Like Petronius, the ancient Roman writer she takes as her model, Eurydice presents a firsthand account of the chaos of human sexuality in all its kinky, confused, and transgressive expressions.

With a style that combines erudition, wit, and hipness, and audaciously draws on both the factual authority of journalism and the atmospheric license of fiction, Eurydice transports us inside the nightmarish, breathtaking realms of dungeons and bloodletting clubs, cross-dressing conferences, supersized strip emporiums, as well as military bases and Catholic monasteries.

Her aim is to understand these people who are drawn to the farthest sexual "fringe." On her journeys, Eurydice learns that, in fact, they are well-educated middle- to upper-class professional Americans. They are housewives and stockbrokers, college students and grandparents, doctors and priests. Drawing on hundreds of interviews, Eurydice probes people's dual lives to answer some fundamental questions: Why is our society simultaneously obsessed with and afraid of sex?

How does this widespread sexual eccentricity coexist with our puritanical hysteria about sexual harassment and "moral turpitude"? Are we today more liberated or actually more confined than in the past?