Gender, Pleasure, and Violence: The Construction of Expert Knowledge of Sexuality in Poland [Płeć, przyjemność i przemoc: Kształtowanie wiedzy eksperckiej o seksualności w Polsce]

Poles of certain generations undeniably remember the popularity that Sztuka kochania [The art of love] by Michalina Wisłocka enjoyed. Between 1978 and 1995, the book had three editions and supposedly sold seven million copies.¹ As Agnieszka Kościańska, an anthropologist and scholar of Polish sexual discourse, claims, this number is most likely slightly inflated, but it does not diminish the book's incredible popularity. In 2017, Poles, especially those who remember the place the book occupied in their lives, got to watch a movie about Wisłocka's stormy and complicated personal life and, perhaps more importantly, also about her struggles in publishing this controversial book.² As an anecdote goes, this book, which the church and Communist Party leadership rejected, was released mostly because some party apparatchiks’ wives put their feet down, forcing their husbands to support its publishing (p. 53). The book certainly revolutionized the approach to sex in Poland, but...