DVDVRSBE: Sex and Punishment by Eric Berkowitz

[jaedmc]

SEX AND PUNISHMENT: FOUR THOUSAND YEARS OF JUDGING DESIRE by Eric Berkowitz

Picked by: Cliff Hanger

Read and Reviewed by JaeDMC

 

So it's taken me a little longer to read this than I hoped, because I realized I couldn't read it at the park while my son plays. I just felt kinda icky sitting around on a playground with this in my hands:

Sex and how we judge each other on sexuality is a subject I have a deep interest in, so I'm really glad I got this one. Berkowitz explores how our feelings about sex have evolved over centuries by explaining laws pertaining to sexuality, and gives specific case studies when he can. He starts out 4,000 years ago with a Mesopotamian homicide trial. This case sets the tone for history, really, as its main focus is on the wife and why she didn't give up the killers immediately. Women would be getting the shaft(LITERALLY AND FIGURATIVELY) for pretty much ever. Women originally had god like power over men, because you know, they freaked dudes out with their supernatural baby making capabilities and ability to bleed without dying every month. So it seems pretty clear that laws were evolved to further stamp down women's status in society, until eventually they were treated like property.

 

One crazy example: If you were a raped a virgin daughter and got caught. You had to pay the father how much she was worth as a virgin. After that the father could decide to marry his daughter off to her rapist. ADDITIONALLY! If the rapist was already married, the victim's father could require the rapist's wife be handed over as a slave that the father could beat and rape anytime he wanted. So, yeah. Looking out for the victims here.

 

It also covers laws about homosexuality and clarifies my own misconceptions about how Romans and Greeks felt about male homosexuality. I think I just thought Romans were cool with it, and they sort of were, but they sort of weren't. It was like sport. But giving your bum up a lot and willingly was frowned upon. Kind of reminds me of how there was a study that showed that men in prison who rape other men don't think of themselves as gay, but they DO think the guy they're raping is. Which additionally reminds me of the present occurrence of the term "No Homo", when talking about how much you like or love another guy. It's weird that after thousands of years homosexuality and female sexuality still weird us the fuck out. I think we're just going to be stupid forever. 

 

The book stops in the 19th century, which I think is the right move, because holy shit he could just write an entire book about the last 100 years. However Berkowitz does a great job of chiming in to relate how little or great we've changed from the archaic laws of the past. It's just enough to get your mind relating present to past, but not so much that it takes away the focus from whatever history he's in. 

 

This is a book that is both incredibly fascinating and enraging. I couldn't stop telling my wife about pretty much everything I read as I read it. It's one of those "Did you know" books, where you can't stop going up to people and saying "Did you know between 1700 and 1820, 80 percent of the men executed in the U.S. for rape were of African decent, 95 percent of the females in these cases were white?" Fascinating factoid, but also the kind of information that pisses you off because you know exactly what was going on there.

 

It's full of so much information that I think I'm going to buy it, because it's just too much to absorb in one reading. It's not that it was difficult to read, the prose is conversational and light. I just want it as a reference because there's just SO MUCH THERE.

 

I'll leave you with one last image from 18th century, because I found the whole topic to be insane:

 

 

This is an illustration of the last stage before you die from masturbation. 

[Cliff Hanger]

Yeah, my apologies on the cover. Since I'm a digital only reader, I can honestly say that I had never seen the cover.

Really glad you were as absorbed as I was; I qlmost apologized for the selection after realizing how much drier and more scholarly it was than the other nonfiction titles in the draw.

The scariest thing in there is the theory that the Abrahamic mad on for homosexuality boils directly down to "We need to reinforce the need to be different from the Egyptians. Those guys are dicks. Wht do they like that we can make a capital crime?"