Sex Rules!

With 24 years as a groundbreaking international development expert, Janice Zarro Brodman has lived, worked or traveled in 35 countries. After earning her PhD in political economy from Harvard University, she created and served as Director of the Center for Innovative Technologies at EDC, a global nonprofit organization founded by MIT scholars. Her projects for the UN, World Bank, and other international organizations focused on small business development and on ending violence against women and girls.As an innovator in using technology for international development, Dr. Brodman has written seminal articles published by The MIT Press, Idea Group Publishing, Harvard Institute for International Development, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Computerworld, Organizational Behavior, and Quest. She has been a frequent speaker at United Nations agencies, the World Bank, the US Agency for International Development, and other organizations.She researched hundreds of sources for Sex Rules! so that however weird, bizarre, and unreal the book’s content may seem, it’s all absolutely true. Her aim is to delight people who reject the notion that “there’s only one way to be sexually moral,” and to give tolerance a fun place to grow.

"In her new book, Sex Rules: Astonishing Sexual Practices and Gender Roles Around the World, [Brodman] shares the results of years of research and world travel to show readers that what we consider normal is anything but. When it comes to human behavior, "normal" is a highly subjective term...Brodman shows just how wildly divergent ideas about sexuality and gender roles can be."-Vice“After getting married, women of the Berom tribe in Nigeria are expected to spend a few weeks with their husbands and then hit the market for one or more casual flings. Teenage boys of the Apanyekra-Canela people in Brazil will be shamed if they hook up with a teenage girl – instead, their sexual education will start with women in their forties and fifties. nd among the Etoro in Papua New Guinea, all men have male lovers, because it makes the crops healthy. It’s having sex with your wife that ruins crops, which is why married couples do it in the woods, far from the crops and their own home. These are just a few of the tidbits about strange cultural practices – strange to us, anyway – that Janice Zarro Brodman has been collecting since her time as a grad student at Harvard in the 1980s and has just published as “Sex Rules! Astonishing Sexual Practices and Gender Roles Around the World.” Mark Levy, Cambridge Day