International in outlook, thoroughly broad-minded and wide-ranging in approach, Fetishes, Florentine Girdles and Other Explorations into the Sexual Imagination is a provocative and idiosyncratic feministʾs companion to the major religious, scientific, political and philosophical theories about sexuality as well as to the artists who have attempted to understand and represent the subject. The 250 alphabetically arranged entries range historically from the ancient world to the end to the twentieth century, and geographically form China to Australia, from Japan to the United States, through India, Africa, South America, the Caribbean and Europe. The entries, by feminist writers of diverse views, combine information with informed opinion, and build up to a passionate and high-spirited debate about sex and sexuality.

Includes information on adultery, agony aunts, androgyny, Maya Angelou, Arabian Nights, Margaret Atwood, Isaac Baker Brown, Charles Baudelaire, Simone de Beauvoir, Annie Besant, Helen Gurley Brown, camp, chastity belt, Chinese marriage laws, Christianity, circumcision, Aleister Crowley, date rape, female genital mutilation (female circumcision, clitoridectomy), Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway, Hinduism, Homosexuality in Renaissance England, honor, Zora Neale Hurston, incest, Indian cinema, Indian sculpture, Islam, Jacobean revenge tragedy, Jin Ping Mei (the Golden Lotus), Judaism, Frida Kahlo, Kama Sutra, David Herbert (D. H.) Lawrence, Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris Lessing, Lie Nu tradition (footbinding), Lolita, Look Back in Anger (John Osborne), Lysistrata, machismo, Robert Mapplethorpe, marital rape, masochism, Margaret Mead, The Microcosm (Maureen Duffy), Mira Bai, misogyny, Edvard Munch, New Portuguese Letters, the nude, obscenity,

Oedipus complex, Oh! Calcutta, Georgia OʾKeeffe, Orlando (Virginia Woolf), Ovid, paedophilia, patriarchy, penis envy, The Perfumed Garden (Shaykh Nefzawi), Pablo Picasso, Sylvia Plath, Plato, pornography, female prostitution, male prostitution, psychoanalysis, Puritanism, rape, rape and revenge movies, Wilhelm Reich, repression, Restoration drama, romantic fiction, romantic love, Rou Putuan (Li Yu), sado-masochism, safer sex, St. Augustine, St. Paul, Margaret Sanger, Sappho, Egon Schiele, sexology, sexual harassment, sexual revolution, William Shakespeare, Shuihu Zhuan, slasher movies, snuff movies, Story of O (LʾHistoire dʾO), surrealism, Jacqueline Susann, The Torture Garden (Octave Mirbeau), transexuality, venereal disease, virginity, voyeurism, Alice Walker, Edith Wharton, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, yin and yang, Emile Zola, etc.