{"product_id":"making-sex-body-and-gender-from-the-greeks-to-freud-9780674543492","title":"Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud","description":"\u003cp\u003eThis is a book about the making and unmaking of sex over the centuries. It tells the astonishing story of sex in the West from the ancients to the moderns in a precise account of developments in reproductive anatomy and physiology. We cannot fail to recognize the players in Thomas Laqueurs story--the human sexual organs and pleasures  food  blood  semen  egg  sperm--but we will be amazed at the plots into which they have been woven by scientists  political activists  literary figures  and theorists of every stripe. Laqueur begins with the question of why  in the late eighteenth century  womans orgasm came to be regarded as irrelevant to conception  and he then proceeds to retrace the dramatic changes in Western views of sexual characteristics over two millennia. Along the way  two \"masterplots\" emerge. In the one-sex story  woman is an imperfect version of man  and her anatomy and physiology are construed accordingly: the vagina is seen as an interior penis  the womb as a scrotum  the ovaries as testicles. The body is thus a representation  not the foundation  of social gender. The second plot tends to dominate post-Enlightenment thinking while the one-sex model is firmly rooted in classical learning. The two-sex story says that the body determines gender differences  that woman is the opposite of man with incommensurably different organs  functions  and feelings. The two plots overlap; neither ever holds a monopoly. Science may establish many new facts  but even so  Laqueur argues  science was only providing a new way of speaking  a rhetoric and not a key to female liberation or to social progress. Making Sex ends with Freud  who denied the neurological evidence to insist that  as a girl becomes a woman  the locus of her sexual pleasure shifts from the clitoris to the vagina; she becomes what culture demands despite  not because of  the body. Turning Freuds famous dictum around  Laqueur posits that destiny is anatomy. Sex  in other words  is an artifice. This is a powerful story  written with verve and a keen sense of telling detail (be it technically rigorous or scabrously fanciful). Making Sex will stimulate thought  whether argument or surprised agreement  in a wide range of readers.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45279731482677,"sku":"ByrdShop_0674543491","price":30.63,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780674543492_e89e80c1-7aa6-4fd0-8bd4-25f019b85c39.jpg?v=1780608030","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/making-sex-body-and-gender-from-the-greeks-to-freud-9780674543492","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}