A Brief History of Human Sex

[malkin767]

Birds do it, bees do it, humans since the dawn of time have done it

Comments

[graey42]

Point of note: the name of the book is The Prehistory of Sex: Four Million Years of Human Sexual Culture. I suppose it's possible there was a name change between hardback and paperback editions. The link is for paperback.

[tlachtga]

"The low priority attached to sexual pleasure by people who lived in distant times is inexplicable unless one considers the hindrances that existed in those days," Shorter writes. He points especially to the 1,000 years of misery and disease-often accompanied by some very un-sexy smells and itching-that led up to the Industrial Revolution.I disagree that there was a low priority attached to pleasure, sexual or otherwise, in the pre-Industrial period. At least since the classical era, there are no small number of texts devoted to sex: how to get it, how to keep getting it; how to make a girl like you; praising men; praising women; praising sexual organs; etc. Even in the Middle Ages, the troubadors wrote about sex in rather explicit terms. And let's not forget Chaucer