Laqueur, Thomas W. Review of Richard Bernstein's THE EAST, THE WEST, AND SEX. SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE June 14, 2009.

Bernstein, Richard. The East, the West, and Sex: a History of Erotic Encounters. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. As Richard Bernstein writes in The East, the West, and Sex, his book about the erotic allure of the East for Western men, "sex was a pleasure avidly pursued by the builders of empire going places where it was readily available." This is beyond dispute if only because sex was also a pleasure avidly pursued by those who stayed at home. Maybe it was more avidly - and successfully - pursued away from the prying eyes of neighbors, kin, police and the church. In any case, sex - kinky and straight - was very much part of the encounter of two worlds. East India merchants set up house with bibis - mistresses - with whom they often lived quite respectably, but they also imitated Mogul princes by engaging dancing girls and whole teams of concubines. Gustave Flaubert could scarcely contain himself in writing about one of the young prostitutes he had in Cairo. His countryman, the 20th century novelist Henry de Montherlant, managed to live a secret life of pederasty in Algiers while enjoying a second life as a literary lion back home. The explorer and polyglot Richard Burton made available to his countrymen The Thousand and One Arabian Nights and the Indian sex guide Kama Sutra in the hope that his translation would shake Europeans loose from their uptight ways. And he did pretty much everything one can do in explorations of the East. In probably no other city of the late 19th and early 20th century was sex of all sorts more available than Shanghai - under European control but serviced by the local mob. . . . Read the whole review here: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/06/14/RVF91830P3.DTL.