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

Sexual freedom is about choice. It's the freedom to say no as well as yes.

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.

Indeed, it is that ambiguity and ambivalence which often is so puzzling in women--the quality of shifting from child to woman, theseeming helplessness one moment and the utter self-reliance the next that baffle us, that seem most difficult to understand. These are the qualities that make her a mystery, the qualities that provoked Freud to complain, "What does a woman want?

For sex to be wholly satisfying, we must have at least as much concern for a partner as for self - a requirement that doesn't live comfortably alongside the exhortation to 'do your own thing.' In the end, we are left with an extraordinarily heightened set of expectations about the possibilities in human relationships that lives side by side with disillusion that, for many, borders on despair.

The ideal visions of one age eventually are seen as its excesses by the next.

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.