I am pleased to announce the publication of the second edition of my book Masculine Power, Feminine Beauty: The Volitional, Objective Basis for Heterosexuality in Romantic Love and Marriage.

The book, in paperback listed for $13 and as an ebook listed for $5, is available on Amazon and in other bookstores through Amazon’s expanded distribution. To purchase the book apart from Amazon, find the paperback and ebook in the Lulu bookstore.

Here is an excerpt from the preface of the book:

Since the publication of the first edition, I have written several articles and blog posts that improved upon the formulations in the book. Moreover, I have made further identifications, especially regarding heterosexuality in romantic love (Chapter 1). I am pleased to be able to include this improved and new content in a second edition.

This new edition also includes essays (Appendices 4 and 5) from two other authors, whom I asked to write some of their own thoughts on masculinity and femininity. These essays illustrate that rational ideas on these subjects can vary while remaining within an objective range. These authors do not necessarily agree with everything I have written in the book, and vice versa. But I do think that what they have written is very much worth reading.

This book offers an objective alternative to the following false alternative regarding the subject of sexual orientation: the authority of religion vs. the subjectivism that has infected much of modern philosophy, science, and culture. (That is not to say that the book is as critical of the contemporary Christian conception of sexual orientation as it is of the contemporary “LGBT” conception.) The book also offers an account of the differences between men and women that recognizes the utmost intellectual ability, rationality, and resultant moral virtue possible in equal measure to each sex.

Since the first edition in 2015, the influence of postmodernism and so-called “critical theory” has reached pandemic proportions, in the form of “critical race theory,” “intersectionality,” “gender studies,” “social justice,” “cancel culture,” “wokeness,” and the like. My treatment of the LGBT movement in Chapters 3 through 5, edited only lightly from the first edition, shows that all of the main philosophical elements of the present cultural pandemic were already present in the LGBT movement. Indeed, the LGBT movement was an early outbreak, into the general public, of the present pandemic.

This book is on philosophy, not psychology. In my judgment, the subject of romantic love is the unidentified sixth branch of philosophy, on a par with esthetics. It is no accident that most major Western philosophers in history have written about love.

Just as a response to a work of art is a sympathetic response to what Ayn Rand ([1966] 1975, 28) calls “metaphysical value-judgments” implicit in the art work, so a romantic response is a sympathetic response to metaphysical value-judgments implicit in the person loved. In Chapter 2, I discuss parallels between love and art, relying heavily on writings of Ayn Rand.

In the book, I analyze numerous writings in the field of psychology, but I do so in order to identify philosophic premises and philosophic errors.

I do travel to the borderline of philosophy and psychology in at least two important and related respects: one, regarding the nature of free will; and two, regarding the relation between reason and emotion. I hope that some readers will find my philosophical thoughts useful when crossing the border from philosophy into psychology. I for one am eager to learn what rational psychological inquiry can yet discover about sexual orientation.

The thinker to whom I am most indebted in all my writing, including this book, is Ayn Rand. (Of course, the judgments I express are the responsibility of me alone.) I quote extensively from Ayn Rand regarding the principle that emotional responses are based on chosen values.