Customer Reviews

Human Sexuality in a World of Diversity

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I bought the book for a sociology course in school. '
The content is very interesting and I've read more than required for the course.
It's a good book if you want to learn more about human sexuality.

I couldn't even conceive of a worse university text on human sexuality. The writing is full of moralistic judgments, such as:

"When we speak of "having sex" (a rather ugly phrase, which seems to imply that we engage in sexual activity much as we "have" a ham sandwich) ..."

What? What sort of supposedly academic text on diversity in sexuality kicks off with an unnecessarily snotty statement like this? Is the purpose of this text to shame and scold its readers for the terms and phrases (even fairly run-of-the-mill and innocuous ones like "having sex") that they use for sex? How is this supposed to open a dialogue about sexuality and diversity when it's judgmental from the very start?

The rest of the book follows the same scattered and banal vein, providing only the most basic wiki-style overviews of sexuality, and proving problematic on other levels as well. There is no need to show photographs of a man leering up a woman's skirt to represent "voyeurism" and a disturbing photo of a lone woman in an alley being menaced by a shadowy figure to illustrate "assault". It's irresponsible sensationalism -- not to mention triggering for women who have experienced these things -- and utterly gratuitous. The whole thing reads as though it were compiled by a bunch of college students as a Human Sexuality project, and those students wrote their pieces separately, ran out of steam halfway through, and resorted to padding it out with photos rifled from the internet.

I learned nothing new or insightful from this text, save what various sexually-transmitted infections look like.