This chapter samples some basic signs of location, such as exit and entry, names of cities and streets of various sizes and styles.

Complex relationships between drugs and sex including alcohol, cannabis, stimulants, ecstasy. The effects of drugs on different aspects of sex such as arousal, risky decision-making, orgasm, and social responding. Effects of stopping drug use on sex. How to treat sexual problems linked to substance use. Effects of smoking on sex, and effects of prescription medications. Natural supplements and the search for aphodisiacs. Special issues around intimacy, and body image.

This vintage rape case concerns an Alabama court’s determination that the jury may consider “social conditions and customs founded upon racial differences, such that the prosecutrix was a white woman and the defendant was a Negro man” in assessing a Black defendant’s culpability for assault with intent to rape. This case represents how rape law was weaponized against Black men and is an ideal case for a feminist rewritten opinion to interrogate how race and rape are closely intertwined.

This chapter explores urban prose, poetry and painting that moves from sense impressions of city streets to statements about American social and political conditions. A strain of American culture, from Ashcan School painting through James Baldwin’s essays on Harlem to Don DeLillo’s set-piece performative protests, insists that the nation’s politics take shape and moods register on city streets. It argues that certain, primarily literary, forms, through their close attention to, and lucid expression of, the way streets feel offer access to experiences that range from jostling crowds to organized protests to violent confrontations. Where the flâneur pursues urban aesthetics and impressions in the spirit of dilettantism, Henry James restlessly analyses New York’s metropolitan scale; insiders and outsiders probe the tensions that shape ethnic enclaves; and in Tillie Olsen’s strike journalism and E. L. Doctorow’s political fiction of mass protests are at once inspiring and monstrous. Where Doctorow and DeLillo describe postmodern withdrawal from the street as a site of meaning, the chapter ends with its reemergence with Occupy and other recent protest movements.

This chapter focuses on the representation of young protagonists and the city space in a select number of children’s realist novels, published from the mid part of the twentieth century to the present day, that are set in New York City – Manhattan to be exact. In particular, it analyses the ability of young characters to upend traditional power structures, to navigate and understand urban environments, and in so doing see the possibilities for the transformation of self. In many children’s texts set in New York empowerment is depicted as only possible through direct engagement with the city, a landscape Michel de Certau describes as ‘a space of enunciation’ where the act of walking in the city offers the opportunity for subversion and transformation. This is a city that is always in the process of becoming. As a result, the parallels with childhood experience and coming of age are immediately apparent.