The Erotic Traveler: An Astonishing Exploration of Bizarre Sex Rites and Customs by the Great Adventurer Sir Richard Burton

Readers today are discovering the “other” Victorians, the suppressed and previously hidden dark world of sexuality behind the more familiar façade of respectable Victorianism. But one Victorian was, and has remained for a hundred years, openly and infamously the symbol of that other side of Victorian life—Sir Richard Burton, the explorer, adventurer and translator of the Kama Sutra and the unexpurgated Arabian Nights.
Burton the sexual anthropologist is the chief concern of this book, though his adventurous life is also sketched in by Edward Leigh, who, in the form of a continuing narrative, presents Burton's writings on strange rites and sex customs around the world. The shape of women’s breasts in Sind, the reasons for the barbarous operations of female circumcision, the various methods of creating eunuchs, and the devices employed in the East to prolong the act of love were all of absorbing interest to Burton. He could write with authority about the anatomical anomalies of Somali prostitutes in Aden or of pederasty in the male brothels of Karachi. This fascinating book, like its central figure, moves from India and Africa to North and South America, and reveals one of the more intriguing facets of a multi-faceted yet singular man.