Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire

by Eric Berkowitz

Overview

From the bedroom to the courtroom-a riveting history of the law of sex. The "raging frenzy" of the sex drive, to use Plato's phrase, has always defied control. However, that's not to say that every civilization has not tried, using its most powerful weapon: the law. At any given point in history, some forms of sex were condoned while others were punished mercilessly, jump back or forward a century or two, or cross a Border, and the harmless fun of one society becomes the gravest crime in another. Sex and Punishment tells the story of the struggle to regulate the most powerful engine of human behavior.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781619021556
Publisher:	Counterpoint Press
Publication date:	11/13/2012
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	116,725
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Eric Berkowitz is a writer, lawyer and journalist. He has a degree in print journalism from University of Southern California and has published in the Los Angeles Times and The Los Angeles Weekly, and for the Associated Press. He was an editor of the West Coast’s premier daily legal publication, The Los Angeles Daily Journal. He lives in San Francisco.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

1 Channeling the Urge: The First Sex Laws 10

2 Honor Among (Mostly) Men: Cases From Ancient Greece 56

3 Imperial Bedrooms: Sex and the State in Ancient Rome 86

4 The Middle Ages: A Crowd Condemned 123

5 Groping Toward Modernity: The Early Modern Period, 1500-1700 174

6 The New World of Sexual Opportunity 251

7 The Eighteenth Century: Revelation and Revolution 273

8 The Nineteenth Century: Human Nature on Trial 328

Editorial Reviews

This is an excellently researched, almost scholarly book that draws on a wide range of sources from Herodotus to St Augustine... and on to Pepys and Foucault. All are properly credited. By backing up his material and selecting sources wisely, Berkowitz has achieved a perfect balance between case study and analysis, and between narrative and reflection.... a wonderfully well-written, well-organised and accomplished book.
—Literary Review

Sara Wheeler

Berkowitz, a lawyer-journalist, begins his historical tour of “sex and punishment” with the 4,000-year-old murder of a priest in Mesopotamia—his wife, suspected of adultery, was executed for the homicide. The book ends with Oscar Wilde’s well-chronicled pillorying for his homosexuality. In between is a bewildering array of ideas about what sexual behavior was unacceptable and strange, and the brutal punishments handed down for it. Berkowitz builds his history around various legal systems, ancient to modern, religious to secular, but he seems to delight in graphic descriptions of the various punishments visited upon adulterers, sodomites, and others who transgressed against the sexual mores of their time and place. In Mesopotamia a disloyal wife was impaled on a pole “and left to suffer a slow and very public death.” The medieval Church burned homosexuals at the stake. Berkowitz also highlights the long history of prostitution and the hypocrisy surrounding it; for example, a 1566 papal edict exiling prostitutes from Rome was rescinded when it was learned that 25,000 people planned to leave the city. Berkowitz writes straightforwardly and has done credible research, but lacking enough sociological and cultural context, the material becomes repetitive. Photos. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Sex and Punishment

"Enormously informative and entertaining…There may be no better lens through which to understand how a particular culture sees itself than its laws pertaining to sex [and] Berkowitz has a keen eye for ridiculous laws and a historian's grasp of the meaning behind them… [The book] cries out for a sequel."—Boston Globe

"[An] extraordinary book… I don't think I've ever read such an entertaining historical work. It has the wisdom granted by perspective, without the condescension of someone who thinks we're wiser than our ancestors. Whether you want to fuel your indignation, or simply furnish yourself with enough jaw-dropping data to galvanize a hundred party conversations, you really must shell out for this book. It's worth every penny."—The Guardian

"Sex and Punishment is an illuminating and deftly told account of the two urges that have done so much to define civilization: humanity’s appetite for sex and its concern to regulate the consequences. As Eric Berkowitz shows, both impulses have been in flux for centuries, and his colorful history serves as a timely reminder of just how arbitrary—and ludicrous—the moral certainties of one era can appear to the next." —Sadakat Kadri, author of The Trial: A History, from Socrates to O. J. Simpson

"Very interesting, very enlightening, very well written, and very timely; Sex and Punishment performs an important service in narrating the pre-twentieth-century history of sexual mores and regulation to a nonspecialist audience." —Richard Posner, Judge, Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and Professor at the University of Chicago Law School

“Berkowitz describes the real stories of medieval cross-dressers, London's rent boys, gay charioteers, and a whole lot of people who were judged for their forbidden sex. The book makes for an excellent, fascinating, and provocative read about carnal desire and what lengths humankind will go to fulfill and control it.” —The Advocate

"It's rare that a book so well researched and provocative is also so downright entertaining. Sex and Punishment will have you gripped and fascinated (and sometimes laughing out loud) at how legal systems over the millennia have attempted to regulate mankind's unruly carnal desires. The chapter on ancient Mesopotamia alone is worth the price of the book." —Tony Perrottet, author of Napoleon's Privates and The Sinner's Grand Tour

"In Sex and Punishment, Eric Berkowitz leads us through the inventive and ultimately futile ways that mankind has tried to tame its most troublesome pleasure. His compehensive tour is sometimes funny, more often scary but always entertaining." --A. J. Langguth, author of Patriots: The Men Who Started the American Revolution

"There may be no question more vexing than 'What is normal human behavior?' and no facet of 'normality' more arbitrarily defined—and viciously policed—than sexual morality. Eric Berkowitz has done an excellent job of showing just how far from certain any of us should be that we really know what is 'normal' or 'ethical' when it comes to human sexuality. Sex and Punishment is built on solid scholarship and spiced with plenty of sordid details that will make you the hit of any cocktail party." —Christopher Ryan, author of Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality

From the Publisher