Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire

Synopsis

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, medieval transvestites, lonely goat-lovers, prostitutes of all stripes and london rent boys.