In ancient Greece, the husband of a cheating wife could shame his rival by shoving spiky fish and radishes up the offender's butt. In the Middle Ages, impotence was one of the few allowable reasons for divorce. Throughout history a common punishment for rapists was marriage — to their victims.
While reading about the evolution of sex laws in Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire, modern audiences may be shocked by what our predecessors considered legal and illegal, as well as how these "deviant" sex acts were punished. However, in examining the past, it is easy to imagine future generations judging our views on sex as being equally peculiar: from our public ridicule of politicians caught in sex scandals to the definition of man-on-man sex as exclusively a homosexual practice. Journalist and lawyer Eric Berkowitz explains what the history of sex laws he chronicles in Sex and Punishment says about us and our society, both past and present.
