Sex and Pleasure in Western Culture

“This volume is convincingly and engagingly written as a whole, [but] Hawkes is at her best when she focuses on the 'Sexual Century', the last hundred years with its apparent explosion of pleasures rapidly channeled into bland consumerism.”
Archives of Sexual Behaviour

“The book is well written and accessible to the non-expert reader. It contains an extensive bibliography and each chapter has a list of suggested further reading which is useful for those who would like to explore further any of the issues raised. I found it interesting and helpful.”
Insights

“An accessible volume…a readable journey through self-control in antiquity, sinful sex in the middle ages, guilty sex and courtly love in Renaissance, the body and desire in the Enlightenment and modern period, and the undisciplined desires of today.”
Canadian Journal of History

“Hawkes paints a complex portrait of sexuality in the West, one that defies simple narratives of repression and liberation, in which sexual discourses are constantly shifting, and there is no teleological motion ... Sex and Pleasure in Western Culture is an intriguing survey.”
British Journal of Sociology

“Gail Hawkes’s new book is a fascinating anatomy of the pleasures and dangers that have long swirled around the erotic. From Plato to the present, from early Christian mortifications of flesh to the hedonistic individualism of the millennium, desire and death, joy and fear mingle, but in ever changing patterns. This book explores the kaleidoscope of sexuality across the centuries, and in doing so brings new insights to the understanding of the body and its pleasures in our historic present.”
Jeffrey Weeks, London South Bank University