A marine biologist’s “funny and entertaining” look at the mating rituals of undersea creatures (Miami Herald). Forget the Kama Sutra. When it comes to inventive sex acts, just look to the sea. There we find the elaborate mating rituals of armored lobsters; giant right whales engaging in a lively threesome while holding their breath; full moon sex parties of groupers and daily mating blitzes by blue-headed wrasse. Deep-sea squid perform inverted 69s, while hermaphrodite sea slugs link up in giant sex loops. From doubly endowed sharks to the maze-like vaginas of some whales, Sex in the Sea is a journey unlike any other to explore the staggering ways life begets life beneath the waves. Beyond a deliciously voyeuristic excursion, the book also connects the timeless topic of sex with the timely issue of sustainable oceans—revealing how overfishing, climate change, and pollution are disrupting the creative procreation that drives the wild abundance of life in the sea, and how we can promote successful sex in the sea. “Hardt’s writing is often spectacular at describing the rituals and courtships of underwater reproduction.” —The New Republic “Weird [and] excellent.” —GQ “An oceanographic Kinsey Report.” —O, The Oprah Magazine “[Readers] will find much to learn in this well-written and delightful study.” —Library Journal (starred review)

When viewed from a quiet beach, the ocean can seem calm, even serene. But hidden beneath the sea's waves are a staggering variety of active creatures, engaged in the never-ending struggles of life--to reproduce, to eat, and to avoid being eaten. Marine scientist Ellen Prager takes us deep into the sea to introduce a cast of fascinating and bizarre creatures. From the tiny arrow worms whose voracious ways may lead to death by overeating, to the lobsters that battle rivals or seduce mates with their urine, Prager reveals the ways they interact as predators, prey, or potential mates. And while these animals make for some jaw-dropping stories--there's far more to Prager's account than entertaining anecdotes: again and again, she illustrates the crucial connections between life in the ocean and humankind, in everything from our food supply to our economy, and in drug discovery, biomedical research, and popular culture.--From publisher description.

Sex, Sea, and Self reassesses the place of the French Antilles and French Caribbean literature within current postcolonial thought and visions of the Black Atlantic. Using a feminist lens, this study examines neglected twentieth-century French texts by Black writers from Martinique and Guadeloupe, making the analysis of some of these texts available to readers of English for the first time. This interdisciplinary study of female and male authors reconsiders their political strategies and the critical role of French creoles in the creation of their own history. This approach recalibrates overly simplistic understandings of the victimization and alienation of French Caribbean people. In the systems of cultural production under consideration, sexuality constitutes an instrument of political and cultural consciousness in the chaotic period between 1924 and 1948. Studying sexual imagery constructed around female bodies demonstrates the significance of agency and the legacy of the past in cultural resistance and political awareness. Sex, Sea, and Self particularly highlights Antillean women intellectuals' theoretical contributions to Caribbean critical theory. Therefore, this analysis illuminates debates on the multifaceted and conflicted relationships between France and its overseas departments and expands ideas of nationhood in the Black Atlantic and the Americas.

Investigating and reimagining the origin story of the sex doll through the tale of the sailor’s dames de voyage. The sex doll and its high-tech counterpart the sex robot have gone mainstream, as both the object of consumer desire and the subject of academic study. But sex dolls, and sexual technology in general, are nothing new. Sex dolls have been around for centuries. In Sex Dolls at Sea, Bo Ruberg explores the origin story of the sex doll, investigating its cultural implications and considering who has been marginalized and who has been privileged in the narrative. Ruberg examines the generally accepted story that the first sex dolls were dames de voyage, rudimentary figures made of cloth and leather scraps by European sailors on long, lonely ocean voyages in centuries past. In search of supporting evidence for the lonesome sailor sex doll theory, Ruberg uncovers the real history of the sex doll. The earliest commercial sex dolls were not the dames de voyage but the femmes en caoutchouc: “women” made of inflatable vulcanized rubber, beginning in the late nineteenth century. Interrogating the sailor sex doll origin story, Ruberg finds beneath the surface a web of issues relating to gender, sexuality, race, and colonialism. What has been lost in the history of the sex doll and other sex tech, Ruberg tells us, are the stories of the sex workers, women, queer people, and people of color whose lives have been bound up with these technologies.

Most times left solely within the confine of plantation narratives, slavery was far from a land-based phenomenon. This book reveals for the first time how it took critical shape at sea. Expanding the gaze even more deeply, the book centers how the oceanic transport of human cargoes--infamously known as the Middle Passage--comprised a violently regulated process foundational to the institution of bondage. Sowande' Mustakeem's groundbreaking study goes inside the Atlantic slave trade to explore the social conditions and human costs embedded in the world of maritime slavery. Mining ship logs, records and personal documents, Mustakeem teases out the social histories produced between those on traveling ships: slaves, captains, sailors, and surgeons. As she shows, crewmen manufactured captives through enforced dependency, relentless cycles of physical, psychological terror, and pain that led to the the making--and unmaking--of enslaved Africans held and transported onboard slave ships. Mustakeem relates how this process, and related power struggles, played out not just for adult men, but also for women, children, teens, infants, nursing mothers, the elderly, diseased, ailing, and dying. Mustakeem offers provocative new insights into how gender, health, age, illness, and medical treatment intersected with trauma and violence transformed human beings into the world's most commercially sought commodity for over four centuries.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Book Lovers and Beach Read comes a sparkling novel that will leave you with the warm, hazy afterglow usually reserved for the best vacations. Two best friends. Ten summer trips. One last chance to fall in love. Poppy and Alex. Alex and Poppy. They have nothing in common. She’s a wild child; he wears khakis. She has insatiable wanderlust; he prefers to stay home with a book. And somehow, ever since a fateful car share home from college many years ago, they are the very best of friends. For most of the year they live far apart—she’s in New York City, and he’s in their small hometown—but every summer, for a decade, they have taken one glorious week of vacation together. Until two years ago, when they ruined everything. They haven't spoken since. Poppy has everything she should want, but she’s stuck in a rut. When someone asks when she was last truly happy, she knows, without a doubt, it was on that ill-fated, final trip with Alex. And so, she decides to convince her best friend to take one more vacation together—lay everything on the table, make it all right. Miraculously, he agrees. Now she has a week to fix everything. If only she can get around the one big truth that has always stood quietly in the middle of their seemingly perfect relationship. What could possibly go wrong? Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2021 by Newsweek ∙ Oprah Magazine ∙ The Skimm ∙ Marie Claire ∙ Parade ∙ The Wall Street Journal ∙ Chicago Tribune ∙ PopSugar ∙ BookPage ∙ BookBub ∙ Betches ∙ SheReads ∙ Good Housekeeping ∙ BuzzFeed ∙ Business Insider ∙ Real Simple ∙ Frolic ∙ and more!

Awarded Bookauthority's "Best Aquaculture Books of all Time" A comprehensive resource that covers all the aspects of sex control in aquaculture written by internationally-acclaimed scientists Comprehensive in scope, Sex Control in Aquaculture first explains the concepts and rationale for sex control in aquaculture, which serves different purposes. The most important are: to produce monosex stocks to rear only the fastest-growing sex in some species, to prevent precocious or uncontrolled reproduction in other species and to aid in broodstock management. The application of sex ratio manipulation for population control and invasive species management is also included. Next, this book provides detailed and updated information on the underlying genetic, epigenetic, endocrine and environmental mechanisms responsible for the establishment of the sexes, and explains chromosome set manipulation techniques, hybridization and the latest gene knockout approaches. Furthermore, the book offers detailed protocols and key summarizing information on how sex control is practiced worldwide in 35 major aquaculture species or groups, including fish and crustaceans, and puts the focus on its application in the aquaculture industry. With contributions from an international panel of leading scientists, Sex Control in Aquaculture will appeal to a large audience: aquaculture/fisheries professionals and students, scientists or biologists working with basic aspects of fish/shrimp biology, growth and reproductive endocrinology, genetics, molecular biology, evolutionary biology, and R&D managers and administrators. This text explores sex control technologies and monosex production of commercially-farmed fish and crustacean species that are highly in demand for aquaculture, to improve feed utilization efficiency, reduce energy consumption for reproduction and eliminate a series of problems caused by mixed sex rearing. Thus, this book: Contains contributions from an international panel of leading scientists and professionals in the field Provides comprehensive coverage of both established and new technologies to control sex ratios that are becoming more necessary to increase productivity in aquaculture Includes detailed coverage of the most effective sex control techniques used in the world's most important commercially-farmed species Sex Control in Aquaculture is the comprehensive resource for understanding the biological rationale, scientific principles and real-world practices in this exciting and expanding field.