In an attempt to combat the widespread confusion regarding sexual issues, Dawn offers a clear biblical understanding of human sexuality. Her fresh perspectives will challenge and encourage readers and her engaging, non-preachy style will appeal to parents, ministers, youth group leaders, and others coping with life in our sex-saturated society.

When Alfred Kinsey's massive studies Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female appeared in 1948 and 1953, their detailed data spurred an unprecedented public discussion of the nation's sexual practices and ideologies. As they debated what behaviors were normal or average, abnormal or deviant, Cold War Americans also celebrated and scrutinized the state of their nation, relating apparent changes in sexuality to shifts in its political structure, economy, and people. American Sexual Character employs the studies and the myriad responses they evoked to examine national debates about sexuality, gender, and Americanness after World War II. Focusing on the mutual construction of postwar ideas about national identity and sexual life, this wide-ranging, shrewd, and lively analysis explores the many uses to which these sex surveys were put at a time of extreme anxiety about sexual behavior and its effects on the nation. Looking at real and perceived changes in masculinity, female sexuality, marriage, and homosexuality, Miriam G. Reumann develops the notion of "American sexual character," sexual patterns and attitudes that were understood to be uniquely American and to reflect contemporary transformations in politics, social life, gender roles, and culture. She considers how apparent shifts in sexual behavior shaped the nation's workplaces, homes, and families, and how these might be linked to racial and class differences.

Publisher Description

Primary sexual traits, those structures and processes directly involved in reproduction, are some of the most diverse, specialized, and bizarre in the animal kingdom. Moreover, reproductive traits are often species-specific, suggesting that they evolved very rapidly. This diversity, long the province of taxonomists, has recently attracted broader interest from evolutionary biologists, especially those interested in sexual selection and the evolution of reproductive strategies. Primary sexual characters were long assumed to be the product of natural selection, exclusively. A recent alternative suggests that sexual selection explains much of the diversity of “primary” sexual characters. A third approach to the evolution of reproductive interactions after copulation or insemination has been to consider the process one of sexual conflict. That is, the reproductive processes of a species may reflect, as does the mating system, evolution acting on males and on females, but in different directions. In this volume, authors explore a wide variety of primary sexual characters and selective pressures that have shaped them, from natural selection for offspring survival to species-isolating mechanisms, sperm competition, cryptic female choice and sexual arms races. Exploring diverse reproductive adaptations from a theoretical and practical perspective, The Evolution of Primary Sexual Characters will provide an unparalleled overview of sexual diversity in many taxa and an introduction to the issues in sexual selection that are changing our view of sexual processes.

Sexual types on the early modern stage are at once strange and familiar, associated with a range of "unnatural" or "monstrous" sexual and gender practices, yet familiar because readily identifiable as types: recognizable figures of literary imagination and social fantasy. From the many found in early modern culture, Mario DiGangi here focuses on six types that reveal in particularly compelling ways, both individually and collectively, how sexual transgressions were understood to intersect with social, gender, economic, and political transgressions. Building on feminist and queer scholarship, Sexual Types demonstrates how the sodomite, the tribade (a woman-loving woman), the narcissistic courtier, the citizen wife, the bawd, and the court favorite function as sites of ideological contradiction in dramatic texts. On the one hand, these sexual types are vilified and disciplined for violating social and sexual norms; on the other hand, they can take the form of dynamic, resourceful characters who expose the limitations of the categories that attempt to define and contain them. In bringing sexuality and character studies into conjunction with one another, Sexual Types provides illuminating new readings of familiar plays, such as Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Winter's Tale, and of lesser-known plays by Fletcher, Middleton, and Shirley.

Man and Woman: A Study of Secondary and Tertiary Sexual Characters, Eight Edition Revised covers the developments of biological investigation of male and female sexual characteristics. This 16-chapter book specifically considers the radical and essential characters of men and women uninfluenced by external modifying conditions. This book starts with an introduction to the boundary between secondary and tertiary sexual characters. The subsequent chapters examine some of the measurable sex differences in terms of metabolism, the viscera, the growth and body proportions, and the senses. Other chapters describe the anatomical distinction between sexes, including the pelvis and the head. A chapter highlights the phenomena of menstruation of women. The discussion then shifts to tertiary sexual character determinants, such as motion, unconscious state, emotion, and artistic and intellectual impulse. The final chapters tackle the issue of variational tendency in men and women. These chapters also provide a summary of what is known about sexual character distinction. Psychologists, psychiatrists, endocrinologists, and development biologists will find this book rewarding.