“The veil has never been silk. It’s been skin all along.”

This book isn’t about sex. It’s about the gravity of flesh—how it splits empires like rot in the ribs of a whale carcass, how it seeps into marble and drips out centuries later as law, art, and perfume. Lo Duca doesn’t write history. He carves it open, cracks its sternum, and tongues the wound.

Each chapter is a cathedral wired with explosives. You turn a page and suddenly Mesopotamia is breathing down your neck. Rome’s at the window. The Middle Ages are under your bed with a knife and a prayer. He’s not charting desire—he’s exhuming the bones of how we learned to want, how we built altars out of thigh bones and shame.