The belief that women are dangerous or impure is widespread throughout the world. It can be found in practices such as isolating menstruating women in huts outside the village through to myths such as Pandora’s Box and the Biblical Fall, which blame female sexuality the world’s evils. It also occurs regularly in literature. Hardy’s Jude the Obscure presents two diametrically opposed, incomplete women, the carnal Arabella and the pure Sue. Different as these women are, their fates both provide warnings about the dangers of female sexuality, providing an underlying message that associates sex with evil and the female. Wilde’s Salomé also resorts to reactionary fantasy and ends up presenting the seeming heroine as a misogynist myth. Lawrence also provides another clear example in his awe and terror at female fertility. The message that women are dangerous because of their sexual capabilities is, for Lawrence, especially apt when such archetypal, innately dangerous creatures break free of the repressive roles patriarchal society has trapped them in and enter the male realm of reason, intellect, and society.

Three of the key writers discussed in the book, Lawrence, Miller, and Mailer, have reputations as literary rebels who challenged the prudish attitudes of their times by writing about sex in radical, progressive ways.