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What royal mistresses and gay charioteers, medieval cross-dressers and lonely goat–lovers, can tell us about the history of human desire . . .
The “raging frenzy” of the sex drive, to use Plato’s phrase, has always defied control. However, that’s not to say the Sumerians, Victorians, and every civilization in between—and beyond—have not tried wielding their most formidable weapon: the law. Sex and Punishment 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 Sex and Punishment is as varied as the forms taken by human desire itself: royal mistresses, gay charioteers, medieval cross-dressers, 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.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
April 12, 2012 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781619020788
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781619020788
- File size: 1771 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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February 13, 2012
Berkowitz, a lawyer-journalist, begins his historical tour of “sex and punishment” with the 4,000-year-old murder of a priest in Mesopotamia—his wife, suspected of adultery, was executed for the homicide. The book ends with Oscar Wilde’s well-chronicled pillorying for his homosexuality. In between is a bewildering array of ideas about what sexual behavior was unacceptable and strange, and the brutal punishments handed down for it. Berkowitz builds his history around various legal systems, ancient to modern, religious to secular, but he seems to delight in graphic descriptions of the various punishments visited upon adulterers, sodomites, and others who transgressed against the sexual mores of their time and place. In Mesopotamia a disloyal wife was impaled on a pole “and left to suffer a slow and very public death.” The medieval Church burned homosexuals at the stake. Berkowitz also highlights the long history of prostitution and the hypocrisy surrounding it; for example, a 1566 papal edict exiling prostitutes from Rome was rescinded when it was learned that 25,000 people planned to leave the city. Berkowitz writes straightforwardly and has done credible research, but lacking enough sociological and cultural context, the material becomes repetitive. Photos. -
April 15, 2012
Journalist and lawyer Berkowitz leads readers on a journey through the history of sex as it has been viewed by the law. Starting in Babylon with Hammurabi's Code and ending at the turn of the 19th century with the trial of Oscar Wilde, the book covers the urge in Western culture to regulate, police, judge, condemn, and punish sex. Berkowitz presents thought-provoking glimpses into this past, from bestiality laws in ancient Greece that cited species involved to the legislative difficulties faced by Victorian reformers in England advocating to increase the age of consent from 12 to 13. VERDICT Even though this readable history raises interesting questions about the relationship between sex and the law, it focuses more on relating events rather than explaining why they happened. For readers who want a broad overview of the sexual obsessions and mores of the West.
Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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