Orgasm and the West: A History of Pleasure from the 16th Century to the PresentISBN: 978-0-7456-3876-8
Paperback
224 pages
November 2008, Polity
Other Available Formats: Hardcover
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A major cultural history of the orgasm and sexual pleasure in the
West, from the 16th Century to the present day.
Muchembled shows how our contemporary ways of thinking about
sexual pleasure are shaped by our histories.
He argues that a powerful repression of carnal appetites was
established at the heart of Western civilization around the middle
of the 16th C and it only lost ground in the 1960s.
The author is well known in the English-speaking world as one of the leading cultural historians of his generation.