Can the orgasm be explained in historical terms? An almost incommunicable individual emotion yet also a cultural reality, the orgasm is part of, but also escapes, collective experience. The history of the orgasm is that of the hidden body, of forbidden desires, of flesh constrained by taboos and morality.

Contents. Preface. Introduction. Part 1 Orgasm and the West. Chapter 1 Carnal Knowledge. The birth of the individual. The Renaissance or capitalism?. The individual and transgression. The envelopes of the self. Beyond the Subject. Is everything sex?. Foucault’s paradigms. The three stages of sexuality. The family and the flesh. Frustrated young men. Sodomites: a ‘third sex’. A new sexual system. The conquest of female pleasure. The erotic revolution of the sixties. ‘Cherchez la femme!’. The fountain of pleasures. Part 2 Imprints. Pleasure in Pain (Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries). Chapter 2 Masculine, feminine: the person and their body. Representing and talking about oneself. The individual enmeshed. The fragility of the Self. The role of women. Weak women. Female roles. Women rebels. The fluidity of bodies. Chapter 3 Carnal Pleasures, Mortal Sins. Forbidden passions. The joys of sex. Peasant eroticism in Somerset. Bawdy culture in France. L’École des filles, a libertine gem. Pleasure and sin. Homosexuality in transition. Repression. The burning of a pornographer. Pleasure and the disruption of the established order. Part 3 Cycles. Vice and Virtue (1700-1960). Chapter 4 The Eroticism of the Enlightenment. The pornographic flood. A literature of transgression. The market in desire. These books that dimmed the lights of the Enlightenment. Measuring sex. Pleasure - in moderation. Orgasm and marriage. The masculine double standard. No pleasure outside the vagina. The crusade against onanism. The art of the ‘I’. Whores, drunks and vicious apprentices. Demonized biographies. The pleasures of the imagination. Chapter 5 Beneath the Victorian Veil (1800-1960). Controlling sex. Social roles. The new medical religion. Nudity and body hair. Sexuality, a shameful, even fatal, sickness. The age of anxiety. Semen wasted, death assured: the great fear of masturbation. Venal pleasures and fallen women. Through the looking glass. Walter the Victorian. The ‘hell’ of sex: pornography prospers. Making the ‘transgressions’ ordinary. Proletarian pleasures. The ebbs and flows of the desire for pleasure. Part 4 Revolutions? The heritage of the Sixties. Chapter 6 The era of pleasure (from 1960 to our own day). A sexual bombshell: the Kinsey Report. The origins of the ‘culture wars’. Homosexuality and masturbation. A hidden erotic culture. The survival of a sexual double standard. The discovery of the female orgasm. Female pleasure. The contraceptive revolutions. Good vibrations. Towards a new sexual contract?. Changes to the code of love. The right to sexual pleasure. Gay marriage. Erotic equality and simultaneous orgasm. The sexual revolution today. Conclusion The narcissistic society. The values of the hedonists. Narcissism and culture

Does the orgasm have a history? An almost incommunicable individual emotion yet also a cultural reality, the orgasm is part of our collective experience and also something separate from it. Its history is that of the hidden body, of forbidden desires, of flesh constrained by taboos and morality. In this major new book Robert Muchembled uncovers a fascinating history of sexual pleasure and the repression of pleasure that lies at the heart of Western civilization. Contrary to Foucault, he argues that a powerful repression of the carnal appetites was established at the very heart of our civilization around the middle of the sixteenth century, and that it only really lost ground in the 1960s. Producing a fundamental tension between the libido of each individual and collective ideals, it was a process that constantly promoted a powerful labour of sublimation throughout this long period, under the successive cultural covers of religion, philosophy and the laws of the capitalist market. The coercive system laid down in the seventeenth century formed the basis for alternate cycles of liberation and constraint, whose fluctuations were fundamental to the general dynamism of the West because they created the need to compensate for the mental disequilibrium they caused. Today, argues Muchembled, the United States remains deeply marked by the old repressive system, while in Europe this system has been shaken by the emergence of new forms of hedonism. Anchored in the dogma of shameful sensuality and the concealed body, the repressive system has been disrupted by the sudden irruption of the female orgasm onto the public stage. Whereas the United States continues to cultivate a nostalgia for the familial and sexual archetype bequeathed by the repressive tradition, Europe finds itself in uncharted territory facing new questions about sexuality, pleasure and the good life.