses, black women's voices have been largely marginalized in these discussions. In this groundbreaking collection, feminist scholars from across the academy come together to correct this omission--illuminating black female sexual desires marked by agency and empowerment, as well as pleasure and pain, to reveal the ways black women regulate their sexual lives.

I'm so busy and tired, how can I find time for sex? How can I go from mommy one minute to passionate lover the next? What medicines or natural herbs can I take to improve my libido? At some point in their lives, most women experience a decline in their sexual desire. Yet despite the vast number of books devoted to sex, surprisingly few focus on the problem of low libido. Fewer still offer any practical advice to the woman who has lost her sex drive and longs to find it again. Reclaiming Desire presents the holistic approach that gynecologist Andrew Goldstein and clinical psychologist Marianne Brandon-co-founders of the Sexual Wellness Center in Annapolis, Maryland-use to successfully treat women with low libido. Capitalizing on their combined medical and psychological expertise, they reveal how a complex set of physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual factors-as well as specific life-changing events such as marriage, pregnancy, childbirth, divorce, and menopause-can affect female sex drive.

In this innovative and revealing study of midcentury American sex and culture, Amanda Littauer traces the origins of the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s. She argues that sexual liberation was much more than a reaction to 1950s repression because it largely involved the mainstreaming of a counterculture already on the rise among girls and young women decades earlier. From World War II-era "victory girls" to teen lesbians in the 1940s and 1950s, these nonconforming women and girls navigated and resisted intense social and interpersonal pressures to fit existing mores, using the upheavals of the era to pursue new sexual freedoms. Building on a new generation of research on postwar society, Littauer tells the history of diverse young women who stood at the center of major cultural change and helped transform a society bound by conservative sexual morality into one more open to individualism, plurality, and pleasure in modern sexual life.

Rural Women's Sexuality, Reproductive Health, and Illiteracy examines the intimate lives of women in the developing world, their sexuality, and views on family planning and gender inequality. Providing insights on cultural traditions and understanding of modern medicine, it is essential for public health and anthropology scholars and practitioners.

Sexual interactions are socially constructed within a historical, social and cultural milieu, and are continually defined and redefined accordingly depending on the surrounding economic, political, moral, and religious social forces. Although the human capacity for sexual expression spans a wide range of variations and permutations, it is nonetheless seriously confined, limited and restricted to only a few acceptable forms. Western style sexual acceptability is, in turn, determined by the prevailing white, heterosexual standards of patriarchy perpetuated through childhood masculine socialization and adolescent and adult machismo practices. Revisiting Sexualities in the 21st Century examines a whole set of explanatory and definitional issues from the very outset, particularly regarding what may be rightly included and excluded from its provenance and coverage. The contributors to this book are brought together from three different methodological spheres: qualitative, quantitative, and historical/comparative. Each author lays out the traditional parameters of the methodology used in their perspectives of social science research, and openly discusses how they have been applied to the study of hetero sexuality/non-heterosexuality and the ways in which their theory and methodology may be improved. Their contributions outline some of the major theoretical and methodological problems that still confront the study of modern sexualities, while also presenting a selection of theoretical and methodological issues of interest to both new and experienced researchers. This anthology identifies the need in contemporary social and cultural studies for more elaborate understandings of the relations of various masculinities and femininities to power, nation, empire, violence, race, class, and embodiment, and, in doing so, brings together an eclectic, multidisciplinary, and wide-ranging collection of essays.

Video games have long been seen as the exclusive territory of young, heterosexual white males. In a media landscape dominated by such gamers, players who do not fit this mold, including women, people of color, and LGBT people, are often brutalized in forums and in public channels in online play. Discussion of representation of such groups in games has frequently been limited and cursory. In contrast, Gaming at the Edge builds on feminist, queer, and postcolonial theories of identity and draws on qualitative audience research methods to make sense of how representation comes to matter. In Gaming at the Edge, Adrienne Shaw argues that video game players experience race, gender, and sexuality concurrently. She asks: How do players identify with characters? How do they separate identification and interactivity? What is the role of fantasy in representation? What is the importance of understanding market logic? In addressing these questions Shaw reveals how representation comes to matter to participants and offers a perceptive consideration of the high stakes in politics of representation debates. Putting forth a framework for talking about representation, difference, and diversity in an era in which user-generated content, individualized media consumption, and the blurring of producer/consumer roles has lessened the utility of traditional models of media representation analysis, Shaw finds new insight on the edge of media consumption with the invisible, marginalized gamers who are surprising in both their numbers and their influence in mainstream gamer culture.

Funk. It is multisensory and multidimensional philosophy used in conjunction with the erotic, eroticism, and black erotica. It is the affect that shapes film, performance, sound, food, technology, drugs, energy, time, and the seeds of revolutionary ideas for black movements. But funk is also an experience to feel, to hear, to touch and taste, and in Funk the Erotic, L. H. Stallings uses funk in all its iterations as an innovation in black studies. Stallings uses funk to highlight the importance of the erotic and eroticism in Black cultural and political movements, debunking "the truth of sex" and its histories.

A daring collaboration among scholars, Black Sexual Economies challenges thinking that sees black sexualities as a threat to normative ideas about sexuality, the family, and the nation. The essays highlight alternative and deviant gender and sexual identities, performances, and communities, and spotlights the sexual labor, sexual economy, and sexual agency to black social life. Throughout, the writers reveal the lives, everyday negotiations, and cultural or aesthetic interventions of black gender and sexual minorities while analyzing the systems and beliefs that structure the possibilities that exist for all black sexualities. They also confront the mechanisms of domination and subordination attached to the political and socioeconomic forces, cultural productions, and academic work that interact with the energies at the nexus of sexuality and race.

The re-issue of the first ever sex guide for people who live with disablities, pain, illness or chronic conditions. Expertly written by a medical doctor, a sex educator and a disablity activist, The Ultimate Guide to Sex and Disability provides readers with encouragement, support and all the information they could ever need to create an enjoyable and successful sex life.

AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION 2019 STONEWALL HONOR BOOK When their daughter Rosie was born, Eric and Stephani Lohman found themselves thrust into a situation they were not prepared for. Born intersex - a term that describes people who are born with a variety of physical characteristics that do not fit neatly into traditional conceptions about male and female bodies - Rosie's parents were pressured to consent to normalizing surgery on Rosie, without being offered any alternatives despite their concerns. Part memoir, part guidebook, this powerful book tells the authors' experience of refusing to have Rosie operated on and how they raised a child who is intersex. The book looks at how they spoke about the condition to friends and family, to Rosie's teachers and caregivers, and shows how they plan on explaining it to Rosie when she is older. This uplifting and empowering story is a must read for all parents of intersex children.

Middlesex is the winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. A dazzling triumph from the bestselling author of The Virgin Suicides--the astonishing tale of a gene that passes down through three generations of a Greek-American family and flowers in the body of a teenage girl. "I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of l974. . . My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver's license...records my first name simply as Cal." So begins the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of l967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.

A pioneering researcher transforms our understanding of trauma and offers a bold new paradigm for healing in this New York Times bestseller Trauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat; one in five Americans has been molested; one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged in physical violence. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, one of the world's foremost experts on trauma, has spent over three decades working with survivors. In The Body Keeps the Score , he uses recent scientific advances to show how trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, compromising sufferers' capacities for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust.