Begins with Classical Greece and establishes some important themes concerning gender, sex and culture which will be traced through the intervention of colonisation, Christianity, and the development of social sciences from the 18th century; traces the relationship between sexuality and socio-political control in the 19th and 20th centuries; investigates the shaping of sexualities through art, literature, cinema and media as well as pornography; and looks beyond the infamy of Lesbos, Mary Magdalen, the Marquis de Sade, Oscar Wilde, Margaret Mead, and Monica Lewinsky, amongst others, to uncover a rich history of the west.