Sex & Punishment: 4000 Years of Judging Desire

BOOK DESCRIPTION

Sex and Punishment tells the story of the struggle throughout millennia to regulate the most powerful engine of human behaviour: sex. From the savage impalement of an ancient Mesopotamian adulteress to the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde for 'gross indecency' in 1895, Eric Berkowitz evokes the entire sweep of Western sex law.

The cast of Sex and Punishment is as varied as the forms taken by human desire itself: royal mistresses, gay charioteers, medieyal transvestites, lonly 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 anythng to with it.

Eric Berkowitz (2013), Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire. London: The Westbourne Press. Softcover. 476 pages. ISBN-13: 978-1-908906-10-6. Format: 128x198 mm (trimmed), Weight: 452 gr