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Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire
Author(s): Eric Berkowitz (Author)
- Publisher: The Westbourne Press
- Publication Date: 4 Mar. 2013
- Language: English
- Print length: 476 pages
- ISBN-10: 1908906103
- ISBN-13: 9781908906106
Book Description
Sex and Punishment tells the story of the struggle throughout millennia to regulate the most powerful engine of human behaviour: sex. From the savage impalement of an Ancient Mesopotamian adulteress to the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde for gross indecency in 1895, Eric Berkowitz evokes the entire sweep of Western sex law.
The cast of
Sex and Punishment is as varied as the forms taken by human desire itself: royal mistresses, gay charioteers, medieval transvestites, lonely goat-lovers, prostitutes of all stripes and London rent boys. Each of them had forbidden sex, and each was judged and justice, as Berkowitz shows rarely had anything to do with it.Editorial Reviews
Review
Sex and Punishment is built on solid scholarship and spiced with plenty of sordid details that will make you the hit of any cocktail party.’ –Christopher Ryan, author of Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality
“Throughout Berkowitz smoothly straddles the divide between the explicit and the subtle, the ridiculous and the sublime – Sex and Punishment constantly reminds us not to be complacent about past victories – nor to rest until genuine equality has been won, from the barricades to the bedroom.” –Socialist Review
“Sex and Punishment is built on solid scholarship and spiced with plenty of sordid details that will make you the hit of any cocktail party.” –Christopher Ryan, author of Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality
About the Author
Eric Berkowitz is a lawyer and journalist. He has published investigative pieces in the Los Angeles Times and maintains a public interest law practice, where he represents victims of domestic violence as well as homosexuals seeking political asylum in the United States.
