Overview

Eric Berkowitz has accomplished what no scholar has yet achieved: to craft a compelling history of Western sex law, using flesh-and-blood cases to tell the story. The cast includes royal mistresses, gay charioteers, medieval transvestites, lonely goat-lovers, priests, prostitutes, and London rent boys. Through their fascinating and often tragic lives, the reader gains critical insight into Western history and many of today's hot-button political issues.

This meticulously researched book, drawing on original sources and the best modern legal and feminist scholarship, presents colorful case examples showing:

• The convulsively shifting law of sex. Depending on the setting and time period, the harmless fun of one society can be a grave crime in another. Sex and Punishment explains how and why this happens.
• The intersection of sex control and power politics.
• The chaotic ideals of what is masculine and feminine, and how they influence the laws of marriage and erotic love.
• The colorful lives of the famous and the forgotten, and their helplessness in the face of urges and laws they could not control.

Sex and Punishment is indeed a wild ride, but it is the ride everyone takes, either in their dreams or their nightmares. The book tells the human story from bedroom and backroom to courtroom, and ultimately to the human soul itself.