My Books
Amatory Pleasures. Explorations in Eighteenth-Century Sexual History

The book reveals some of the more hidden aspects of eighteenth-century sexual culture and sheds light on the private lives of individuals and groups of people. Many eighteenth-century men and women married or cohabited, some remained happily monogamous and some had adulterous affairs. Others varied their sex lives with non-mainstream acts of sex. Some acts were legal and resulted in the birth of children, some were permissible forms of entertainment. Other acts were condemned by the church or deemed criminal.

While mainstream texts often showed a misogynistic view of the world, others books, pamphlets and images fêted sexual activities of both men and women in a flourishing celebration of all kinds of diverse amatory pleasures. This is an exploration of those men and women who conformed, and of those who broke the rules. Bloomsbury 2016.
The Pleasure's All Mine

The Pleasure's All Mine explores the gamut of sexual activity that has been seen as strange, abnormal or deviant over the last 2,000 years, as well as heterosexuality and what it means.
Exploring letters, diaries, memoirs, court records, erotic books, medical texts and advice manuals, it shows how, for ordinary people, different kinds of sex have always offered myriad different pleasures. There never was a 'normal'.


Those who desired their own sex, those who liked dressing up as the opposite sex, those who enjoyed sado-masochism - all have been considered 'deviants' in the past - and some still are. Concomitantly there has been almost universal acceptance that unembellished vaginal penetration, performed by one man and one woman, is 'normal' sex. 

I contest that this is an outdated  view which has been socially constructed through religion, science, media and society. A new approach in examining sexuality in a more exploratory and diverse way is needed of we are to become a more inclusive world.





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