The depth of a friendship - how much it means to us ... depends, at least in part, upon how many parts of ourselves a friend sees, shares and validates.

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

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.

The structure of the family is not born in nature but in human design. What we can do, we can also undo.

Intimacy. We hunger for it, but we also fear it.

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.