This is a study of the creation and deconstruction of sexuality through the ages. It narrates the remarkable story of sex in the West from ancient times to the modern era and offers an accurate review of developments in reproductive anatomy and physiology. We will recognize the significant factors of Thomas Laqueur's history—human sexual organs and pleasures, sustenance, blood, semen, the egg, and others—but we will be impressed by the plots in which they have been intertwined by scientists, political activists, literary figures, and theorists.

Laqueur begins with the question of why, in the late eighteenth century, the female orgasm was considered irrelevant to conception and then traces the dramatic changes in Western views on sexual characteristics over two millennia. Thus, two "main plots" emerge. In the history of one gender, the woman is an imperfect version of the man, and they are anatomically and physiologically recognized as such: the vagina is considered an internal penis, the uterus as an inverted scrotum, the ovaries as testes. The body is therefore a representation, not the foundation, of social gender. The second plot prevails in thought after the dawn of the Enlightenment, while the one-gender model is deeply rooted in classical knowledge. The history of two genders argues that the body determines gender differentiation, that the woman is the man's opposite with incomparably different organs, functions, and emotions. The two plots overlap.

Science may establish multiple new facts, but even so, Laqueur argues that science provides only a new way of speaking, a rhetoric rather than a key to women's liberation or social progress. "Making Sex" ends with Freud, who dismissed neurological evidence to argue that, as a girl becomes a woman, the seat of her sexual pleasure shifts from the clitoris to the vagina; she becomes what culture demands, rather than, not because of, the body. Turning Freud's famous adage, Laqueur posits that destiny is anatomy. Sex, in other words, is an art.

This is a powerful story, written with vivacity and a sharp sense of detail (whether technically rigorous or imaginatively passionate). "Making Sex" will stimulate thought, whether in a businesslike form or in surprise, across a broad range of readers.