"From Teen Vogue sex and love columnist Nona Willis Aronowitz, a blend of memoir, social history, and cultural criticism that probes the true meaning of desire and sexual freedom in today's age. At thirty-two years old, everything in Nona's life, and in America, was in extreme disarray. Her marriage was falling apart. Her nuclear family was slipping away. Her heart and libido were suffering from overexposure. Embroiled in an era of fear, reckoning, and reimagining, her assumptions of what "sexual liberation" meant were suddenly up for debate. It was in that moment of personal and political sea change that Nona turned to the words of history's sexual revolutionaries-including the writing of her late mother, early radical pro-sex feminist Ellen Willis. At a time when sex has never been more accepted and feminism has never been more mainstream, Nona asked herself: What, exactly, do I want? And are my sexual and romantic desires even possible amid the horrors and bribes of patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy? Bad Sex places Nona's intimate history alongside her family history and other stories stretching back nearly two hundred years: those of ambivalent wives and unchill sluts, Free Lovers and radical lesbians, sensitive men and woke misogynists, women who risk everything for sex, who buy sex, reject sex, have bad sex and good sex. The result is a brave, bold, and vulnerable exploration of the enduring barriers to sexual freedom. This book lays bare the triumphs and flaws of contemporary feminism and also helps shine a light on universal questions of desire"--

In the 1990s Americans are divided on virtually every issue surrounding sexuality. Emotion and political passion have come to dominate sexual matters, and the debates on teenage pregnancy, pornography, homosexuality, abortion, and AIDS reveal deep social conflicts. The sexual sphere is so entangled that it defies analysis or even description. In Embattled Eros Steven Seidman seeks to clarify some of the major dynamics and patterns of contemporary American intimate culture. He shows that at the root of the major conflicts are two sexual ideologies, the libertarian and the romanticist. Examining the strengths and limits of each ideology, he suggests broad outlines for a sexual ethic that goes beyond the current polarization. In part one Seidman argues that we should reject our usual way of looking at recent history--a sexual revolution in the '60s followed by a conservative backlash in the '80s, an ongoing struggle between the forces of freedom and the forces of repression. Between the '60s and the '80s he argues, there transpired neither a sexual revolution nor counter-revolution but a heightened conflict over the meaning of sex, its relation to pleasure, romance, and self-identity, its proper moral role in private and public life. In part two Seidman's primary purpose is to analyze moral arguments over sexual norms and practices. He chooses the sex debates that occurred within feminism and the gay male community in the late '70s through the '80s as his sites for moral engagement, as it is here that the debate over sexual ethics has been given its fullest elaboration. In conclusion, Seidman offers a pragmatic ethic that revolves around the concept of sexual and social responsibility as a bridge between libertarians and romanticists. The main issue is how to preserve the expansive notion of sexual choice, diversity, and pleasure contained in the libertarian ethic yet also retain standards that allow us to offer social and personal criticisms of intimate life. Building on the work presented in Romantic Longings, the author's history of intimacy in the United States, Embattled Eros presents a sophisticated yet accessible analysis of contemporary sexual life and its moral conflicts. Emphasizing feminist and lesbian and gay issues, the book is for all readers interested in contemporary sexuality.

In Romantic Longings Steven Seidman offers an original perspective on the origins and current meaning of the American intimate culture. Drawing on a wide range of sources--sex surveys, advice literature, autobiographies, novels--he charts a change from a Victorian spiritual ideal to efforts by current reformers to sexualize love. Stressing that contemporary notions of intimacy are grounded in twentieth-century historical developments, he observes the birth of a culture of eroticism in the post-World War II years--a culture where sexuality is conceived as both a sphere of love and intimacy and a domain of pleasure and self-expression.

Contradictory stereotypes about Jewish sexuality pervade modern culture, from Lenny Bruce's hip eroticism to Woody Allen's little man with the big libido (and even bigger sexual neurosis). Does Judaism in fact liberate or repress sexual desire? David Biale does much more than answer that question as he traces Judaism's evolving position on sexuality, from the Bible and Talmud to Zionism up through American attitudes today. What he finds is a persistent conflict between asceticism and gratification, between procreation and pleasure. From the period of the Talmud onward, Biale says, Jewish culture continually struggled with sexual abstinence, attempting to incorporate the virtues of celibacy, as it absorbed them from Greco-Roman and Christian cultures, within a theology of procreation. He explores both the canonical writings of male authorities and the alternative voices of women, drawing from a fascinating range of sources that includes the Book of Ruth, Yiddish literature, the memoirs of the founders of Zionism, and the films of Woody Allen. Biale's historical reconstruction of Jewish sexuality sees the present through the past and the past through the present. He discovers an erotic tradition that is not dogmatic, but a record of real people struggling with questions that have challenged every human culture, and that have relevance for the dilemmas of both Jews and non-Jews today.

Traces the relationship between nationalist ideology and the normative manners, morals, and sexuality of modern Europe which emerged at the end of the 18th century. Discusses the view that "outsiders" - homosexual, insane, criminal, or Jewish - were abnormal, and the equation of racial degeneracy with sexual degeneracy. Some homosexuals, wishing to prove their masculinity, attacked Jews and embraced racism. In Weimar Germany, sexual decadence was blamed on the Jews. Ch. 7 (pp. 133-152) deals with the relationship between sexuality and antisemitism in Germany and in Nazi thought.

Sex is beyond reason, and yet we constantly reason about it. So, too, did the peoples of ancient Greece and Rome. But until recently there has been little discussion of their views on erotic experience and sexual ethics. The Sleep of Reason brings together an international group of philosophers, philologists, literary critics, and historians to consider two questions normally kept separate: how is erotic experience understood in classical texts of various kinds, and what ethical judgments and philosophical arguments are made about sex? From same-sex desire to conjugal love, and from Plato and Aristotle to the Roman Stoic Musonius Rufus, the contributors demonstrate the complexity and diversity of classical sexuality. They also show that the ethics of eros, in both Greece and Rome, shared a number of commonalities: a focus not only on self-mastery, but also on reciprocity; a concern among men not just for penetration and display of their power, but also for being gentle and kind, and for being loved for themselves; and that women and even younger men felt not only gratitude and acceptance, but also joy and sexual desire. Contributors: * Eva Cantarella * Kenneth Dover * Chris Faraone * Simon Goldhill * Stephen Halliwell * David M. Halperin * J. Samuel Houser * Maarit Kaimio * David Konstan * David Leitao * Martha C. Nussbaum * A. W. Price * Juha Sihvola