From the bedroom to the courtroom-a riveting history of the law of sex. The "raging frenzy" of the sex drive, to use Plato's phrase, has always defied control. However, that's not to say that every civilization has not tried, using its most powerful weapon: the law. At any given point in history, some forms of sex were condoned while others were punished mercilessly, jump back or forward a century or two, or cross a Border, and the harmless fun of one society becomes the gravest crime in another. Sex and Punishment tells the story of the struggle to regulate the most powerful engine of human behavior. Book jacket.