ABSTRACT
Some may be dazzled by his works, others may find them unnecessarily obscure, still others perverse. While his intellectual style eludes facile classification, Michel Foucault was an imaginative and audacious thinker. Culture critics and historians would do well to reflect on his dense book, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (1976).1 In it Foucault examined the shifts in Western man's perception of sexuality over the past three hundred years. He focused on mentalité-the shared myths, norms, joys, anxieties, and suffering connected with sexual practice, but above all, with codes of thinking and attitudes related to sexuality.
