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This last chapter presents a translation of a humorous satirical poem by the famous Bengali poet, Dāśarathī Rāy (1805–57). He was particularly well known as a master of the Pāñcālī form, which are basically songs interspersed with short hymns to various deities. He is also noteworthy for his rather raw and gritty—and very funny—depictions of the lives of the lower orders of Calcutta during the colonial era. Largely conservative in his religious views, Dāśarathī singled out the Kartābhajās (a Bengali sect devoted to Tantra in colonial Calcutta) as the very worst example of all that was wrong with the Hindu society of his day—their sexual licentiousness, idolatry, violation of caste, overturning of traditional laws of purity, chicanery, and fraud. Hence, he provides a window onto the perception of the Kartābhajās in the eyes of the upper class elites of the day.

The publication and popularity of Henri Estienne’s Latin translation of Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of Skepticism allows for a new, skeptical approach to same-sex sexuality that questions its perceived unnaturalness and foreignness. Such an approach is embodied by Michel de Montaigne’s Essays. It is well-known that the French essayist applies a classical skepticism to forms of subjectivity around ethnicity, but his skeptical reading practices can be enlarged to same-sex sexuality. Skeptical approaches to cultural phenomena are easily transferred to same-sex sexuality because they are predicated on questioning the natural through a series of cross-cultural comparisons that reveal the ultimate relativity of culture. In a discussion of hermeneutics in his skeptical manifesto “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” Montaigne specifically critiques translators of Plato for “putting Plato to bed wherever they want,” thus for imposing their own morality and for reading Platonic sexuality anachronistically. But, Montaigne suggests, because they do not apply a skeptical lens to sexuality and do not consider it in a more objective manner, they—not the assumed crazed lovers of boys—are the ones affected as they try to efface the same-sex elements from the corpus.

“Licentiousness in All its Forms” recovers African American women’s significant intervention into sexual discourse between 1835 and 1845, a period here designated the interracial moment in moral reform. In an era of amalgamation riots, some black abolitionists forged a delicate coalition with white evangelicals. Female moral reformers condemned “licentiousness in all its forms,” and black abolitionists applied this language to “the licentiousness of slavery.” In turn, African American women built upon the physiological contention that all bodies were equally prone to virtue or vice. By distinguishing universal sexual virtue from white female purity, they undercut stereotypes of black licentiousness. Activists such as Sarah Mapps Douglass, Nancy Prince, Lavinia Hilton and Hetty Burr inspired Sarah and Angelina Grimké’s famous analysis of women’s moral equality with men. In this activist context, it became both possible and necessary for a few white women to question assumptions of their inherent purity. In the process, they applied the language of solitary vice to their own lives. African American women strategically appropriated antimasturbation physiology even as they remained focused on structural oppression. Although they only temporarily destabilized racialized discourses on female sexuality, their moral reform efforts had significant consequences for American sexual thought.

This chapter outlines the tradition of the epigram in the Classical, Medieval and Renaissance periods, with particular focus on the influence of Martial, Catullus, and the Greek Anthology. Despite the genre’s reputation for licentiousness and cynicism, it came to be used for a wide variety of subjects. However, a commitment to brevity and sharpness of wit distinguished the genre regardless of subject and was often noted by Renaissance theorists. The chapter also explores some more limited influences, such as the medieval proverbial epigram, on the Renaissance use of the genre.

This concluding chapter argues that behind the gentlemen's concern for property itself, there lay a deeper set of interests and anxieties. This was the question of social order. What they feared most, and what they believed lay at the root of such unjust measures as the paper-money laws, was the people's licentiousness. It was licentiousness, above all, that the new constitution was designed to crush. For gentlemen, it was the fate of the republic—and the outcome of the revolution—that hung in the balance. If social order and commercial justice could not be secured through the republican means offered in the constitutional proposals, then it would soon be imposed by harsher means.

The transcendent aspect of the “Xing zi mingchu” is analyzed in this chapter. Dance and music are crucial elements of reaching ecstatic morality. One important element of this is the surprising inclusion of licentious as well as more refined ancient songs in the repertoire of morally beneficial music. The core of the chapter is a thorough analysis of the role of the Dao in the text.

Food is a topic of abiding interest to human beings, and thus likely to be a source of metaphorical expressions. Examination of its vocabulary shows significant overlap with groups of words in other categories, suggesting the establishment over time of conceptual metaphors, i.e. those which are part of the semantic structure of the language. Examples include general links such as that between foodstuffs and shape, and more specific, socially interesting, connections between food and human characteristics: appearance (e.g. dumpling, string-bean, pudding), mental capacity (e.g. fruitcake, barmpot, turnip), social class (e.g. cocktail, scullion, upper crust), and licentiousness (e.g. man-eating, tart, jelly bean).

This chapter investigates the metaphorical uses of address terms with a ‘bottom-up’ empirical study. Address terms encode sociolinguistic parameters such as social and professional rank, family relations, age, and marital status, but they also encode aspects of conduct such as politeness and speaker attitudes. Gender and family motivate metaphorical applications, while biological aspects are enhanced both in male (procreation with sire) and female terms (budding new life with mistress). The role of a protective parent is also highlighted (safety with father; dame transferred to animals). Pejorative uses are found both for men and women, and the category of ‘Licentiousness’ is prominent (squire, daddy; mistress, miss, madam). Case studies focus on lord, sir(e), mistress, and madam. The chapter concludes by outlining metaphorical uses of address terms across changing cultures in the history of English.

This chapter documents the shaping power of everyday economic markets on cultural politics in China. It examines how sellers, producers, and consumers of sexual representations shifted the boundaries of what counts as erotically transgressive: in other words, which kinds of depictions of sexuality should be condemned and controlled. The chapter then asserts that, about a century ago, China and many other societies around the world entered a new and ongoing pornographic stage in the history of such boundary drawing. In China, this phase built on, but is distinct from, an earlier vocabulary of licentiousness. Ultimately, the chapter argues, from a Chinese empirical basis, that key early-twentieth-century changes in conceptions of eroticism around the world were at least as rooted in the activities of historically anonymous people making, selling, and buying depictions of desire and sexuality as they were generated by intellectual discourse, elite cultural production, and state initiatives around sexuality and media.

This chapter demonstrates that, under the regime of licentiousness, hierarchies of pleasure largely matched the distribution of worldly power: elites backed up both articulation and denial with physical and material domination. The chapter then introduces the early modern challenge to yin ideology. Despite the crisis in control over sexual depictions that began in the sixteenth century, hierarchical values around the regulation of these representations largely persisted. By exemplifying the crucial developments in Chinese markets for, and regulations of, sexual representations from the earliest periods of Chinese history up to about the year 1880, the chapter traces these developments as they form a culturally specific backdrop essential to understanding the pornographic transition after 1880. Ultimately, the remainder of the chapter turns to the late imperial breakdown of elite dominance over the circulation and consumption of sexual representations and how the legal and cultural authorities tried to impose new controls over licentious print goods.

This chapter points out the persistence of early modern genres and technologies in turn-of-the-century markets for sexual depictions. It shows that existing ways of thinking about licentiousness among urban Chinese consumers, merchants, and law enforcement helped novel media content and forms take root in early twentieth-century China. The chapter focuses on the simultaneity of novel material developments and long-standing trends in the markets for and regulation of sexual representations. It also describes the distance between the letter of the law and its enforcement, arguing that grassroots law enforcement's definitions of transgressiveness directly, powerfully shaped what counted as pornographic. The chapter dissects the most dramatic example of Chinese early modern sexual culture's enduring power: its assimilation of the self-consciously modern genre of sexual science. Existing sexual discourse and print economies absorbed sexological treatises so that, in the eyes of buyers, sellers, producers, and police, sexology became difficult to separate from licentious xiaoshuo and lyric books. It then examines continuities and changes in the perceptions and lived experiences of those on the demand and supply sides of the market. Ultimately, the chapter discusses the case of Zhang Jingsheng's rebranding as “Dr. Sexology,” and the assimilation of sexology into existing markets and vocabularies for eroticism.

This chapter shows that despite — indeed, because of — the democratization of desire and access to sexual representations, individuals continued seeking authoritative positions from which to pronounce judgments on the desires of others. The chapter revisits examples raised as new developments in the previous chapters: depictions of women in public, nationalistic commentaries on The Plum in the Golden Vase (hereafter Plum), campaigns to rescue folk songs and lyric books, the furor around female nudes, and elite consumption of sexology as a status symbol. In each case, the chapter shows how new classifications worked and addresses why it seemed so necessary to continue excluding certain categories of desire and their bearers from legitimacy. It also explains why attempts to replace the hierarchy of licentiousness with a new order were vulnerable as never before. Ultimately, the chapter presents another view of Zhang Jingsheng's publications on sex, showing that his peers attacked these works to defend themselves from the former ally they increasingly saw as a threat to their own expertise.