East, the West, and Sex: A History of Erotic Encounters
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A rich and seductive narrative of the powerful erotic pull the East has always had for the West—a pervasive yet often ignored aspect of their long historical relationship—and a deep exploration of the intimate connection between sex and power.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 conquerers 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.A remarkable work of history: as unexpected as it is lucid, and as provocative as it is brilliantly illuminating. Publishers Weekly "Is the notion of the East as a zone of special erotic possibilities purely a matter of Western fantasy and wishful thinking...?" This question is at the center of Bernstein's wide-ranging, critically astute history of the complicated relationship between Western male sexuality and the East. The book opens in 2006 Shanghai and concludes in contemporary Bangkok; in between, we are led through a sweeping yet focused, male-centered history of sexuality, spanning a broadly defined East and West, from antiquity to the 21st century. Bernstein examines Flaubert's sexual exploits in Egypt, where he vividly recorded "a sensual intensity, impossible in the West"; British explorer Richard Burton's travels through the Middle East, India and Africa, all exemplified by a sexual artistry uncultivated in Christian Europe; the fascinating case of the secretive Henry de Montherlant, a pederast who spent years in North Africa "greedy for flesh" and eventually took his own life. Former New York Times correspondent Bernstein (Fragile Glory) writes lucidly and with verve. This probing, absorbing and eclectic study critically challenges morally and politically correct interpretations of the Western sexual exploitation of the East. 12 illus. (June 2)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1 Bohemians at home and abroad 32 The whole world as the white man's brothel 323 That cad Ludovico 584 The harem in the mind of the West 745 The eternal dream of Cleopatra 926 Enlightenment from India 1027 Colonialism and sex 1218 The Eastern paradox 1609 What happened to the harem? 17910 The inescapable courtesy of Japan 19611 "I souvenir : you boom-boom" 22512 Thinking of Nana, or Noi, or Am 25713 Judgments 287Acknowledgments 297Notes 299Index 315
