The Game of Desire

Author: Shan Boodram
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062886010
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 316

Book Description
A certified sex educator and intimacy expert shows women how to gain control of their love life and find the relationship they want in this modern guide. “Boodram’s brand of relationship advice . . . focuses on empowering single women with the tools they need to succeed in the digital dating era.” —Refinery29 We all have that friend . . . the one who wants to capture hearts in real life and online without breaking her own. The one who can’t seem to overcome ghosting, orbiting and flaking. The one who wants to inspire like Oprah and seduce like a stripper. The one who looks for love and loses herself. You might have that friend (or be that friend), but congratulations—you have found the solution. The Game of Desire will teach you the self- and social awareness to make dating your new favorite hobby. The truth is that we live in a world where dissatisfaction and disenchantment with dating aren’t just normal—they’re expected. Sexologist and intimacy expert Shan Boodram has analyzed the competitive dating landscape as well as the common pitfalls women face in the pursuit of passion and has developed a five-phase strategy to help down-on-love daters achieve romantic success. Testing out this strategy is a group of chronically single women eager to learn how to attract, approach and seduce any partners they desire. By challenging this group to empower themselves through identifying and tackling bad habits, and by debunking dating myths through real-life experiments, Boodram empowers you to take control of your love story and to manifest the life you know you are meant to live. Featuring exclusive workshops from a range of experts, surprising techniques and revelations on why good intentions just aren’t good enough anymore—this book will inspire you to give your best self a chance to come out and play to win. Hilarious, poignant and insightful, The Game of Desire is a must for everyone tired of the new normal. “In a world thought to be run by males, sexologist Shan Boodram levels the dating playing field for all sexes with her educated dissection of the human mind, emotions, dating and sex.” —Winnie Harlow, supermodel “For The Game of Desire, a new self-help dating guide from Shan Boodram, the sexologist enlisted five women for a romance boot camp, designed to teach them to flirt better, identify matches and communicate with purpose . . . the bulk of her advice is sound: learn what you want and create the circumstances to get it.” —TIME magazine

Games of Desire

Author: Patti O'Shea
Publisher: Harlequin
ISBN: 1460334078
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 81

Book Description
The union between a wizard and a demon is impossible. It's also undeniable. Chloe has always been there to clean up after her little sister—a wizard who doesn't use her powers responsibly. But when she must search for her wayward sister after another prank gone terribly awry, Chloe finds a demon instead—a demon with taut muscles, irresistible dimples and eyes burning with desire. Ever the good girl, Chloe tries to ignore him, but the mere sight of this demon undoes her. Marax is searching for Chloe's sister, too. Just like Chloe, he's driven by duty. And, just like Chloe, he can't resist the fiery attraction that burns between them. When Chloe and Marax give in to one night of passion, they find themselves bound in ways they never could have imagined—and battling a demon more powerful than anything they imagined….

The Genesis of Desire

Author: Jean-Michel Oughourlian
Publisher: MSU Press
ISBN: 1609171268
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 223

Book Description
We seem to be abandoning the codes that told previous generations who they should love. But now that many of us are free to choose whoever we want, nothing is less certain. The proliferation of divorces and separations reveal a dynamic we would rather not see: others sometimes reject us as passionately as we are attracted to them. Our desire makes us sick. The throes of rivalry are at the heart of our attraction to one another. This is the central thesis of Jean-Michel Oughourlian's The Genesis of Desire, where the war of the sexes is finally given a scientific explanation. The discovery of mirror neurons corroborates his ideas, clarifying the phenomena of empathy and the mechanisms of violent reciprocity. How can a couple be saved when they have declared war on one another? By helping them realize that desire originates not in the self but in the other. There are strategies that can help, which Dr. Oughourlian has prescribed successfully to his patients. This work, alternating between case studies and more theoretical statements, convincingly defends the possibility that breakups need not be permanent.

The Other Side of Desire

Author: Daniel Bergner
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141956151
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Book Description
Jacob is a man with an overwhelming attraction to female feet. The Baroness is a clothing designer and evangelical sadist. Roy is a wedding band singer entranced by his step daughter. Ron and Laura are simply in love - only Laura lost both her legs in a car accident, and Ron is beguiled by a beauty many would be blind to. How do we deal with desire? Our own, and the desires of others? How do we comprehend desires that are extreme, or unacceptable? And how do those who have them, live with them? In A Map of Desire Daniel Bergner takes us on a journey into human passion suffered, endured, and celebrated. Desire is a sometimes anarchic, sometimes ecstatic, sometimes destructive, sometimes redeeming, and always powerful force.Immersing himself in it through the people whose lives he follows and the scientists he spends time with who are trying to understand it, slowly he exposes and illuminates layers of our humanity.

The Evolution of Desire

Author: David M. Buss
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465093302
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 455

Book Description
A “drop-dead shocker” (Washington Post Book World) that uses evolutionary psychology to explain human mating and the mysteries of love If we all want love, why is there so much conflict in our most cherished relationships? To answer this question, we must look into our evolutionary past, argues prominent psychologist David M. Buss. Based one of the largest studies of human mating ever undertaken, encompassing more than 10,000 people of all ages from thirty-seven cultures worldwide, The Evolution of Desire is the first work to present a unified theory of human mating behavior. Drawing on a wide range of examples of mating behavior — from lovebugs to elephant seals, from the Yanomamö tribe of Venezuela to online dating apps — Buss reveals what women want, what men want, and why their desires radically differ. Love has a central place in human sexual psychology, but conflict, competition, and manipulation also pervade human mating — something we must confront in order to control our own mating destiny. Updated to reflect the very latest scientific research on human mating, this definitive edition of this classic work of evolutionary psychology explains the powerful forces that shape our most intimate desires.

The Botany of Desire

Author: Michael Pollan
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 0375760393
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Book Description
“Pollan shines a light on our own nature as well as on our implication in the natural world.” —The New York Times “A wry, informed pastoral.” —The New Yorker The book that helped make Michael Pollan, the New York Times bestselling author of How to Change Your Mind, Cooked and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, one of the most trusted food experts in America Every schoolchild learns about the mutually beneficial dance of honeybees and flowers: The bee collects nectar and pollen to make honey and, in the process, spreads the flowers’ genes far and wide. In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan ingeniously demonstrates how people and domesticated plants have formed a similarly reciprocal relationship. He masterfully links four fundamental human desires—sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control—with the plants that satisfy them: the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato. In telling the stories of four familiar species, Pollan illustrates how the plants have evolved to satisfy humankind’s most basic yearnings. And just as we’ve benefited from these plants, we have also done well by them. So who is really domesticating whom?

Lessons of Desire

Author: Madeline Hunter
Publisher: Bantam
ISBN: 0440243947
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 418

Book Description
Handsome, suave, and carnal as the devil, Lord Elliot Rothwell awaits readers in Lessons of Desire, bestselling author Madeline Hunter’s latest book in the Rothwell series and her most provocative novel to date. A man used to getting what he wants, Elliot is every woman’s most secret fantasy in the living flesh. He first appears beneath her prison window as her savior—a sinfully attractive man whose charm and connections have ensured her release from an unjust arrest. But author and publisher Phaedra Blair quickly learns that the price of her “freedom” is to be virtually bound to her irresistible rescuer. For Elliot Rothman didn’t come solely on a mission of goodwill. He came to extract a promise that Phaedra won’t publish a slanderous manuscript that could destroy his family’s name, and he’s not above bribery, threats, or bedding her to get his way. And with each erotic encounter raising the stakes between them, Elliot discovers he’s ever more reluctant to lose this sensual game…or the one woman who’s every bit his match.

The Bedtrick

Author: Wendy Doniger
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226156443
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 631

Book Description
"Somehow I woke up one day and found myself in bed with a stranger." Meant literally or figuratively, this statement describes one of the best-known plots in world mythology and popular storytelling. In a tour that runs from Shakespeare to Hollywood and from Abraham Lincoln to Casanova, the erudite and irrepressible Wendy Doniger shows us the variety, danger, and allure of the "bedtrick," or what it means to wake up with a stranger. The Bedtrick brings together hundreds of stories from all over the world, from the earliest recorded Hindu and Hebrew texts to the latest item in the Weekly World News, to show the hilariously convoluted sexual scrapes that people manage to get themselves into and out of. Here you will find wives who accidentally commit adultery with their own husbands. You will read Lincoln's truly terrible poem about a bedtrick. You will learn that in Hong Kong the film The Crying Game was retitled Oh No! My Girlfriend Has a Penis. And that President Clinton was not the first man to be identified by an idiosyncratic organ. At the bottom of these wonderful stories, ancient myths, and historical anecdotes lie the dynamics of sex and gender, power and identity. Why can't people tell the difference in the dark? Can love always tell the difference between one lover and another? And what kind of truth does sex tell? Funny, sexy, and engaging, The Bedtrick is a masterful work of energetic storytelling and dazzling scholarship. Give it to your spouse and your lover.

Dealing in Desire

Author: Kimberly Kay Hoang
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520960688
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 247

Book Description
This captivating ethnography explores Vietnam’s sex industry as the country ascends the global and regional stage. Over the course of five years, author Kimberly Kay Hoang worked at four exclusive Saigon hostess bars catering to diverse clientele: wealthy local Vietnamese and Asian businessmen, Viet Kieus (ethnic Vietnamese living abroad), Western businessmen, and Western budget-tourists. Dealing in Desire takes an in-depth and often personal look at both the sex workers and their clients to show how Vietnamese high finance and benevolent giving are connected to the intimate spheres of the informal economy. For the domestic super-elite who use the levers of political power to channel foreign capital into real estate and manufacturing projects, conspicuous consumption is a means of projecting an image of Asian ascendancy to potential investors. For Viet Kieus and Westerners who bring remittances into the local economy, personal relationships with local sex workers reinforce their ideas of Asia’s rise and Western decline, while simultaneously bolstering their diminished masculinity. Dealing in Desire illuminates Ho Chi Minh City’s sex industry as not just a microcosm of the global economy, but a critical space where dreams and deals are traded.

The Game of Hope

Author: Sandra Gulland
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0425291022
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 357

Book Description
For Napoleon's stepdaughter, nothing is simple - especially love. Paris, 1798. Hortense de Beauharnais is engrossed in her studies at a boarding school for aristocratic girls, most of whom have suffered tragic losses during the tumultuous days of the French Revolution. She loves to play and compose music, read and paint, and daydream about Christophe, her brother's dashing fellow officer. But Hortense is not an ordinary girl. Her beautiful, charming mother, Josephine, has married Napoleon Bonaparte, soon to become the most powerful man in France, but viewed by Hortense at the outset as a coarse, unworthy successor to her elegant father, who was guillotined during the Terror. Where will Hortense's future lie? it may not be in her power to decide. Inspired by Hortense's real-life autobiography with charming glimpses of life long ago, this is the story of a girl destined by fate to play a role she didn't choose.