In this long-anticipated collection, columnist, photographer, critic, and sexual explorer David Steinberg has gathered the best of his essays, anecdotes, and photographs into a uniquely insightful, engaging overview of sex in America. For 25 years, Steinberg has documented the American sexual landscape from teenage sexuality to Viagra, swingers' parties to erotic spirituality, lap dancing to women's sexual liberation, fine art sexual photography to pornography, homophobia to BDSM. He calls on readers to question their sexual assumptions and fears, and to embrace sex as an opportunity for intimacy, self-understanding, and psychic adventure. Rejecting sensationalized rhetoric rooted in shame and fear, Steinberg offers an emotionally grounded understanding of a topic that is endlessly debated but rarely approached with depth and calm awareness. Whimsical, philosophical, unapologetically political, and revealingly personal, This Thing We Call Sex will take you into sexual worlds that include Marco Vassi, the Marquis de Sade, 19th-century feminist Victoria Woodhull, erotic photographer Jan Saudek, and porn producer Kink.com, exploring the spectrum of human sexuality with an unflinching eye, a compassionate heart, and a keen mind. After reading this book, you will find yourself doing the same.