Turning Freud's famous dictum around, Thomas Laqueur posits that destiny is anatomy. Sex, in other words, is an artifice and "Making Sex" tells the story of sex in the west from the ancients to the moderns. The reader cannot fail to recognize the players in Laqueur's story - the human sexual organs and pleasures, food, blood, semen, egg, sperm - but the reader will be amazed at the plots into which they have been woven by scientists, political activists, literary figures, and theorists of every discipline. The book looks at how our predecessors, including physicians and scientists, thought about anatomy and analyzes our ideas on gender.
Thomas Laqueur is Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley.
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