Readers have riveted onto different things. Some are most struck by the world of one hundred years ago, which I try to recreate in the first chapter. How prostitution was everywhere the open-secret supplement to marriage, how prostitutes were considered far more sexually exciting than wives, and how much effort it took to eroticize marriage. Or how abortion was once considered far less immoral than contraception. Or how incompletely the categories of homo- and heterosexuality had been disentangled.Others are drawn most strongly to the chapter on sexual violence in World War II and the Holocaust. They are interested in how the Nazis, far from being generally sexually repressive, were actually wildly pro-sex for the majority of the population (nondisabled, heterosexual “Aryans”)—upsetting the Christian churches profoundly—and yet also managed to associate Jewishness with “dirty” sex. And they are concerned to understand the sexual abuse and humiliation of victims within the concentration and death camps, whether in the context of pseudoscientific “reproductive” experiments or just sheer sadism among the guards. It is difficult but important to grasp this hideous combination of disinhibition and incitement with cruelty and horror—not least because it explains a great deal about the turn to conservatism after the war.The chapter I like best is about the sexual revolution of the 1960s to 1970s. In some ways, it’s the time period people feel they know best, but here too there are so many surprises. For example, the standard story we are now often told is that women were the losers of the revolution, nothing but sexual objects for commitment-phobic men. But actually it turns out that there were many men who had deep ambivalence about sexual freedom for women. I am also moved by the anguished disappointment of the activists of the Make Love Not War generation when it turned out that the consumer capitalism they reviled was a major factor in the liberalization of sexual mores they had been fighting for. And it is important to remember that discomfort with sexual liberties, and male annoyance at women’s demands for better heterosexual sex, were two key factors in what would become a renewed turn toward sexual conservatism. Although the forms in which disappointments were expressed were still rather inchoate, a backlash against the sexual revolution was already building—before anyone had ever even heard of the disease that would eventually be called HIV/AIDS.I am lucky that I was able to take a couple of extra years to collect materials for this book on twentieth-century Europe while I was writing a previous one about the sexual politics of the Religious Right in the United States. This did two things: It allowed me to make use of remarkable new material just emerging on the countries of the former “Eastern bloc,” so that the story is not just a Western one—and it makes us see the West in a totally different light. Second, working on the recent past in the U.S. helped me think about the extraordinarily intimate levels at which cultural retrenchment works. So Sexuality in Europe really can be thought of as part of the new “emotional turn” in cultural history. That’s not just because the book emphasizes the complexity of emotions brought to the topic and practice of sex—the yearnings, anxieties, and envies as well as the joys and delights. The aim was to help readers understand better things that are usually so confusing: from the disappointments as well as the electric excitements felt in the midst of the sexual revolution to the unexpected but wonderful recent return of romance in the midst of the ever-growing commercialization of sex in the era of Viagra, vibrators, and the Internet.Throughout, I was especially concerned with unanticipated and/or paradoxical twists, for instance the at first appallingly ugly but then inventive and creative responses to HIV/AIDS, or the unprecedented reorientation of traditional sexual conservatives to a prohomosexual stance once they were faced with the ascent of neofundamentalism within some strands of European Islam, but also the alarming new trend in which the so infinitely precious and hard-won achievements of disability rights activists are abruptly being turned against women’s rights to reproductive self-determination.Consent and self-determination are the moral bedrock of sexual ethics, and opponents of these values are incredibly clever. But above all, I think that ethical debate needs historical awareness.The book demonstrates the tremendous historical changeability of notions not only of sexual preference and identity but also of the very nature of desire and happiness. What was immoral or repugnant, what was thrilling or satisfying, varied enormously across time and space—understanding this offers fresh vantage points on the dilemmas of the present juncture as well.