Make Love, Not Law.

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 'sterilization of masturbators' in the United States. The catalogue of fun is 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. 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)'. 'From the reign of Emperor Constantine to the present,' 'the Christian notion that sexual love brings spiritual death has been the cornerstone of Western sex law.’ What all this amounts to, in most of the human cultures that have ever existed, is the male fear of and wish to subjugate women. I don't suppose it sounds humorous to contemporary victims of forced marriages sanctioned by law, of condoned rape, of female circumcision - and of God knows what else happens to women in those countries existing in ethical midnight. In Ur Nammu in the third millennium BC the penalty for raping a slave girl 'was as trivial as a speeding ticket today'. Considering the recent case of the monstrous Dominique Strauss-Kahn, one wonders how far we have