Sex, Politics and Society. The regulation of sexuality since 1800

'"Sexuality'', Jeffrey Weeks writes in Sex, Politics, and Society, 'has become a continent of knowledge, with its own rules of exploration and its own expert geographers.' Such a phenomenon is of recent origin, an expression, Weeks implies, of a liberating recognition of a field that historians had tended to shy away from until recent years.

Amid the hoopla of Shere Hite and Michael Carrera, it is reassuring to encounter a study that is cool, objective, scholarly, and responsible. It is a book that will be indispensable in social policy courses, but it is unfortunate that the publishers have given it the appearance of a daunting textbook.

Perhaps that is what Weeks intended: few significant facts can be missing from his intensive account of the interaction between government interference and individual assertion. Yet even history books are written from a personal perspective, and in his attempt to steer a middle course, to avoid flashy generalisations and unsubstantiated hypotheses, he drains the blood from his discussion of the most disturbing of all instinctual drives.