San Antonio College Library

"The issue of public morality, so often at the center of heated debates about pornography, narcotics, public indecency, violent entertainments, "family values," et cetera, is at once a continuing reality and a persistent dilemma in our liberal society. With Public Morality and Liberal Society, Harry M. Clor makes an important contribution to this perennial and intensely debated theme by considering how public morality can be justified in theory and...

Sex is bad. Unprotected sex is a problem. Having a baby would be a disaster. Abortion is a sin. Teenagers in the United States hear conflicting messages about sex from everyone around them. How do teens understand these messages? In Mixed Messages, Stefanie Mollborn examines how social norms and social control work through in-depth interviews with college students and teen mothers and fathers, revealing the tough conversations teeangers just can't...

A sociological study examining the effects of informal social control--the response to behavior or people regarded as deviant, problematic, threatening, or undesirable--in everyday life in a lesbian community in the heartland of the United States. Based on interviews, participant-observation, and document sources gathered over a period of nine years (1994 to 2003), the book anyalyzes the effects of social control on relations of power (based on race,...

The concept of sex addiction took hold in the 1980s as a product of late twentieth-century cultural anxieties. Though essentially mythical, creating a problem that need not exist, sex addiction has to be taken seriously as a phenomenon. Rarely has a socio-psychological discourse had such impact on the public imagination and proven an influential concept in academic circles, too. Its success as a purported malady lay with its medicalization, both as...

A collection of essays on great children's literature that relates the lives of the authors to the works themselves.

"From the clamshell razors and homemade lye depilatories used in colonial America to the diode lasers and prescription pharmaceuticals available today, Americans have used a staggering array of tools to remove hair deemed unsightly, unnatural, or excessive. This is true especially for women and girls; conservative estimates indicate that 99% of American women have tried hair removal, and at least 85% regularly remove hair from their faces, armpits,...