The Boundaries of Desire summary

It’s no secret that men have been the authors of the majority of American laws. It’s because of this bias that so many women have been denied justice in court, especially when it comes to rape cases.

Until the mid-twentieth century, about half of American female rape victims ended up in prison themselves.

The law hasn’t only failed to protect women from sexual assault, but it has failed children, too.

In the United States alone, over 17,000 underage victims have accused some 6,000 Catholic priests of sexual abuse in multiple cases. Yet few of these abusive priests have been registered as sex offenders and many cases against the priests have been subsequently dropped.

In the first half of the twentieth century, homosexuality was considered a mental illness that needed to be cured.

One popular theory suggested that homosexuality resulted from defects in a person’s nervous system, which caused the person to develop improperly and “misdirect” sexual energy toward members of the same sex.

Nudity can be considered a crime, but it can also be viewed as art. It all depends on where the naked person is, and who is watching.

Whether we as a society tolerate nudity depends on the context in which we see a naked body.

We’ve seen that laws concerning sexual abuse often blame the innocent, and the same is true when it comes to prostitution.

Prostitution is now legal in many countries, including Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Canada, Germany and the Netherlands. It’s still a crime in many other countries, however.

Even though slavery in the United States was legally abolished in 1863, white people still found new ways to deny rights to and further oppress the black community.

In both the north and south, people widely believed that the end of slavery had turned black men into sexual criminals eager to target white women. George T. Winston, a white American educator, went so far as to say that freedom had transformed black men into “brutes.”