Incluye referencias bibliográficas e índice.

Introduction : sex and the problem of Western civilization -- Sex and the city : Greece and Rome -- Divine desire in Judaism and early Christianity -- Medieval fantasies of desire, sacred and profane -- From twilight moments to moral panics : the regulation of sex from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century -- The age of exploration : sexual contact and culture clash in Spain and colonial Mesoamerica -- Enlightening desire : new attitudes toward sexuality in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries -- In the Victorian twilight : sex out-of-wedlock, sexual commerce, and same-sex desire, 1750-1870 -- Boundaries of the nation, boundaries of the self : 1860-1914 -- Managing desire or consuming sex in interwar culture -- Sex and the state in the 1930s : Sweden, the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany -- The reconstruction of desire and sexual consumerism in postwar Europe.