The East, the West, and sex
Subtitle: a history of erotic encounters
By: Richard Bernstein.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2009
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 325
ISBN-13: 9780375414091
Subjects: Erotica -- Asia; Erotica -- Developing countries; National characteristics, Asian; Orientalism
Description: "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."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Bohemians at home and abroad; title: The whole world as the white man's brothel; title: Yangsook; title: That cad ludovico; title: "just a page in the book of your life"; title: The harem in the mind of the west; title: The fantasy comes true; title: The eternal dream of Cleopatra; title: Enlightenment from India; title: Colonialism and sex; title: A secret life in Algiers and Paris; title: The Malacca blues; title: The eastern paradox; title: What happened to the harem?; title: The inescapable courtesy of Japan; title: The butterfly complex; title: "me souvenir : you boom-boom"; title: A room of her own; title: Thinking of nana, or noi, or am; title: The yearning of the wanderer's heart; title: Judgments.