"A brave book with a polemical argument on the paradoxes, struggles and advantages of aging. How old am I? Don't ask, don't tell. As the baby boomers approach their sixth or seventh decade, they are faced with new challenges and questions of politics and identity. In the footsteps of Simone de Beauvoir, Out of Time looks at many of the issues facing the aged--the war of the generations and baby-boomer bashing, the politics of desire, the diminished situation of the older woman, the space on the left for the presence and resistance of the old, the problems of dealing with loss and mortality, and how to find victory in survival"--

Is heterosexual sex inherently damaging to women? Is it possible for women to enjoy sensuality and pleasure with men that does not increase male power? Lynne Segal's unflinching examination of feminist thinking on sexuality over the past twenty-five years tackles these questions head on. Straightforward and challenging, she invites an exploration of sex in our culture--an exploration that could reverse the traditional male gaze and phallic construction of the heterosexual woman.Only two decades ago, politically aware women often declared themselves both sexual liberationists and feminists--their right to sexual fulfillment symbolized their right to selfhood. However, the most positive women's writing on female sexuality in recent years has come primarily from the lesbian community. Segal addresses the silence of heterosexual feminists on questions of sex and love and notes the shift toward sexual conservatism. She looks at the trends that followed Sixties sex as a subversive activity, the "liberated orgasm," sex advice literature, gender uncertainties, Queer politics, antipornography campaigns, the rise of the moral right.The hidden anxieties of male sexuality are also discussed. For both men and women, says Segal, our wildest dreams and worst fears are often projected onto sex. She urges an understanding of how our personal pleasures and pains remain public issues, and how a rethinking of sexual liberation could inspire a truly progressive politics for our time."It is always another whom we try to reach when we experience desire, it is their physical contact we want--sometimes, any sort of contact will suffice . . . and by whom we yearn to feel ourselves desired. It is the very greatest of joys, as I experience it . . . simply to know that we are able to desire, maybe even able to love, some other human adult." --from the book

Three decades after the remarkable resurgence of feminism, gender issues have become ubiquitous in public debate. For some, feminism is the favorite scapegoat for multiple social ills; for others, the greatest success story of the closing century. The Janus face of feminism in the media reflects the competing images of women´s lives today. Feminists themselves hold sharply opposing views on the success or failures of three decades of women´s activism. Why Feminism? looks at the shifts in feminist thinking from the brash emergence of Women´s Liberation at the close of the 1960s to the diverse and discordant feminisms of recent decades. Exploring feminism´s troubled relations with psychology and psychoanalysis, the rise of new evolutionary theory, the impact of queer theorizing on gender categories, controversies over memory and trauma, and increasing anxieties about men and masculinity, Why Feminism? illustrates the continuing provocation and significance of feminist inquiry, laying out potentialities and pitfalls for the century ahead.