Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire by Eric Berkowitz - book review

BOOK REVIEW - FIVE STARS

Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire by Eric Berkowitz

Extraordinary documentary of the evolutionary progression of organized religion and governmental extremes that taxed, punished and tortured to build a power base while amassing ill-gotten wealth.

This tome is a collection of facts arranged chronologically as civilizations evolved.

Points proven; It is far better to be rich and guilty than poor and innocent.

EXCERPTS:

Jesus Christ said much about love, but precious little about sex. Although his own life was relatively chaste by local standards, the fine points of sexual behavior were not his main concerns. He made no statements on carnal relations between the unmarried or homosexuals, he was tolerant of prostitutes, and he was less harsh toward adulterers than the Jews had been. But Jesus the man did not last long in this world, and soon his word was taken up by others. His most influential followers were consumed with sex in all of its permutations and devoted much of their attention to questions of sexual morality. Jesus’s relative indifference never prevented the Christian fathers from devising a violent array of restrictions in the Savior’s name.

First generation of Christian sages was the Apostle Paul, who taught that sexual behavior could be nearly as bad as murder: Homosexuals, masturbators, adulterers, anyone who sought sexual satisfaction for its own sake were, he said, to be barred from the kingdom of God.

Paul was no great proponent of matrimony either.

Marriage was a crutch for those too weak in their faith to give up sex entirely. “It is better to marry than to burn,” so if they could stand it; those who were already married should stay with their husbands and wives. No more divorce, remarriage, prostitutes, or concubines were permitted. To keep a lid on adulterous desires, Paul instructed husbands and wives to submit to each other’s sexual demands

For the common Christian, sex was acceptable in limited quantities, at least until Judgment Day.

Polanski’s crime was an accident of history. It was only recently that encounters between men and girls that age became illegal at all. Had he been caught less than a century earlier, the law would have looked the other way. California’s legal age of consent during the nineteenth century was ten, as in most other states in the Union (in Delaware, it was seven). The state raised it to fourteen in 1889 after a tussle between Christian pressure groups and male legislators.

Depictions of male homosexuality were risky even though private homosexual sex was no longer strictly illegal. There were more prosecutions against homosexual pornographers than there were against homosexuals. “Sapphism” was particularly irksome to the police. Absent special certification, women were not even permitted publicly to wear men’s clothing in public.

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