Book review: Law and Libido

In the Greek Classical period the husband of an adulterous woman was permitted to insert a spiky fish into his rival's anus. The book includes a pleasant picture of the fish.

Sara Wheeler: Make Love, Not Law
Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire By Eric Berkowitz 

This stimulating book examines the ways in which legal systems have attempted to regulate sexual activity over millennia, from the 'slow impalement of unfaithful wives' in Mesopotamia to the 'sterilisation of masturbators' in the United States. 'I have mapped out the story of Western civilisation', Eric Berkowitz boldly claims in his introduction, 'from the perspective of law and libido.' A distinguished American lawyer-cum-journalist, Berkowitz arranges his material chronologically. The first cases, culled from cuneiform on shattered clay tablets, reveal ancient societies in thrall to gonads. The laws of middle Assyria (c1450-1250 BC) decreed that 'if in a quarrel a woman injures the testicle of a man, one of her fingers they shall cut off'. The action moves to the sexual mores of the pointy-bearded Hittites, through Greece and Rome, and onwards to the Middle Ages in Europe. Besides punishment for transgression, Berkowitz looks at legal provision for revenge. In the Greek Classical period the husband of an adulterous woman was permitted to insert a spiky fish into his rival's anus. The book includes a pleasant picture of the fish.

As Berkowitz often points out, what people do never changes, only behavioural norms, and the harmless fun of one society becomes the gravest crime of another. The catalogue of fun subject to continual reinterpretation by the baleful forces of law includes incest, masturbation, bestiality, sex during menstruation, boring old adultery, prostitution, transvestism, pornography (which came of age in the Early Modern period), and the cult of virginity. As for homosexuality, the Theban infantry had a gay unit that fought nobly at the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC, and the issue only moved centre stage in the Christian era. The level of savagery sodomites faced in the Middle Ages beggars belief - Edward II's lover, Hugh le Despenser, had his balls and penis burned off publicly and, in case that wasn't enough, was then executed. Overall, Christians come out of the story badly, 'with their insistence on the conflict between the body (which craves sex) and the spirit (which sex destroys)'. Berkowitz often returns to this theme. 'From the reign of Emperor Constantine to the present,' he writes, 'the Christian notion that sexual love brings spiritual death has been the cornerstone of Western sex law

This is an excellently researched, almost scholarly book that draws on a wide range of sources from Herodotus to St Augustine (who f***ed the living daylights out of half of Carthage and Milan before declaring celibacy the way to go when he could no longer get it up) and on to Pepys and Foucault. All are properly credited. By backing up his material and selecting sources wisely, Berkowitz has achieved a perfect balance between case study and analysis, and between narrative and reflection... Read more: http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/wheeler_08_12.php