THE BOUNDARIES OF DESIRE by Eric Berkowitz is Available Now

What makes sex criminal? Should it be illegal for teens to sext each other? Should young children be marked as dangerous sex offenders for experimenting with their playmates? Should parents be slapped with child abuse chargers for bathing their children with their bare hands instead of using a washcloth? Do mental-health profes­sionals have the right to call for an 'intervention' when parents and their kids share the same bed?

There are sex crimes and there are sex crimes. And in Eric Berkowitz's fascinating and deeply topical new book THE BOUNDARIES OF DESIRE: A Century of Bad Laws, Good Sex, and Changing Identities (On Sale: August 11, 2015; ISBN 978-1-61902-529-5; $28 Hardcover), the human rights lawyer/ journalist investigates the real people who have played central roles in the formation of our sexual rights. Since the post-WW II sexual revolution, the compulsion to control the sex lives of others remains as powerful as the yearning for sex itself; with each unfastening of sexual restrictions have come other, sometimes fearsome, restraints. Who we make love to, how we do it, and why we do it are among the law's central concerns.

Being a sex criminal often depends on the bad luck of being caught in the wrong place or decade, belonging to a different class or race, or doing something on the wrong side of a passing morality panic. Writes Berkowitz: "At any given point in time, everywhere, some forms of sex have been encouraged while others have been punished without mercy." One only has to look at past 'sex criminals' such as Nazi-era Jews killed for "defiling" the "master" race with German lovers or

African Americans lynched sex - or the accusation of sex - with white people. Charges of sexual misbehavior are commonly used to neutralize enemies and troublemakers. In 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the FBI's main political targets but when they failed to link him to criminal conspiracies, they turned to sex, threating to expose evidence of his alleged affairs.

Sex law currently saturates the news and will continue to. From the ongoing media surrounding the Steubenville trial to Pope Francis's accepting views on homosexuality to an October 2014 cover story in The Atlantic Monthly on why kids sext, one thing is for certain: The laws remain in constant flux as our sexual identities shift and morph.

Over the century, nearly every aspect of Western sexual morality has been turned on its head. THE BOUNDARIES OF DESIRE aims to illustrate this evolution and in so doing, ultimately argues that compas­sion is always preferable to sanctimonious condemnation and that "before we further radicalize the politics of sexuality, we need to stop and take a long breath."

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eric Berkowitz's lengthy career as a lawyer, journalist, and writer has been marked by both meticulous schol­arship and uncompromising advocacy. An active intellectual property, First Amendment, and business litiga­tor, his work has a appeared in the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, California Lawyer, and The Washington Post, as well as websites such asHuffington Post, AlterNet, and Salon. He lives in San Francisco

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