fter telling us the sordid and predictable tale of a foreign English teacher in present-day China boasting on his blog of his own mini-harem of Chinese conquests, Bernstein quickly takes us back to the good old days of imperialism and colonialism, when the British, French and Dutch moved in on the East — like a bad boyfriend in every way — and then to the mid-20th century, when unerring American know-how took its profligate and tacky turn in Vietnam, producing “a wartime erotic circus of historic proportions,” and the V.D. to match. The story was certainly much prettier when “Madama Butterfly,” “The Mikado,” “The Arabian Nights,” Japanese woodcuts, and Dela­croix and Ingres provided the prism through which to view the East as a rhapsody of delicacy and ecstasy.

Image Richard Bernstein Credit... Zhongmei Li

When Flaubert traveled to Egypt in 1849, he, along with Sir Richard Burton — easily the most interesting men in Bernstein’s book — recorded some of the most detailed, salacious and divine views of sex in the East, which still color our vision today. Flaubert adored prostitution (even in Paris!): “a meeting place of so many elements — lust, bitterness, complete absence of human contact, muscular frenzy, the clink of gold.” In the dancer Kuchuk Hanem, he found the soul of his East. Her vagina (not the word Flaubert used) “felt like rolls of velvet. . . . I felt like a tiger,” he wrote. “My night was one long, infinitely intense reverie. . . . Toward the end there was something sad and loving in the way we embraced.” En Égypte, Madame Bovary, ce n’est pas moi!

Burton, one of the most brilliant and romantic figures of the 19th century, conducted parallel searches for the source of the Nile and the source of Flaubert’s pleasure, not unconnected drives. While he did not quite succeed with the Nile, he did find that certain tribal slave girls made expert use of “the constrictor vaginae muscles,” so that a woman could induce her partner’s orgasm “not by wriggling and moving but by tightening and loosing the male member with the muscles of her privities.” (Now there’s a decent indecent word for us, girls!) She was known as a kabbazah, which in Arabic means “holder.” Holders were quite expensive. Meanwhile, of the single brutal swipe that rendered a boy a eunuch, Burton reported laconically, “He often survives.”

The first Viscount Wolseley, a field marshal in the British Army, brashly admitted that he “consorted with an ‘Eastern princess’ ” who provided “all the purposes of a wife without any of the bother,” and that he had no plans to marry “ ‘some bitch’ in Europe, unless she were an heiress.” Today the viscount could read Burton on how best to survive the castration likely to come his way. (It involves boiling water and implantation “in a fresh dunghill.”)

A commander in the Indian Army in 1803, one David Ochterlony, landed himself 13 spouses and “liked to parade around Delhi with his wives following behind, each on her own elephant.” Not exactly the kind of afternoon outing he could take through Beacon Hill back in Boston, where he was born.

In one of his well-meaning attempts to look at the female side of things in this very male-oriented book, Bernstein states that in the age of exploration “it would seem implausible, if not entirely impossible, for there to be a story of, say, a Frenchwoman who falls in love with a Persian or Arab adventurer.” But if you want to know what the girls were doing while the boys were indulging themselves, try Lesley Blanch’s transporting classic “The Wilder Shores of Love,” where you will find the (Caucasian) ladies of Arabia doing even more brave and interesting things than the gentlemen, as well as having plenty of sex with Bedouin sheiks.

Bernstein’s survey suggests a near-perfect illustration of the psychotherapist Jack Morin’s simple but brilliant sexual equation — Attraction + Obstacles = Excitement — where being “neither too close nor too far” is the ideal distance from one’s beloved. While Bernstein’s book provocatively externalizes, and maps, the heterosexual male erotic mind, he does not dig deeper into the real heart of darkness, the labyrinth where sex actually takes place, where hostility, anxiety, Oedipus and inequality (the truly erotic cannot distinguish the politically incorrect from a cheap garter belt) mingle with the overwhelming desire to merge. His book’s real topic is the history of men’s joy in defiling, often while loving, what is innocent and beautiful, of finding purity and wantonness in one.