The Price of Pleasure: Pornography, Sexuality, and Relationships

The advancement of gender equality and feminisms are arguably difficult to measure. One of the greatest successes, however, is the growing level of complexity with which we view previously black and white issues. In other words, we as a society are more capable to recognize the grey in controversial issues.

Love and Other Natural Disasters

This is your life, now what? This is the question Eve has to answer when she finds out during Thanksgiving dinner that her husband, Jon, has been having a long distance emotional affair with another woman for the past year. Eve is devastated and demands that Jon move out that night. Jon complies and leaves their house. Eve’s feeling of betrayal and mistrust lead her to start hacking Jon’s email in order to find out more about the other woman, Laney. Eve reads all Jon’s correspondence with Laney, but she is unable to figure why Jon lied to her for a year.

Try To See It My Way: Being Fair in Love and Marriage

“That’s not fair!” A common refrain in any relationship, heard from child to parent, between spouses, and, eventually, from parent to child. The question inherent in resolving these conflicts is: who is fair? We all like to think of ourselves as reasonable, kind, just people; and most of all, we like to think of ourselves as right.

Little Giant of Aberdeen County

The Little Giant of Aberdeen County is Tiffany Baker's debut novel. Wow! How does one follow this work with another novel? The story is set in rural Aberdeen County, where several generations of doctors named Robert Morgans live and practice. Truly Plaice was a baby that stretched her mother to epic proportions. The town watched Mrs. Plaice's pregnancy with relish. Most of the people in town placed bets on the size and weight of the baby.

Good Dick

Good Dick is not porn—in fact, it’s a love story. You could call it a romantic comedy, but by “romantic comedy” I mean the polar opposite; there’s not much romance and its comedy leans more towards the dark side. Yet the central theme is certainly a romantic one.

The Makedown

The Makedown is marketed as a witty take on a makeover in reverse. However, this part of the storyline actually occurs in the last fourth of the novel.

Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line

When I first read the jacket for Martha A Sandweiss’s Passing Strange, I did a literal double take. I read those introductory paragraphs over and over again, the words slipping and sliding over my brain without sinking in.

Private Practices: The Story of a Sex Surrogate

Private Practices is the story of a sex surrogate, Maureen Sullivan Ward, who teaches men with sexual dysfunctions how to improve their sexual communication, physical expression, and experience pleasure. Maureen "Mo" Sullivan Ward approaches sex in a clinical fashion, seeking ways to make clients more comfortable and assisting them in exploring their personal fears and phobias.

Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South – An Oral History

The African-American community and the gay community have come under scrutiny since the passing of Proposition 8 banning gay marriage in California. Black voters reportedly came out in unprecedented numbers to support the ban, furthering the stereotype of rampant homophobia among the black community.  Northwestern University professor E.

To Love What Is: A Marriage Transformed

Two a.m. When you are young, this is the time that bars close, new love springs unbidden in doorways, and entire dramas are played out in the time it takes a traffic light to change. When you are older, with marriage and children under your belt, it is the hour at which a ringing phone wakes you in terror, not annoyance; when a voice in the darkness signals illness, not invitation; when awakening in a strangely empty bed, one will know that something has gone awfully wrong with the person whose warmth still lingers in the covers.

Lake Bottom LP

The strong and lovely voices of the Chapin Sisters offer a raw, deep-down quality to Lake Bottom LP. Listeners who have ever found themselves betrayed by a lover will relate; a theme of troubled love runs through all eleven tracks. The sisters sing about temptation, jealousy, promises kept and broken, loneliness, and longing. Of course, the approach is not feeble or helpless.

Love Iranian-American Style

Finding love is never easy. But having to deal with what your family expects, especially when it contradicts the current society that you are a part of, makes it that much harder. Tanaz is an Iranian-American woman, who has pursued an education and is now a filmmaker. However, she is 26 years old and unmarried, which is unacceptable in her family’s eyes.

The Baby Lottery

Kathryn Trueblood takes on the weighty issues of motherhood in the age of abortion in her first novel, The Baby Lottery. (Trueblood is also the author of a book of short stories, The Sperm Donor’s Daughter.) Her characters are a circle of friends who have stayed together from college into their thirties. One is preparing for an abortion and coping with an overbearing husband. One is a nurse working with abortion providers.

Brainscan 21: Irreconcilable Differences

In her riveting zine, Alex Wrekk writes in raw and powerful detail about her marriage to a man named J who dominates the relationship and systematically chips away at her self-esteem until she feels like a big zero, like she's the one who is crazy. (Projection and gaslighting are tactics of choice used by the cowardly abusers, but victims don’t usually "get it" until they are in way over their head.) I believe no one can fully understand what a Herculean task escaping and recovering from abuse is unless they have traversed a twisted relationship personally.