Sex and Death


Book Description

In this introduction to philosophy of biology, Kim Sterelny and Paul E. Griffiths present both the science and the philosophical context necessary for a critical understanding of the debates shaping biology at the end of the 20th century.




Sex After Death


Book Description

The old khaki jacket is frayed around the collar. One of its straps is hanging loose. The metal buttons that closed the front are tarnished and the wool lining is worn in places. The Field and Stream label is grey from years of rubbing against the back of a neck. Its various reporters pockets are empty now. Its been around the world and back. It smells of London, Paris, Prague and Rome. It carries the scent of a hundred trips and a thousand memories. But mostly it smells like Rodger. The jacket made its last trip home in April. I keep it under my pillow and make the bed around it. I lay in the dark every night holding it to me. Lonely, shaky and scared, I smell his smell and breathe him in. Im doubled over the jacket, holding on to this solid evidence that he was here. This piece of him that was left behind. Curled into a ball in the middle of the bed, I keen. Not mere crying, but wrenching sobs I pull deep from my chest, my legs, between my legs. Every part of me that loved him is aching with grief. I cannot stop. I went looking for a gun and found a vibrator. Theyre both long, thin and end with a bang. I had decided that living alone I should have protection. Rodger had a pistol somewhere buried in a closet. Wed hidden it up and away when Katie was a baby. But where? I dug through the top shelves of my closet and found tons of old books, some photos and my first communion veil. No gun, but a bag of gag gifts way in the back. And lo and behold, what fell out but a long, narrow box. At first I wasnt sure what it was, but I turned it over and there in living color, bright lime green, was a dildo. Given that the bag was filled with anti-aging pills, fake Viagra and the like, I figured this was a remnant of a birthday gift to be given or received. No clue. But there it was. I pulled the thing out of the box and turned it over. It felt weird, like, well, plastic. It was sort of clammy but that may have been my imagination, or the revolting green color. I touched the end and the damn thing started buzzing. I couldnt stop laughing. Here I am, fifty years old, sitting alone in my bedroom, with the Hulks tool. What the hell now?




Sex, Death, and Tantra: How Sex Changed My Life After Death


Book Description

My worst fear happened. My husband of 15 years left our 6 year old daughter downstairs watching ET, kissed me, and left to walk the dog. He never came home. He was hit by a car and was killed. He was 39. Sex, Death and Tantra is the story of my first years as a single, gay, widower, dad, embracing my grief, parenting a grieving child, attending to her educational, social, emotional needs, all while trying to create a wholly new life for myself. Tantra? While intense and wildly pleasurable sex is a part of Tantra, it is not Tantra. Tantra is a set of principles and practices (most of which are not sexual) which transcends the self. For decades I sought a marriage of sex and spirituality yet these practices seemed to exclude gay men. The year prior to Zachary's death, we met Ken and began our study of tantra with him. Ken was a successful psychotherapist who taught tantra to gay men. He had a separate erotic healing practice where he used tantra, eroticism, and sex to help men do profound emotional, psychological healing work. He was a father. He was a husband. He was a sacred whore. Tantra is not an easy path. Zachary and I each dealt with painful psychological and emotional issues as we deepened our spiritual selves, our erotic knowledge and experience. It was also sexy and fun. I got a taste of how sex--highly pleasurable, conscious sex--can be a pathway towards healing, personal growth, and spiritual awakening. Feeling lost and afraid, sitting in the hospital with Zachary's wrecked lifeless body, I called Ken. And we began our journey together. We explored grief--my grief-- using tantra as our foundation. From that day forward, Ken and I met most days at 5AM before my daughter awoke, for tea, meditation, erotic practices, and conversation. I credit him with saving my life after Zachary's sudden death. Sex, Death, and Tantra is not only a story about love and loss, but one of optimism and healing. Reminiscent of Spanbauer's The Man Who Fell In Love WIth The Moon, my story chronicles an uncommon, radical, application of Tantra which transcends gender and orientation. My story is real, raw, erotic, and emotional. While this is not a definitive tantra text, many tantric principles and practices are brought to light.




Cheese Sex Death


Book Description

From lauded cheesemonger and creator of the popular blog Cheese Sex Death, a bible for everything you need to know about cheese For many people, the world of artisan cheese is an intriguing but intimidating place. There are so many strange smells, unusual textures, exotic names, and rules for serving. Where should a neophyte begin? From evangelist cheesemonger Erika Kubick, this comprehensive book guides readers to become confident connoisseurs and worshippers of Cheesus. A preacher of the curd word, Kubick provides the Ten Commandments of Cheese, which breaks down this complex world into simplified bites. A welcoming sanctuary devoted to making cheese a daily part of life and gatherings, this book explores the many different styles of cheese by type, profiling commonly found and affordable wedges as well as the more rare and refined of rinds. Kubick offers divine recipes that cover everything from everyday crowd pleasers (think mac and cheese and baked brie) to festive feasts fit for holidays and gatherings. This cheese devotee outlines the perfect cheese plate formula and offers inventive yet easy-to-execute beverage pairings, including wine, beer, spirits, and non-alcoholic drinks. These heavenly spreads and recipes wring maximum indulgence out of minimal effort and expense. Filled with seductive photography and audacious prose, Cheese Sex Death is a delightfully approachable guide to artisan cheese that will make just about anyone worship at the altar of Cheesus.




Help Your Marriage Survive the Death of a Child


Book Description

Many parents who have experienced the death of a child struggle with painful and at times overwhelming marital problems. Grieving can create great marital distance, and it can magnify those problems that existed before the child's death. Grieving parents often fear that divorce is a real possibility. This book can help. Based on intensive interviews of 29 couples who experienced the death of a child, this book offers perspectives and advice on common marital problems experienced by bereaved parents. Each couple's problems are unique, but often the problems are connected to couple communication, sexuality, parenting of other children, the use of alcohol and drugs, blaming, and differences in such areas as whether to have another child, how to grieve, how to talk about the child who died, whether to go outside the marriage for support, and what to do with things and spaces that were the child's. Although the book deals with pain and marital distress, it offers a message of hope. Grieving parents can and do get through the hard times, based on respect for differences, mutual understanding, and shared history. Author note: Paul C. Rosenblatt is Morse Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor of Family Social Science at the University of Minnesota. He was the founder of the Grief and Families Focus Group of the National Council on Family Relations. Rosenblatt was the keynote speaker at the First International Congress on Death and Dying in London and has been elected to membership in the prestigious International Work Group on Death, Dying, and Bereavement.




Sex After Grief


Book Description

“A profoundly compassionate, deeply personal, and exceptionally practical guidebook for moving forward after loss with both purpose and joy.” —Lynn Comella, PhD, author of Vibrator Nation Winner of the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA) Writing Award in Service/Self-Help Sex after Grief is the first book to address sex and grief together and treat sex as a normal, positive, life-affirming part of emerging from such a difficult time. Joan Price, the top expert on senior sex, draws on her own experiences as a widow since 2008, when she lost the love of her life to cancer. She shares her raw grief journey, sexual reawakening (and the many stumbles along the way), and attempts to dip back into dating, along with excellent advice on handling each step. As Price says, there’s no right or wrong method or timeline for bringing our sexuality back into into our lives, whether it’s with our own hands, a friend with benefits, a hook-up, a new companion, or any combination. Sex After Grief includes a variety of people’s personal stories from folks of all genders and orientations. Some jumped into sex quickly. Some took years. Some withdrew from sexual possibility. No one was wrong, and no choice is defective or shameful. Sex After Grief includes: Inspiring tales of how different people brought sex back into their lives after the loss of their spouse or partner Guidelines for dating again and getting sexual with a new person Reasons that solo sex is healthy and can be the path to feeling sexual again Advice from therapists, grief counselors, and sex coaches Self-help takeaways for creating an action plan




Sex, Death, and the Superego


Book Description

This book is a personal reappraisal of psychoanalytic theories in the light of clinical experience. The first part is about sexuality and begins where psychoanalysis began, with hysteria. The second part is about the ego and the super-ego, the relationship of which dominated Freud's writing from his middle period onwards. The last part is on narcissism and the narcissistic disorders, a major preoccupation of psychoanalysis in the second half of the twentieth century.




Sex and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature


Book Description

This book discusses sex and death in the eighteenth-century, an era that among other forms produced the Gothic novel, commencing the prolific examination of the century’s shifting attitudes toward death and uncovering literary moments in which sexuality and death often conjoined. By bringing together various viewpoints and historical relations, the volume contributes to an emerging field of study and provides new perspectives on the ways in which the century approached an increasingly modern sense of sexuality and mortality. It not only provides part of the needed discussion of the relationship between sex, death, history, and eighteenth-century culture, but is a forum in which the ideas of several well-respected critics converge, producing a breadth of knowledge and a diversity of perspectives and methodologies previously unseen. As the contributors demonstrate, eighteenth-century anxieties over mortality, the body, the soul, and the corpse inspired many writers of the time to both implicitly and explicitly embed mortality and sexuality within their works. By depicting the necrophilic tendencies of libertines and rapacious villains, the fetishizing of death and mourning by virtuous heroines, or the fantasy of preserving the body, these authors demonstrate not only the tragic results of sexual play, but the persistent fantasy of necro-erotica. This book shows that within the eighteenth-century culture of profound modern change, underworkings of death and mourning are often eroticized; that sex is often equated with death (as punishment, or loss of the self); and that the sex-death dialectic lies at the discursive center of normative conceptions of gender, desire, and social power.




Sex and Death


Book Description

For centuries people have debated the nature of the human self. Running beneath these various arguments lie three certainties - we are born, reproduce sexually, and die. The models of spirituality which dominate the Western tradition have claimed that it is possible to transcend these aspects of human physicality by ascribing to human beings alternative traits, such as consciousness, mind and reason. By locating the essence of human life outside its basic physical features, mortality itself has come to be viewed as a problem, for it appears to render human life both meaningless and absurd. Complex connections have then been made between the key features of life: sex is linked with death, and birth becomes the event that introduces the child to the world of decay - and ultimately to death itself. This fascinating book exposes the way in which the preoccupation with transcendence in both religious and secular thinking has distorted our sense of what it is to be human. At the same time, Sex and Death offers an alternative approach to the debate, based on an acceptance of mortality that emphasizes the depth and profundity possible in human life. It is an argument which will be essential reading for students of philosophy or religion, as well as the general reader interested in these debates.




Sex and Death in Protozoa


Book Description

Is ageing inevitable, or can senescence and death be evaded? Large animals and plants always age if they live long enough; even individual cells from their bodies cannot continue living and dividing indefinitely. Whether or not single-celled organisms also age and die, and what relation sex bore to the process of senescence, was the subject of vigorous debate and experimentation early in the last century. In this book, Dr Bell disinters and reanalyzes these forgotten experiments, and argues that protozoan lineages do indeed senesce, as the result of an accumulated load of mutations that can be shed only through sexual reproduction. This unexpected connection between sex and death is the central theme of a book that will interest all students of evolutionary biology, sexuality and senescence.