🧲 Books like this
The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women
Jessica Valenti · back to the book
What’s in it
Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.
24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorGirls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape
Peggy Orenstein · 319 pages
Bad Feminist
Roxane Gay · 360 pages
A collection of essays spanning politics, criticism, and feminism from one of the most-watched young cultural observers of her generation, Roxane Gay. "Pink is my favorite color. I used to say my favorite color was black to be cool, but it is pink, all shades of pink. If I have an accessory, it is probably pink. I read Vogue, and I'm not doing it ironically, though it might seem that way. I once l
The Sex Myth: The Gap Between Our Fantasies and Reality
Rachel Hills · 272 pages
"Fifty years after the sexual revolution, we are told that we live in a time of unprecedented sexual freedom. But beneath the veneer of glossy hedonism, millennial journalist Rachel Hills argues that we are in the grip of a new brand of sexual control. Cosmopolitan meets Foucault in this full-scale investigation of the role that sex plays in today's culture. Coming of age in the early 2000s, Rache
Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work
Melissa Gira Grant · 136 pages
Sex work and conditions within the sex industry are frequent topics of discussion in mainstream culture and media, but rarely do these discussions include sex workers themselves, and rarely do they deviate from the position that sex workers must be saved from their evil industry's position that New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof repeatedly advocates. This work turns this position on its hea
Promiscuities: An Opinionated History of Female Desire
Naomi Wolf · 286 pages
Promiscuities follows a group of adolescent girls as they gradually become aware of themselves as sexual beings and discover what our culture tells them being female means. Drawing on her own experiences as well those of her contemporaries, Naomi Wolf reveals the secrets of our coming of age: the sexual games, forbidden crushes, losses of virginity, and rites of initiation. She also uncompromisin
Excellent Daughters: The Secret Lives of Young Women Who Are Transforming the Arab World
Katherine Zoepf · 265 pages
"For more than a decade, Katherine Zoepf has lived in or traveled throughout the Arab world, reporting on the lives of women, whose role in the region has never been more in flux. Only a generation ago, female adolescence as we know it in the West did not exist in the Middle East. There were only children and married women. Today, young Arab women outnumber men in universities, and a few are begin
The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World
Melinda Gates · 288 pages
Cunt: A Declaration of Independence
Inga Muscio · 277 pages
An ancient title of respect for women, the word "cunt" long ago veered off this noble path. Inga Muscio traces the road from honor to expletive, giving women the motivation and tools to claim "cunt" as a positive and powerful force in their lives. With humor and candor, she shares her own history as she explores the cultural forces that influence women's relationships with their bodies. Sending o
Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture
Ariel Levy · 240 pages
Meet the female chauvinist pig -- the new brand of "empowered woman" who embraces "raunch culture" wherever she finds it. In her groundbreaking book, New York magazine writer Ariel Levy argues that, if male chauvinist pigs of years past thought of women as pieces of meat, female chauvinist pigs of today are doing them one better, making sex objects of other women -- and of themselves. Irresistibly
Sex and the Citadel: Intimate Life in a Changing Arab World
Shereen El Feki · 345 pages
A groundbreaking examination of changing sexual attitudes and behaviors in the Middle East identifies the sexual factors behind key political, economic, social, and religious trends impacting the region.
Whores in History: Prostitution in Western Society
Nickie Roberts · 380 pages
'If prostitution is the world's oldest profession, then men writing about it is certainly the second oldest.' It was to retrieve an important part of women's history from the hands of male writers - who have defined prostitution from their own point of view as the client sex - that Nickie Roberts undertook this invigorating blend of social history and sexual politics. In her far-reaching narrative
Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex
Judith Levine · 301 pages
Intercourse
Andrea Dworkin · 315 pages
Dworkin argues that in a male supremacist society, sex between men and women constitutes a central part of women's subordination to men.
Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both
Laura Sessions Stepp · 304 pages
Features a new Afterword for this edition. A controversial look at today's sexual hook-up culture, and "[a] book...you won't stop talking about."-Patricia CornwellFrom the front lines of today's sexual battlefield comes an eye-opening examination of the hookup culture, seen through the personal experiences of the teenage girls and young women who live it-and who are left unprepared for its consequ
How to Be a Woman
Caitlin Moran · 313 pages
Though they have the vote and the Pill and haven't been burned as witches since 1727, life isn't exactly a stroll down the catwalk for modern women. They are beset by uncertainties and questions: Why are they supposed to get Brazilians? Why do bras hurt? Why the incessant talk about babies? And do men secretly hate them? Caitlin Moran interweaves provocative observations on women's lives with l
Women on Top
Nancy Friday · 441 pages
Nancy Friday's groundbreaking books My Secret Garden and Forbidden Flowers offered an unprecedentedly detailed and honest look at the inner fantasy lives of ordinary women. In Women on Top, Friday returns to this topic, collecting detailed sexual fantasies from over 150 contemporary women from diverse backgrounds. Based on intimate personal interviews and letters, this book updates the conversatio
Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women
Susan Faludi · 592 pages
*Skillfully Probing the Attack on Women's Rights* "Opting-out," "security moms," "desperate housewives," "the new baby fever"--the trend stories of 2006 leave no doubt that American women are still being barraged by the same backlash messages that Susan Faludi brilliantly exposed in her 1991 bestselling book of revelations. Now, the book that reignited the feminist movement is back in a fi
Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality
Gail Dines · 204 pages
This book takes an unflinching and intimate look at porn -- its hard-core and racist content, its unchecked profits, and how it distorts our identities. Astonishingly, the average age of first viewing porn is now 11.5 years for boys, and with the advent of the Internet, it's no surprise that young people are consuming more porn than ever. And, as Gail Dines shows, today's porn is strikingly differ
Everyday Sexism
Laura Bates · 406 pages
In a culture that's driven by social media, women are using this online space to come together, share their stories and encourage a new generation to recognise the problems that women face. This book is a call to arms in a new wave of feminism, and it proves sexism is endemic - socially, politically and economically - but women won't stand for it.
The Underground Girls of Kabul
Jenny Nordberg · 350 pages
An award-winning foreign correspondent who contributed to a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times series reveals the secret Afghan custom of disguising girls as boys to improve their prospects, discussing its political and social significance as well as the experiences of its practitioners.
When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present
Gail Collins · 471 pages
Tells how American women got from there to here, in politics, fashion, economics, sex, families and work in the past five decades.
We Should All Be Feminists
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · 64 pages
In this essay -- adapted from her TEDx talk of the same name -- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, award-winning author of Americanah, offers readers a unique definition of feminism for the twenty-first century, one rooted in inclusion and awareness. Drawing extensively on her own experiences and her understanding of the often masked realities of sexual politics, here is one remarkable author's exploration