Angus McLaren is Professor of History at the University of Victoria, British Columbia.
This book brilliantly explores the parallel historical expansion of
sexual propriety and blackmail, the one making the other profitable
until the onset of modern sexual tolerance put the blackmailers out
of business. McLaren writes first-rate comparative legal and sexual
history with wit, erudition, and considerable doses of irony.
*Robert A. Nye, Oregon State University*
Sexual Blackmail is an original, timely, and illuminating study of
a pervasive sexualized and criminalized cultural practice. McLaren
offers a riveting narrative, with arguments supported by rich,
evocative, and illustrative examples. A superbly written and finely
researched history of a fascinating subject.
*Judith Allen, Indiana University*
By culling examples from the New York Times and the Times of
London, legal reports, film TV and tabloids, McLaren shows not just
how sexual blackmail reflects social mores, but also the ways in
which sexual deceit and secrecy have affected legislation...The
book tracks sexual blackmail from repressive Victorian times to
today, when exposure of sexual secrets if far less
damaging...Deftly organized and full of gripping facts and
critique, Sexual Blackmail makes reading history a wicked
indulgence.
*Washington Post*
The central premise of this carefully researched volume is that
sexual blackmail--the attempt to extort money by threatening to
expose sexual secrets--has a past. McLaren...has delved extensively
into court documents and news archives to furnish hundreds of
examples of his subject...McLaren's most useful cautionary tale is
that blackmail flares up in times when widely practiced sex acts
are most stigmatized.
*Publishers Weekly*
McLaren...offers a fascinating account of blackmail in England and
America, showing that it both reflected and influenced society's
sexual values.
*Library Journal*
One suspects that an examination of sexual blackmail in the United
States and Britain must reveal a great deal about differing
attitudes to sex in general, and indeed Angus McLaren's Sexual
Blackmail--which addresses these two countries alone--does
constitute a fascinating comparative study of sexual values...An
excellent history: vividly argued, richly textured, widely focused
and thought-provoking.
*Times Literary Supplement*
McLaren's book is a fascinating account of shifting power
relations, influenced by largely unconscious assumptions about
class, race and gender...It is a powerful reminder of a vanished
world in which desperate women and gay men were persecuted, and
judicial attempts to police private life were far more corrupting
than the practices they sought to prevent.
*The Observer*
A fascinating new study...[McLaren] introduces us to a gallery of
persistent blackmailers, like Dapper Dan Collins, who led an
American extortion gang 80 years ago...[He] sees the history of
Europe and North America through the prisms offered by sexual
experience and laws related to sex...McLaren uses the rich material
he's uncovered as a way to understand sexuality in modern
history.
*National and Financial Post*
As [McLaren] shows in this meticulous and detailed excavation of a
painful history, people suffer doubly when their consensual,
private erotic needs are denied or distorted by a hypocritical
culture: first by being forced to hide or deny their desires;
second by being exposed to the insidious forms of sexual
blackmail.
*Times Higher Education Supplement*
Angus McLaren's book is full of fascinating stories
McLaren argues
that sexual blackmail is unique to the modern period
[T]his book
provides a wealth of rich evidence that establishes the cultural
prominence of stories about sexual blackmail in the years in which
sexuality began to take a modern form.
*Journal of American History*
Angus McLaren's account of modern sexual blackmail is extravagantly
detailed. It confirms the view of legal scholars that sexual
blackmail as a crime emerged out of a "sodomite" subculture of the
eighteenth century
With increasing acceptance of sexual minorities,
and the declining stigmatization of behavior that was hitherto
regarded as deviant, McLaren suggests that sexual blackmail has
died out.
*Journal of Contemporary History*
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