The Prehistory of Sex: Four Million Years of Human Sexual Culture Review

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(More customer reviews)Archaeology is ultimately an act of the imagination and Prof. Taylor does a brave job in trying to reconstruct sexual behaviors that have had only the most indirect effects on the archaeological record. Many of his hypotheses are stimulating; a few may even be correct. He is adept at pointing out prejudices and assumptions that are so ingrained that we do not even realize we are making them. He certainly changed my opinion on a number of issues. His reinterpretation of passages in classical history is also most helpful. The topic is extremely exciting and underresearched in an accessible form. However, perhaps because he didn't really identify his intended audience or because of the limited amount of material strictly relevant to his subject, he has padded the book with a rather routine run through human palaeontology and spends a lot of time demolishing straw men in the field like the acquatic ape hypothesis. I often wished he had spent more time dealing (even speculatively) with sex. In several places I was surprised that he avoided or abbreviated discussions when I knew there was more material to present. The result is scattershot and repetitious and the narrative structure falls apart at the end just when the amount of source material increases. I felt genuinely disappointed that he wouldn't follow his speculations through. More a draft or outline for a book than a finished work.
Prof. Taylor's nonjudgemental pleas for a tolerant approach to sexual behavior both in practice and in academic study and his mapping of the broad range of sexual behavior in primates are admirable. In this context the book should be required reading for all psychologists and psychiatrists (I ordered quite a few copies this year for all the therapists I know).
His list of sources is wide and furnished me with a great deal of interesting reading, though some evaluation of the reliability of the works he cites would be extremely valuable since some of the works are scholarly and some fringe. Additionally, a great deal of his source material consists of popular presentations rather than primary scholarly sources.
All in all a near miss, but still a worthy effort and well worth reading.

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Sex Differences in the Brain: From Genes to Behavior Review

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(More customer reviews)When it comes to studying the nature and origin of differences between men and women, one quickly encounters an aggressive cacophony of politics. Often, the scientists themselves are the most egregious perpetrators of this confusion, selectively coloring and distorting findings to suit their personal agendas.

The fact is, there is an overwhelming amount of science addressing sex differences. And no single book does a better job of communicating the bulk of this science in a neutral fashion than Sex Differences in the Brain. As SDintB asserts early on, accurate knowledge of sexual dimorphisms in the brain isn't just a political or philosophical issue, but a health issue: men and women suffering from multifarious sources of neural and psychiatric debilitation may require different treatment depending on their gender. This is a point often overlooked in the rush to insist that men and women are fundamentally the same in the brain.

Make no mistake: this is an academic book, aimed at scholars. It's dense with invaluable references, with chapters authored by a variety of scientists from a respectably wide diversity of disciplines. It covers almost every major area of sex differences: genetic, behavioral neuroendocrinology, neurocognition, neuroplasticity, neurophysiology, psychiatry, pharmacogenetics, stress response. The chapters are quite thorough, and generally review the available research in a neutral fashion.

There's probably no better place to start an inquiry into what truly makes men and women different than Sex Differences in the Brain.

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Sex is a fundamentally important biological variable. Recent years have seen significant progress in the integration of sex in many aspects of basic and clinical research, including analyses of sex differences in brain function. Significant advances in the technology available for studying the endocrine and nervous systems are now coupled with a more sophisticated awareness of the interconnections of these two communication systems of the body. A thorough understanding of the current knowledge, conceptual approaches, methodological capabilities, and challenges is a prerequisite to continued progress in research and therapeutics in this interdisciplinary area.
Sex Differences in the Brain provides scientists with the basic tools for investigating sex differences in brain and behavior and insight into areas where important progress in understanding physiologically relevant sex differences has already been made. This book was edited and co-authored by members of the Isis Fund Network on Sex, Gender, Drugs and the Brain, sponsored by the Society for Womens Health Research.

The book is arranged in three parts. The first part of the book introduces the study of sex differences in the brain, with an overview of how the brain, stress systems, and pharmacogenetics differ in males and females and how this information is important for the study of behavior and neurobiology of both genders.The second part presents examples of sex differences in neurobiology and behavior from both basic and clinical research perspectives, covering both humans and nonhuman animals.The final part discusses sex differences in the neurobiology of disease and neurological disorders.
For interested individuals as well as those who are considering conducting research at the intersections of endocrinology, neuroscience, and other areas of biomedicine, the study of sex differences offers exciting and challenging questions and perspectives. This book is intended as a guide and resource for clinicians, scientists, and students.

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How Sex Works: Why We Look, Smell, Taste, Feel, and Act the Way We Do Review

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(More customer reviews)Most books on sex focus on either the titillating or the medical - on relationships or the nasty little details of STI's. Moalem's book not only discusses both, but also manages to connect the medical and the psychological. I don't think anyone has quite done this since Desmond Morris wrote The Naked Ape. I found myself picking this book up frequently - no matter where I started reading, there was something compelling. Especially the chapter on homosexuality - who knew that this might be triggered by the same gene that causes women to like men - in other words, the gene that promotes heterosexuality in females? And the wide range of sexual behaviours in animals - that male big horn sheep culture is predominantly gay?? A lot of this is not fundamental knowledge, but it sure makes for interesting, fun reading.

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Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud Review

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(More customer reviews)Joan Cadden's much more important and accurate book, _The Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages_, opens by taking Laqueur's premise to task.And she's right to do so -- someone had to.

The problem is that Laqueur simplifies.He attempts to argue, based on little understanding of the complexity of medical models used either in antiquity or in the Middle Ages, that a one-sex model predominated in medicine.And while, to a degree, he's right, he's equally wrong.He would be correct if Aristotle's model of the human body were the ONLY one used either in antiquity or the Latin west.But Aristotle pointedly presented his model of gender in opposition to that proposed by the Hippocratics.Galen, who obviously knew both Aristotle and Hippocrates, then modified the idea of what constitutes sexual differentiation even further.After Galen, we have centuries of commentary and modification by Arabic scholars -- Avicenna predominates -- before we get to the Latin translations which spurred scholastic debate in the universities of the west.Their model of the body was not simple or limited, it didn't rely solely on authoritative sources from the past, and it never solidified into a unified theory.To argue that it did would rob these individuals of their collective rationality and treat them like amusing children -- something a historian should avoid whenever possible.

In order to create a readable and comprehensible text, Laqueur elided the complexities of the arguments common in the medieval universities regarding sex difference and reproduction in order to present his readers with a neat and tidy package.Whenever presented with a neat package in history, doubt the source.

Cadden's work is a direct refutation of Laqueur's.In it, she attempts to detail the confusing and complex model of sexual differentiation inherited by the Latin west from antiquity, including Galen's two-seed model and all the implications thereof.She furthermore attempts to demonstrate the application of these theories of gender and sex.She grounds her arguments much more firmly in the context of the time than Laqueur ever managed to do.
If you really want to understand pre-modern concepts of the body, set Laqueur aside and pick up Cadden instead.While Laqueur's model is a nicely simplified version of the past, the question has to arise -- when does simplification become distortion?How much detail about the past can be safely ignored in the name of simplicity before you create a useless model?But for those who only want a cursory investigation into the history of the body through a primarily medical lens, by all means read the Laqueur.He's far easier to read than Cadden.He's just not as reputable.

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This is a book about the making an unmaking of sex over the centuries. It tells the astonishing story of sex in West from the ancients to the moderns in a precise account of the history of reproductive anatomy and physiology.

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