The Use of Pleasure. History of Sexuality. Volume 2

Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality, an incisive analysis of the changing nature of desire, represents one of the boldest and most challenging intellectual achievements of recent decades.

The Use of Pleasure (and the two companion volumes) offers an original and controversial account of the emergence of Christianity from the Ancient World. Here Foucault describes the stranger by ways of Greek medicine (with its advice on the healthiest season for sex as well as on exercise and diet), the permitted ways of courting young boys, and the economists' ideas about the role of women. The book is full of extraordinary insights into the differences - and the continuities - between the Ancient, Christian and Modern worlds. But Foucault does far more than merely re-create a vanished era when sex was not a major moral issue (only Plato, like Saint Paul, saw puritanical restraint as the way of wisdom) he makes us rethink our own assumptions about sex