The East, the West, and Sex: A History of Erotic Encounters

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 Europes 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 Puccinis 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 yesterdays 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.

"'Is 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 'a 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 'greedy 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)" Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"It is the main thesis of this book," declares Richard Bernstein, "that for centuries the East, broadly defined to include most of the world's territory from North and East Africa to South, Southeast, and East Asia, represented a domain of special erotic fascination and fulfillment for Western men." Bernstein hammers this banality throughout his book, but readers should know what to expect from the... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) beginning. As an epigraph to his depressing mishmash, Bernstein quotes from Rudyard Kipling's poem "Mandalay":

Tho' I walks with fifty 'ousemaids outer Chelsea to the Strand,

An' they talks a lot o' lovin', but wot do they understand?

Beefy face an' grubby 'and —

Law! wot do they understand?

I've a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land!

On the road to Mandalay. ...

Bernstein writes later that this poem "is all you need to understand the heart-racing allure that the East had for tens of thousands of adventurous Europeans, eager to hear the temple bell at dawn (which 'comes up like thunder') and see the nut-brown girl who's waitin.'" By the end, the main message is that he agrees with Kipling.

There are a lot of nut-brown girls in "The East, the West, and Sex," and often they are just that — girls, children, teenagers, not women. But even the women are never in a position of equality, in society or in Bernstein's mind. "Sex and combat, like rape and pillage, have always accompanied each other in war," writes Bernstein. In case you might miss his casual dismissal of rape he adds, "or, as Time magazine put it in 1966 in an article aimed at downplaying the importance of sex in Vietnam, 'Strumpets trailed the trumpets of Joshua at Jericho,'" cutesy wordplay that metamorphoses soldiers into musical instruments and rape victims into whores. Bernstein's own jokes include double entendres such as "the Western penetration of the East."

Bernstein went to work for Time in China in 1973; six years later, he opened the magazine's first bureau there. He lived there for decades, married a Chinese woman and has written books about the region such as "From the Center of the Earth" and "The Coming Conflict with China." He is now a columnist for the International Herald Tribune. In his new book, he ranges from interviews with Vietnam vets to Flaubert's praise for the boys of Egyptian bathhouses to a recent American blogger who ignited a furor in Shanghai by bragging online about his sexual conquests among Chinese women.

Along the way, Bernstein wastes a lot of time. For one thing, he repeats himself. Although he's made this point before, he writes, "The East was a place where money was made and imperial ambitions pursued," then two sentences later says, "Chiefly, Westerners went to Asia in pursuit of personal wealth and national glory." This sort of echo occurs throughout. He also makes ridiculous generalizations. "It is a quality of young men in general, and American young men in particular, to want to be liked," he remarks while writing about Vietnamese prostitutes and U.S. soldiers. During this chapter, entitled "I Souvenir. You Boom-Boom," Bernstein can't muster enough qualifiers to mask his bias: "Indeed, there are no clear signs that the alleged depravity of the Americans and their 'puppets,' as Hanoi put it, particularly bothered a substantial part of the local population." He even spends time passing judgment on his female interviewees. "If you are a man whose taste in women runs to the slim and delicate," he writes of one of them, "you couldn't do much better than Yangsook, a thirty-seven-year-old Korean woman now living in New York." He doesn't stop with this personal ad. "She's a lovely woman," he adds later, "and perhaps one of these days some lucky man is going to win her heart." These admiring tributes occur during one of the "Interludes," personal close-ups inserted every few chapters.

Bernstein seems to assume that his audience for this book will be mostly male — perhaps men who describe women as "creatures," as Bernstein does in the closing hymn to "the urge for a moment of delirious, primal, sublime contact with an exquisite perfumed creature free from the judgment of an unsympathetic God and far from the domain of restriction and repression that is home." Or perhaps he hopes that this book will be read mainly by Brooklyn-born white male journalists in their mid-60s who are looking back fondly on the erotic adventures of their youth.

Michael Sims' most recent books are "The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime" and a companion book to the National Geographic Channel's "In the Womb" series.

Reviewed by Michael Sims, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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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.