"A total time machine--I loved it." --Maria Semple, New York Times bestselling author of Where'd You Go, Bernadette Named One of the Best Books of the Summer by Good Morning America, Cosmopolitan, Harper's Bazaar, and PopSugar A daringly honest, sexy debut novel about three young women coming of age in 1980s New England and New York--a bingeable summer read It's 1983. David Bowie reigns supreme, and downtown Manhattan has never been cooler. But Justine and Eve are stuck at Griswold Academy, a Connecticut boarding school. Griswold is a far cry from Justine's bohemian life in New Haven, where her parents run a theater and struggle to pay the bills. Eve, the sophisticated daughter of status-obsessed Park Avenue parents, also feels like an outsider amidst Griswold's preppy jocks and debutantes. Justine longs for Eve's privilege, and Eve for Justine's sexual confidence. Despite their differences, they form a deep friendship, together grappling with drugs, alcohol, ill-fated crushes, and predatory male teachers. After a tumultuous school year, Eve and Justine spend the summer in New York City where they join Eve's childhood friend India. Justine moves into India's Hell's Kitchen apartment and is pulled further into her friends' glamorous lives. Eve, under her parents' ever-watchful eye, interns at a SoHo art gallery and navigates the unpredictable whims of her boss. India struggles to resist the advances of a famous artist represented by the gallery. All three are affected by their sexual relationships with older men and the power adults hold over them, even as the young women begin to assert their independence. A captivating, timeless novel about friendship, sex, and parental damage, Amanda Brainerd's Age of Consent intimately evokes the heady freedom of our teenage years.

The Age of Consent; Young People, Sexuality and Citizenship addresses the contentious issue of how children's sexual behaviour should be regulated. The text includes: ·A unique history of age of consent laws in the UK, analysed via contemporary social theory ·A global comparative survey of age of consent laws and relevant international human rights law ·A critical analysis of how protectionist agendas shaped new age of consent laws in England and Wales in the Sexual Offences Act 2003 ·In-depth theoretical discussion of the rationale for age of consent laws ·An original proposal to reduce the age of consent to 14 for young people who are less than two years apart in age Responding to contemporary concerns about young people's sexual behaviour, sexual abuse and paedophilia, this book will engage readers in law and socio-legal studies, sociology, history, politics, social policy, youth and childhood studies, and gender and sexuality studies; and professionals and practitioners working with young people.

A manifesto for a new world order.

Sex and Harm in the Age of Consent cautions against the adoption of consent as our primary determinant of sexual freedom. For Joseph J. Fischel, consent is not necessarily always ethically sound. It is, he argues, a moralized fiction, and it churns out figures for its normativity: the predatory sex offender and the innocent child. Examining the representation of consent in U.S. law and media culture, Fischel contends that the figures of the sex offender and the child are consent’s alibi, its negative space, enabling fictions that allow consent to do the work cut out for it under late modern sexual politics. Engaging legal, queer, feminist, and political theory, case law and statutory law, and media representations, Fischel proposes that we change our adjudicative terms from innocence, consent, and predation to vulnerability, sexual autonomy, and “peremption,” which he defines as the uncontrolled disqualification of possibility. Such a shift in theory, law, and life would be less damaging for young people, more responsive to sexual violence, and better for sex.

The vise-grip of moral relativism on American popular culture was not suddenly achieved in the 1960s. In an incisive book of unequaled historical scope, Robert H. Knight studies this alluring but poisonous philosophy's hundred-year conquest of the institutions that shape the popular mind: art, music, architecture, film, and, of course, television.

This book challenges received mainstream and scholarly ideas about how and why child abuse occurs and offers fresh ideas about understanding how we can enhance young people's agency and can make a difference to their lives by ensuring they have an opportunity to grow up developing their own voices and identities, free from adult coercion. The purpose of this edited collection is to bring interdisciplinary research around the high profile subject of child sexual abuse and look closely at why public concern and awareness is often diverted away from the real issues at stake. It challenges the notion that 'sexting' and online pornography are playing a key role in grooming young people for abuse. It also looks empirically at the evidence for the cycle-of abuse theory, why young people so often fail to speak out and the role that legal and media discourses play in framing the way we understand child sexual abuse.

In the United States, each state determines the age at which a person can legally have sex. Age of Consent laws exist to prevent exploitation of young people, but these policies often spark debate because of their breadth and ambiguity. Many people may wonder if these policies are too protective in some cases and too punitive in others. This book offers a variety of perspectives on the effectiveness and impact of age of consent laws, allowing readers to gain an insight into a broad and challenging dialogue. The question of individual maturity in respect to consensual sex, the impact of Sarah's law on the rights of parents and children, and the criminal labeling of sexually active teens are just a few topics of discussion in this comprehensive anthology.