Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire
by Eric Berkowitz
Counterpoint
It is the mark of an excellent writer to take a heavily treated subject and approach it with new energy and direction. Eric Berkowitz has done this with Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire. He takes us through several millennia of sexual stasis and deviation with marvelous velocity, grace, and precision. He instructs and delights, and within these Aristotelian parameters harnesses (and preserves!) the lurid verve of the Hefners, the Jongs, and the lugubrious Frank Harris of My Life and Loves.
Where else to start but with the Mesopotamian civilizations? In small, insular Babylon one’s reputation was always up for review. Male and female prostitutes were traded regularly. These “chattels” served both as skilled pleasure-givers and as intermediaries between customers/worshipers and temple deities. From 1047 to about 600 BC, Hebrew tribes settled in coastal Palestine and began formulating rules and regulations restricting sexual activities. Just as Jewish dietary laws stipulated what could come in and out of the mouth, similar codes proscribed what could enter or leave the genitals, how they could, and at what time. Adultery was banned for both men and for women, and if sex between a man and a menstruating woman “polluted them both,” the mixture of fluids between humans and animals was worse, and could result in the death penalty.
In Greece, eight hundred to a thousand years later, the primary issue was control of the (incredibly prevalent) male-male relationship. “A love affair in itself is neither right or wrong,” said Plato, “but right when it is conducted rightly and wrong when conducted wrongly.” A good male lover was supposed to be a constant in the older man’s feelings, and the elder was to love the boy’s character as well as his body. When this purpose was matched by the boy’s willingness to acquire wisdom, the union was regarded as “heaven” (ideal if not Platonic); “then and only then was it right for a boyfriend to gratify his lover.” Courtesans were valued in the Hellenic world and were often esteemed equally with men, including statesmen, in matters of debate and political acumen. Courtesans were usually tried only on grounds of procuring additional sexual services for their patron from non-Greek women. The most famous trial involved Pericles’s courtesan Aspasia confronting such a charge. When the trial was at its apogee, Pericles himself—in an early foreshadowing of Bill Clinton and Jimmy Swaggart—came forward, sobbed of his uncontrollable lusts before the jury, blamed only himself, and begged them to acquit Aspasia. The jury complied.
Discussions of Rome’s imperial bedrooms fall third in line after those of deep antiquity and the Greeks, but Berkowitz is most interesting when exploring ages whose sexual history has been given short shrift, as in the Middle Ages. In many ways the moyen age was utterly practical, with (especially) Mediterranean societies deeming prostitution indispensable and taking the opportunity to tax it heavily. But money was never the key component of harlotry under the law. A strumpet could be merely a woman who had been available to “a number of men,” the magic number of five somehow sufficing. In the monastic countryside, nun-prostitutes were required to remit fees to their convents or keep their proceeds to give later to chosen pious causes. Clerics and not constables were the sexual police of the age. Laws prohibiting certain acts almost always had a racist or ethnic-cleansing component: homosexuality and bestiality were invariably perceived as forces of either Islam or Judaism. Each was a conduit to hell, their practitioners vividly pictured as agents of Satan, horned, bearded, chained, and tailed.
The book moves through the early modern period, with Charles II not daring to institute a code that would curtail his debaucheries. The Protestant Reformation contained elements of rebellion against priestly lechery, institutionalized molestation, the tincture of the papacy in the pure, clear vessel of the church. By the time of de Sade and the Bastille, sexual freedom joined the battle against monarchy and theocratic nationalism, its leader a prophet of deviance who spent his prison hours carving wood phalluses and inserting them into himself nightly.
The Renaissance is treated mainly through a British prism, particularly geniuses like Shakespeare, Jonson, and others whose condemnation of society’s sexual sanctions became accepted, if not revered. Measure for Measure, The Winter’s Tale, and other works served to highlight the hypocrisy of sexual bans more effectively than tracts of essayists or the proclamations of the Roundheads. Oddly, artists like Milton, whose “Defense of Divorce” is an antipapist masterpiece and has been relied upon by modern feminist writers like Margaret Talbot, submitted to the sexual curdle of fellow Puritans, at least when called on to support policy positions.
The fine polish, that powdered-wig perfection, of the Augustans of course masked a lust that no law could tamp down. Samuel Pepys’s libido was especially powerful, and the legal apparatus of his time seemed more concentrated on sedition than on prohibiting the upstairs-downstairs groping and buggery that can be read between the lines of his masterful Diary. The chambermaids who combed lice out of his hair and helped him dress could expect his hands to travel up their legs as they worked, and he had a penchant for being masturbated by a maid in stagecoaches on the way to parliamentary debates (no doubt on vice laws). Bestiality was especially rampant in England at the time, and when a Scot, David Malcolm, was caught copulating with an animal, he fell to his knees and begged for mercy, explaining how many times he had theretofore tried it without success and how he wished to be allowed his hard-earned consummation. Bestiality was almost always associated with witchcraft, and while these practitioners were at it, they were most catholic in their taste: cows, goats, and deer were favorites, but other unwilling sexual receptacles included boars and foxes. The punishment often involved burning at the stake rather than hanging, in order to purify the earth of a pervert’s flesh.
By the time of American slavery, of course, sexual crimes broke down rigidly along racial lines. The southern states mandated castration for black men who even attempted to woo the kin of their white masters, though simple execution was the more common punishment. The hammer came down hard during Reconstruction. “After the Civil War,” Berkowitz writes, “racial tensions. . . . reached their apex, and a man’s dark skin was proof enough that he was a rapist; juries were instructed to infer that any sexual encounter between a black man and a white woman involved intent on his part to commit rape. Between 1700 and 1820, more than 80 per cent of the men executed in the U.S. for rape were of African descent, and 95 percent of females in these cases were white.”
The most fascinating chapters turn on sanctions of pornography, or literature that was mistakenly pushed under that rubric by particularly conservative British, French, and American administrations. John Cleland’s Fanny Hill and stories by de Maupassant, Zola, Flaubert, and of course D. H. Lawrence were targeted by authorities. If the censors deemed your book so salacious that it had to be wrapped in a plain brown wrapper, you had won half the battle for the potential reader’s heart. Postal systems were crawling with censors, seizers, and name-takers. Courts invoked a kind of strict liability that put in the dock writer, publisher, distributor, and the reader lucky enough for the prior three to have beaten the odds. The Lady Chatterley’s Lover ban was the broadest and most effective, some believe because the book involved heterosexual buggery, something the British bench found particularly unnerving.
Berkowitz’s book is not without its faults. The perspective is almost exclusively Western, which is surprising given our Orientalist erotic fascination and the fact that the first sexual “novel” came out of Japan. Some of the chapters could have done with some compression. But Berkowitz’s book in the end is a rewarding wonderland of the forbidden, and of society’s attempts to keep it so, despite their inevitable failure. It is a mural sometimes done as miniature, sometimes as epic, but always with a craftsman’s hand—a sprawling story told with uncommon precision and purity of expression. In past ages, the bluenoses would have Berkowitz himself clapped into prison. But his book belongs in your hands and on the shelf of any reader interested in, to paraphrase Lord Rochester, our long and fruitless bridling of lust.
