So I am halfway through a mid-week called on Money/Sex/Power. This week we began a two-part discussion about sex and sexuality. As I did with the topic of Money, I began with a very, very brief, history of sex--we tend to think, as George Michael once reminded us that "sex is natural," which, of course, is true, but sex is also the product of histories and systems of power and influence that have shaped how we approach sex and sexuality. We journeyed back to the Babylonians and made our way forward, stopping a key spots along the way--contrasting views from late antiquity with medieval views and then shifted to the 18th and 19th century when ideas about sex and sexuality as we now understand it started to emerge. The move beyond anatomical reasoning to a more nuanced understanding of sex as more than anatomy is something that emerged quite late in the history of sex

