Books: The Sexual History of London

British social history and social histories of sexuality are two of my favorite things so I really ought to have loved The Sexual History of London by Catharine Arnold.  And yet, I did not.   It wasn't badly written and didn't feel badly researched, so I think it really just comes down to her emphases and preferences not being mine.  Though the subtitle promised me "lust, vice, and desire across the ages" the focus was very much on prostitution, pornography, and criminalized sexual activity.  There were some interesting bits there about armed police attacks on well-defended brothels in strategically defensible locations.  Some nice interview quotes from 1900s-era prostitutes.  Far more citations from My Secret Life than I needed given that I've already read a fair hunk of My Secret Life, thanks, and the book bores me in itself and when described by others.

Basically, it's not a history of people characterizing sex and desire - it's an overview of people monetizing and criminalizing sex and desire.  And it doesn't feel as socially engaged as the source material it cites.  She's got some nods to how religion and disease affected mores, but they really strongly feel to me like nods that were in her source material, that she's passing along. 

I will add that the feeling I got from the text of authorial emotional engagement level goes way up in the 1900s material and the material stretching into the early 2000s. It felt to me like prostitution and/or sex work in the time period 1930s-2010 was really her emotional entry into the topic, and the rest was just rotating around that - but it's really hard to read a nonfiction book whose emotional heart seems to be the last few chapters and feel balanced about the experience.  Maybe there was a disconnect between what interested her and what would be most marketable?