"This book explores elemental principles in the study of sex for trained philosophers and lay readers alike. Singer locates sex within a spectrum that also includes love and compassion, and claims that fundamental mistakes have persistently occurred because numerous theorists relegate sex, love, and compassion to separate and distinct compartments. Discussing sex as both an appetite and an interpersonal drive.

Singer argues that much philosophical confusion has resulted from the doctrines of those who constrain sexuality within either of these to the detriment of the other. What is sexual for human beings is normally, and perhaps always in some degree, a composite of the appetitive and the interpersonal. In us, sex is generically a function of each.

This unified conception of sexuality as a coming together of the appetitive and interpersonal drives then becomes the basis for his remarks about the relative value of individual sex acts, as well as their place within the aesthetic and moral dimension of human nature."--BOOK JACKET.