Sexual drives are rooted in biology, but we don't act on them blindly. Indeed, as the eminently readable judge and legal scholar Richard Posner shows, we make quite rational choices about sex, based on the costs and benefits perceived.

Drawing on the fields of biology, law, history, religion, and economics, this sweeping study examines societies from ancient Greece to today's Sweden and issues from masturbation, incest taboos, date rape, and gay marriage to Baby M. The first comprehensive approach to sexuality and its social controls, Posner's rational choice theory surprises, explains, predicts, and totally absorbs.

Richard A. Posner is Circuit Judge, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School.

Read More by Richard A. Posner:

• Law and Literature, Revised and Enlarged Edition
• The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory
• Private Choices and Public Health: The AIDS Epidemic in an Economic Perspective
• The Economics of Justice
• The Federal Courts: Challenge and Reform, Revised Edition
• Overcoming Law
• The Problems of Jurisprudence
• An Affair of State: The Investigation, Impeachment, and Trial of President Clinton
• The Economic Structure of Tort Law
• Frontiers of Legal Theory
• Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline
• Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy
• The Economic Structure of Intellectual Property Law
• Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, With a New Preface and Epilogue
• How Judges Think
• Law and Literature, Third Edition
• A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression
• The Crisis of Capitalist Democracy