Sex and Punishment Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire

by Berkowitz, Eric

• ISBN13: 9781619021556
• ISBN10: 1619021552
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2013-04-09
• Publisher: Counterpoint

Summary

From the bedroom to the courtroom-a riveting history of the law of sex. The "raging frenzy" of the sex drive, to use Plato's phrase, has always defied control. However, that's not to say that every civilization has not tried, using its most powerful weapon: the law. At any given point in history, some forms of sex were condoned while others were punished mercilessly, jump back or forward a century or two, or cross a Border, and the harmless fun of one society becomes the gravest crime in another. Sex and Punishment tells the story of the struggle to regulate the most powerful engine of human behavior. Book jacket.

Author Biography

Eric Berkowitz is a writer, lawyer and journalist. He has a degree in print journalism from University of Southern California and has published in the Los Angeles Times and The Los Angeles Weekly, and for the Associated Press. He was an editor of the West Coast’s premier daily legal publication, The Los Angeles Daily Journal. He lives in San Francisco.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
Channeling the Urge: The First Sex Laws	p. 10
Honor Among (Mostly) Men: Cases From Ancient Greece	p. 56
Imperial Bedrooms: Sex and the State in Ancient Rome	p. 86
The Middle Ages: A Crowd Condemned	p. 123
Groping Toward Modernity: The Early Modern Period, 1500-1700	p. 174
The New World of Sexual Opportunity	p. 251
The Eighteenth Century: Revelation and Revolution	p. 273
The Nineteenth Century: Human Nature on Trial	p. 328
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