The Boundaries of Desire

A Century of Bad Laws, Good Sex, and Changing Identities

“A bracing look at the often-strange relationship between sexuality and the legal system over six tumultuous decades” (Booklist).

Society’s acceptance of sex and the grasp of its many variables are in constant flux. Switch a decade, cross a border, or traverse class lines and the harmless pleasures of one group become the gravest crimes in another. Combining meticulous research and lively storytelling, this “eye-opening history of sexual legislation” traces the fast-moving blood sport of sex law over the past century. It challenges our most cherished notions about family, power, gender, and identity, and proves that nothing sparks intolerance—on the left and the right—more than sex (Publishers Weekly Starred Review).

Starting when courts censored birth control information as pornography and let men rape their wives, and continuing through the “sexual revolution” and into the present day (when sexual assault, gay rights, sex trafficking, and sex on the internet saturate the news), legal scholar Eric Berkowitz explores how the law has remained out of synch with the convulsive changes in sexual morality. “In lively, passionate prose, [he] shows how irrational, unjust, and destructive even well-intentioned attempts to legislate lust can be. This controversial book is as mind-blowing as it is heart-opening” (Christopher Ryan, author of Sex at Dawn).