Sex and Punishment: 4000 Years of Judging Desire is a book to read when you want more than your fair share of space on the morning commute.
But don’t let that put you off. Eric Berkowitz’s riveting investigation of sex law charts its progression from the beginning of written history in Mesopotamia through to Oscar Wilde’s incarceration for sodomy in 1895. Along the way, he addresses ideas that frequently amaze with their modern parallels. Laws addressing intimate acts become another means of the white male hegemony imposing its punitive will on traditional victims of repression: women, blacks, Jews and the poor.
Berkowitz skips between continents and historical eras to highlight resonances in the law’s attitude to sex. Consider, for example, the following: ‘The facts show that in people who are raped, who are truly raped, the juices don’t flow, the body functions don’t work, and they don’t get pregnant.’ Ill-informed and expressing a medieval attitude to rape, it was spoken by North Carolina legislator Henry Aldridge in 1985.
Ever respectful of both bonkers laws and those who suffer them, Berkowitz places the foibles of the premoderns in context, drawing out theory behind legislation. He addresses his subject with precision and deftly placed humour. The law’s preoccupation with sex is old as time itself and rewards investigation. Sex and Punishment is a fine book and certainly one worth reading. While you might get looks for your reading taste, you’ll have the material in your hands to debate why that is.
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