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A rich and seductive narrative of the powerful erotic pull the East has always had for the West—a pervasive yet often ignored aspect of their long historical relationship—and a deep exploration of the intimate connection between sex and power.
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 conquerers 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.
A remarkable work of history: as unexpected as it is lucid, and as provocative as it is brilliantly illuminating.
- Sales Rank: #1957959 in Books
- Published on: 2009-06-02
- Released on: 2009-06-02
- Format: Deckle Edge
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.55" h x 1.20" w x 6.70" l, 1.50 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 336 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. œIs the notion of the East as a zone of special erotic possibilities purely a matter of Western fantasy and wishful thinking...? This question is at the center of Bernstein's wide-ranging, critically astute history of the complicated relationship between Western male sexuality and the East. The book opens in 2006 Shanghai and concludes in contemporary Bangkok; in between, we are led through a sweeping yet focused, male-centered history of sexuality, spanning a broadly defined East and West, from antiquity to the 21st century. Bernstein examines Flaubert's sexual exploits in Egypt, where he vividly recorded œa sensual intensity, impossible in the West; British explorer Richard Burton's travels through the Middle East, India and Africa, all exemplified by a sexual artistry uncultivated in Christian Europe; the fascinating case of the secretive Henry de Montherlant, a pederast who spent years in North Africa œgreedy for flesh and eventually took his own life. Former New York Times correspondent Bernstein (Fragile Glory) writes lucidly and with verve. This probing, absorbing and eclectic study critically challenges morally and politically correct interpretations of the Western sexual exploitation of the East. 12 illus. (June 2)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
“Fascinating . . . Accessible, much-researched and far-reaching . . . Bernstein’s book provocatively externalizes, and maps, the heterosexual male erotic mind.”
-Toni Bentley, The New York Times Book Review
“The East, the West, and Sex is the best sort of book about sex: It is replete with anecdotes from history that titillate as they inform and observations on human nature that amuse as they illuminate, all delivered in language and tone that is broadly moral without being moralizing.”
-Tunku Varadarajan, The Wall Street Journal
“Provocative and intriguing . . . Properly high-minded . . . Very good and eminently discussable.”
-Simon Winchester, The New York Times
“Bernstein negotiates this territory with great delicacy and considerable historical knowledge . . . [An] elegantly written book.”
-Laura Miller, salon.com
“Bernstein is very good at telling these stories . . . [He] is brave to insist, in the face of much postmodern academic writing about colonialism, that for various reasons having nothing to do with the West, women . . . were far more readily available in the Middle and Far East than in Europe.”
-Thomas W. Laqueur, San Francisco Chronicle
“Wide-ranging [and] critically astute . . . Sweeping yet focused . . . Former New York Times correspondent Bernstein writes lucidly and with verve. This probing, absorbing, and eclectic study critically challenges morally and politically correct interpretations of the Western sexual exploitation of the East.”
-Starred review, Publishers Weekly
“A survey whose range is almost stupefyingly wide . . . Bernstein’s book . . . introduces the complexity of everyday reality into a world about which it is easy to preach.”
-Colin Thubron, The New York Review of Books
“In his loose-limbed style . . . a diligent scholar pursues a subject . . . intriguing any way you look at it.”
-Kirkus
About the Author
Richard Bernstein is a columnist for the International Herald Tribune and a contributor to The New York Times. He has served as a foreign correspondent in Asia and Europe for Time and the Times, and is the author of six previous books, including Fragile Glory: A Portrait of France and the French, a New York Times Best Book of the Year, and Out of the Blue: A Narrative of September 11, 2001, from Jihad to Ground Zero, named by The Boston Globe as one of the seven best books of 2002. He lives in New York City.
Most helpful customer reviews
16 of 19 people found the following review helpful.
The Long Conversation
By Rob Hardy
The very words are exotic - think of the harem, the geisha, the Kama Sutra, all of them indicating the exoticism and eroticism of the East. The sexual culture of the orient (however that got to be defined) has for centuries captivated, first, Western explorers, and afterwards, Western imperialists and visitors. The erotic allure of the East for Western men is the subject of a grand history, _The East, The West, and Sex: A History of Erotic Encounters_ (Knopf) by Richard Bernstein. The author has been a foreign correspondent serving in Asia, and himself has a wife named Zhongmei Li, whom he appreciatively calls "my vision of the East". The topic, then, is close to his heart, and his book is a spectacular history of peculiarities of culture. There is some titillation here, descriptions of acts and accessibilities that cannot help but be curious and arousing, but the historical anecdotes are wonderful illustrations of general human behavior, besides often being amusing. Bernstein has described things as they have been and how things are are, with only an admirably small amount of wondering how they _ought_ to be, and certainly without any prudishness.
They do sex differently "over there". This is a constant theme within Bernstein's book, and the source of the special erotic fascination men have for North and East Africa and Asia. The West had a generally Christian morality, promoting monogamy and often stressing the sinfulness of sexual fun even within marriage. In many Eastern cultures, sex was not tightly linked to love or sin. It was often assumed that men, especially powerful men, naturally would enjoy sexual favors from many women, and that desires were to be satisfied, possibly by a particular class of women. Trained sexual masseurs, courtesans, harem girls, and legal prostitutes all come under Bernstein's broad definition of harem culture. The pattern has continued to modern times. Lt. Col. John Paul Vann was an advisor to the South Vietnamese Army in the 1960s. He had a wife in the States, two girlfriends in separate households in Saigon, and countless bar girls now and then. American servicemen didn't usually have his resources, but all of them knew places to get serviced. Many Vietnam veterans are involved in what Bernstein calls "the latest phase of the long erotic adventure of the West into the East," living in Thailand for warm weather, cheap living, good food, the companionship of fellow vets (they even have official Veterans of Foreign Wars chapters), and of course the accessible women. "Do the arithmetic," one of the vets tells us. "She's 51 years younger than me. Do you think I could have somebody like her in Pennsylvania?"
Bernstein is scrupulous in his understanding that a degree of sexual oppression comes from invading forces, whether commercial or military. He cannot escape that his subject matter forces him to write about powerful and eager males and compliant, often commercial females, so the subject is rife with political incorrectness. Even so, there is a practical give and take to both sides. The Thai bar-girl slang for a foreign man translates to "a walking ATM". There is a story that is not unusual about a bar girl who got her besotted Austrian client to marry her and build her a house. In Thailand, land and houses can only be owned by Thai citizens, so when she moved into the house with her real boyfriend and sought an end to the marriage, he had no claim on the goods. It isn't all greed; most of the girls use their earnings to help poorer members of their families. There might be religious judgments to be made upon the girls or their clients, but it is a clear commercial transaction. The clients should take care not to confuse compliance and service with love, but at the same time foreigners ought to reject notions that these particular women are merely sex slaves. There is no dispute that the money is beneficial; a member of the Thai legislature says, "Which is better as foreign assistance, foreign assistance through sex, or foreign assistance through the government that never gets to the people anyway?" Kipling knew that East was East, and West was West; neither has a monopoly on the "right" way to handle sexual matters. But with all due respect to Kipling, the two do meet, through the centuries and through intimate sensualities. Bernstein's book is an detailed look at the long sexual conversation between two different worlds.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Disappointing
By Kbish
I bought this book expecting it to compare and contrast the cultural attitudes toward sex throughout the history in both the East and West, describing where the attitudes meshed or came into conflict. Although some of this was touched on, the impression I walked away was that the book was simply a chronicle of the Western man's sexual exploits throughout history.
I found the tone to be rather patronizing and the writing style made it hard to stay engaged. Perhaps I could have understood Bernstein's ideas better if not for his tendency to jump around, bringing up names and anecdotes which didn't fit in to the overall argument. Even some of the the "interludes" seemed irrelevant, and for the most part the East is loosely defined as having "harem culture", which may be true but I wish there were more historical accounts to help clarify what exactly that means. The historical accounts on harems, which Bernstein builds entire chapters on, are mostly based on hearsay and there is much admitted speculation as to whether the accounts even happened. I would have much rather read reported Ottoman accounts of harem life rather than what some European guy fantasized about.
To Bernstein's credit, the later chapters about Japan and Vietnam at least sounded a little more reputable, although I still felt a little lost with all the anecdotes that were brought up. Even the parts that were easily followed were not enough to salvage the rest of the book.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Good Description, Little Analysis
By Timothy Haugh
There is always fear of what is different but, within that fear is fascination, too. One of the largest cultural dividing lines in history is what is loosely referred to as "east" and "west". And one of the largest cultural taboos is sexual behavior. In The East, The West, and Sex, Richard Bernstein sets out to explore the dynamics of the clash between east and west in matters sexual.
There's a lot of nice history here, including some classic encounters described in the writings of men like Burton and Flaubert. Over and over, we get to see how the contact of Europeans guided by supposedly Christian values become enamored of the cultures of the east, from Turkey, Arabia and India to China and Japan. Everything from the harem culture to the simply differing views of relationships gave Western men the opportunity to throw off more restrictive mores, which many of them chose to do.
Even more interesting are the encounters of more recent vintage. Soldiers stationed in Japan after World War II had their eyes opened by the "welcome" provide by the government via the women. And the brothels of Viet Nam, of course, are notorious. In their wake, we currently have the sexual tourism of southeast Asia, though it is interesting to see how the women are often able to take advantage of their "boyfriends".
In the end, though the history and descriptions are interesting, the reader is left wondering about the roots and reasons of the nature of these erotic encounters. Clearly, there were some solid relationships developed; however, it is difficult to separate the relationships from the influence of colonialism and war. Like any other time connections are made between very different peoples, there are mutually satisfying results as well as clashes from men drunk with sexual freedom, as well as simple misunderstanding. Mr. Bernstein hasn't given us much in the way of answers, but he has given us much to ponder over.
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