Title
The East, the West, and sex : a history of erotic encounters / Richard Bernstein.
Edition
1st ed.
ISBN
9780375414091 (alk. paper)
0375414096 (alk. paper)
Imprint
New York : Knopf, c2009.
Language
English
Description
325 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.
Call Number
HQ460 .B47 2009
Dewey Decimal Classification
306.77095/090511
Summary
"Richard Bernstein defines the East widely - northern Africa, the Middle East, Asia, the Pacific Islands - and frames it as a place where sexual pleasure was not commonly associated with sin, as it was in the West, and where a different sexual culture offered the Western men who came as conquerors and traders thrilling but morally ambiguous opportunities that were mostly unavailable at home. Bernstein maps this erotic history through a chronology of notable personalities. Here are some of Europe's greatest literary personalities and explorers: Marco Polo, writing on the harem of Kublai Khan; Gustave Flaubert, describing his dalliances with Egyptian prostitutes (and the diseases he picked up along the way); and Richard Francis Burton, adventurer, lothario, anthropologist and translator of The Arabian Nights." "Here also are those figures less well-known but with stories no less captivating or surprising: Europeans whose "temporary marriages" to Japanese women might have inspired Puccini's Madama Butterfly; rare visitors to the boudoirs of Chinese emperors in the Forbidden City; American G.I.s and journalists in Vietnam discovering the sexual emoluments of postcolonial power; men attracted to the sex bazaars of yesterday's North Africa and the Thailand of today. And throughout, Bernstein explores the lives of those women who suffered for or profited from the fantasies of Western men."--BOOK JACKET.
Bibliography, etc. Note
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Bohemians at home and abroad
The whole world as the white man's brothel
Yangsook
That cad ludovico
"just a page in the book of your life"
The harem in the mind of the west
The fantasy comes true
The eternal dream of Cleopatra
Enlightenment from India
Colonialism and sex
A secret life in Algiers and Paris
The Malacca blues
The eastern paradox
What happened to the harem?
The inescapable courtesy of Japan
The butterfly complex
"me souvenir : you boom-boom"
A room of her own
Thinking of nana, or noi, or am
The yearning of the wanderer's heart
Judgments.
