Making Sense of Sex: How Genes And Gender Influence Our Relationships

by David Philip Barash, Judith E. Lipton, Judith Eve Lipton

In Making Sense of Sex , the husband and wife team of David Barash, an evolutionary biologist, and Judith Lipton, a clinical psychiatrist, draw on their respective areas of expertise to explore and explain the central fact of our existence-that men and women are fundamentally, unalterably different. They present an eye-opening and wide-ranging consideration of what those differences are, how they came to be, why they are important, and what they mean in our everyday lives. The authors integrate biological and anthropological findings with real-life stories of indviduals to address the conundrums that surround male-female behavior and relationships. Drawing on the latest research in evolutionary biology, they trace the multifaceted gender gap to the basic, defining difference between males and females: that one makes sperm, the other, eggs. They show how that distinction explains why women and men differ in essential ways, exploring such questions as: Why are men more attracted than women to pornography, group sex, and one-night stands? Why are women the "gatekeepers" of sex? Why do women have orgasms? Making Sense of Sex is a highly informative and entertaining look at human relationships. The book will help readers not only to better understand themselves, but to better understand their children, their relatives, and their lovers with whom they share so much yet find so infuriatingly and fascinatingly different.

Genres: Psychology

256 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1997

About the author

David P. Barash is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Washington, and is notable for books on Human aggression, Peace Studies, and the sexual behavior of animals and people. He has written approximately 30 books in total. He received his bachelor's degree in biology from Harpur College, Binghamton University, and a Ph.D. in zoology from University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1970. He taught at the State University of New York at Oneonta, and then accepted a permanent position at the University of Washington.

His book Natural Selections: selfish altruists, honest liars and other realities of evolution is based on articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education and published in 2007 by Bellevue Literary Press. Immediately before that was Madame Bovary's Ovaries: a Darwinian look at literature, a popular but serious presentation of Darwinian literary criticism, jointly written with his daughter, Nanelle Rose Barash. He has also written over 230 scholarly articles and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, along with many other honors.

In 2008, a second edition of the textbook Peace and Conflict Studies co-authored with Charles P. Webel was published by Sage. In 2009, Columbia University Press published How Women Got Their Curves and Other Just-So Stories, a book on sex differentiation co-authored with Judith Eve Lipton. This was followed in 2010 by Strange Bedfellows: the surprising connection between sex, evolution and monogamy published by Bellevue Literary Press, and, in 2011, Payback: why we retaliate, redirect aggression and seek revenge, coauthored with Judith Eve Lipton and published by Oxford University Press. His book Homo Mysterious: Evolutionary puzzles of human nature appeared in 2012, also published by Oxford University Press, and in 2013, Sage published the 3rd edition of his text, Peace and Conflict Studies.

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 2 out of 5]

Can't remember when it was published, but it was old hat. Some interesting ideas in regards to why we have sex, but I wish there was more empirical data concerning humans.