Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App. Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. To get the free app, enter your mobile phone number. Would you like to tell us about a lower price? If you are a seller for this product, would you like to suggest updates through seller support? It has the wisdom granted by perspective, without the condescension of someone who thinks we're wiser than our ancestors.

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Subscribe to our newsletter and receive updates from Saqi direct to your inbox. Email address:. Sex and Punishment tells the story of the struggle throughout millennia to regulate the most powerful engine of human behaviour: sex. 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.
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Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App. Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. To get the free app, enter your mobile phone number. Eric Berkowitz is a writer, lawyer and journalist. He lives in San Francisco. Would you like to tell us about a lower price? If you are a seller for this product, would you like to suggest updates through seller support? 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.
The invasive prurience of sex rules at US universities such as Gettysburg College, where, if you're sleeping with a fellow student, you have to wake him or her up and ask permission before fondling , is nothing new according to Eric Berkowitz, a San Francisco lawyer and journalist. In the ancient Middle East, he notes, "sex was evidently more micromanaged than even now. Since this is similar to a law in Assyria where women only lost a finger , Berkowitz suggests there was "a regional testicle fixation". Subtitled 4, Years of Judging Desire, this entertaining, angry and deeply fascinating study shows how legislators over the centuries have carefully calibrated punishments for erratic sexual behaviour. In medieval Europe, "a lonely monk who took a cow as his lover would be punished twice as severely as a lay owner of the beast". A man who used "mechanical help" for masturbation was punished by 40 days of penance but it was a year for a woman who used a dildo three years if she shared it with a chum.