The raging frenzy of the sex drive, to use Plato\'s phrase, has always defied control.
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.
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.
Sex and Punishment tells the story of the struggle throughout the millennia to regulate the most powerful engine of human behavior.
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.
At any given point in time, some forms of sex were condoned while others were punished mercilessly.
However, that\'s not to say that the Sumerians, Victorians, and every civilization in between and beyond have not tried, wielding their most formidable weapon: the law.
The raging frenzy of the sex drive, to use Plato\'s phrase, has always defied control.
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.
Each of them had forbidden sex, and each was judged--and justice, as Berkowitz shows, rarely had much to do with it.
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, London rent boys.
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.
Sex and Punishment tells the story of the struggle throughout the millennia to regulate the most powerful engine of human behavior.
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.
At any given point in time, some forms of sex were condoned while others were punished mercilessly.
However, that\'s not to say that the Sumerians, Victorians, and every civilization in between and beyond have not tried, wielding their most formidable weapon: the law.
The raging frenzy of the sex drive, to use Plato\'s phrase, has always defied control
