Reviews for Sex and reason

The average rating for Sex and reason based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-07-11 00:00:00 Paul Hoeft Every 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:

Review # 2 was written on 2008-03-13 00:00:00 Francis Romero 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.