"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 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.

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