From our earliest beginnings, we have been a nation obsessed with sex, titillated by it at the same time that we fear it, elaborating rules to contain it at the same time that we violate them.

For those who have lived on the edge of poverty all their lives, the semblance of poverty affected by the affluent is both incomprehensible and insulting.

How then can we account for the persistence of the myth that inside the empty nest lives a shattered and depressed shell of a woman--a woman in constant pain because her children no longer live under her roof? Is it possible that a notion so pervasive is, in fact, just a myth?

No revolution creates a wholly new universe. Rather, it reflects the history and culture that spawned it.

In our minds lives the madonna image--the all-embracing, all- giving tranquil mother of a Raphael painting, one child at her breast, another at her feet; a woman fulfilled, one who asks nothing more than to nurture and nourish. This creature of fantasy, this myth, is the model--the unattainable ideal against which women measure, not only their performance, but their feelings about being mothers.

Sometimes we choose a friend who mirrors our fantasies, dreams of a self we wish we could be.

Whatever else we may say about sex, it is at least as much a social and psychological phenomenon as it is a biological one.