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Sex and Reason
Sexual drives are rooted in biology, but we don’t act on them blindly. Indeed, as the eminently readable judge and legal scholar Richard Posner shows, we make quite rational choices about sex, based on the costs and benefits perceived.
Drawing on the fields of biology, law, history, religion, and economics, this sweeping study examines societies from ancient Greece to today’s Sweden and issues from masturbation, incest taboos, date rape, and gay marriage to Baby M. The first comprehensive approach to sexuality and its social controls, Posner’s rational choice theory surprises, explains, predicts, and totally absorbs.
Drawing on the fields of biology, law, history, religion, and economics, this sweeping study examines societies from ancient Greece to today’s Sweden and issues from masturbation, incest taboos, date rape, and gay marriage to Baby M. The first comprehensive approach to sexuality and its social controls, Posner’s rational choice theory surprises, explains, predicts, and totally absorbs.
458 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1992
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334 people want to read
About the author
Richard A. Posner
129 books181 followersRichard Posner is Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago Law School.
Following his graduation from Harvard Law School, Judge Posner clerked for Justice William J. Brennan Jr. From 1963 to 1965, he was assistant to Commissioner Philip Elman of the Federal Trade Commission. For the next two years he was assistant to the solicitor general of the United States. Prior to going to Stanford Law School in 1968 as Associate Professor, Judge Posner served as general counsel of the President's Task Force on Communications Policy. He first came to the Law School in 1969, and was Lee and Brena Freeman Professor of Law prior to his appointment in 1981 as a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, where he presided until his retirement on September 2, 2017. He was the chief judge of the court from 1993 to 2000.
Judge Posner has written a number of books, including Economic Analysis of Law (7th ed., 2007), The Economics of Justice (1981), Law and Literature (3rd ed. 2009), The Problems of Jurisprudence (1990), Cardozo: A Study in Reputation (1990), The Essential Holmes (1992), Sex and Reason (1992), Overcoming Law (1995), The Federal Courts: Challenge and Reform (1996), Law and Legal Theory in England and America (1996), The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory (1999), Antitrust Law (2d ed. 2001), Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy (2003), Catastrophe: Risk and Response (2004), Preventing Surprise Attacks: Intelligence Reform in the Wake of 9/11 (2005), How Judges Think (2008), and A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression (2009), as well as books on the Clinton impeachment and Bush v. Gore, and many articles in legal and economic journals and book reviews in the popular press. He has taught administrative law, antitrust, economic analysis of law, history of legal thought, conflict of laws, regulated industries, law and literature, the legislative process, family law, primitive law, torts, civil procedure, evidence, health law and economics, law and science, and jurisprudence. He was the founding editor of the Journal of Legal Studies and (with Orley Ashenfelter) the American Law and Economics Review. He is an Honorary Bencher of the Inner Temple and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy, and he was the President of the American Law and Economics Association from 1995 to 1996 and the honorary President of the Bentham Club of University College, London, for 1998. He has received a number of awards, including the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Award in Law from the University of Virginia in 1994, the Marshall-Wythe Medallion from the College of William and Mary in 1998, the 2003 Research Award from the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation, also in 2003 the John Sherman Award from the U.S. Department of Justice, the Learned Hand Medal for Exellence in Federal Jurisprudence from the Federal bar Council in 2005, and, also in 2005, the Thomas C. Schelling Award from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Following his graduation from Harvard Law School, Judge Posner clerked for Justice William J. Brennan Jr. From 1963 to 1965, he was assistant to Commissioner Philip Elman of the Federal Trade Commission. For the next two years he was assistant to the solicitor general of the United States. Prior to going to Stanford Law School in 1968 as Associate Professor, Judge Posner served as general counsel of the President's Task Force on Communications Policy. He first came to the Law School in 1969, and was Lee and Brena Freeman Professor of Law prior to his appointment in 1981 as a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, where he presided until his retirement on September 2, 2017. He was the chief judge of the court from 1993 to 2000.
Judge Posner has written a number of books, including Economic Analysis of Law (7th ed., 2007), The Economics of Justice (1981), Law and Literature (3rd ed. 2009), The Problems of Jurisprudence (1990), Cardozo: A Study in Reputation (1990), The Essential Holmes (1992), Sex and Reason (1992), Overcoming Law (1995), The Federal Courts: Challenge and Reform (1996), Law and Legal Theory in England and America (1996), The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory (1999), Antitrust Law (2d ed. 2001), Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy (2003), Catastrophe: Risk and Response (2004), Preventing Surprise Attacks: Intelligence Reform in the Wake of 9/11 (2005), How Judges Think (2008), and A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression (2009), as well as books on the Clinton impeachment and Bush v. Gore, and many articles in legal and economic journals and book reviews in the popular press. He has taught administrative law, antitrust, economic analysis of law, history of legal thought, conflict of laws, regulated industries, law and literature, the legislative process, family law, primitive law, torts, civil procedure, evidence, health law and economics, law and science, and jurisprudence. He was the founding editor of the Journal of Legal Studies and (with Orley Ashenfelter) the American Law and Economics Review. He is an Honorary Bencher of the Inner Temple and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy, and he was the President of the American Law and Economics Association from 1995 to 1996 and the honorary President of the Bentham Club of University College, London, for 1998. He has received a number of awards, including the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Award in Law from the University of Virginia in 1994, the Marshall-Wythe Medallion from the College of William and Mary in 1998, the 2003 Research Award from the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation, also in 2003 the John Sherman Award from the U.S. Department of Justice, the Learned Hand Medal for Exellence in Federal Jurisprudence from the Federal bar Council in 2005, and, also in 2005, the Thomas C. Schelling Award from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
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August 15, 2013Every Monday, The CSPH takes a look at a book or film focusing on an aspect of sexuality. This week we are featuring the book Sex and Reason by Judge Richard Posner.
Richard Posner is a legal theorist, economist, federal judge, and professor; according to The Journal of Legal Studies, Posner is the most cited legal scholar of the 20th century. While it’s accurate to describe him as on the right of the American political-spectrum, Posner’s pragmatism, cosmopolitanism, qualified moral-relativism, support for gay rights, and enjoyment of Friedrich Nietzsche make labeling his political affiliation difficult. In short, he’s complicated. If you read “Sex and Reason” sentence by sentence as a radical-feminist looking for problematic arguments, you’ll find it and you’ll have a bad time; for example, he argues that men have an innately higher sex drive. But, if you look at it as a text by a Reagan-appointed judge—someone likely to be read by conservatives—who is defending LGBT rights, arguing against Christian Puritanism, and expanding our view of the range of possible sexual norms, you will see value in this book. Further, a book with this large of a scope paints an entire worldview and it is intrinsically fascinating to see an intelligent person build a self-consistent web of beliefs.
The deepest theme in this book is sex through the lens of economics, specifically microeconomics and a rational-choice model of human behavior. However, Posner draws heavily from biology, history, law, philosophy, and anthropology. He argues that although much of sexual desire is ultimately rooted in immutable facts about our psychology, the balance of the various “costs” of sex (e.g., possibility of children, diseases, social or legal disapproval, and the difficulty of finding it) strongly affects the frequency of different sexual practices and that the strengths of these variables differs from culture to culture and through time. Not only does Posner want us to look at the long term consequences of different sexual norms, but he also seeks for us to not prejudice our own norms as the-only-way-to-do-things. For example, he observes that ancient Greece and Rome and medieval China and Japan did not share America’s anti-gay attitude.
Although Posner claims to be anti-morality, what he’s really against is the sex-negative, traditional morality of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Posner defends the rights of individuals to govern their sexual lives by their own choices except when it causes harm or infringes on the rights of others. However, very often Posner won’t take a moral stand; instead, he’ll say things like: “If your goal is to have more of the country’s sex inside of marriage, what sorts of social arrangements would affect that?” followed by a look at the relevant causal variables. Diverse topics like teenage pregnancy, homosexuality, pornography, abortion, and divorce are examined via this analytical and detached viewpoint.
But dispassionate is not synonymous with correct, and sometimes he comes to to implausible conclusions. For example, when discussion possible divorce norms, he says, “In a regime of no divorce, prospective spouses will have incentives to engage in elaborate marital search, because the cost of a mistake is so high. The longer and more intense the search, the likelier it is to produce a good match.” Barry Schwartz, a psychologist studying happiness, has found that people who agonize over optimizing their decisions often regret their decisions more than people who “satisfice” or select the option that seems to pass an acceptability threshold. Further, given that people discount the importance of distant future events and that no one likes the self-identity of thinking their relationship will not work out, I’m doubtful that people will engage in more intense spouse searches or even that more intense searches would make people happier.
Early in Sex and Reason, Posner writes that his main goal for writing this book was to “dispel some of the clouds of ignorance, prejudice, shame, and hypocrisy that befog public discussion of sex in America generally and in the American legal system in particular.” Although not a perfect work, a conservative judge discussing sex from such an interdisciplinary perspective who doesn’t see sex as low, shameful, or sinful is a welcome breath of fresh air.
See more book (and film!) reviews from the CSPH at our website: http://thecsph.org/category/csph-blog....
Richard Posner is a legal theorist, economist, federal judge, and professor; according to The Journal of Legal Studies, Posner is the most cited legal scholar of the 20th century. While it’s accurate to describe him as on the right of the American political-spectrum, Posner’s pragmatism, cosmopolitanism, qualified moral-relativism, support for gay rights, and enjoyment of Friedrich Nietzsche make labeling his political affiliation difficult. In short, he’s complicated. If you read “Sex and Reason” sentence by sentence as a radical-feminist looking for problematic arguments, you’ll find it and you’ll have a bad time; for example, he argues that men have an innately higher sex drive. But, if you look at it as a text by a Reagan-appointed judge—someone likely to be read by conservatives—who is defending LGBT rights, arguing against Christian Puritanism, and expanding our view of the range of possible sexual norms, you will see value in this book. Further, a book with this large of a scope paints an entire worldview and it is intrinsically fascinating to see an intelligent person build a self-consistent web of beliefs.
The deepest theme in this book is sex through the lens of economics, specifically microeconomics and a rational-choice model of human behavior. However, Posner draws heavily from biology, history, law, philosophy, and anthropology. He argues that although much of sexual desire is ultimately rooted in immutable facts about our psychology, the balance of the various “costs” of sex (e.g., possibility of children, diseases, social or legal disapproval, and the difficulty of finding it) strongly affects the frequency of different sexual practices and that the strengths of these variables differs from culture to culture and through time. Not only does Posner want us to look at the long term consequences of different sexual norms, but he also seeks for us to not prejudice our own norms as the-only-way-to-do-things. For example, he observes that ancient Greece and Rome and medieval China and Japan did not share America’s anti-gay attitude.
Although Posner claims to be anti-morality, what he’s really against is the sex-negative, traditional morality of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Posner defends the rights of individuals to govern their sexual lives by their own choices except when it causes harm or infringes on the rights of others. However, very often Posner won’t take a moral stand; instead, he’ll say things like: “If your goal is to have more of the country’s sex inside of marriage, what sorts of social arrangements would affect that?” followed by a look at the relevant causal variables. Diverse topics like teenage pregnancy, homosexuality, pornography, abortion, and divorce are examined via this analytical and detached viewpoint.
But dispassionate is not synonymous with correct, and sometimes he comes to to implausible conclusions. For example, when discussion possible divorce norms, he says, “In a regime of no divorce, prospective spouses will have incentives to engage in elaborate marital search, because the cost of a mistake is so high. The longer and more intense the search, the likelier it is to produce a good match.” Barry Schwartz, a psychologist studying happiness, has found that people who agonize over optimizing their decisions often regret their decisions more than people who “satisfice” or select the option that seems to pass an acceptability threshold. Further, given that people discount the importance of distant future events and that no one likes the self-identity of thinking their relationship will not work out, I’m doubtful that people will engage in more intense spouse searches or even that more intense searches would make people happier.
Early in Sex and Reason, Posner writes that his main goal for writing this book was to “dispel some of the clouds of ignorance, prejudice, shame, and hypocrisy that befog public discussion of sex in America generally and in the American legal system in particular.” Although not a perfect work, a conservative judge discussing sex from such an interdisciplinary perspective who doesn’t see sex as low, shameful, or sinful is a welcome breath of fresh air.
See more book (and film!) reviews from the CSPH at our website: http://thecsph.org/category/csph-blog....
March 14, 2008
The author Judge Richard Posner is one of the finest legal minds in America. This is a multi discipline review of how ancient and modern societies view sexual practices normatively and legally. It is a bit academic with extensive footnotes and bibliography, but is a facinating discussion. The breadth of sexual practices and customs demonstrate that sexual attitudes within a society are the product of environmental and economic pressures that are given expression through the law, religion and social convention. The varied human sexual experience demonstrates that what is biologically a simple act is extremely complicated because of man's ability to enjoy sex for reasons other than procreation and therefore there are few if any universal norms.
June 24, 2015
Posner is fearless, and great at thinking on the margin. Also, there have to be hundreds of citations, meaning he has a giant pervy library about the history of sex and sexual regulations.
Posner has some premises that are hard to swallow, but mostly shows that they're consistent with his model of behavior.
Also, don't miss: he loves to make a really over-the-top claim, which he footnotes—with a reference to his own previous work. Also, towards the end he straight up flays the legal reasoning in the Baby M case, which is pretty amusing.
Posner has some premises that are hard to swallow, but mostly shows that they're consistent with his model of behavior.
Also, don't miss: he loves to make a really over-the-top claim, which he footnotes—with a reference to his own previous work. Also, towards the end he straight up flays the legal reasoning in the Baby M case, which is pretty amusing.
December 30, 2012
awful. struggling through all the conservative, problematic, sexist bullshit, until coming across the phrase "unprovoked rape," and it was no longer worth it. agonizing stuff.
May 1, 2023
A great lesson in how far brute-force Beckerian thinking can get you.
July 13, 2024
Took me seven months to finish this book. Do with that what you will.
July 12, 2025
Fragments of it, I want to dissect, but going through the whole thing again in general doesn’t interest me.
Maybe getting it from the library again sometime?
Maybe getting it from the library again sometime?
Want to read
January 3, 2013Technically I've already read half of this book, but it's currently in storage and I'm trying to separate the "books I am in the middle of but cannot or will not finish at this time due to circumstance" chaff from the "shit I am actually in the process of reading right now, I swear to God" wheat and thus clean up my "currently reading" list. But you don't care about that, no, you just want to hear a take on what should hereafter always be known as "Dick Goes to Sexytown," or, if you're into Dinosaur Comics, "Posnerkapow." Thus far it's Posner - in the early to mid-'90s - on sex, which means that kids, you don't actually need me to tell you that this book is, on the whole, effing terrible. C'mon now, you know you knew that business already, and if you didn't, you at *least* knew that I was going to think it was effing terrible. I have All The Faith in your powers of logical reasoning and deduction. (Not to mention the fact that I don't think anyone reads my reviews who doesn't already kinda know me.) Interestingly enough, however, I will give Posner credit where it's due on his brief yet entirely (though perhaps inadvertently?) amusing opinion on a sex toy patent case (Ritchie v. Vast Resources Inc., you're welcome). That ruling was roughly three years ago, so it seems possible that Posner's language re: sex has simply evolved to something more palatable and less stabby-feelings-inducing (though attitude is still up in the air, since that was an IP case more than a sex case) in the past twenty years. I mean, these days, he actually makes a delightfully subtle yet totally not at all double entendre on "lubricious." Lubricious! You know how many times a SCOTUS opinion has used the word "lubricious"? NONE. I'm just sayin'. (Yes, I actually checked this claim with the legal language explorer. Lubricious has made an appearance on the CoA four times, if you were wondering.). As it stands, however, I'm basically only reading this really rather dated and thus far über-meh book as a necessary bit of fodder in the sexual theory Canon. In the interest of fairness, I won't actually rate it until I've finished.
December 11, 2012
It's sex! It's lawyers! It's sex and lawyers together! For a reader like me, that's catnip. I looked forward a great deal to this book, which came out of a series of public lectures Posner, a US judge on the federal bench, gave. Posner's outspoken and interesting blog touches on many topics, but in this lecture series and the resulting book, he gives an extended take on one topic: the intersection of sex and the law.
Posner's ambition shows through in his approach to the topic: he proposes nothing short of what he calls an "economics of sex," which he feels could be used to rationalize our society's laws in the places where they overlap with sexual conduct.
The book is brilliant except where it isn't -- he'll put together an amazingly constructed argument and then wrap it up with a conclusion that left me thinking, "Wait. That's where he was going?" The disconnects sometimes seem to stem from his identification of people like himself as the locus of power; for instance, he wraps up a section that deals heavily with prostitution by saying, "Sex is not a workplace activity," ignoring the fact that for the sex workers he spent the last chapter talking about, it very much is a workplace activity. But their perspective doesn't seem to exist; the only perspective that's addressed in that peculiar passage is the perspective of men who might be their clients.
Still, I got all the way to the end and enjoyed it thoroughly, even when I thought some of the guy-centric blind spots were a bit puzzling.
Posner's ambition shows through in his approach to the topic: he proposes nothing short of what he calls an "economics of sex," which he feels could be used to rationalize our society's laws in the places where they overlap with sexual conduct.
The book is brilliant except where it isn't -- he'll put together an amazingly constructed argument and then wrap it up with a conclusion that left me thinking, "Wait. That's where he was going?" The disconnects sometimes seem to stem from his identification of people like himself as the locus of power; for instance, he wraps up a section that deals heavily with prostitution by saying, "Sex is not a workplace activity," ignoring the fact that for the sex workers he spent the last chapter talking about, it very much is a workplace activity. But their perspective doesn't seem to exist; the only perspective that's addressed in that peculiar passage is the perspective of men who might be their clients.
Still, I got all the way to the end and enjoyed it thoroughly, even when I thought some of the guy-centric blind spots were a bit puzzling.
March 7, 2018
Written by one of the leading American legal jurists of all time, and a heavy-weight intellectual generally, the book does not disappoint. It is a multi-disciplinary, comprehensive survey of history and theories of sexuality, regulation of sex in different societies, rationales for regulation and prescriptions for regulations.
The writing, however, is somewhat dry. It reads like a long academic paper. It's unlikely to appeal to those looking for a quick, witty and popular read. Nearly every sentence in the book contains something substantive and no space is wasted on just aimless talk. The book is also very organized, and easy to follow. The language is generally non-technical, but I would not recommend skimming it.
All in all, it's a great book for research, or for people with a serious interest in the topic (like myself). But if you are looking for a quick and fun read, you might be disappointed. Judge Richard Posner is a very smart (an understatement really) and a serious person and this book illustrates this well.
The writing, however, is somewhat dry. It reads like a long academic paper. It's unlikely to appeal to those looking for a quick, witty and popular read. Nearly every sentence in the book contains something substantive and no space is wasted on just aimless talk. The book is also very organized, and easy to follow. The language is generally non-technical, but I would not recommend skimming it.
All in all, it's a great book for research, or for people with a serious interest in the topic (like myself). But if you are looking for a quick and fun read, you might be disappointed. Judge Richard Posner is a very smart (an understatement really) and a serious person and this book illustrates this well.
October 4, 2013
Very informative in the sense of understanding the development of social behavioral patterns (as all of Posners treatises). However, sexuality reasons of the female gender is not examined at all, maybe due to the fact that the book is quite old. Maybe too much justification of sexual perversions, which I find way too bold for a statement made by a jurist.
November 26, 2014
While this book gave an extremely thorough cost-benefit analysis in regards to all matters sex in society, it was extremely dry and difficult to read. It took me 11 months to read and I usually read about 40 books a year! I did enjoy how it analyzed social taboos from an unemotional, logical standpoint, but those 442 pages put me to sleep many nights...quickly.
January 3, 2010
So far, Posner has lived up to the intellectual powerhouse that he is reputed to be. The number of disciplines that he covers is unbelievable, as well as the vast number of footnotes...
January 10, 2012
Slightly out of date but still very interesting.
December 7, 2012
Extremely dense and a bit out of date, but fascinating none-the-less.
September 25, 2014
a bit outdated.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews