Sex: A Rousing History

By Rachel Feltman

Did you know that someone won a Nobel prize for treating syphilis by giving people malaria? Have you heard the one about women in Ancient Egypt using crocodile dung as a contraceptive? How about the fact that Nikola Tesla was probably in love with a pigeon?

From our tangled cultural relationships with genitals and gender to our endless quest for pills and potions to make sex happen when and where we want it and without consequences, history is packed with provocative, humorous and illuminating stories about our bodies and ourselves. In Sex: A Rousing History, Feltman gathers these delicious nuggets into chapters about birth control, aphrodisiacs, disease, courtship and more, showing us how much things have changed – and how much they haven’t.

Sex will have readers laughing at the retrospective absurdity of ‘normal’ practices from years long past. We learn a lot about biology and safe sex in the process – there’s nothing quite like the bizarre for tricking an audience into studying esoteric facts – but we also come to understand just how many waves of sexual attitudes and practices humanity has ridden throughout our species’ history. From the Zuni tribe’s non-binary lhamana to the Dominican Republic’s third-gender guevedoces, to the bachelor marriages among cowboys in the American West, we learn just how weird all sex is, and has always been. So who’s to say what’s normal?

There have been books that take readers on scientific tours of the neuroscience and physiology of sex, but no one has really delved into the hot mess that is sex and culture. Sex: A Rousing History is that hot mess, for a whole new generation – it’s sex-ed meets Drunk History for science geeks, history buffs and curious readers everywhere.