Eric Berkowitz – författare

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. Each of them had forbidden sex, and each was judged – and justice, as Berkowitz shows – rarely had anything to do with it.

The “raging frenzy” of the sex drive, to use Plato’s phrase, has always defied control. 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. At any given point in time, some forms of sex were condoned while others were punished mercilessly. 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. Judging Desire tells the story of the struggle throughout the millennia to regulate the most powerful engine of human behavior.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.” The cast of Judging Desire 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. Each of them had forbidden sex, and each was judged—and justice, as Berkowitz shows, rarely had much to do with it.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.

The act of reproduction, and all of its variants, have been practiced in roughly the same ways since the beginning, but our ideas about the meaning and consequences ¬of sex are in constant flux. At any given point in time, some forms of sex have been encouraged, while others have been punished without mercy. Jump forward or backward a century, or cross a border, and the harmless fun of one society becomes the gravest crime in another.Beginning at the point when courts guarded the sanctity of the “family home” by permitting men to rape their wives, continuing on through the “sexual revolution,” a period that transformed traditional notions of childhood and marriage, and extending into the present day (where debates surrounding gay marriage, sex trafficking, and sex on the internet are part of our daily lives), Berkowitz explores the ways nearly every aspect of Western sexual morality has been turned on its head, with the law always one or two steps behind.By focusing on the experiences of real people who played central roles in the formation of our sexual rights, Berkowitz adds a compelling human element to what might otherwise be faceless legal battles—ultimately arguing that compassion for others is always preferable to sanctimonious condemnation, and that questions about morals and sexual laws are too complicated and volatile to resolve through simple, catch-all solutions.

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. Each of them had forbidden sex, and each was judged – and justice, as Berkowitz shows – rarely had anything to do with it.