Sex and Punishment Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire

by Berkowitz , Eric

• ISBN13: 9781582437965
• ISBN10: 1582437963
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-05-08
• Publisher: Counterpoint

Summary

The “raging frenzy” of the sex drive, to use Plato’s phrase, has always defied control. However, that’s not to say that the Sumerians, Victorians, and every civilization in between and beyond have not tried, wielding their most formidable weapon: the law. At any given point in time, some forms of sex were condoned while others were punished mercilessly. Jump forward or backward a century or two (and often far less than that), and the harmless fun of one time period becomes the gravest crime in another. Judging Desire tells the story of the struggle throughout the millennia to regulate the most powerful engine of human behavior.

Writer and lawyer Eric Berkowitz uses flesh-and-blood cases—much flesh and even more blood—to evoke the entire sweep of Western sex law, from the savage impalement of an Ancient Mesopotamian adulteress to the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde in 1895 for “gross indecency.” The cast of Judging Desire is as varied as the forms taken by human desire itself: royal mistresses, gay charioteers, medieval transvestites, lonely goat-lovers, prostitutes of all stripes, London rent boys. Each of them had forbidden sex, and each was judged—and justice, as Berkowitz shows, rarely had much to do with it.
With the light touch of a natural storyteller, Berkowitz spins these tales and more, going behind closed doors to reveal the essential history of human desire.

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. 231
The Eighteenth Century: Revelation and Revolution	p. 273
The Nineteenth Century: Human Nature on Trial	p. 328
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