Books like The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2

Limits To Growth summarized the first major computer simulation of world society. It was comprehensive, including the influence of: human population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion. The results were sobering! It showed that, if major limits were not established for human population, pollution, and resource depletion, a severe collapse of human society would follow in the near future. What most people do not know is, the report was so disturbing it was accepted by the United Nations for action. It was so well received by world leaders that, by 1974, almost every world nation agreed to take major steps to set such limits. China, for example, established its one-child family policy. Ironically, the U.S. refused any commitment. By 1978, carbon industry disinformation killed all the commitments.

The book offers an in-depth exploration of how an anarchist, anti-capitalist society without money or government would work and juxtaposes it against a more familiar, wasteful, capitalist world. It's thought-provoking and can be a great tool for self-exploration because this world isn’t easy to live in and has its own challenges.
Even though it took me a long time to get into the story, once I did, I was fascinated by all the details. It's unlike other stories. It offers ideas that don't often get explored in speculative fiction, and it left me with a lot to think about.

This is a brilliant intellectual history of US environmentalism and its rooting on what in the 1960s was seen as a global ‘population bomb’. The global population kept growing in the 1980s and 1990s, but slower, and the bomb has, for the time being at least, been defused. It is time for environmentalists like myself to reflect on the legacy of our roles as prophets of unrealised doom, and this book helps us get the historical record right. Paul Ehrlich is a key figure in this story of overpopulation scare, that was not a marginal academic debate, but one that made it into the political mainstream, and around which Ronald Reagan fashioned his persona, as the ever optimist who unlike Jimmy Carter, did not succumb to limits of growth, and the pessimism of Ehlrich and his likes. What I learned from this book is that unless environmentalists develop a positive… show more.

This edited volume questions the notion of scarcity, which is the lynchpin of modern economics. Ever since Malthus’s Essay on Population at the turn of the 19th century, there is a myth that human wants are unlimited (and illimitable) and that the world is too small for all of us and our needs. Economists invented this myth to justify capitalism´s perpetuation of inequality and poverty amidst plenty, constructing an ideology of limitless growth as the only possible response to our predicament of this supposed universal and eternal scarcity. The contributions to this volume reveal how this ideology of scarcity plays out till our day, and elites invoke scarcity and limits to control the bodies and desires of marginalized groups. 

This is the Granddaddy of earthshattering, perspective-changing books: philosopher Michel Foucault’s nimble dissection of the rise and the role of sexuality in the Western world. Written, and surely meant to be read, more like a Homeric epic poem than an academic treatise, every single sentence in this book quivers with energy and perception. From pithy aphorisms like “The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species”, to heady pronouncements such as ‘”Power relations are both intentional and nonsubjective”, this book is a gift that perpetually keeps on giving. Guaranteed to blow your mind.

In Turned On, Kate Devlin takes us on a ride through the history of sex and technology, from the Ancient Greeks to modern sex robots. 

This book is written by a technologist with an acute sense of the human. Not strictly a book about human rights, Devlin raises human rights and ethical considerations around sex tech as well as offering optimism and imagination about the ways that we could enhance our intimate lives with technology. 

The way we experience sex and intimacy is at the heart of our right to private lives, Turned On offers an erudite, funny, and sensitive exploration of what technology could mean for us.

It is all the fault of the corridor… I’ve always been fascinated by the family – what is a family, how does it function?

But where did we get the idea that it should be a tight nuclear unit? In medieval times, family encompassed a swathe of relations and hangers-on who lived together in large unprivate households.

When I stumbled across Lawrence Stone’s controversial, but utterly compelling, analysis of the changes that resulted in the modern nuclear family, I was hooked. Once corridors, which allowed rooms with doors to open off them, were put into buildings, privacy became the norm, and the smaller family began to take shape.  

I read Tropic of Cancer at the beginning of my writing career, soon after I’d begun living on my own for the first time. Miller’s life as a Brooklyn boy in Paris, struggling to survive and to write, seemed similar in so many ways to my own life in Manhattan. I’ve since read Tropic of Cancer multiple times and have portions memorized. I went through a phase where everything I wrote came out sounding like Henry Miller—that’s how taken I was by his voice. Miller taught me that it’s possible to write a great book that’s voice-driven rather than plot-driven.

This is a tour de force on the lives of girls and young women in the era of World War II and the 1950s.

Littauer makes use of non-traditional sources to show how young women negotiated a sexual landscape that was rapidly changing and which gave them more choices and often more control over their sexuality.

During the war years, young women found that the rapid mobilization and unsettled conditions near military bases gave them opportunities for sexual adventures that settle times would never allow.

And during the post-war, within the “going steady” practices of the time, women could become sexually active with some protection from social stigma.

Clement explores the working class environment that produced what we think of as “normal” relations between young men and women.

The commonly used term at the time, “treating,” has disappeared. But in the early 20th century this practice, which shared some features with prostitution, turned a search for fun, gendered scripts, and wage discrepancies between men and women into the general model of what would become the classic practice of dating.