The Ultimate Guide to Sex and Disability

Lou FCD — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 12:08:40 -0700

Full Title: The Ultimate Guide to Sex and Disability: For all of us who live with disabilities, chronic pain & illness
Author: Miriam Kaufman, M.D., Cory Silverberg, and Fran Odette
Publisher: Cleis Press
Copyright: 2003, 2007 (2nd ed.)
ISBN: 978-157344-304-3
Pages: 334 plus index
Price: $18.95 (US)

Review:

Introduction

The sexuality of disabled members of our society is perhaps one of the most closeted, or at least overlooked, topics in American public discourse. Rarely is the topic addressed even by the most strident of sex positive advocates. The Ultimate Guide to Sex and Disability was written to rectify this deficiency in our public square. The authors, Miriam Kaufman, M.D., Cory Silverberg, and Fran Odette, take a unique and personal approach to their mission by lacing the book with actual responses from a survey done by phone and internet. These survey responses faithfully guide the book toward its objective.

(The rest of the review is below the fold)

Chris Hall reviews Robert Jensen's new book, "Getting off: Pornography and the end of masculinity"

The Editors — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 18:32:10 -0800

When we were approached by Robert Jensen, by email, some months ago about reviewing his new book Getting off: Pornography and the end of masculinity, (South End Press, 2007), we were, admittedly, a bit puzzled. Surely he could tell from a cursory glance at this site that we were not likely to agree with his analysis of porn. Still, it seemed worthwhile to review the book, and worthwhile it has been. Here is an excerpt from Chris's review:

It’s not immediately obvious, but Robert Jensen and I have a lot in common. We both grew up as scrawny, physically inept boys with no aptitude for athletics. We were the kind of boys who were by default identified as “faggots” by our peers and, at least in my case, sometimes by teachers. On the playground and the streets, our status as “sensitive” boys made us easy targets for insults and physical abuse.

Most importantly, we both grew into men with deep dissatisfactions with what our society told us we were supposed to be, do, and think as men, and with an appreciation for feminism as a vital tool for both men and women to break free of old, potentially lethal gender scripts. And both of us can go on at length about what sucks about porn.

It’s this last point where the differences between Jensen and I become too obvious to ignore; yes, I can go on for hours and hours about what irredeemable psychic flotsam the great mass of porn is, and could probably fill several volumes thicker than Jensen’s on the mediocrity, body fascism, poor production values, labor abuses and sexism that dominate mainstream porn. These are all things that people of good conscience should find troubling about porn as it exists today. And yet, even as I calculate all the sins of pornography to the nth degree, and catalog the ways that I find it disappointing and trivial in taxonomies so detailed that the Library of Congress would have to invent a whole new indexing system, there’s something else: I think that in porn lies our salvation.

Click here to read the whole review!

book review

The Ultimate Guide to Sex and Disability

Chris Hall reviews Robert Jensen's new book, "Getting off: Pornography and the end of masculinity"