Sex in History by Reay Tannahill

Sex in History Reviews

• 
  Tim Pendry

  'Sex in History' is more than two decades old. It still provides an informed, often wry, and certainly intelligent review of the history of sexuality. It is a first point of call for anyone new to the subject, looking to understand how we became what we are both as a culture and as individuals (at least in the West).
  
  Her judgement is excellent, given the facts at her disposal. I strongly approve her refusal to take at face value any late imposition of theory on how minds worked in the past. We can know nothing of past thoughts.
  
  Similarly, the Freudianism that was still regarded as respectable when she was writing the book is now seen for what it is - another 'grand projet' from comfortably off dead white males and their camp-followers It gets only a couple of mentions and then with not much respect. Good!
  
  Similarly, she is not sentimental. The Amerindians may have been treated appallingly by the Spanish conquistadores - their culture if not their persons by the incoming bishops - but the sexual laws of the Aztecs and Incas show no indication of 'noble savagery'.
  
  On the contrary, if there is a message of this book, it is that increased state power and empire tend - whether from Constantine or any of the other thugs who get to the top - to increase interference in the life choices of persons. This alone must encourage a slight prejudice towards anarchy and against super-states and a very strong prejudice towards democracy and secularism.
  
  Tannahill has also written an equally informative book on the role of food in history (as well as a book on cannibalism) so that, from this one author, you can be well primed on the nutritional and emotional drivers behind our history. The book ends with the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and it does not include either the latest research into many of the stories she tells here nor does it tell the story of the last two decades.
  
  Since 1989, the character of sexual liberation has changed yet again and entered a new world of interactive net-based communications. Still, this book gives us a grounding from an informed liberal perspective and it should have the effect, if read today, of enabling us to remain highly cautious of dabbling in our sexual lives by priests, governments and 'respectable' feminists.
  
  If there is a criticism, it is that Tannahill takes perhaps at too much face value the mythic narrative of patriarchy, forgetting that male power is rarely a matter of black and white but has depended on women choosing to accept the situation and then manage it from within. The greatest enemy of both the free woman and the free man appears, so often throughout history and as demonstrated by Tannahill repeatedly, not so much the male as the authoritarian and conservative female to whom the powerful male will bend for the quiet life. Liberation is damned hard work!
  
  Respectability, generally based on poor science and the desire to exclude the other and preserve privilege, has so often been cover for racist protectionism - as British wives came to Imperial India to enforce. Anglo-Saxon feminists promoted birth control not for the right reasons, to give women more control over their lives, but as a war on migrant, black or working class population growth.
  
  It is rare nowadays to find a book that creates an inner anger but this one does, an anger less at the patriarchs (though these should cause disdain enough) than at the war on their sisters by middle class respectable women. The imposition by these harridans of prohibitionist morality created the illusion of the good society but it drove exploitation and villainy underground, institutionalising not merely hypocrisy across the West but, eventually, organised criminality in the US.
  
  This is not to exonerate patriarchy by any means, but it is to question the accepted view that 'respectable' Judaeo-Christian morality did much more than protect some at the expense of others. Any good done was at the cost of a massive perversion of the human condition, encouraging an apartheid, quite conscious in some circles by the end of the nineteenth century, between men and women, a conspiracy of sexual silence and of exploitation at the expense of the less propertied, the uprooted and, bluntly, the more sexually aware.
  
  Of course, the Catholic Church itself has to be the most disturbing organisation short of the Nazi Party ever to have interfered in human sexual relations. It is the death instinct institutionalised - a movement of self-reinforcing power that has managed not merely to last two thousand years but will undoubtedly be mounting missions to Mars in another two thousands.
  
  There is a tendency to believe that some institutions cannot be criticised as too 'sacred' - the British monarchy, Parliament, Jewish mothers - but nothing is too sacred for criticism if it does bad things. The really bad thing with the Catholic Church is that it has set up a moral standard that drives sex so far underground as a taboo (unlike the spiritual traditions of Tantra or Tao or even the pragmatic reformism of solid European Protestantism) that vile acts are tolerated - as if not saying is not doing.
  
  The scandal of child abuse by priests and of the treatment of 'fallen women' in Ireland is not recent. It is embedded within a culture of silence and hypocrisy. It is the same with the denial of condom use in Africa which is directly related to the mass murder of (potentially) millions.
  
  Personally, I sympathise with the Church's position on abortion but the stand against sex education, contraception and homosexuality and for celibacy in the spiritual community, for sexual silence and for damn-close-to-enforced child adoption in the past are all expressions not of the right to life but of the death instinct and of the desert.
  
  There are many good priests and catholics but the religion certainly has its dark side. It is a cheap shot to say that the Church had its own brothel during its Avignon period yet, while enforcing sexual continence on the masses, there is evidence enough (and it is only commonsense given the human condition) that some churchmen were far from celibate and often exploitative.
  
  The justification has often been that the office and the man should be regarded separately - an attitude often translated to the modern corporate officer - but the difference here is that the office made claims affecting others while keeping back relevant information about its own conduct.
  
  Not that Protestants were that much better when they started out - Luther saw sex as sinful - but the difference is that they recognised it as a reality instead of living in a fantasy of pure spiritual aspiration that asked for our world to be made more miserable.
  
  The book is not only about Western attitudes - it covers East and South Asia and is generous about the Americas before and after the Spanish Conquest, as well as telling a reasonable tale of Muslim sexual mores and their translation into that peculiar revolution amongst the Frankish upper classes, courtly love.
  
  The dialectic between Christian miserabilism (which has its Roman intellectual antecedents) and a courtly apartheid culture which objectified both men and women into stereotypes seems to be the story of a culture that, like Rome before it, was the most successful on the planet to date and yet doomed to destruction as soon as it could no longer expand to fill every vacuum.
  
  The point of the courtly love model (which was a mere literary conceit when it started and only became serious with industrialisation) is that it turned women into wimps or harridans with nothing in between. How can you have a decent relationship with another human being if you are worshipped as a stereotype? How can you develop a relationship if you can only do it by becoming a stereotype?
  
  The stereotypes are still deeply embedded in Western marital culture. Dialogue, any serious communication, is discouraged because any open discussion is almost inevitably going to expose 'difference' and 'difference' means that the stereotype ceases to be a stereotype.
  
  If the marital deal was predicated on an ideal instead of on a dialogue, there is every incentive to avoid conversation and exposure of one's inner life in case it 'rocks the boat'. Eventually, if the illusion cannot be maintained, misery ensues or one or other party 'snaps' - going into hysteria or prostitution and secret sex in an age of restriction or divorce or detachment in an age of freedom.
  
  'Respectable' people would like to legislate against prostitution and divorce but you cannot legislate against hysteria or for happiness. Indeed, one of Tannahill's themes is that respectability's attempts at legislative control of sexual behaviour is invariably disastrous in its consequences (Fawcett Society, please note). She also uses the case of the various British Contagious Diseases Acts, clumsy attempts to halt the spread of veneral disease through regulation of prostitution, as an example of the opposite - the damage caused to the community by moralists attacking basically sensible legislation!
  
  The apartheid of courtly love created two dichotomies, not only between men and women but between 'us' (the tamed aristocracy of blood) and 'them' (humanity in the raw). Courtly love moderated the Judaeo-Christian death instinct that would have preferred castration and celibacy to sexual pleasure by bringing raw sexuality within some tolerable ideological bounds.
  
  From there, allowing for aristocratic reversion to the animal in the eighteenth century, Christian virtue danced a dance of death with the aspirations of the propertied to maintain 'standards'. These standards, modelled on the aristocracy, were taken up by the middle classes in the nineteenth century and then by the working classes, especially the 'respectable' socialist working classes, in the twentieth.
  
  An entire rapacious culture of 'respectability' not merely extended across the white settler world but became the basis of radical nationalism in Europe. It was copied by nationalists elsewhere who thought that they were liberating themselves from the West but whose cultural 'modernisation' merely meant a new slavishness to its mores.
  
  We have noted elsewhere how the Meiji restoration and then the MacArthur period after 1945 imposed such modernisation in Japan - yet somehow, in the last half-millennium, only the Japanese have managed to resist cultural subjection in matters of sexuality.
  
  Tannahill, without emphasising it, points out how the politicisation of Western women has had a direct relationship with eugenics, racial and class prejudice. The rise of women in politics is not quite the story of progressive enlightenment that we would like to believe. This was just one class of women determined on the control of the males of their own class and on the organisation and acculturation of everything below them to their 'standards'. These people were as culturally dangerous as any bunch of celibate priests.
  
  In fact, other than in the mad 'kinder, kirche, kuche' era of interwar Europe and the separate hypocrisies of patriarchal catholicism, the Europeans have retained the basis for a healthy liberalism in sexual matters. Even the British come across as one of the more liberal of nations, successfully negotiating (in general) some sort of freedom out of the weight of respectability. America was another matter ...
  
  America today, still culturally the dominant nation on earth, sends out two contradictory signals. The commercial marketplace operating since the 'liberatory' 1970s sends out a story of sexual liberation and licentiousness, a lack of privacy and discretion, that destabilises many traditional cultures whose upper caste, in aping this, rediscover sexual habits that they deny to their masses.
  
  On the other hand, three hundred or so years of puritanism, patriarchy, respectable feminism and political fear have created a domestic political culture where the sight of a nipple on prime-time television causes a national cultural crisis, a politician is judged on his fidelity to his partner rather than his competence and sexuality is the subject of endless study and torment in which every act becomes a political one.
  
  America is like an inconsistent parent - censorious one day, not caring the next. No wonder the world acts like a dysfunctional family.
  
  The villain of the story is not feminism. On the contrary, widespread contraception and the women's movement of the 1970s democratised the war on patriarchy but it also created the conditions for an appropriate liberation of both men and women based on the elimination of the 'respectable' as a necessary condition for the good life.
  
  It is a revolution that is still localised and metropolitan, still childish, certainly immature. Men, shell-shocked by being blamed for crimes about which they are still confused whether they committed them or not, are developing their own responses, based not on conduct required by an agrarian society out of time and place but on what men and women really are like over a life cycle - on the basis of true equality and respect.
  
  The villain is that malign synthesis of the desert mentality of the Christian hermit and a model of the 'lady' that transmuted itself into that High Victorian horror, a culture of respectability where all went to church and where prostitution was the only deal able to be done by poverty-stricken women and men living an elaborate lie.
  
  These respectable dames, whose attitudes would drift down into the class they oppressed (or gave employment to, if that suits you better), required leisure. While their menfolk employed thousands of prostitutes to give them something that could not be discussed at home (and brought back the risk of veneral disease), the girls had servants - thousands of them. 751,641 girls over ten were domestic servants in 1841. Within thirty years, the number has risen to 1,204,477. Given the conditions in which these girls worked, the labour use of their bodies and the lack of use of their minds was no better than prostitution unless you were determined on a morality of 'respectability'.
  
  The institution of temple prostitute might have been a lot better for some of them than the drudgery and obligatory attendance at church on Sundays just to be told that everyone had their place. The issue comes up today when 'respectable' women, ensconced in nice jobs as lawyers, tell working women that their lap-dancing should be legislated out of existence so that they can be check-out girls at Sainsburys on a third of the wages.
  
  As Tannahill points out, the High Victorian myth of the family and the respectable woman presided over an explosive increase in prostitution, an epidemic spread of veneral disease and the introduction of a morbid taste for masochism amongst the middle class male. She does not say but we would add that it created the conformist death instinct that materially contributed to the dumb willingness to die in a trench for an abstraction.
  
  That abstraction, in one country, turned into a killing machine for the destruction of, symbolically, the race that kicked off the Judaeo-Christian ethic but then got left behind as its Frankenstein monster of Christianity transmuted into the hell of its opposite in national socialism. A Freudian might regard Auschwitz as the grandson attempting to murder the grandfather - Western culture is a continuum and not a series of revolutions.
  
  Deal with the poverty of women and deal with the right of a man to be a man and society might be improved, but this has not been possible until recently because the cult of the 'lady', the cult of the perfect marriage (at its most demotic in the Hollywood romantic movie) and the separation of propertied interests from the unpropertied created a 'faux'-socialism. This was a top-down moralism that crushed the souls and spirits of many men and most women.
  
  Since Tannahill wrote her book, we have seen further revolutions in the West - an increased (though still inadequate) economic equality between the sexes, the slow removal of the faiths from moral governance except where individuals, as is their right, choose to embrace them, the acceptance of non-exploitative consensual sexual difference as 'normal' and the acceptance of a variety of sexual partnerships and liaisons that merely require government to intervene to protect the weaker party.
  
  The point of the revolution is that the culture of the desert has begun to be replaced by a culture of the oasis for many. The land is being irrigated slowly by a refusal of ordinary people to be told how to run their lives by 'essentialists'.
  
  Of course, things 'may have gone too far' in the sense that children are being brought into the world without stability and that exploitation continues, especially in parts of the sex trade. But neither of these are insoluable. Both arise not from viciousness per se but from stupidity and liberal economics and globalisation. Education, the recreation of community, government regulation to deal with exploitation rather than morality and improved barriers on trade where it is exploitative should be sufficient.
  
  Contrasted with the West in the book is what is now clearly its rival, China. This rivalry was far less clear in the 1980s and so China is placed alongside India and the Americas as just 'other'. Today, we must see China differently. It also offers us two contrasting traditions whose dialectic will be as influential as the Judaeo-Christian death instinct and courtly love have been in the creation of the Western soul.
  
  The first tradition is the yin/yang patriarchial but ultimately sexually vibrant culture of Tao. The other is the conformist order-driven top-down culture of Neo-Confucianism which is not, by any means, anti-sexual but is concerned with public propriety.
  
  A point made by the author here is that Chinese sexual life is rich but intensely private. We may extrapolate that Neo-Confucian resistance to Western radical sexual liberalism need not be assumed to mean puritanism in private, although foreign conquest and the malign influence of Western missionaries and Marxist earnestness (as well as state-driven population control) have driven much of the richness away and replaced it with a dogged seriousness that would gain the approval of many an Anglo-Saxon harridan seeking to re-moralise society.
  
  It is impossible to predict the future but we can see a war of trends - private resistance to the commercialisation of sex just as it spreads around the world as an act of defiance against hypocritical leaderships and faith leaders, the continued rediscovery of sexual complexity and its normalisation in the urban West, the attempt of 'respectable' elites to contain a revolution from below driven, in part, by the new communications technology, cultural tensions within highly puritanical new powers as prosperity reintroduces dissident sexual indigenous traditions amongst the younger and more prosperous generations.
  
  As for 'respectability' and social control, it is not dead. It remains strong, as always, on the alleged 'progressive' side of the political spectrum. It is interesting that the new freedom now inclines people to conservatism in the United Kingdom because politicians like Harriet Harman, in the dying days of the least competent centre-left administration in post-war European history, seem to want to use their last year of office to use a legislative sledgehammer to crack the serious nut of exploitation.
  
  The Fawcett Society in its war on prostitution is the grim successor to Frances Willard and the Women's Christian Temperance Union, the dim-witted prohibitionist movement whose fruits have been the embedding of organised crime into American society. This book is recommended because it is humane. No-one humane could be a 'progressive' nowadays.
• 
  Abeer

  يقدم الكتاب عرض لوضع المرأة والرجل وعلاقتهما على مر التاريخ، وارتباط ذلك بالمعتقدات الدينية والفلسفية، والعادات الاجتماعية عبر العصور والحضارات والثقافات المختلفة.
  
  الكتاب تطرق إلى الكثير من الفلسفات كالطاوية والكونفوشية والتانترا.
  والمعتقدات الدينية المصرية والبابلية والعبرانية، ثم اليونانية والرومانية والمسيحية والديانات الشرقية البوذية والهندوسية.
  ---
  القسم الأول: عالم ما قبل التاريخ.
  محاولة لإيضاح أسباب نشأة الكثير من الأفكار والمعتقدات التي ترسخت لاحقا، من أين نشأت فكرة سيادة الرجل، وارتباط الحضارات الرعوية بالنظام الذكوري والحضارات الزراعية بالنظام الأمومي.
  ---
  القسم الثاني: الشرق الأدنى مصر وأوروبا.
  مقسم لعدة فصول:
  -الحضارات القديمة
  يقارن أوضاع المرأة من حيث العمل والاستقلال المادي والتعدد والطلاق، وكذلك موضوعات الإنجاب والختان والإجهاض وتحديد النسل والدعارة عند المصريين والبابليين والعبرانيين.
  -اليونان
  يستعرض الثقافة السائدة والأحوال في اليونان، انتشار الغلمانية، وأوضاع المرأة المزرية، وكره الزواج وموازنته بقتل الأطفال الإناث.
  - روما
  التي كان وضع المرأة فيها أفضل قليلا إذ تساوت بالعبيد.
  - الكنيسة الرومانية
  هذا الفصل كان صادما بالنسبة لي أكثر من غيره، به قدر غير طبيعي من التشوه النفسي (والعقلي في رأيي)، احتقار المرأة والعلاقات وترسيخ فكرة الزهد والحرمان ما نشأ عنه تناقضات عجيبة.
  ----
  القسم الثالث:
  آسيا حتى العصور الوسطى والعالم العربي.
  مقسم لفصول:
  - الصين
  استمتعت بالقراءة عن واحدة من أعرق الحضارات وعن الفلسفة الطاوية والكنفوشية، وكيف كانت قائمة على التناغم مع الطبيعة وكائناتها لا البحث عن آلهة قوية لإرضائها.
  - الهند
  أيضا فكر مختلف ومميز، يعرض فلسفة التانترا ثم يناقش أوضاع المرأة وطبيعة العلاقات في الثقافة الهندية.
  - الإسلام والعرب
  في رأيي الفصل لم يكن منظما ولا توجد وحدة موضوع أو تسلسل أفكار. فالكاتبة بدأت بالحديث عن التقدم العلمي في بغداد، ثم خضوع الكثير من الحضارات لدين الإسلام دون أن تقدم مبررا مقنعا "اكتشف غير المسلمين أن عليهم الاستسلام لأصحاب الدين"! ثم التأثير المتبادل بين الحضارات الغربية والإسلام.
  انتقلت بعدها لنظام التوريث وذبح السلاطين لإخوتهم، ونظام الحريم وتطوره والأغاني العربية والحب العذري ثم أفاضت في موضوع الطواشية.
  
  =========
  
  الوضع الذي عرضه الكتاب للمرأة في كل الثقافات والحضارات القديمة صادم لدرجة فاقت توقعي. ربما أفضلهم مصر وإن كان الوضع سيئا أيضا (لا أثق كثيرا بالمعلومات التي أوردتها وأحتاج للبحث عنها). وكنت أريد أن أقرأ أكثر عن حضارات بلاد النهرين.
  
  أحتاج لفاصل قبل أن أقرأ النصف الثاني من الكتاب الذي يتناول أوروبا وأمريكا والقرن التاسع عشر وصولا للحاضر.
  =========
  أسلوب الكتاب سلس وشيق، لكن به بعض المشاكل.
  - رغم أن الكتاب موثق بالكثير من المصادر لكن يحتاج مراجعة وتحقق من المعلومات.
  - في فصول كثيرة كان هناك مشكلة في تسلسل الأفكار، واستطرادات عديدة سببت تشتت.
  - الكتاب قطع كبير والخط صغير وباهت ومرهق للعين ولا أعرف سبب لذلك سوى أن حجمه تجاوز ال 500 صفحة وربما لا يريد الناشر أن يكون أضخم، في رأيي كان من الأفضل أن يكون في ضعف حجمه الحالي حتى لو تخطى ١٠٠٠ صفحة لكن بخط واضح دون أن يسبب إرهاق وصداع.
  .
  شكرا للمترجم إيهاب عبد الحميد ولدار ميريت على تقديم هذا الكتاب للقارئ العربي.
  
  #أبريل_2021
• 
  Kyla Li

  I am sorry I didn’t like this book. Tannahill’s prose is very engaging, and it would have been a pleasure to read except for a few things.
  
  -The book was published in 1980, which means that her entire first section is completely worthless, thanks to the anthropological discoveries that have taken place since then.
  
  -Because I knew I couldn’t trust the anthropological information, I didn’t feel that I could trust the archaeological information, an area where I am substantially less knowledgeable.
  
  -Tannahill indulges in a fair amount of speculation about motives, emotions, etc.
  
  -Tannahill uses single sources to make a point when there are many differing ones to choose from. Rather than making it clear that her source is one opinion among many, she puts it forward as a representative of the cultural mindset, which is dishonest in a history.
• 
  Sarah Magdalene

  A surprisingly depressing tome which illustrates the fact that it is not our allegedly over sized brains that has caused all our millenia of misery, but the bits between our legs. Which is a fitting paradox. Pleasure is always a precursor to pain, though many people (especially women) seem to have missed out on the pleasure part and gone directly to pain (and death) via disgust and boredom. The only people who seem to have developed any kind of system of knowledge designed to make sex pleasurable for women were the Chinese, and this they did not for the purpose of making their cloistered herds of women happy, but to maximize the theft of their life essences. Indeed it was thought that if a man had sex with enough different women he could attain immortality. This knowledge was suppressed completely in China by the 17th century but it did leak through to Japan along with the rest of Chinese civilization. She doesn't say much more about this, but it would be an interesting field to research. It also probably inspired the Kama Sutra, but from what I have read of that it is quite crude and treats women no better than beasts. Both options of course are preferable to the sex as sin approach pursued in the west. That makes somewhat hair raising reading to say the least.
  
  Certainly this overview does support the idea that the vast majority of the human race thinks with their sex organs, if you can call the hormonal imperative thinking. Even more depressing when reading history is how bad intentions quite often have unintended good results, and how "good" intentions are most often driven by moral and religious delusions, and so of course end in disaster. The real truth of the war between the sexes, as portrayed here is that women themselves have had a starring role in their own oppression and that they consistently outstrip men in their narrow minded conservatism. Men of course are only interested in planting their semen in as many receptacles as possible, being even more hormonally ruled than women. It is quite astonishing the lengths they will go to to achieve this end. In fact I tend to believe that this is the only reason they are motivated to do anything at all. Women too of course will go to amazing extremes of behavior to be the object of this desire.
  
  It is pure luck really that women have ended up being "allowed to join the human race" at least on paper (and of course only in affluent countries). This honour itself is a highly mixed blessing. I really do sympathize with Sadawos' character in PACO and The Magical Book, whose "insanity" was that he didn't want to be a human being. He preferred to wear a snail costume and hide in the pond. After reading this book I am feeling like doing the same thing.
• 
  Caroline

  Anyone picking up this book hoping for a pornographic romp through the millennia may be disappointed, but that's no criticism. This isn't a titillating or salacious read, nor is it intended to be. This is as much a book about how societies have influenced, reacted to and controlled sexual relations, and how men and women have related to each other over the centuries, as it is about the sex act itself. You'll find as much discussion on feminism and Victorian morals in these pages as you will Greek dildoes, Egyptian contraception and Tantric sex positions.
  
  It ranges from the very earliest records of human history to the modern day (or almost - this book was published in the 1980s), from the palaeolithic era to the AIDS epidemic. It encompasses ancient Sumer and Egypt, medieval Europe and the pre-Colombian Americas, China, Japan, India. There is, however, very little mention of Africa or the aboriginal peoples of America and Australia, I suspect due to a lack of written records or archaeological trace evidence. And for a book on such an enormous topic, it is relatively short - yes, it's still pushing 500 pages, I realise, but in reality, dwelling on the sexual history of each country or civilisation alone could fill that many pages and more.
  
  Tannahill writes with a fresh, lively style, and a wry humour no doubt needed when tackling such a topic. There is no judgement or moral overview here, even when discussing the most outlandish sexual kinks and fetishes. Indeed, one of the more fascinating aspects of this book is just how inventive and imaginative human sexual history truly is. I suspect there is rarely a plant, animal or mineral in existence that some human somewhere hasn't stuck his cock into. One wonders if it might be our sexual imagination that truly distinguishes us from the animals, rather than our supposed higher intelligence...
• 
  محمود راضي

  في السنوات اﻷخيرة، باتت زاويتي المفضلة في القراءات التاريخية هى تلك التي تصب جل اهتمامها على الحياة الاجتماعية لا على الحياة السياسية وكواليس القصور وأخبار الحروب والغزوات، دائمًا ما أراها زاوية بالغة الصعوبة في التناول والبحث التاريخي ومليئة بالتحديات والمشقات في التفتيش بين المراجع والمصادر ﻷنها اﻷكثر التصاقًا بالحياة اليومية لعامة الناس في مختلف تعاملاتهم الاعتيادية، وربما قد تبتعد للوهلة اﻷولى عما هو مثير ويسرق العين، لكن اﻹثارة تكمن في عقد المقارنات ومراقبة التغيرات البطيئة التي تطرأ من فترة للثانية على شئون ما من شئون الحياة.
  
  ري تاناهيل في عملها الموسوعي الشيق الضخم تلتهم كم مخيف ومرعب من المراجع كي تقدم للقاريء حكاية واحدة طويلة ممتدة عبر الزمن وعابرة لكل قيود الجغرافيا عن أكثر جانب حميمي وشخصي في حياة البشر أجمعين، متتبعة إياه منذ بداياته الجديدة واكتشاف البشر له وصولًا إلى الثورة الجنسية في ستينات وسبعيات القرن العشرين، مرورًا بالتاريخ الطويل للجنس بين البشر والمحاولات الدائمة من الساسة ورجال الدين والسلطة الاجتماعية لوضعها تحت السيطرة، كاشفة عن صراع دائم بعمر البشرية بين نزعاتنا البشرية وبين كابحيها.
  
  وإن كانت هناك خلاصة يمكن للمرء أن يستخلصها من هذه الرحلة الطويلة مع تاريخ الجنس، فهى أن البشر دومًا ما سيجدون طريقة ﻹشباع احتياجاتهم الجنسية مما تفننت السلطات السياسية والدينية واﻹجتماعية في قمع وتحجيم شهوات البشر، مؤكدًا على عقم كل هذه المحاولات مهما طال بها اﻷمد، وحتى لو شوهت منظورنا للجنس مثلما ح��ث في فترات قبضة الكنيسة الحديدية على رقاب العباد، وعلى مصائرهم الدنيوية واﻷخروية، فإن الزمن يتغير، والطبيعة اﻹنسانية باقية.
• 
  Erik Graff

  This global survey of sexual beliefs and practices is written for the general public. Tannahill, a popular writer, seems to cover her bases well although there is a disproportionate amount of attention paid to the West. Throughout, the place of women in society runs as a leit motif, coming to dominate the text by its conclusion.
  
  What particularly struck me was the treatment of the history of sexual mores in China. Although I've read some classics of sexology, I'd never come upon so thorough a treatment of the subject as this, particularly as regards the traditional Taoist understanding of human sexuality. If one were to be born a woman in any but the modern age, China, before Neo-Confucianism, would have been the place to be. Among the civilized cultures of the antique world, Taoist China (and, derivatively, Japan) alone had significant regard for women in the sense of regarding female pleasure in sex as being vitally important. Of course, the primary emphasis was on male health and male pleasure, but the Chinese emphasis on harmony between opposites made the health of yin contingent upon that of yang to the benefit of all.
• 
  Namimia

  this book covers the roles of the sexes since the beginning of mankind in a multi- cultural and historical perspective.
  
  it is fascinating to see how long and why women had been subservient to men. learning about ancient greece, taoism, yin and yang, ancient asia-- times when sex was not only accepted openly but encouraged and considered a neccesity.
  
  i have never been so interested in learning about history and religion, i guess the context is what matters!
  
  
• 
  Christine

  Half of this book is really gender in history, which is fine. I'm not sure how much of the earlier chapters would be changed due to recent discoveries, but there are some interesting theories in this book.
• 
  Rebecca

  I picked up this book because I had been interested in learning more about the progression and variety of cultural attitudes toward sex. It took a little while to find a book that seemed to be at least somewhat scholarly and not written provocatively. I was pleasantly surprised that this book delivered so much more than that.
  
  First, I have never read anything that made me so thankful for my current historical context. As a woman, and as someone raised in a fundamental Christian context, it is easy to dwell on current injustices and inequalities and feel frustrated. It is easy to look backward and be angry at the failures and abuses of those who have gone before. But there is also so much to be thankful for in the imperfect and tangled thread of history, and much good in the current moment that was hard-won and long fought for, however entangled those victories are with further imperfections. Life, and history, is a mess. There's no sidestepping that, and this book does not try to.
  
  This book is about sex is the very broadest terms. The predominant scope of the book concerns the social and political dynamics as concerns gender and gender roles. It is not simply about sex in history, but about how sex has impacted and influenced history. Most surprising to me in this aspect of the book was how much I -- remember, raised in fundamentalist purity culture -- came to understand and deeply appreciate the American women's lib movement. Whether or not I agree with everything or everyone in it, I am a grateful recipient of the outcomes. The exploration in the book of the women's suffrage movement as well helped me to understand that the impacts of that reach far beyond me simply being able to cast a vote, but impacts the way women in general are perceived in a much broader context. The reverberations extend from there as well.
  
  Though the author reports on and comments on many world religions, she equally disrespects them all. Not in a crass or up-front way; she merely does not give any of them any credit beyond human constructions. Ironically, I found that this treatment specifically of certain biblical passages worked against her bias. Her detailed and uncensored explanation of the sexual culture of the first century Greek culture, for example, puts Paul's words in a different context than I had heard before, and I could finally see how those passages actually were radically liberating for women and evident of God's love and design. There were many other instances where I was able to appreciate other portions of Scripture more through the context provided in the book. Even the sections about the early Church fathers and their "sex is sinful" teachings, within the historical context provided in the book, were more understandable -- still wrong, but I could see how they were overreacting to a deeply lewd culture that they had previously reveled in. They were probably poorly dealing with a great deal of shame and guilt in the midst of it as well. They didn't have the option of going to therapy to deal with their startling life changes and learn to express their feelings. They blundered through imperfectly. And it started to make more sense, as she worked through the centuries, how the purity culture I was raised in came to be. And that, even, is messy. It's not as simple as people wanting to control other people. We all are born into established and evolving systems of thought and behavior, and each age leaves its mark. The fundamental church of the nineties was imperfectly working within an inherited system, just like every iteration of every culture has been. Very few, if any, have been all bad or all good. I was encouraged to read about Martin Luther and John Calvin and their intellectual courage to speak against not just faulty doctrines of salvation but also faulty perspectives of marriage and sex. I had never known that before! Again, the book does not sidestep the fact that history is messy. Some of the terrible atrocities of secular and religious systems happened because people were evil, and others because they were well-intentioned but deeply wrong or flawed. And some people were different things at different times. And this is what the Bible teaches -- we are all sinners. None of us escape error. This book highlights that for sure. Yet at the same time, there is an overarching sense of betterment, though certainly not in linear way, and sadly not equally throughout the world. As I said -- this book made me deeply appreciate my current cultural context.
  
  At times the chronology was a little difficult to track with as the book is divided into different cultural areas throughout a segmented chronology, but overall I thought it was well-written. The different errors I could notice in some of the scholarship about biblical issues did make me wonder if other similar misrepresentations existed elsewhere. But, in sum, it was a good read that was more than I bargained for in good ways.
  
  
• 
  =====D

  "Sex in History" will teach you lots about the attitudes of different cultures towards sex and love, but keep an eye on the author. At one point, she cites some bigoted and faulty studies from who knows when claiming that certain indigenous people are dead ignorant about the purpose and mechanics of human reproduction. Then, to seal her argument, she references some young british lass who wrote in to a "Dear Abby" columnist asking whether, having had a mulatto child with a black lover, she would continue having mulatto babies with her new man, a whitey. Apparently indigenous ("primitive") people have nothing to be ashamed of in being ignorant of how babies come about because there is a white girl out there who is equally ignorant on the subject. There is no bigotry like that of a highly trained scientist.
  
  This is an older book, from 1980, and as such, suffers from much outdated science. Humans females are not alone among primates experiencing orgasm; polygamy and monogamy are not the only two options worth considering in regard to our prehistoric ancestors-- they likely practiced polyamory like chimps and bonobos; and speaking of bonobos, much of the recent scholarship has drastically revised the way in which we understand ourselves by the discovery that we are equally close to bonobos as to chimps, genetically. To see what this book would be if it wasn't based on ages-old wives' tales, read
  "Sex at Dawn" by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha. Once one is open to dispose of many standard notions regarding human nature, the implications for everything we think we know are immense.
  
  Off topic, but kind of related, yesterday I learned that cetaceans are among a group of animals including humans who possess culture. Humpback whales all sing the same, ever evolving song, even as they are migrating across the world separated by thousands of miles. Many or most or all cetaceans pass skills and vocalizations to their offspring and pod-mates. When captive, orcas are highly trainable, but they easily get bored with the tests required of them and have been known to purposely get every question wrong after getting them all right for dozens of tries in a row.
  
  In one study, a trainer rewarded a dolphin for a certain behavior one day; the next day he stopped rewarding the dolphin for that behavior, but rewarded him for a different behavior instead. Every day, the trainer rewarded the dolphin when it performed some behavior, until after a week or two the dolphin ran out of its natural behaviors and was no longer rewarded. At this point, the dolphin "became despondent," and moped around until he performed a previously unseen-- novel-- behavior, for which he was rewarded. Thereafter, the dolphin continues to be rewarded, but now for novel behaviors only, at which point the dolphin got really excited and started performing novel and previously unseen behaviors in such a flurry that there was no way to keep track of them. The dolphin figured out that he was being rewarded for being creative. The study's author notes that it takes people about as long as it does dolphins to figure out that they are being rewarded for novel behaviors, at which point dolphins explode in a flurry of novel behaviors, while people are merely relieved.
  
  How can we-- people-- be such amazing boors, confident that we are masters of the world even as we destroy it? If humans once prided themselves on their morality, aesthetics, and curiosity/ inventiveness (i don't know if we ever did), today we are obsessed almost exclusively with mercantile concerns, so far as i can tell. It's been a while since I've seen someone rewarded for making the world a more beautiful or humane place. Yet, no shortage of accolades awaits those who would figure out how to turn a profit. Good on 'em, let those who have get more. What bothers me is the fact that someone who makes their goal to make the world a better place, moment by moment, is shit out of luck once they are past adolescence. Not only is it highly unlikely that one can live this way in our society considering how brutal the task of surviving is these days, but should you somehow succeed at it, you will be thought of as insane by most people.
• 
  Casey

  Far and away the most comprehensive resource on this history of sex that I have ever read, and I took a full course on the subject. Trannahill covers everything from prehistoric man, to the ancient civilizations of Greece, Rome, Egypt, China, India etc. to Christian Europe from the earliest centuries after Christ to the middle ages all the way through the modern era. The Islamic world and its influence over other places during the crusades is also covered as is America from colonial times to now. This book is indespensable. I mean, Playboy called it "required reading." That is not to say that it is less academic. It is meticulously researched and well documented. Truly a treasure for those of us who consider the history of sexuality and gender relations to be a cornerstone of historical study.
• 
  Kenneth

  This book is interesting and informative.It discusses sexual practices from the earliest days of history and through different cultures. The only criticism I have for it is the bias it has against Roman Catholicism. It isn't always blatant and I understand why she would cover it for the purposes of the romantic idealization of women during the Middle Ages which she says partly came from worship of the Madonna, but she seems to give that more criticism than she does Muslims locking women away into harems and denying the same rights in more blatant ways.
  
  It's still a good book for understanding the sexual customs of Rome, Greece, India, and others.
• 
  Richard Hodkinson

  Excellent and well-researched book, giving unusual and not-obvious reasons for the things we assume to be true about our sexual norms. And shows how they are both socially contingent and not historically normal or necessary at all.
  Bringing the contingency of social construction of sexual and marriage meanings to a wider audience is an essential and excellent work. Also the biological constraints are considered, but better than many commentators in Britain she doesn't bow to the hegemony of biological determinism. Strains of feminism are welcome, and 30 years later this book is still fresh, thoughtful and insightful.
• 
  Jen

  Generally an interesting and well-written book, although the breadth of the subject matter does seem to defeat the author's efforts at times.
  
  One comment: Speaking as someone well-read in human evolution and prehistory, skip that section. As near as I can tell, the author hasn't a clue what she's talking about on anything that happens before the historical period. If you want real information on the subject of sex in human prehistory, take a look at
  Frans de Waal's books.
• 
  Kendra

  Really fascinating and detailed book on the views of sex throughout history. From open sexuality, homosexuality, to the restricted Church-version of sex for procreation ONLY, to devices to protect boys and men from nocturnal emissions because it was related to the Devil. A lot of info packed into this book.
  
  Also wanted to add the book comes across as funnily sarcastic. Granted it might be my own thoughts coming through it, but I was literally laughing out loud with this book.
• 
  N

  This book looks at both sex and popular attitudes towards sex around the world, right through from pre-historic times to the 1980s. Well-researched and very readable. Usually I use "digressive" as a bit of a slam, but this book is actually entertainingly digressive -- of course, if you're not as much of a geek for women's studies/sociology as I am, you may disagree.
• 
  Daniel

  I liked this book. Obviously, a single tome encompassing the whole of human history and many diverse cultures and sexual orientations is not going to be exhaustive, but nevertheless it holds plenty of interesting facts and the writing is often witty.
• 
  Johanne

  Interesting in places but in others badly dated....I can't remember where I read it but it was a warning about reading history books that were over 30 years old because the theories and ideas are often well out of date and sadly so it is with this.
• 
  Adrian

  Fun read, plenty of outdated (terminology, race-related, sometimes sexuality-related) / offensive stuff here and there that is recognizable as it just being 30 years old because that content almost always relates to how the author is describing history, not the author's own views, but she does dedicate a lot of space to imperialism and its harms. The overall arc of her argument is progressive (arguably feminist) and amusing at the same time. Just old enough to to give it a bit of historicism / historical-history value like, you can see how 'we' / society (her society) thought about this 30 years ago! The more things change...
• 
  Kitty

  A bit dated from a gender perspective but fundamentally well-meaning and interesting.
• 
  Tucker

  I read the first hundred pages, which is about the first quarter of the book, before I had to part with it. If I'd had more time with the book, I likely would have made the effort to finish it, but some of the early parts were already bothersome. Specifically, right at the outset on page 17, there was a reference to the "classic case" of the allegedly unusual shapes of female and male sexual parts of the Kalahari Bushmen, a rumor whose details I don't see a need to repeat, but I will point out that she says the Bushmen's bodies are "a perennial subject for humor among neighbouring tribes," a detail that does not lead me to assume that the joke has basis in fact. She does not offer a footnote for this statement but mentions the name of C. D. Darlington (who, as I took the initiative to look up for myself, was a eugenicist who believed that Africans had fared better under slavery and then were worse off after emancipation). This passage is not a rollicking great start to an investigation of sex in history. Tannahill does have
  a few pages on eunuchs which is why I picked up the book. That information is echoed from books dating up to the early twentieth century. As a cross-cultural overview of castration in history, the basic facts she pieced together seem straightforward and unobjectionable — they're in every book on the subject — but I was less willing to trust her interpretations of the meaning of castration for Chinese boys and for African boys brought to Turkey because I'm not sure what sources of information she privileged and how critical she was willing to be.
• 
  Rebecca

  The later parts of this ambitious work do a nice job of covering both sex and sexism across cultures and time periods. It starts out awkwardly, though, in prehistory, centered around a series of assertions that are not at all backed up. I realize that because of the breadth of the book she isn't going to cite every bit of evidence in the text itself. There are extensive references in the back. But when one declares what sex was like in say, the Edo period, it's obvious that we have a bunch of evidence including diaries, governmental records, drawings, and artifacts. When one makes declarations about what sex was like in prehistoric times, though, I feel like you need to back up your arguments a little more rigorously. Especially since a bunch of her declarations sounded pretty bullshitty to me. I'm happy to be proven wrong, but I kicked off the book with skepticism I never subsequently shook. The last chapter as she winds up to (for her) present day also shows some of how her own views color her account. Unfortunately, the rest is presented as blatant fact, making it hard to evaluate some of the claims. There's a lot here that's quite interesting, though.
• 
  Ann Evans

  This book was written some time ago, and more modern books have recently discovered information not available to Tannahill, but it is fascinating in that it debunks commonly held beliefs, and goes some way toward organizing a more rational view of sex. I HAVE noticed that our view of sex is important, yet we don't talk about it much. Understandably so, but that doesn't stop us from reading privately about it and forming our own opinions. Tannahill shows a lot of courage writing this book.
  
  The research is mind boggling -- she presents art, religion, medicine, governance, family life, and everything else as she discusses especially the role of women throughout history. I have come to the conclusion that there have been other eras in which women were more highly valued than they have been in the last couple of centuries in America. Things are perhaps changing for the better, and we would do well to look at the past as we figure out where we want to go in the future.
• 
  Fred

  My primary objection is that both the title and the description are extremely misleading. It should be "Gender Politics in History" and it should be described as "A view of history from a somewhat dated lens." Not that I disagree with a single thought expressed, but it seems that all of global history can't be uniformly judged by the standards of one specific moment in time. Tannahill is factually correct in every detail but the book loses some steam when you point out the same injustices in every place, time and culture that ever existed. It would be great if she could do a re-write now and change up some sections using a more colorful palate of feminist criteria. And change the title or include sex, one or the other.
• 
  Subin

  This book is interesting, not just because of the topic of sex but because it also gives an overview of world history, political as well as socioeconomic, from prehistoric stone age to the 20th century. It was fascinating to learn about how sex was perceived in different cultures around the world and how they evolved over time. The position of women in society at different times was also an interesting topic frequently talked about in this book. Several historical practices mentioned in this book are shocking; for example, infanticide was a very common method for population controlled practiced basically in all societies! I also like the blunt and witty writing style of the author. But at times the book tend to be slow, going into details about things that I didn't care much about.
• 
  Sheila

  The title of the book is quite accurate, however, this book reads more like a college level cultural anthropology text than anything else. While sex of all sorts and variations is covered from the ancient Sumerians and Babylonians forward, so are social customs, ownership of property, voting rights, etc. I believe this book has been used as a text for college courses; it is not a light read, particularly the entire chapter on castration. It is well worth it if you are interested in the historical perspective, because if nothing else, the next time a national figure spouts off on the topic of sex, women's place in society, homosexuality, etc you will know how ignorant they really are.
• 
  Michael

  An impressive history of sexual attitudes and practices in several cultures, including ancient Greece, Rome, the Christian Church, China, India, Islam, and of course the modern West. The style is amusing on occasion, readable but sometimes dense. The author is hostile to practically all moral belief beyond "live and let live," with particular scorn for Christianity. Overall, slightly disappointing for her bias, but can you blame her after being familiar with such varied superstitions through the ages? I still recommend it.
• 
  Mike Walker

  I bought this eons ago and had it on my shelf as a "future read" and only read it now as a backup to another book. I was pleasantly surprised that it is a very enjoyable and easy read. It corroborates what I know from other sources, so I'm inclined to accept what it says with the usual caveats (unnamed sources, etc). I'm particularly interested in the middle ages/renaissance, and it's inspired me to do some more reading about statuary from the 12th through 16th century. Leading you to a new idea is always the mark of a worthwhile book.