Sex and Punishment - Eric Berkowitz
Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire - Eric Berkowitz
Non-Fiction
Pages: 368
This book traces the ways in which society has judged and controlled sexual behaviour, beginning over four thousand years ago in ancient Egypt and closing with Oscar Wilde's trial in 1895. As the author himself states in his opening, to attempt to investigate the twentieth and twenty-first centuries would have required another book.
It's a fascinating book, looking at changing attitudes and responses towards all manner of sexual behaviour - masturbation, necrophilia, adultery, abortion, prostitution, sadomasochism, homosexuality. You name it, someone somewhere has done it, and someone else has tried to forbid it. It looks at ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, before moving to focus primarily on Western attitudes and legal attempts to control sexual behaviour.
Some parts were incredibly eye-opening to say the least (the punishments in Ancient Egypt involving rape by donkeys, to say the least), and other parts made me laugh out loud: a Catholic priest's advice on resisting 'spontaneous orgasms' - pretty much lie down, think of God and hope it goes away!
My one criticism is that it focuses too much on just a small handful of countries. Once we've most past ancient history there is no more focus on Egypt, Persia or the Middle East, and the attitudes towards sex there are just as interesting. It focuses very heavily on Britain, America, France and Germany, pretty much to the exclusion of every other country on earth. I can understand that a book focusing on sex worldwide would be massive in scope and size, but even so, some more mentions of the last two thousand years in Egypt or Iraq or Russia or Africa would have been nice.
Non-Fiction
Pages: 368
This book traces the ways in which society has judged and controlled sexual behaviour, beginning over four thousand years ago in ancient Egypt and closing with Oscar Wilde's trial in 1895. As the author himself states in his opening, to attempt to investigate the twentieth and twenty-first centuries would have required another book.
It's a fascinating book, looking at changing attitudes and responses towards all manner of sexual behaviour - masturbation, necrophilia, adultery, abortion, prostitution, sadomasochism, homosexuality. You name it, someone somewhere has done it, and someone else has tried to forbid it. It looks at ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, before moving to focus primarily on Western attitudes and legal attempts to control sexual behaviour.
Some parts were incredibly eye-opening to say the least (the punishments in Ancient Egypt involving rape by donkeys, to say the least), and other parts made me laugh out loud: a Catholic priest's advice on resisting 'spontaneous orgasms' - pretty much lie down, think of God and hope it goes away!
My one criticism is that it focuses too much on just a small handful of countries. Once we've most past ancient history there is no more focus on Egypt, Persia or the Middle East, and the attitudes towards sex there are just as interesting. It focuses very heavily on Britain, America, France and Germany, pretty much to the exclusion of every other country on earth. I can understand that a book focusing on sex worldwide would be massive in scope and size, but even so, some more mentions of the last two thousand years in Egypt or Iraq or Russia or Africa would have been nice.