Books like Solitary Pleasures by Paula Bennett

After graduating college, journalist Jon Krakauer traces the true story of Christopher McCandless, a young adventurer who abandoned possessions, took the name Alexander Supertramp, and ventured into Alaska’s wilderness, where he met his untimely death.

A powerful and terrifying warning about the dire consequences of global warming, from the acclaimed author of The Seven Obstacles to Climate Change.

Dick Hebdige explores the meanings behind Britain’s postwar working‑class youth subcultures, from teddy boys to punks, using semiotics, sociology of deviance and Marxist theory.

A novel exploring the life of a young man trapped in his apartment who desperately seeks to expand his world through social interaction and personal growth.

"This is the first cultural history of the world's most common sexual practice: masturbation. At a time when almost any victimless practice has its public advocates and almost every sexual act is front-page news, the easiest and least harmful one is embarrassing, discomforting, and genuinely radical when openly acknowledged. But this has not always been the case. The ancient world cared little about maturbation; it was of no great concern in Jewish and Christian teaching about sexuality. In fact, as Thomas Lacqeur dramatically shows, solitary sex as an important medical and moral issue can be dated with a precision rare in cultural history: the solitary vice, self-pollution, or self-abuse came into being around 1712. A creature of the Enlightenment, masturbation at first worried not conservatives - for whom it had long been but one among many sins of the flesh - but rather the progressives who welcomed sexual pleasure but struggled to create an ethics of self-government. The first truly democratic sexuality, masturbation was of ethical interest to both men and women, young and old.". "Solitary Sex explains how and why this humble and once obscure means of sexual gratification became the evil twin of the great virtues of modern commercial society; individual moral autonomy and privacy, creativity and the imagination, abundance, and desire. It shows how a moral problem became a medical one, how some of the most famous doctors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were convinced that solitary pleasures killed or maimed. In the early twentieth century, Freud and his successors transformed this tradition: masturbation defined a stage in human development, the foundational sexuality that culture transformed for its own purposes. And finally, in the late twentieth century, masturbation become for some a key element in the struggle for sexual, personal, and even artistic liberation. Working with material from the prehistory of solitary sex in the Bible to third wave feminism, conceptual artists and the World Wide Web, historian Thomas Laqueur uses medical and philosophical texts as well as diaries, autobiographies, and pornography to tell the story of what has become the last taboo."--BOOK JACKET.

Sophie Fontanel shares her personal journey of choosing sexual abstinence and redefining intimacy in this autobiographical exploration.

"Image Studies provides an engaging introduction to visual studies analysis and an account of existing and emergent visual culture debates, along with chapters on a range of topics, including: consumer culture and identity; photography and digital imaging; painting and drawing; the moving image; the relationship between image and text (including reference to text in art, comics and animation); and scientific imaging.Written in an engaging and accessible way, the text will also include extracts of existing critical materials. Each chapter will include key set readings, including short extracts from existing literatures with accompanying study notes and questions. The chapters will also include a range of critical and creative tasks, designed to bring the academic study of visual culture into direct contact with practical aspects of visual culture and image-making.Image Studies is a new text aimed predominantly at undergraduate students in visual culture, but which will also be useful for media studies students and arts students more generally"--