This chapter is a comprehensive history of sexually-explicit literature drawn from books banned and prosecuted in Asia and Europe, sixteenth to twentieth centuries. The prurient treatment of sexual violence and the lewd mockery of authority form part of this discourse, yet law and censorship denied its literary value, reduced all erotica to the most basic “obscenity” or mere “pornography” (literally, “whore-writing”), and sometimes put the author to death. (Paradoxically the cultures richest in sex-writing also suppressed it most fiercely.) Here is a more complex history, hybridizing multiple genres: manuals of sexual positions, courtesans” autobiography, satire against hypocrisy and repression, philosophies of mind, body, and desire – normally homoerotic, though in China and the West true knowledge of sexuality is represented as female, passed down by mistresses of the secret arts providing instructions for the wedding night (and beyond). The phallus was even gendered female. Libertinism continued to explore same-sex desire (especially in Italy and Japan), while its heteronormative branch dissociated sexuality from procreation, insisting that biological sex should be transformed into an art of aesthetic “transmutation”, urging women to pursue erotic pleasure as a supreme end in itself – centuries before contraception made this realistic. Feminocentric and masculinist perspectives intertwine.

Though Mailer published incisive and unapologetic criticism of the works of his contemporaries, he was also generous with his support of writers and his advocacy for literary freedom. He readily came to the defense of literature that was deemed obscene or controversial, and under threat of official ban, from William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch to Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. His literary activism took consistent aim at publishing houses, which too often relied on money and marketing strategies to determine their publication choices. By protesting the promotion of already-wealthy writers and bringing little-known writers into the spotlight, Mailer not only proclaimed the force of his own work in post-war America but also defended a larger vision of literary freedom that endures today.