Human sexuality seems normal to us, but it is bizarre by the standards of other animals. Diamond arues that our strange sex lives were as crucial to our rise to human status as our large brains. Among the aspects of human sexuality discussed are female menopause, our having sex in private, our often having sex for fum rather than procreation and the expansion of women's breasts even before use in lactation, and the battle of the sexes over parental care. These features might seem too natural to require explaination, but on reflection they prove surprisingly difficult to account for.

Three decades after the remarkable resurgence of feminism, gender issues have become ubiquitous in public debate. For some, feminism is the favorite scapegoat for multiple social ills; for others, the greatest success story of the closing century. The Janus face of feminism in the media reflects the competing images of women´s lives today. Feminists themselves hold sharply opposing views on the success or failures of three decades of women´s activism. Why Feminism? looks at the shifts in feminist thinking from the brash emergence of Women´s Liberation at the close of the 1960s to the diverse and discordant feminisms of recent decades. Exploring feminism´s troubled relations with psychology and psychoanalysis, the rise of new evolutionary theory, the impact of queer theorizing on gender categories, controversies over memory and trauma, and increasing anxieties about men and masculinity, Why Feminism? illustrates the continuing provocation and significance of feminist inquiry, laying out potentialities and pitfalls for the century ahead.