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Seks ve Ceza: Arzuyu Yargılamanın Dört Bin Yıllık Tarihi
Yatak odasından mahkeme salonuna - seks hukukunun hayret verici tarihi...
Kraliyet metresleri, eşcinsel at arabası yarışçıları, ortaçağ travestileri, cadılar, keçi seviciler, rahibe fahişeler ve Londralı kiralık oğlanlar gibi aykırı oyuncuların renklendirdiği seks tarihinde bir çağ ve toplumda hoşgörülen davranışlar bir ötekinde en ağır şekilde cezalandırıldı. Ancak seks dürtüsü antik çağlardan beri kendini dizginlemeye çalışan her türlü girişime karşı koydu. Seks ve Ceza, dört bin yıllık cinsellik, din ve mülkiyet üçgeninin açılarının çok da değişmediğini gösteriyor bizlere.
"Elbette tecavüz, zina, ensest ve seks hukuku alanına giren diğer tüm meseleler insanlığın varoluşundan beri vuku bulmuştur. Değişen tek şey, insanların birbirlerinin bedenlerini kontrol etmek için kullandıkları yöntemler ve bu yöntemleri kullanma gerekçeleridir."
Eric Berkowitz Antik Mezopotamya'da zina yapan bir kadının kazığa oturtulmasından başlayıp 1895'te Oscar Wilde'ın "büyük ahlaksızlık" suçuyla hapis cezası aldığı döneme kadarki seks hukukunun uzun tarihini gözler önüne seriyor.
Seks ve Ceza, mahkeme tutanaklarıyla tarihi belgelerde yer alan gerçek insanların hayatlarından yola çıkarak insanlık tarihine ayna tutarken, insan ruhunun karanlık taraflarını ortaya çıkarıyor. Berkowitz zaman zaman tüyler ürperten, zaman zaman hayal gücünü zorlayan bir yolculuğa davet ediyor okurları.
Kraliyet metresleri, eşcinsel at arabası yarışçıları, ortaçağ travestileri, cadılar, keçi seviciler, rahibe fahişeler ve Londralı kiralık oğlanlar gibi aykırı oyuncuların renklendirdiği seks tarihinde bir çağ ve toplumda hoşgörülen davranışlar bir ötekinde en ağır şekilde cezalandırıldı. Ancak seks dürtüsü antik çağlardan beri kendini dizginlemeye çalışan her türlü girişime karşı koydu. Seks ve Ceza, dört bin yıllık cinsellik, din ve mülkiyet üçgeninin açılarının çok da değişmediğini gösteriyor bizlere.
"Elbette tecavüz, zina, ensest ve seks hukuku alanına giren diğer tüm meseleler insanlığın varoluşundan beri vuku bulmuştur. Değişen tek şey, insanların birbirlerinin bedenlerini kontrol etmek için kullandıkları yöntemler ve bu yöntemleri kullanma gerekçeleridir."
Eric Berkowitz Antik Mezopotamya'da zina yapan bir kadının kazığa oturtulmasından başlayıp 1895'te Oscar Wilde'ın "büyük ahlaksızlık" suçuyla hapis cezası aldığı döneme kadarki seks hukukunun uzun tarihini gözler önüne seriyor.
Seks ve Ceza, mahkeme tutanaklarıyla tarihi belgelerde yer alan gerçek insanların hayatlarından yola çıkarak insanlık tarihine ayna tutarken, insan ruhunun karanlık taraflarını ortaya çıkarıyor. Berkowitz zaman zaman tüyler ürperten, zaman zaman hayal gücünü zorlayan bir yolculuğa davet ediyor okurları.
428 pages, Paperback
First published April 10, 2012
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5635 people want to read
About the author
Eric Berkowitz
9 books35 followersEric Berkowitz is a writer, lawyer and journalist. He is the author of Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire. 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.
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May 10, 2022Well, this is an absolutely appalling read.
There is a lot of information on the history of sex and punishment in the ancient Middle East, and then in the UK, Europe, and the US. (Other countries/continents are barely mentioned except in the context of Western colonialism.)
Most of that information is horrifying. It's a litany of primarily white cis men abusing female bodies, black and brown bodies, non-cis people, children, queer people, poor people, basically if you're not a powerful white cis man, fuck you. Literally. Page after page of rape, endlessly approved and excused by the powers that be; page after page of obsessive Christian domineering over people's lives. It's really quite upsetting to read on this scale and there were parts I had to skim because of the grotesque cruelty and abuse on display, particularly relating to the horrific intersection of misogyny and racism in the US's disgusting history. The race element is massive throughout--there's a persistent theme of anti-Semitism in Europe's sex laws. White Christian patriarchy has its clammy, grasping hands all over the book.
The main takeaway is that anyone who thinks that sexual and reproductive autonomy is somehow an inalienable right needs a history lesson. What's going on in the US now is exactly what's been going on in the US since the Puritans landed: the effort to use sex, sexuality and gender to control and exploit everyone who isn't a rich white Christian man. We've had a handful of years in Western recorded history in which women had some stab at reproductive and bodily autonomy, rape has been occasionally punished, fucking children has come to seem not okay, and queer people have been allowed to get on with their lives: that is by no means a given. There is a straight line back from the current US abortion wars and UK TERF bullshit to a long history of social control thinly masked by claims of protecting women and preserving morality.
It's very depressing. My copy has a quote from the Sunday Times calling it "hugely entertaining", which I assume was written by a white cishet man, because while there are a few decent jokes, I cannot imagine anyone else finding this litany of abuse "entertaining". What the *fuck* is wrong with you, Mr Sunday Times Man.
I also have to observe that there is a lot of, frankly, creepy shit in here. The author really loves "take" as a sexual verb, particularly as a rape verb, which started to make my skin crawl early on. He's fond of words like tart and whore. He describes the women-led battle against the unspeakably abusive Contagious Diseases Act as "melodramatic" and the people fighting to raise the age of consent for children as "the morality lobby". And there are lengthy passages which appear to argue that Roman Polanski had a rough deal because at any other time in history, the fact that he screwed a fourteen-year-old child would have been perfectly acceptable, which...yes, the whole book is full of disgusting things that used to be acceptable but are currently illegal, what's your point?
Yeah. So. Lots of very useful information in here but I want a shower now.
There is a lot of information on the history of sex and punishment in the ancient Middle East, and then in the UK, Europe, and the US. (Other countries/continents are barely mentioned except in the context of Western colonialism.)
Most of that information is horrifying. It's a litany of primarily white cis men abusing female bodies, black and brown bodies, non-cis people, children, queer people, poor people, basically if you're not a powerful white cis man, fuck you. Literally. Page after page of rape, endlessly approved and excused by the powers that be; page after page of obsessive Christian domineering over people's lives. It's really quite upsetting to read on this scale and there were parts I had to skim because of the grotesque cruelty and abuse on display, particularly relating to the horrific intersection of misogyny and racism in the US's disgusting history. The race element is massive throughout--there's a persistent theme of anti-Semitism in Europe's sex laws. White Christian patriarchy has its clammy, grasping hands all over the book.
The main takeaway is that anyone who thinks that sexual and reproductive autonomy is somehow an inalienable right needs a history lesson. What's going on in the US now is exactly what's been going on in the US since the Puritans landed: the effort to use sex, sexuality and gender to control and exploit everyone who isn't a rich white Christian man. We've had a handful of years in Western recorded history in which women had some stab at reproductive and bodily autonomy, rape has been occasionally punished, fucking children has come to seem not okay, and queer people have been allowed to get on with their lives: that is by no means a given. There is a straight line back from the current US abortion wars and UK TERF bullshit to a long history of social control thinly masked by claims of protecting women and preserving morality.
It's very depressing. My copy has a quote from the Sunday Times calling it "hugely entertaining", which I assume was written by a white cishet man, because while there are a few decent jokes, I cannot imagine anyone else finding this litany of abuse "entertaining". What the *fuck* is wrong with you, Mr Sunday Times Man.
I also have to observe that there is a lot of, frankly, creepy shit in here. The author really loves "take" as a sexual verb, particularly as a rape verb, which started to make my skin crawl early on. He's fond of words like tart and whore. He describes the women-led battle against the unspeakably abusive Contagious Diseases Act as "melodramatic" and the people fighting to raise the age of consent for children as "the morality lobby". And there are lengthy passages which appear to argue that Roman Polanski had a rough deal because at any other time in history, the fact that he screwed a fourteen-year-old child would have been perfectly acceptable, which...yes, the whole book is full of disgusting things that used to be acceptable but are currently illegal, what's your point?
Yeah. So. Lots of very useful information in here but I want a shower now.
August 31, 2013
In March 1320, eleven-year-old Joan Seler was playing outside her father's house in central London when she was grabbed by a passing French merchant. The assailant dragged her back to his place, where, according to trial testimony, he
To say nothing of the peace of eleven-year-old Joan Seler. She reported the rape to officials and her father straight away, and eight months of legal skirmishing followed. But the case was eventually thrown out on technicalities: she had filed suit after the forty-day time limit, and she got confused over what day of the week the assault had taken place. Whereupon, the French merchant countersued his victim and her family for conspiracy. ‘The record ends with Joan's father being arrested.’
So ends a fairly typical example of the ‘justice’ on show in Eric Berkowitz's tabloidy but fascinating history of how legal systems have tried to regulate sexual behaviour, which starts with the Code of Hammurabi and works its way chronologically through to the trials of Oscar Wilde.
Because the book is built around court cases, there are always winners and losers. The biggest losers were women, who got an almost universally shitty deal from every society ever from the start of recorded history up to within living memory. Women in ancient societies were owned by men, first their fathers and then their husbands – and if they didn't have a husband (let's say he died), then many societies would assign the woman a guardian to own her on behalf of the state. Rome's Oppian Law, for instance, prevented women from wearing expensive clothes, travelling in a carriage, or owning more than half an ounce of gold; when the Senate debated repealing it, Cato, like the early men's-rights activist he was, foresaw terrible consequences: ‘From the moment they become your equals, they will become your masters.’
Rape in this context, of course, was not really a sex crime but rather a crime against property. Women could lose out even with a guilty verdict – like in Assyria, where rapists were punished by proxy: their wives were given up to be raped in turn by the original victim's husband and father.
As always, the Middle Ages have the best stories. Europe's crazy mixture of Classical law-codes and Biblical morals led to a whole patchwork of sexual transgressions that were fitted into a baffling sliding scale of sin.
Which is just as well, because if I was a woman in the Middle Ages, I would have been in a state of homicidal fury 24/7.
Then again, in other kinds of sexual litigation, courts often turned to the expert testimony of what I can only describe as ‘forensic prostitutes’. In one mediaeval divorce case that centred on a man's supposed impotence, the court set a team of girls loose on the husband to test his physical reactions. Sure enough, one reported back that she ‘exposed her naked breasts, and…rubbed the penis and testicles of the said John…the whole time aforesaid the said penis was scarcely three inches long…remaining without any increase or decrease.’ Even more amazing is a case from Venice, where one Nicolò was accused of impotence and ‘arranged a public inspection by prostitutes to prove his virility’:
We're a long way from Rumpole of the Bailey.
Unfortunately, although the anecdotal value of Sex and Punishment is high, the book gets off to a poor start and it has several methodological and stylistic problems.
My main concern boils down to the fact that Eric Berkowitz is a lawyer and journalist, not a historian: the writing style is a shade too casual for my liking and too few of his facts are supported with footnotes. This is particularly annoying in the early chapters covering Ancient Greece and the Near East, where for example Herodotus is taken as a reliable source on temple prostitution – hmm – and where Berkowitz makes several unsupported statements that just seem like complete speculation: ‘Before the Biblical period, sex law had nothing to do with morality as we know it’; ‘It was not until about 9000 BC […] that the link between sexual intercourse and pregnancy was confirmed’ – how do you know?
His prose style goes for easy readability, but it too often just seems unserious. Describing Christianity as ‘a small, gay-bashing Near Eastern religion’, or Greek symposia as ‘whore-greased dinner parties’, is a mistake and it rapidly eroded my faith in the author. Similarly, while historians have learned to be cautious of drawing modern analogies, Berkowitz thinks nothing of making extremely clumsy comparisons such as the following:
Because in other respects Classical Greece and twentieth-century America are identical? It gets even worse a few pages later, when he summarises Pericles' appearance in court to defend a favourite courtesan, Aspasia, before suggesting: ‘Think of Bill Clinton's conduct…’
Overall it compares unfavorably with Faramerz Dabhoiwala's The Origins of Sex, which came out the same year, although the focus is very different. Luckily, things do start to improve fairly steadily as the reliability of Berkowitz's source material increases, and by the end he has made a good case that ‘Neither the law nor religion ever seems to have lasting changes on what people do in bed.’ Sexual practices remain the same; the only difference is whether society punishes you for them or not.
The things lawmakers have worried about have never been constant – adulterous women used to be the big thing, then homosexuality, now paedophilia – and they continue to shift. One ends the book with a renewed sense of how arbitrary our current laws are, especially in matters that already differ widely by region, such as the age of consent – 14 in Germany, 16 in Britain, 18 in California. However, with the possible exception of some recent activity in parts of the US, it does seem that Western legislation has been moving in the right direction – by which I mean away from protecting the ruling classes and towards protecting the most vulnerable.
A lot of this must be to do with changing psychological issues around sex – many of which still seem pretty obvious. ‘When lawmakers view sex as bad,’ Berkowitz observes, in what could be a one-line summary of the whole book, ‘they write bad sex laws.’
raised the clothes of the same Joan…to her navel, she being clothed in a blue coat and a shift of light cloth and feloniously…with both his hands separated the legs and thighs of this same Joan, and with his right hand took his male organ of such and such a length and size and put it into the secret parts of the same Joan, and bruised her watershed and laid her open so that she was bleeding, and ravished her maidenhead, against the peace of our lord the King.
To say nothing of the peace of eleven-year-old Joan Seler. She reported the rape to officials and her father straight away, and eight months of legal skirmishing followed. But the case was eventually thrown out on technicalities: she had filed suit after the forty-day time limit, and she got confused over what day of the week the assault had taken place. Whereupon, the French merchant countersued his victim and her family for conspiracy. ‘The record ends with Joan's father being arrested.’
So ends a fairly typical example of the ‘justice’ on show in Eric Berkowitz's tabloidy but fascinating history of how legal systems have tried to regulate sexual behaviour, which starts with the Code of Hammurabi and works its way chronologically through to the trials of Oscar Wilde.
Because the book is built around court cases, there are always winners and losers. The biggest losers were women, who got an almost universally shitty deal from every society ever from the start of recorded history up to within living memory. Women in ancient societies were owned by men, first their fathers and then their husbands – and if they didn't have a husband (let's say he died), then many societies would assign the woman a guardian to own her on behalf of the state. Rome's Oppian Law, for instance, prevented women from wearing expensive clothes, travelling in a carriage, or owning more than half an ounce of gold; when the Senate debated repealing it, Cato, like the early men's-rights activist he was, foresaw terrible consequences: ‘From the moment they become your equals, they will become your masters.’
Rape in this context, of course, was not really a sex crime but rather a crime against property. Women could lose out even with a guilty verdict – like in Assyria, where rapists were punished by proxy: their wives were given up to be raped in turn by the original victim's husband and father.
As always, the Middle Ages have the best stories. Europe's crazy mixture of Classical law-codes and Biblical morals led to a whole patchwork of sexual transgressions that were fitted into a baffling sliding scale of sin.
A man who had sex with a pig knew that he was being less offensive to God than he would be if he had anal intercourse with his wife, and women in some regions knew they could draw a longer period of penance for performing fellatio on a man than killing him outright.
Which is just as well, because if I was a woman in the Middle Ages, I would have been in a state of homicidal fury 24/7.
Then again, in other kinds of sexual litigation, courts often turned to the expert testimony of what I can only describe as ‘forensic prostitutes’. In one mediaeval divorce case that centred on a man's supposed impotence, the court set a team of girls loose on the husband to test his physical reactions. Sure enough, one reported back that she ‘exposed her naked breasts, and…rubbed the penis and testicles of the said John…the whole time aforesaid the said penis was scarcely three inches long…remaining without any increase or decrease.’ Even more amazing is a case from Venice, where one Nicolò was accused of impotence and ‘arranged a public inspection by prostitutes to prove his virility’:
He took a scribe, his boss, and a priest to a brothel, where he hired two women. Soon after he started in with one of the women, he called the priest over. The priest testified that Nicolò had placed the clergyman's hand on his erect penis, bragging: ‘Look here, I am a man, even though some say I cannot get it up.’ Nicolò then had intercourse with the prostitute on a bench while the witnesses watched, after which he smeared his ejaculate on the hands of the scribe.
We're a long way from Rumpole of the Bailey.
Unfortunately, although the anecdotal value of Sex and Punishment is high, the book gets off to a poor start and it has several methodological and stylistic problems.
My main concern boils down to the fact that Eric Berkowitz is a lawyer and journalist, not a historian: the writing style is a shade too casual for my liking and too few of his facts are supported with footnotes. This is particularly annoying in the early chapters covering Ancient Greece and the Near East, where for example Herodotus is taken as a reliable source on temple prostitution – hmm – and where Berkowitz makes several unsupported statements that just seem like complete speculation: ‘Before the Biblical period, sex law had nothing to do with morality as we know it’; ‘It was not until about 9000 BC […] that the link between sexual intercourse and pregnancy was confirmed’ – how do you know?
His prose style goes for easy readability, but it too often just seems unserious. Describing Christianity as ‘a small, gay-bashing Near Eastern religion’, or Greek symposia as ‘whore-greased dinner parties’, is a mistake and it rapidly eroded my faith in the author. Similarly, while historians have learned to be cautious of drawing modern analogies, Berkowitz thinks nothing of making extremely clumsy comparisons such as the following:
Far from barring homosexuality in the military, as the United States famously did in 1942, or embracing a ‘Don't Ask, Don't Tell’ policy as it did fifty-one years later, Greek societies saw no incompatibility between male-male love and military discipline.
Because in other respects Classical Greece and twentieth-century America are identical? It gets even worse a few pages later, when he summarises Pericles' appearance in court to defend a favourite courtesan, Aspasia, before suggesting: ‘Think of Bill Clinton's conduct…’
Overall it compares unfavorably with Faramerz Dabhoiwala's The Origins of Sex, which came out the same year, although the focus is very different. Luckily, things do start to improve fairly steadily as the reliability of Berkowitz's source material increases, and by the end he has made a good case that ‘Neither the law nor religion ever seems to have lasting changes on what people do in bed.’ Sexual practices remain the same; the only difference is whether society punishes you for them or not.
The things lawmakers have worried about have never been constant – adulterous women used to be the big thing, then homosexuality, now paedophilia – and they continue to shift. One ends the book with a renewed sense of how arbitrary our current laws are, especially in matters that already differ widely by region, such as the age of consent – 14 in Germany, 16 in Britain, 18 in California. However, with the possible exception of some recent activity in parts of the US, it does seem that Western legislation has been moving in the right direction – by which I mean away from protecting the ruling classes and towards protecting the most vulnerable.
A lot of this must be to do with changing psychological issues around sex – many of which still seem pretty obvious. ‘When lawmakers view sex as bad,’ Berkowitz observes, in what could be a one-line summary of the whole book, ‘they write bad sex laws.’
August 14, 2025
It pretty much all started with Adam and Eve and that damn apple from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Life was perfect until then, but humans had to go f*** things up by discovering---well, you know: SEX.
For millenia and since the dawn of time, sex has been a four-letter word, having been the cause of so much joy and misery. Mostly misery. That's why humans created laws.
No, seriously: the first recorded law (Sumerian, circa 2100 B.C.) was a law that stated that married women caught in an adulterous affair were to be killed. The male lover, by the way, received no punishment.
Eric Berkowitz's "Sex and Punishment" is simultaneously funny and disturbing, enlightening and entertaining, intellectual and raunchy. Mainly, it's a great read.
Berkowitz covers four thousand years of the socio-political history of humanity's attempt, through the law, to control our most basic human urges, in roughly 400 pages. He does a pretty damn good job of it, too. Well-researched and incorporating anecdotes, legal records, religious texts from almost every culture, news articles, epic poems, dirty limericks, personal ads, and Victorian-era porn magazines (yes, there really were porn magazines in the Victorian era---and they made Hustler read like the Saturday Evening Post...), "Sex and Punishment" is probably one of the most enjoyable and readable sociology textbooks I've ever read.
It's all the more poignant in today's political climate with women's reproductive rights and marriage equality being such hot-button issues. According to Berkowitz, nothing's really changed in four thousand years. We're still bickering about the same old things: incest, rape, adultery, pedophelia, bestiality, sodomy, homosexuality, pornography... And, as Berkowitz demonstrates, the laws we create and enforce are pretty much arbitrary. We pretend that it's all in the name of morality, but, in truth, our laws are there for one reason: money.
Economics lurks behind nearly every sex law that has ever been written, from the Old Testament's numerous laws attempting to establish an economic system to control the distribution and maintenance of man's property (namely, women) to establishing ways to justify the sexual torture and abuse of human property in the form of black slaves during the early-American colonial period.
Berkowitz tackles some fascinating areas of sexual morality and poses some interesting questions. They are age-old questions, really, and ones that we still can't adequately answer, the primary one being: who sets the moral standards by which we are supposed to live: God or Man?
Of course, Berkowitz doesn't have an answer to this one. He's having way too much fun asking the questions.
For millenia and since the dawn of time, sex has been a four-letter word, having been the cause of so much joy and misery. Mostly misery. That's why humans created laws.
No, seriously: the first recorded law (Sumerian, circa 2100 B.C.) was a law that stated that married women caught in an adulterous affair were to be killed. The male lover, by the way, received no punishment.
Eric Berkowitz's "Sex and Punishment" is simultaneously funny and disturbing, enlightening and entertaining, intellectual and raunchy. Mainly, it's a great read.
Berkowitz covers four thousand years of the socio-political history of humanity's attempt, through the law, to control our most basic human urges, in roughly 400 pages. He does a pretty damn good job of it, too. Well-researched and incorporating anecdotes, legal records, religious texts from almost every culture, news articles, epic poems, dirty limericks, personal ads, and Victorian-era porn magazines (yes, there really were porn magazines in the Victorian era---and they made Hustler read like the Saturday Evening Post...), "Sex and Punishment" is probably one of the most enjoyable and readable sociology textbooks I've ever read.
It's all the more poignant in today's political climate with women's reproductive rights and marriage equality being such hot-button issues. According to Berkowitz, nothing's really changed in four thousand years. We're still bickering about the same old things: incest, rape, adultery, pedophelia, bestiality, sodomy, homosexuality, pornography... And, as Berkowitz demonstrates, the laws we create and enforce are pretty much arbitrary. We pretend that it's all in the name of morality, but, in truth, our laws are there for one reason: money.
Economics lurks behind nearly every sex law that has ever been written, from the Old Testament's numerous laws attempting to establish an economic system to control the distribution and maintenance of man's property (namely, women) to establishing ways to justify the sexual torture and abuse of human property in the form of black slaves during the early-American colonial period.
Berkowitz tackles some fascinating areas of sexual morality and poses some interesting questions. They are age-old questions, really, and ones that we still can't adequately answer, the primary one being: who sets the moral standards by which we are supposed to live: God or Man?
Of course, Berkowitz doesn't have an answer to this one. He's having way too much fun asking the questions.
October 7, 2015
I'll admit it...this book had me in stitches. Just imagining a cuckolded husband publicly and legally pounding scorpion fish and radishes up the rectum of his wife's paramour had me practically in tears. I couldn't help but picture the people sitting around the boardroom table drawing up a list of items that could be legally breech-loaded into an adulterer. Radishes? Please spare me! And the fellow who confessed to having carnal knowledge of a cow, a goat, and a...deer!?!! He should take his show on the road...people would pay good money to watch him chase that deer down.
I wish I had read this book when I was still in the military; I could have teased my infantry buddies with this gem from page 304, which gives an insight to the infantry selection process:
When the Prussian king Frederick the Great was told that one of his knights had sodomized a mare, the monarch's reaction was more bemused than horrified: "That fellow is a pig; he must be placed in the infantry."
After getting through about half of the book, it dawned on me that there was some pretty serious stuff in here. A lot of lives have been ruined (or ended) because some people had some pretty firm ideas about what other people should be allowed to do with their private parts. Mr Berkowitz has done a great job of research in order to explain how the church and the state have combined to oppress lovers of every stripe right up to the present day.
I would have liked to have seen Berkowitz delve a bit more into issues regarding age of consent and polygamy and polyandry, but I suppose he figured the book was thick enough already. The chapters seemed rushed toward the end of the book. Essentially, he reports the salient points of his research without taking the pulpit to expound on his own views.
This is a great read, very entertaining. You will probably end up as I did, asking yourself why we do these things...why do we care what anyone else does with his or her genitalia, so long as the recipient of the sexual attention is willing and the activity is not public? Definitely a book to make you think about our attitudes and prejudices toward sex.
I wish I had read this book when I was still in the military; I could have teased my infantry buddies with this gem from page 304, which gives an insight to the infantry selection process:
When the Prussian king Frederick the Great was told that one of his knights had sodomized a mare, the monarch's reaction was more bemused than horrified: "That fellow is a pig; he must be placed in the infantry."
After getting through about half of the book, it dawned on me that there was some pretty serious stuff in here. A lot of lives have been ruined (or ended) because some people had some pretty firm ideas about what other people should be allowed to do with their private parts. Mr Berkowitz has done a great job of research in order to explain how the church and the state have combined to oppress lovers of every stripe right up to the present day.
I would have liked to have seen Berkowitz delve a bit more into issues regarding age of consent and polygamy and polyandry, but I suppose he figured the book was thick enough already. The chapters seemed rushed toward the end of the book. Essentially, he reports the salient points of his research without taking the pulpit to expound on his own views.
This is a great read, very entertaining. You will probably end up as I did, asking yourself why we do these things...why do we care what anyone else does with his or her genitalia, so long as the recipient of the sexual attention is willing and the activity is not public? Definitely a book to make you think about our attitudes and prejudices toward sex.
September 5, 2012
It's sort of ironic that there are three naked women on the cover when pretty much all of the book's material is about historical white-male sexual insecurities and the laws that arose to keep them "on top." A giant phallus would probably have been more a propos but, ironic again, that likely would not have gone over well given current obscenity sensibilities.
Well worth the read, although you can tell by the material's treatment that this was definitely written by a lawyer. Other books go over similar ideas but the law perspective is unique. From a female point of view, there were times when the book could be very depressing: Because of the nature of the subject, women either didn't factor in at all or only to receive the short end of the stick. It's sad that things like passive homosexuality and buggering have been historically considered more punishable by law than, say, rape. Or that women dressing as men or taking the sexual initiative could lead to jail time or a death sentence. Berkowitz does say that he stopped his book well before the modern era to avoid commenting on modern sex/law issues, but that doesn't stop him from (gleefully?) pointing out parallels between our so-called enlightened approaches to sex law and what was considered acceptable well before our modern age. Good food for thought.
One draw back is that Berkowitz had to limit himself to civilisations that not only presaged the modern Western world but also left behind a substantial legal record. I'd be curious to know how other civilisations, either non-Western or those with less of a written tradition, dealt with sexual issues and how the approaches compared. (Honestly, I just want to be reassured that somewhere, at some point in history, women weren't getting such a raw deal).
Well worth the read, although you can tell by the material's treatment that this was definitely written by a lawyer. Other books go over similar ideas but the law perspective is unique. From a female point of view, there were times when the book could be very depressing: Because of the nature of the subject, women either didn't factor in at all or only to receive the short end of the stick. It's sad that things like passive homosexuality and buggering have been historically considered more punishable by law than, say, rape. Or that women dressing as men or taking the sexual initiative could lead to jail time or a death sentence. Berkowitz does say that he stopped his book well before the modern era to avoid commenting on modern sex/law issues, but that doesn't stop him from (gleefully?) pointing out parallels between our so-called enlightened approaches to sex law and what was considered acceptable well before our modern age. Good food for thought.
One draw back is that Berkowitz had to limit himself to civilisations that not only presaged the modern Western world but also left behind a substantial legal record. I'd be curious to know how other civilisations, either non-Western or those with less of a written tradition, dealt with sexual issues and how the approaches compared. (Honestly, I just want to be reassured that somewhere, at some point in history, women weren't getting such a raw deal).
November 23, 2014
At times all the laws and prosecution could get a little repetitive, but rather than being a fault of the author it more serves to show the relentless persecution faced by homosexuals, women & pretty much everyone else over countless centuries. Whilst some of the sex-based crimes or efforts to curtail them were sometimes verging on the rediculous, far more were shocking for the ferocity with which they were punished- things that would barely raise an eyebrow today being dealt with by the death penalty etc. A very interesting and engaging read.
September 27, 2013
This was a dnf for me at page 68. I don't like the tone of the writing, and there's no analysis of the content, but I'm already familiar with the content itself, so there feels like no reason to continue.
Maybe a good book for someone just out of high school, who has no idea that sexual mores were different in other eras.
Maybe a good book for someone just out of high school, who has no idea that sexual mores were different in other eras.
May 26, 2013
For those who need to know exactly what the mores of a particular time was, this is a good source book.
It also confirms my long-held opinion that it was rarely a good time to be female.
It also confirms my long-held opinion that it was rarely a good time to be female.
December 3, 2023
Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire by Eric Berkowitz
“Sex and Punishment” is the fascinating four-thousand year history of mainly western society’s attempt to control sexuality through the law. This eye-opening book covers a wide spectrum of societal sexual manifestations up until the end of the 19th century. Writer, lawyer and journalist, Eric Berkowitz takes the reader on a voyeuristic ride into humankind’s obsession to control sex via the law. With countless in-depth cases the author shows what has happened to those who engage in sexual behavior that runs contrary to prevailing societal attitudes. This at times mesmerizing 456-page book is composed of the following eight chapters: 1. Channeling the Urge: The First Sex Laws, 2. Honor Among (Mostly) Men: Cases from Ancient Greece, 3. Imperial Bedrooms: Sex and the State of Ancient Rome, 4. The Middle Ages: A Crowd Condemned, 5. Groping Toward Modernity: The Early Modern Period, 1500 – 1700, 6. The New World of Sexual Opportunity, 7. The Eighteenth Century: Revelation and Revolution and 8. The Nineteenth Century: Human Nature on Trial.
Positives:
1. A well researched book that provides many riveting historical examples.
2. As fascinating a topic as you will find: sex and society’s quest to legislate it.
3. At the heart of this book, Berkowitz shows quite compellingly with a luxury of details what happens to those who engage in sexual behavior that runs contrary to prevailing societal attitudes. “At any given point in time, some forms of sex and sexuality have been encouraged while others have been punished without mercy. Jump forward or backward a century or two, or cross a border, and the harmless fun of one society becomes the gravest crime of another.”
4. The book covers from the early Sumerian kingdom of Ur-Namma (2100 BC) to the trial of Oscar Wilde (1895). Roughly a period of four-thousand years.
5. The origination of Western sex law. What they represent.
6. The book is full and I mean full of eye-opening facts. I guarantee that after reading this book you will not lack for interesting topics. “It was not until about 9000 BC that the link between sexual intercourse and pregnancy was confirmed.”
7. I’m astounded and you will be too at what was considered scientifically acceptable as recent as late 19th century.
8. This book covers a wide variety of sexual manifestations including uncomfortable sexual taboos. I’m flabbergasted at some of the accounts!
9. The author provides many examples that show the abhorrent treatment of women throughout history and cultures. “The strength of Rome would depend on keeping women in line and preventing the corrupting influence of femininity in men.”
10. The greatest sex crimes. The evil of slavery, rape…
11. Homosexuality in perspective, before morality and how it evolved over time and cultures.
12. Sexual prohibitions. A lot of this book covers sexual prohibitions and what events transpired to arouse legislation. Prostitution.
13. The impact of Judaism and Christianity on society with regards to sex and punishment. Protestant reformation.
14. The book covers the penalties associated with sexual behavior. Some of it is guaranteed to shock and provoke the reader. “The penitentials were the church’s field guides for ranking good and bad sexual behavior.” Sexual repression. Witchcraft.
15. The battlefield of obscenity. Society’s obsession. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.
16. The fruits of overseas conquest.
17. The issue of race in the United States. Fascinating stuff.
18. The ravages of self-abuse. Society’s quest to control private pleasures.
19. Censorship of books, written materials. The impact of the word. The punishments.
20. The issue of age of consent. The laws that raised the age of consent. Global influence.
21. Sterilization. An awful abhorrent practice…its history.
22. Links worked fine. A notes and bibliography section.
Negatives:
1. Some of the stories depicting the more outlandish sexual acts will repulse the average reader.
2. Stories involving harsh punishments of people in particular women and children is uncomfortable.
3. The book lacks overall cohesion. It’s not always a smooth transition from one story to another and at times repetitive.
4. Charts would have added value. Charts that summarized the sexual behaviors by culture and the laws created to control and/or punish them would have added value to the book.
5. I think the author originally wanted to make a book that covered until current times but decided to stop at the Oscar Wilde trial (1895). Hopefully a part two is in the works.
6. At over 400 pages the book does require an investment of your time.
In summary, this is an entertaining, enlightening and eye-opening book. The author succeeds in providing the reader with the history of Western civilization from the perspective of law and libido. It is full of amusing and at times even shocking stories that will leave you dumbfounded. Some of the acts depicted in the book can be repulsive and will make some readers very uncomfortable. That all being said, if you want to learn about sexual behavior and society’s quest to legislate it this book certainly succeeds. I recommend it!
Further recommendations: “Bisexuality in the Ancient World” by Eva Cantarella, “Half the Sky: Turning Oppressions into Opportunity for Women Worldwide” by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn, “Not for Sale” by David Batstone, “Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves” by Sarah B. Pomeroy, “Three Cups of Tea” by Greg Mortenson “Misogyny” by Jack Holland, “Society without God” by Phil Zuckerman, “The Penguin and the Leviathan” by Yochai Benkler, “Infidel” by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, “Cruel Creeds, Virtuous Violence” by Jack David Eller, “Moral Combat” by Sikivu Hutchinson, and “Slavery As Moral Problem” by Jennifer Glancy.
“Sex and Punishment” is the fascinating four-thousand year history of mainly western society’s attempt to control sexuality through the law. This eye-opening book covers a wide spectrum of societal sexual manifestations up until the end of the 19th century. Writer, lawyer and journalist, Eric Berkowitz takes the reader on a voyeuristic ride into humankind’s obsession to control sex via the law. With countless in-depth cases the author shows what has happened to those who engage in sexual behavior that runs contrary to prevailing societal attitudes. This at times mesmerizing 456-page book is composed of the following eight chapters: 1. Channeling the Urge: The First Sex Laws, 2. Honor Among (Mostly) Men: Cases from Ancient Greece, 3. Imperial Bedrooms: Sex and the State of Ancient Rome, 4. The Middle Ages: A Crowd Condemned, 5. Groping Toward Modernity: The Early Modern Period, 1500 – 1700, 6. The New World of Sexual Opportunity, 7. The Eighteenth Century: Revelation and Revolution and 8. The Nineteenth Century: Human Nature on Trial.
Positives:
1. A well researched book that provides many riveting historical examples.
2. As fascinating a topic as you will find: sex and society’s quest to legislate it.
3. At the heart of this book, Berkowitz shows quite compellingly with a luxury of details what happens to those who engage in sexual behavior that runs contrary to prevailing societal attitudes. “At any given point in time, some forms of sex and sexuality have been encouraged while others have been punished without mercy. Jump forward or backward a century or two, or cross a border, and the harmless fun of one society becomes the gravest crime of another.”
4. The book covers from the early Sumerian kingdom of Ur-Namma (2100 BC) to the trial of Oscar Wilde (1895). Roughly a period of four-thousand years.
5. The origination of Western sex law. What they represent.
6. The book is full and I mean full of eye-opening facts. I guarantee that after reading this book you will not lack for interesting topics. “It was not until about 9000 BC that the link between sexual intercourse and pregnancy was confirmed.”
7. I’m astounded and you will be too at what was considered scientifically acceptable as recent as late 19th century.
8. This book covers a wide variety of sexual manifestations including uncomfortable sexual taboos. I’m flabbergasted at some of the accounts!
9. The author provides many examples that show the abhorrent treatment of women throughout history and cultures. “The strength of Rome would depend on keeping women in line and preventing the corrupting influence of femininity in men.”
10. The greatest sex crimes. The evil of slavery, rape…
11. Homosexuality in perspective, before morality and how it evolved over time and cultures.
12. Sexual prohibitions. A lot of this book covers sexual prohibitions and what events transpired to arouse legislation. Prostitution.
13. The impact of Judaism and Christianity on society with regards to sex and punishment. Protestant reformation.
14. The book covers the penalties associated with sexual behavior. Some of it is guaranteed to shock and provoke the reader. “The penitentials were the church’s field guides for ranking good and bad sexual behavior.” Sexual repression. Witchcraft.
15. The battlefield of obscenity. Society’s obsession. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.
16. The fruits of overseas conquest.
17. The issue of race in the United States. Fascinating stuff.
18. The ravages of self-abuse. Society’s quest to control private pleasures.
19. Censorship of books, written materials. The impact of the word. The punishments.
20. The issue of age of consent. The laws that raised the age of consent. Global influence.
21. Sterilization. An awful abhorrent practice…its history.
22. Links worked fine. A notes and bibliography section.
Negatives:
1. Some of the stories depicting the more outlandish sexual acts will repulse the average reader.
2. Stories involving harsh punishments of people in particular women and children is uncomfortable.
3. The book lacks overall cohesion. It’s not always a smooth transition from one story to another and at times repetitive.
4. Charts would have added value. Charts that summarized the sexual behaviors by culture and the laws created to control and/or punish them would have added value to the book.
5. I think the author originally wanted to make a book that covered until current times but decided to stop at the Oscar Wilde trial (1895). Hopefully a part two is in the works.
6. At over 400 pages the book does require an investment of your time.
In summary, this is an entertaining, enlightening and eye-opening book. The author succeeds in providing the reader with the history of Western civilization from the perspective of law and libido. It is full of amusing and at times even shocking stories that will leave you dumbfounded. Some of the acts depicted in the book can be repulsive and will make some readers very uncomfortable. That all being said, if you want to learn about sexual behavior and society’s quest to legislate it this book certainly succeeds. I recommend it!
Further recommendations: “Bisexuality in the Ancient World” by Eva Cantarella, “Half the Sky: Turning Oppressions into Opportunity for Women Worldwide” by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn, “Not for Sale” by David Batstone, “Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves” by Sarah B. Pomeroy, “Three Cups of Tea” by Greg Mortenson “Misogyny” by Jack Holland, “Society without God” by Phil Zuckerman, “The Penguin and the Leviathan” by Yochai Benkler, “Infidel” by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, “Cruel Creeds, Virtuous Violence” by Jack David Eller, “Moral Combat” by Sikivu Hutchinson, and “Slavery As Moral Problem” by Jennifer Glancy.
June 11, 2012
This book traces the ways in which society has judged and controlled sexual behaviour, beginning over four thousand years ago in ancient Egypt and closing with Oscar Wilde's trial in 1895. As the author himself states in his opening, to attempt to investigate the twentieth and twenty-first centuries would have required another book.
It's a fascinating book, looking at changing attitudes and responses towards all manner of sexual behaviour - masturbation, necrophilia, adultery, abortion, prostitution, sadomasochism, homosexuality. You name it, someone somewhere has done it, and someone else has tried to forbid it. It looks at ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, before moving to focus primarily on Western attitudes and legal attempts to control sexual behaviour.
Some parts were incredibly eye-opening to say the least (the punishments in Ancient Egypt involving rape by donkeys, to say the least), and other parts made me laugh out loud: a Catholic priest's advice on resisting 'spontaneous orgasms' - pretty much lie down, think of God and hope it goes away!
My one criticism is that it focuses too much on just a small handful of countries. Once we've most past ancient history there is no more focus on Egypt, Persia or the Middle East, and the attitudes towards sex there are just as interesting. It focuses very heavily on Britain, America, France and Germany, pretty much to the exclusion of every other country on earth. I can understand that a book focusing on sex worldwide would be massive in scope and size, but even so, some more mentions of the last two thousand years in Egypt or Iraq or Russia or Africa would have been nice.
It's a fascinating book, looking at changing attitudes and responses towards all manner of sexual behaviour - masturbation, necrophilia, adultery, abortion, prostitution, sadomasochism, homosexuality. You name it, someone somewhere has done it, and someone else has tried to forbid it. It looks at ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, before moving to focus primarily on Western attitudes and legal attempts to control sexual behaviour.
Some parts were incredibly eye-opening to say the least (the punishments in Ancient Egypt involving rape by donkeys, to say the least), and other parts made me laugh out loud: a Catholic priest's advice on resisting 'spontaneous orgasms' - pretty much lie down, think of God and hope it goes away!
My one criticism is that it focuses too much on just a small handful of countries. Once we've most past ancient history there is no more focus on Egypt, Persia or the Middle East, and the attitudes towards sex there are just as interesting. It focuses very heavily on Britain, America, France and Germany, pretty much to the exclusion of every other country on earth. I can understand that a book focusing on sex worldwide would be massive in scope and size, but even so, some more mentions of the last two thousand years in Egypt or Iraq or Russia or Africa would have been nice.
Read
October 2, 2012A history of sex laws from the pre-Hammurabi legal codes of the Middle East to the Wilde trial, written by a lawyer with ample experience in the field. As well as being on the side of the angels (or rather, not - religion is, inevitably, one of the chief villains here) he's also a writer with style and verve. There are moments of repetition, but I suspect they mainly serve to make individual segments worth reading even for students or specialists who aren't going to attempt the whole book. Though such readers are missing out - the ancient segments especially are at once fabulous and horrifying in their sheer strangeness. Whilst also, of course, always serving to remind us how odd our own preoccupations will one day seem.
July 17, 2013
Interesting book. As a law student I appreciated the legal research. I could have given it 4 stars but the way the author tries soooooo hard to make us sympathize with Polanski just made me mad as hell. He keeps bringing up the case over and over again and EVERY TIME trying to justify Polanski's conduct. No thanks.
November 19, 2015
I really liked the author's writing style. It made the law parts easy to understand and infused the sex parts (pun) with humor. The book tackles how sex, marriage and depictions of sex were regulated from ancient times to Oscar Wilde's trial.
October 1, 2022
Nope. The author starts strong by arguing that universities having rules against students having sex with unconscious people (aka rape) is "prudish," that the sexual history of a woman could exonerate her rapist, and that that a woman's defense of being fearful for her life in not reporting a murder is a "weak female" defense. All within the first few pages.
I thought maybe i could skim through the rest of the book and gleam some sort of information. But then he boldly made the claim that humans didn't connect sex with babies until 9000 BC without providing one single inch of any sort of explanation or citation to back it up or show how he arrived at that conclusion. This in the same sentence where he claimed H. sapiens first emerged 100,000 years AFTER we actually evolved into existence. He could have spent 5 extra seconds googling that. Perhaps he didn't mean H. sapiens in general, but specifically sapiens as a modern species, but he's wrong with that timeframe as well. It's like he just made up a time from something he heard one time in college.
So there's nothing worth reading here. The book is skewed to boldly assume men have a right to our bodies, as long as they don't beat us, and whatever information he presents that might have any historical value is suspect at best and blatantly incorrect at worse.
Don't bother. This book is a waste of your time. If you just are interested in learning more about toxic masculinity and the confidence of a mediocre cishet white guy, you can find plenty of that on social media.
I thought maybe i could skim through the rest of the book and gleam some sort of information. But then he boldly made the claim that humans didn't connect sex with babies until 9000 BC without providing one single inch of any sort of explanation or citation to back it up or show how he arrived at that conclusion. This in the same sentence where he claimed H. sapiens first emerged 100,000 years AFTER we actually evolved into existence. He could have spent 5 extra seconds googling that. Perhaps he didn't mean H. sapiens in general, but specifically sapiens as a modern species, but he's wrong with that timeframe as well. It's like he just made up a time from something he heard one time in college.
So there's nothing worth reading here. The book is skewed to boldly assume men have a right to our bodies, as long as they don't beat us, and whatever information he presents that might have any historical value is suspect at best and blatantly incorrect at worse.
Don't bother. This book is a waste of your time. If you just are interested in learning more about toxic masculinity and the confidence of a mediocre cishet white guy, you can find plenty of that on social media.
June 19, 2024
Bu kitabı nerdeyse bir ay kadar bir sürede okumuşum, bu sabah bitirdim. Uzun zamandır okuma listemdeydi ama
cerencsungur'un videosunu izleyince okumaya baslamıştım.
Araya başka kitaplar alınca normalden uzun sürdü bitirmem.
Kitap ile söyleyebileceğim ilk şey, ismi aslında kitabın içeriğini tam da yansıtmıyor demek olur. Sanırım kitabım konusu hakkınds cinsel suçlar içim hukuk tarihi diyebilirim rahatlıkla.
Tabiki ilk çağlardan günümüze neler yasanmış o da bahsediliyor ama asıl odak noktası türlü kültürlerde neler
yasak neler tolere edilebilir olmuş. Ve aslında hayat her zaman olduğu gibi kadınlar, çocuklar, azınlıklar, zenciler, hayvanlar yani kısacası beyaz erkekler dışındakiler için hep zor olmuş.
cerencsungur'un videosunu izleyince okumaya baslamıştım.
Araya başka kitaplar alınca normalden uzun sürdü bitirmem.
Kitap ile söyleyebileceğim ilk şey, ismi aslında kitabın içeriğini tam da yansıtmıyor demek olur. Sanırım kitabım konusu hakkınds cinsel suçlar içim hukuk tarihi diyebilirim rahatlıkla.
Tabiki ilk çağlardan günümüze neler yasanmış o da bahsediliyor ama asıl odak noktası türlü kültürlerde neler
yasak neler tolere edilebilir olmuş. Ve aslında hayat her zaman olduğu gibi kadınlar, çocuklar, azınlıklar, zenciler, hayvanlar yani kısacası beyaz erkekler dışındakiler için hep zor olmuş.
January 21, 2020
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.
I think Sex and Punishment is one of my favourite non-fiction books of all time. Informative, witty, amusing, well written and educational; it’s everything I want in a history book. Berkowitz is definitely a lawyer, as you can see his love for the law and its history in every chapter – unfortunately this made the first few chapters surrounding Ancient Greece and Rome a slight bit tedious, as Berkowitz focused almost solely on the laws surrounding sexuality and it made for slightly dry reading. Moving on from Ancient Greece and Rome, however, the book became more enjoyable, funny and extremely entertaining.
I’d recommend this book to any non-fiction, and/or history lover. I already cannot wait to reread it in a few years.
5 / 5
I think Sex and Punishment is one of my favourite non-fiction books of all time. Informative, witty, amusing, well written and educational; it’s everything I want in a history book. Berkowitz is definitely a lawyer, as you can see his love for the law and its history in every chapter – unfortunately this made the first few chapters surrounding Ancient Greece and Rome a slight bit tedious, as Berkowitz focused almost solely on the laws surrounding sexuality and it made for slightly dry reading. Moving on from Ancient Greece and Rome, however, the book became more enjoyable, funny and extremely entertaining.
I’d recommend this book to any non-fiction, and/or history lover. I already cannot wait to reread it in a few years.
5 / 5
November 25, 2015
Interesting look at Sex and the control of it over the years. Starts with ancient history and moves to the late 19th early 20th century. It concentrates on western culture and the effect Christianity had on pre-existing European culture after looking at Classical Greek and Roman society. A mess was made of various societies by the attempt to control people and their reactions to people they are attracted to.
Sex and sexuality is complicated and we still haven't resolved a lot of our issues with it but this is an interesting romp through 4000 years of judging desire.
Sex and sexuality is complicated and we still haven't resolved a lot of our issues with it but this is an interesting romp through 4000 years of judging desire.
May 22, 2012
Very good, though you want to make sure you've assessed the crowd before showing off your newly gained trivia. It's not for work meetings or brunch with mom.
August 20, 2023
Kitap bazi kisimlarda aşırı uzamış, daha fazla ornek vermek konuyu daha iyi açıklamak anlamina gelmiyor her zaman.
Ama yine de epey iyi bir toplama olmus içerdiği başlıklar açısından.
Yorumlarda, hic yorum içermiyor analiz yok, yazilmis , katiliyorum.
Bazi sorularin cevabi yok, kim ihbar ediyor bu kadar mahrem olaylari:)) ey kilise ey devlet baska isin gucun yok mu:))
Hayatin ta kendisi baslangici merkezi bir konunun bu kadar gundem olmasina sasmamali belki de.
Ama yine de epey iyi bir toplama olmus içerdiği başlıklar açısından.
Yorumlarda, hic yorum içermiyor analiz yok, yazilmis , katiliyorum.
Bazi sorularin cevabi yok, kim ihbar ediyor bu kadar mahrem olaylari:)) ey kilise ey devlet baska isin gucun yok mu:))
Hayatin ta kendisi baslangici merkezi bir konunun bu kadar gundem olmasina sasmamali belki de.
May 14, 2020
Very informative. A range of information is covered beginning in ancient times and ending in the early 20th century. The ending was very abrupt and completely lacking a conclusion. I really felt the book suffered when the author chose not to end the book with a chapter where he summed up the book and briefly covered sex and sexual law regarding current affairs. The main focus of the book was heterosexual law, policy, social views, and general lifestyle. Homosexuality was mentioned frequently especially during the chapters regarding ancient times but as the book progressed the subject came up less and less. I would suggest another book if that is the readers main interest. There is barely any information regarding polygamy which I would have enjoyed. I chuckled quite a bit because some of the things people did and said was absolutely ridiculous! Monty Python would of had a field day with this book!
April 20, 2017
I picked this book up for the Kindle while it was on offer, and quite frankly I’m pleased I didn’t pay a lot for it. I thought it would be an entertaining and informative read, and while I’ll grant that it was informative (for the most part), it’s certainly not my idea of entertainment. This is basically over 350 pages of misogyny, homophobia, racism, and torture, and it doesn’t matter how informative a book is, that amount of depressive reading will grind you down in the end. I did finish it, out of sheer bloodymindedness, but I breathed a sigh of relief when I got to the last page.
December 13, 2015
Intriguing and disturbing in equal measure - a very interesting read.
February 13, 2021
علاقات الدم والجنس
.
.
بالنسبة للقديس أوغسطينوس ، كانت المطالب الملحة للأعضاء التناسلية هي لعنة الله على البشرية بسبب خطايا آدم وحواء. كل فعل وكل فكرة جنسية كانت عقوبة جديدة لأخطاء الرجل والمرأة الأولين. عند الحديث عن نفس الموضوع من منظور مختلف ، أدرك أفلاطون أيضًا شغف البشرية الشديد بالجنس ، قائلاً في حواره الأخير ، القوانين ، إنه "يؤثر على أرواح الرجال الذين يعانون من الهيجان الأكثر احتدامًا - الرغبة في زرع النسل بأقصى درجات العنف ".
بالنسبة لأفلاطون ، كان الدافع الجنسي جهدًا مجنونًا في العقل الباطن لإعادة توحيد الطبيعة البشرية المتصدعة.
لم يميز الأشخاص الأوائل الرغبة الجنسية في هذه الكلمات ، لكنهم شعروا بها بالتأكيد. لقد أدركوا بالتأكيد أن شيئًا ما يجب القيام به للسيطرة على "الجنون" إذا كان الناس سيعيشون معًا في مجموعات كبيرة. حتى يتم ترويض الدافع الجنسي وإخضاعه للاحتياجات المشتركة ، ستكون الحياة المتحضرة مستحيلة!!
بالنسبة للرجال ، كان ذلك يعني محاولة التصالح مع لغز الأنثى. في المجتمعات البدائية ، يُفترض أن الرجال ينظرون إلى النساء بنفس الرعب الذي شعروا به تجاه العالم الطبيعي. كانت البشرية المبكرة في حالة حرب دائمة مع الطبيعة ، كانت قوى الطبيعة مميتة وغير مفهومة. كان جوهر العالم الطبيعي هو رحم الأنثى ، ومنه كانت حياة الإنسان حديث الولادة تتساقط في سيل من الدماء والصراخ.
لم يتم تأكيد العلاقة بين الجماع والحمل إلا في حوالي 9000 قبل الميلاد (ما يقرب من مائة وخمسة وثمانين ألف سنة بعد ظهور الإنسان العاقل ، أو الإنسان الحديث). حتى ذلك الحين ، لم يعرف البشر العلاقة بين الجنس والولادة ، وعلى أي حال ، أمضت النساء جزءًا كبيرًا من حياتهن القصيرة إما حوامل أو مرضعات.
يبدو أن الأطفال يظهرون في الرحم فجأة!! . الأمر الأكثر غرابة وربما المرعب هو الدم الذي يتدفق بشكل دوري من أجساد النساء. كان الدم هو الحياة بحد ذاته ، فقدانه سحري وخطير ، ومع ذلك تنزف النساء بحرية لأيام دون إصابة ، ولا أحد يعرف السبب. الحقيقة الواضحة هي أن دم الحيض يأتي من النساء فقط ، ومن نفس المكان الذي بدأت فيه حياة الإنسان.
كان من الممكن أن تكون المحظورات الجنسية الأولى قد اتخذت شكل المحرمات من العصر الحجري القديم ضد الجماع مع النساء خلال فتراتهن الشهرية. (لا تزال مثل هذه القواعد موجودة في العديد من الثقافات ، وتستند إلى الطبيعة "غير النظيفة" المفترضة للحيض.) كان من الممكن أن يكون لهذه المحظورات أسس أعمق بكثير من مجرد النظافة ، ولكن ربما كان الظهور المفاجئ لدماء الحيض يذكّر الرجال بأنه على الرغم من تفوقهم الجسدي (القوة) ، لا يمكنهم توليد الحياة البشرية بمفردهم. ربما كان دم الحيض يعتبر علامة على خجل المرأة أو حتى عقمها ، حيث لا تنزف المرأة إلا عندما لا تكون حاملاً أو مرضعة. على الأرجح ، كان رفض النساء أثناء تدفق دمائهن خطوة احترازية ، وهي طريقة لتهدئة الوجود الإلهي الذي يشعر به الرجال عند مواجهة المجهول.
من خلال منع ممارسة الجنس في أوقات محددة من الشهر ، تمكنت المجتمعات البدائية من فرض النظام على فوضى الجنس والتكاثر. مع مرور الوقت ، غالبًا ما تطور خوف الرجال من النساء إلى عداء صريح ، مما أدى إلى اعتبار النساء في فترة الحيض بمثابة كائنات خطرة وقذرة. تم تضخيم الاعتقاد في القرون اللاحقة ، في مختلف الثقافات. بالنسبة إلى الهندوس القدماء ، كان الحيض لعبة محصلتها صفر: كان يُعتقد أن ممارسة الجنس مع النساء خلال فتراتهن يستنزف "قوة وحيوية" الرجال ، بينما يُعتقد أن تجنب العلاقات الجنسية مع النساء في فترة الحيض يضيف إلى حكمة الرجال وحيويتهم. في بابل ، كان كل شيء تلمسه المرأة خلال فترة دورتها ، من الأثاث إلى الناس ، يعتبر ملوثًا ، وبالنسبة للآشوريين اللاحقين كانت كلمة "الحيض" مرادفة لكلمة "لا يمكن الوصول إليها".
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Eric Berkowitz
Sex and punishment
Translated By #Maher_Razouk
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بالنسبة للقديس أوغسطينوس ، كانت المطالب الملحة للأعضاء التناسلية هي لعنة الله على البشرية بسبب خطايا آدم وحواء. كل فعل وكل فكرة جنسية كانت عقوبة جديدة لأخطاء الرجل والمرأة الأولين. عند الحديث عن نفس الموضوع من منظور مختلف ، أدرك أفلاطون أيضًا شغف البشرية الشديد بالجنس ، قائلاً في حواره الأخير ، القوانين ، إنه "يؤثر على أرواح الرجال الذين يعانون من الهيجان الأكثر احتدامًا - الرغبة في زرع النسل بأقصى درجات العنف ".
بالنسبة لأفلاطون ، كان الدافع الجنسي جهدًا مجنونًا في العقل الباطن لإعادة توحيد الطبيعة البشرية المتصدعة.
لم يميز الأشخاص الأوائل الرغبة الجنسية في هذه الكلمات ، لكنهم شعروا بها بالتأكيد. لقد أدركوا بالتأكيد أن شيئًا ما يجب القيام به للسيطرة على "الجنون" إذا كان الناس سيعيشون معًا في مجموعات كبيرة. حتى يتم ترويض الدافع الجنسي وإخضاعه للاحتياجات المشتركة ، ستكون الحياة المتحضرة مستحيلة!!
بالنسبة للرجال ، كان ذلك يعني محاولة التصالح مع لغز الأنثى. في المجتمعات البدائية ، يُفترض أن الرجال ينظرون إلى النساء بنفس الرعب الذي شعروا به تجاه العالم الطبيعي. كانت البشرية المبكرة في حالة حرب دائمة مع الطبيعة ، كانت قوى الطبيعة مميتة وغير مفهومة. كان جوهر العالم الطبيعي هو رحم الأنثى ، ومنه كانت حياة الإنسان حديث الولادة تتساقط في سيل من الدماء والصراخ.
لم يتم تأكيد العلاقة بين الجماع والحمل إلا في حوالي 9000 قبل الميلاد (ما يقرب من مائة وخمسة وثمانين ألف سنة بعد ظهور الإنسان العاقل ، أو الإنسان الحديث). حتى ذلك الحين ، لم يعرف البشر العلاقة بين الجنس والولادة ، وعلى أي حال ، أمضت النساء جزءًا كبيرًا من حياتهن القصيرة إما حوامل أو مرضعات.
يبدو أن الأطفال يظهرون في الرحم فجأة!! . الأمر الأكثر غرابة وربما المرعب هو الدم الذي يتدفق بشكل دوري من أجساد النساء. كان الدم هو الحياة بحد ذاته ، فقدانه سحري وخطير ، ومع ذلك تنزف النساء بحرية لأيام دون إصابة ، ولا أحد يعرف السبب. الحقيقة الواضحة هي أن دم الحيض يأتي من النساء فقط ، ومن نفس المكان الذي بدأت فيه حياة الإنسان.
كان من الممكن أن تكون المحظورات الجنسية الأولى قد اتخذت شكل المحرمات من العصر الحجري القديم ضد الجماع مع النساء خلال فتراتهن الشهرية. (لا تزال مثل هذه القواعد موجودة في العديد من الثقافات ، وتستند إلى الطبيعة "غير النظيفة" المفترضة للحيض.) كان من الممكن أن يكون لهذه المحظورات أسس أعمق بكثير من مجرد النظافة ، ولكن ربما كان الظهور المفاجئ لدماء الحيض يذكّر الرجال بأنه على الرغم من تفوقهم الجسدي (القوة) ، لا يمكنهم توليد الحياة البشرية بمفردهم. ربما كان دم الحيض يعتبر علامة على خجل المرأة أو حتى عقمها ، حيث لا تنزف المرأة إلا عندما لا تكون حاملاً أو مرضعة. على الأرجح ، كان رفض النساء أثناء تدفق دمائهن خطوة احترازية ، وهي طريقة لتهدئة الوجود الإلهي الذي يشعر به الرجال عند مواجهة المجهول.
من خلال منع ممارسة الجنس في أوقات محددة من الشهر ، تمكنت المجتمعات البدائية من فرض النظام على فوضى الجنس والتكاثر. مع مرور الوقت ، غالبًا ما تطور خوف الرجال من النساء إلى عداء صريح ، مما أدى إلى اعتبار النساء في فترة الحيض بمثابة كائنات خطرة وقذرة. تم تضخيم الاعتقاد في القرون اللاحقة ، في مختلف الثقافات. بالنسبة إلى الهندوس القدماء ، كان الحيض لعبة محصلتها صفر: كان يُعتقد أن ممارسة الجنس مع النساء خلال فتراتهن يستنزف "قوة وحيوية" الرجال ، بينما يُعتقد أن تجنب العلاقات الجنسية مع النساء في فترة الحيض يضيف إلى حكمة الرجال وحيويتهم. في بابل ، كان كل شيء تلمسه المرأة خلال فترة دورتها ، من الأثاث إلى الناس ، يعتبر ملوثًا ، وبالنسبة للآشوريين اللاحقين كانت كلمة "الحيض" مرادفة لكلمة "لا يمكن الوصول إليها".
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Eric Berkowitz
Sex and punishment
Translated By #Maher_Razouk
October 17, 2017
"Sex & Punishment" is a very easy and compelling read. Whilst Berkowitz's account leaves much to be desired in terms of historical analysis, his writing style and ability to condense some 4 millenia of sex laws in to an eminently readable book is itself laudable. Overall, "Sex & Punishment" charts the origins and developments of Western sex laws. Starting out with the Code of Hammurabi, Berkowitz begins his analysis of exactly who could commit sex offences, and who could be victims of them.
This leads us to an interesting set of chapters regarding ancient Greek and Roman sexual charters. Perhaps the most important points to note here (for the uninitiated) are that the State was the ultimate arbiter of the sex trade. Indeed, prostitutes went on the City records as such, were taxed, and were marked as class of their own. Whilst this did not make them "civil servants" by any stretch of the imagination, it shows that prostitution, in its earliest forms, has always called for a large dollop of State regulation. There are some brilliantly entertaining (and cringe inducing) punishments for adultery, whereby the wronged party (always male), could insert spiky fish into the anus of the adulterer (also always male). Of particular interest is the treatment meted out to Vestal Virgins who defied their vows. As representatives of the City, it was imperative for the City to cleanse itself. The offending Vestals were stripped, flogged, marched and buried alive with some food, so that no one inhabitant of the City could be attributed responsibility for their deaths.
It is also interesting to note the passages that deal with high-born free-women who notably registered themselves as prostitutes. After all, the lives of wives have never been something to envy, whilst prostitutes could live a life of relative freedom. Indeed, Berkowitz never falters from shining the lens on how the driving motor behind sexual offences of all ilks has long been misogyny, and this is admirable. He is not an apologist for this driving force, but relentlessly hammers home the simple truth, that life for women who did not submit to the edicts of jealous, crazy men was apt to be short, solitary and likely end in brutality.
This segues in to the rise of Christianity. With the rise of Christianity, misogyny was ramped up a notch, and this led to witch trials. The link between witchcraft and sex may not seem obvious, but it is brilliantly exposed here. Berkowitz uses the example of the Inquisition, which had a deep rooted obsession with bestiality. Witches were often tortured to confess to having fucked with Satan, who invariably took on the form of a goat. These magical goat copulations were enough to sentence one to death. The tragedy being that since Satan would compel women to lie about their sexual encounters with him, the only way to get to the truth was torture. The evidence from torture, in this instance, would lead to a swifter (though not particularly merciful) death.
Leaving behind the witch-hunts of early Christianity, we are drawn inexorably to the Protestant reformation, and its attendant rise of capitalism. As people flood the cities, more and more women seek work. The only work open to them is that of domestic servant. This leads to an analysis of the power relationships that arise, and a window is opened on to victim-blaming culture. Thus, the masters of domestic servants were expected to take certain liberties (can you guess what they are?) with their maidservants - and with an age of consent near 7, these liberties were manifold. Couple this with a popular belief that the cure for STDs (at this time, it was the dreaded scourge of syphilis) was to sleep with (read: rape) a virgin, more and more men sought younger and younger girls in order to fuck guaranteed virgins. Of course, all this behaviour was the fault of women, who enticed men with their existence, and thus the blameless men dually suffered, slaves to their libidos, and punished by the infectious nature of women.
Berkowitz then analyses the potent power dynamic of rape. As the colonial period followed the above, Berkowitz is clear. More women of colour than can ever be accounted for in history were raped at the hands of white men. These white men were able to do so with impunity. There were some menial punishments on hand (though the enforcement of them is patchy at best) for raping free Amerindian women. However, raping your slaves was your god-given right invested through the sanctity of property rights. Whilst the same men lived in mortal fear of black men raping white women (driven by still contemporary stereotypes about black penis size and the lust this "must" induce in virtuous white women). Thus, a set of brutal laws would lead to castration, mutilation and death for black men, even if white women consented. After all, white women couldn't consent, and to reinforce this for good measure "interracial" sex became a criminal offence too. Of course, this offence was overlooked when the perpetrator was a white man and the victim a black woman.
Finally, Berkowitz takes us on a whirlwind tour of the 19th Century, and the sodomy craze. He shows how men dressing as women (never illegal) went from being a lark, to a signifier of the effeminisation of the homosexual. The creation of the homosexual as a distinct class, whose bodies must carry marks of the pathology they bear is laid bare by analysis of a set of distinct legal cases. Berkowitz also uses the Oscar Wilde trial to great effect to show how the middle class opprobrium was usually reserved for the ruling classes, who with their wealth could corrupt working class men (in echoes of the white-slave trade moral panic which Berkowitz also deals very well with). This was also the era of masturbation demonisation and the first anti-pornography campaigns. These anti-porn campaigns included such publications as advice on marital sex and how to avoid conception.
In short, this is an illuminating book for its excellent case studies which qualitatively argue the case for the arbitrary, and male-dominated hysteria that has surrounded sexual conduct, and has driven sexual offending laws. It is worth reading, especially for the lay reader who is not trained in either law or history.
This leads us to an interesting set of chapters regarding ancient Greek and Roman sexual charters. Perhaps the most important points to note here (for the uninitiated) are that the State was the ultimate arbiter of the sex trade. Indeed, prostitutes went on the City records as such, were taxed, and were marked as class of their own. Whilst this did not make them "civil servants" by any stretch of the imagination, it shows that prostitution, in its earliest forms, has always called for a large dollop of State regulation. There are some brilliantly entertaining (and cringe inducing) punishments for adultery, whereby the wronged party (always male), could insert spiky fish into the anus of the adulterer (also always male). Of particular interest is the treatment meted out to Vestal Virgins who defied their vows. As representatives of the City, it was imperative for the City to cleanse itself. The offending Vestals were stripped, flogged, marched and buried alive with some food, so that no one inhabitant of the City could be attributed responsibility for their deaths.
It is also interesting to note the passages that deal with high-born free-women who notably registered themselves as prostitutes. After all, the lives of wives have never been something to envy, whilst prostitutes could live a life of relative freedom. Indeed, Berkowitz never falters from shining the lens on how the driving motor behind sexual offences of all ilks has long been misogyny, and this is admirable. He is not an apologist for this driving force, but relentlessly hammers home the simple truth, that life for women who did not submit to the edicts of jealous, crazy men was apt to be short, solitary and likely end in brutality.
This segues in to the rise of Christianity. With the rise of Christianity, misogyny was ramped up a notch, and this led to witch trials. The link between witchcraft and sex may not seem obvious, but it is brilliantly exposed here. Berkowitz uses the example of the Inquisition, which had a deep rooted obsession with bestiality. Witches were often tortured to confess to having fucked with Satan, who invariably took on the form of a goat. These magical goat copulations were enough to sentence one to death. The tragedy being that since Satan would compel women to lie about their sexual encounters with him, the only way to get to the truth was torture. The evidence from torture, in this instance, would lead to a swifter (though not particularly merciful) death.
Leaving behind the witch-hunts of early Christianity, we are drawn inexorably to the Protestant reformation, and its attendant rise of capitalism. As people flood the cities, more and more women seek work. The only work open to them is that of domestic servant. This leads to an analysis of the power relationships that arise, and a window is opened on to victim-blaming culture. Thus, the masters of domestic servants were expected to take certain liberties (can you guess what they are?) with their maidservants - and with an age of consent near 7, these liberties were manifold. Couple this with a popular belief that the cure for STDs (at this time, it was the dreaded scourge of syphilis) was to sleep with (read: rape) a virgin, more and more men sought younger and younger girls in order to fuck guaranteed virgins. Of course, all this behaviour was the fault of women, who enticed men with their existence, and thus the blameless men dually suffered, slaves to their libidos, and punished by the infectious nature of women.
Berkowitz then analyses the potent power dynamic of rape. As the colonial period followed the above, Berkowitz is clear. More women of colour than can ever be accounted for in history were raped at the hands of white men. These white men were able to do so with impunity. There were some menial punishments on hand (though the enforcement of them is patchy at best) for raping free Amerindian women. However, raping your slaves was your god-given right invested through the sanctity of property rights. Whilst the same men lived in mortal fear of black men raping white women (driven by still contemporary stereotypes about black penis size and the lust this "must" induce in virtuous white women). Thus, a set of brutal laws would lead to castration, mutilation and death for black men, even if white women consented. After all, white women couldn't consent, and to reinforce this for good measure "interracial" sex became a criminal offence too. Of course, this offence was overlooked when the perpetrator was a white man and the victim a black woman.
Finally, Berkowitz takes us on a whirlwind tour of the 19th Century, and the sodomy craze. He shows how men dressing as women (never illegal) went from being a lark, to a signifier of the effeminisation of the homosexual. The creation of the homosexual as a distinct class, whose bodies must carry marks of the pathology they bear is laid bare by analysis of a set of distinct legal cases. Berkowitz also uses the Oscar Wilde trial to great effect to show how the middle class opprobrium was usually reserved for the ruling classes, who with their wealth could corrupt working class men (in echoes of the white-slave trade moral panic which Berkowitz also deals very well with). This was also the era of masturbation demonisation and the first anti-pornography campaigns. These anti-porn campaigns included such publications as advice on marital sex and how to avoid conception.
In short, this is an illuminating book for its excellent case studies which qualitatively argue the case for the arbitrary, and male-dominated hysteria that has surrounded sexual conduct, and has driven sexual offending laws. It is worth reading, especially for the lay reader who is not trained in either law or history.
January 16, 2021
Kaip suponuoja pavadinimas, knygoje seksualumas nagrinėjamas per bausmės prizmę - tiek bažnytinę, tiek civilinę teisę. Remdamasis atitinkamais įstatymais, autorius nupasakoja seksualinių bausmių raidą ir suteikia persperktyvos dabartinei mūsų teisei, nusakančiai kas socialiai yra priimtina, o kas - ne; priverčia kvestionuoti mūsų socialinius, moralinius įsitikinimus bei įstatymų leidybą.
Būtent tai gali įžiebti nepasitenkinimą ar pyktį - kvestionuojamas dabartinis požiūris į tokias jautrias temas kaip prievarta, age of consent, homoseksualumas (ar netgi bažnytinės vienos lyties asmenų santuokos!). Jei nesate pasiryžę pažvelgti į šiuos bei kitus seksualinio gyvenimo aspektus per kitokią nei jums įprastą prizmę - ši knyga tikriausiai ne jums. Tačiau jei norite pažvelgti į tai, iš kur galimai kilo dabartiniai mūsų visuomenės taboo ar priešiškumas vienai ar kitai seksualiniai praktikai - knygą rekomenduoju.
Kitavertus, tenka ir sutikti su kritika, jog kai kurie informacijos šaltiniai pirmuosiuose knygos skyriuose yra kvestionuotini, tačiau tai normalu, turint omenyje, jog aprašomi laikmečiai yra gerokai prieš mūsų erą, o ir autorius nėra istorikas. Net jei ir būtų - kiek patikimų šaltinių, kalbančių apie seksą, iš to laikmečio galime rasti?
Būtent tai gali įžiebti nepasitenkinimą ar pyktį - kvestionuojamas dabartinis požiūris į tokias jautrias temas kaip prievarta, age of consent, homoseksualumas (ar netgi bažnytinės vienos lyties asmenų santuokos!). Jei nesate pasiryžę pažvelgti į šiuos bei kitus seksualinio gyvenimo aspektus per kitokią nei jums įprastą prizmę - ši knyga tikriausiai ne jums. Tačiau jei norite pažvelgti į tai, iš kur galimai kilo dabartiniai mūsų visuomenės taboo ar priešiškumas vienai ar kitai seksualiniai praktikai - knygą rekomenduoju.
Kitavertus, tenka ir sutikti su kritika, jog kai kurie informacijos šaltiniai pirmuosiuose knygos skyriuose yra kvestionuotini, tačiau tai normalu, turint omenyje, jog aprašomi laikmečiai yra gerokai prieš mūsų erą, o ir autorius nėra istorikas. Net jei ir būtų - kiek patikimų šaltinių, kalbančių apie seksą, iš to laikmečio galime rasti?
January 25, 2023
Emek verilmiş bir araştırma olduğuna şüphe yok. Bazen bağlamdan koptuğumuzu hissettiğim için okuyor olsaydım çoktan vazgeçerdim dediğim oldu. Belki bağlamın geniş bir yelpazede olmasının kurbanınıdır yazar da. Eğer iyi bir seslendirme yazılmışsa Storytel böyle kitaplar için tercih ettiğim mecra oluyor. Seks, tarihten bugüne sosyal statü, cinsiyet eşitsizliği gibi hala gündemimiz olan sosyolojik ve hukuki bir çok konuda söz sahibi. Kabul edemiyorsanız, ne alaka diyorsanız bu kitaptan bir iki bölüm de olsa okuyun derim. Seks ve Ceza gibi kitaplar kütüphanede bulundurulup referans kitap olarak başvurulur nitelikte kitaplar.
July 14, 2021
This is an almost excellent book content-wise, and only the author's style is what is dragging it down. Thoroughly researched, and at times witty (see the paragraphs about modern conservatives on marriage), the book pins down the evolution of the sex laws, from a 'meh' approach in the Ancient Middle East to a 'guns-blazing' XV-XVIth centuries repressive craze. I'm looking now to read the sequel, to see if the 100 years of the XXth century are as well documented as the previous 4000 years were in this book
April 13, 2024
wish it had discussed countries other than ones in europe and the US more, and i feel there shouldve been a conclusion in here, such an abrupt ending. however it is a very well researched book, entertaining and horrific at once. very well done
November 24, 2025
it’s taken me over 13 months but i have FINALLY finished this. and it was very interesting! would definitely recommend
March 20, 2023
3.5, this was so funny and interesting in parts
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