“It is the main thesis of this book that for centuries the East, broadly defined to include most of the world’s territory from the North and East Africa to South, Southeast, and East Asia, represented a domain of special erotic fascination and fulfillment for Western men.”

In his new book, Richard Bernstein, contributor to the New York Times, writes about what his publisher calls “a deep exploration of the intimate connection between sex and power.”

This is an all-purpose definition of erotic encounters, equally at home in Washington, D. C., Bangkok, Mumbai, Malacca or Kuala Lumpur. The one exception is that the thrall of eroticism, a distant second to political power in Washington, rarely lasts more than five minutes — at least as far as I could tell when I worked there for 20 years.

Bernstein divides the East and West into two erotic zones. He writes, “There was the Western erotic zone of guilt and repression and the Eastern zone of the harem, of multiple sexual partners, in which it was assumed, for good or ill, that it is entirely natural and healthy for a man to enjoy the favors of many women ...” Not only that, there are “many Easts”, as the author acknowledges.

Bernstein’s “history” is replete with stories of famous philanderers: Marco Polo, Flaubert, and Richard Francis Burton, translator of “The Arabian Nights” or Puccini’s opera, “Madame Butterfly”, which tells the story of “the Japanese courtesan Cio-Cio-San and the American naval officer Pinkerton.” There is also something to be said of the literary scholar Edward Said’s “Orientalist fallacy, that is, not seeing the reality but perceiving the pre-existing prejudice.”

Plenty of others make the book as well, administrators of the East India Company in British India, French rubber planters in Cambodia, European and American sex tourists, GIs, literally millions of hapless drones over centuries searching for “a moment or two of illicit paradise,” spreading disease and dysfunction as they travel by land, sea and, more recently, by air.

Describing this stuff can be a dispiriting business. Bernstein, however, navigates the sirens’ shores with ears unplugged, hoisting high nature’s profligate flag. I suppose the public’s interest in erotic encounters must be served, and Bernstein sees some profit in satisfying its appetite.

A few chapter titles give the reader a sense of the menu: “The Harem in the Mind of the West”, “The Eternal Dream of Cleopatra,”, “Enlightenment from India”, “Colonialism and Sex”, “I Souvenir. You Boom- Boom.”

The author draws upon his own past in his first chapter, “Bohemians at Home and Abroad.” He writes, “I am a foreigner when I travel in China, and I am married to a Chinese woman, and neither my wife nor I have detected any hostility or anger during the many trips we have taken together there . . . ” Privately, his wife notes that Chinese male friends express some “polite chagrin” at her marrying outside her native group. “They say, ‘Richard’s very nice, but what’s wrong with us?’ ”

What is wrong with Chinese men? Bernstein has interviewed a number of Chinese professional women — “a thin urbanized layer”, is how he describes them — about the attractiveness of Western men. These women tell Bernstein that Western men have better hygiene, pay more attention to equality for women, and are less domineering than are Chinese men.

“To be seen with a Western man is chic. . . To be seen with a Chinese man is ordinary,” two of them say. Moreover, there is a “self-abasement” and victim-hood among some Chinese men. They rail against the imperialism of the Western powers and their stud-muffin playboys who come to despoil their women.

Bernstein could get into trouble with this kind of reporting, so he balances things off by saying that the overwhelming majority of Chinese men and women fall in love with each other and get along just fine.

This may be so but we do not know. It is a happy surmise.

More likely is the author’s own conclusion about communism in China as a social and moral force: “It seems to be part of the natural history of Communism that first it proclaims sexual equality and sexual freedom, then it imposes a regime of sexual repression, and after a certain interval the forces of untrammeled libido return.”

This book could have used more understanding and compassion for the dispossessed, particularly girls and young women in Southeast Asia herded into prostitution by parents, pimps and poverty. At times Bernstein is over the top with high school boys’ locker room chat, a disturbing element for a

supposedly serious book.

I suppose his publishers pressed him on this. It is hard to write a book on erotic encounters without describing them.

The author justifies the “culture of the harem” around the world by observing that there are no statistics showing more fidelity in Christendom than in the East. “Rules of monogamy and fidelity are disregarded on a massive scale”, so his argument runs, and therefore, the harem may be “more attuned to the true nature of human beings.” Marco Polo is said to have established “the Eastern harem as a natural extension of the home, the whore made part of the family.”

This does not say much for the dignity of women, and Bernstein acknowledges this fact. His conclusion is to ask, paraphrased, what you would do if you were in the place of the Filipino or Thai mistress — choose prostitution to help your family, or suffer hunger instead?

Bernstein closes by summarizing what is behind this history of East, West, and sex. It is “the raw power of the urge that has populated the globe, which drives some men crazy and makes other men wise, the urge for a moment of delicious, primal, sublime contact with an exquisite perfumed creature free from the judgment of an unsympathetic God and far from the domain of restriction and repression that is home.”

What is the reader to make of such a conclusion? His description rings true on a purely physical level. Nevertheless, he is stacking the deck. Many have felt the same ecstatic moments in a monogamous marriage, independent of geography.

In any case, there is more to the world than its physical aspects. Bernstein puts aside virtue, the common good and countries working together to improve the lives of their citizens.

It is not that he is against improvement. It is just that his life experience tells him that things seem not to change for the better — because of the intransigence of evil in the world — the “penetration of the East by the West.” This means, with no program of improvement by First World countries, increased prostitution, disease, family instability, out-migrations and a loss of trust and hope.

No one ever said building a just world society would be easy. What is needed, as a correlative to Bernstein’s view, is a coordinated effort around the globe that frees its citizens from the pitiful and limited choices the author describes.

The East, the West and Sex:A History of

Erotic Encounters

By Richard Bernstein Knopf, 325 pages, $27.95

Michael D. Langan is a former official of the Labor Department and Treasury Department and a former headmaster of Nardin Academy.