Allen Edwardes

Who is Allen Edwardes?

Allen Edwardes is the pen-name of a scholar of Middle Eastern and Oriental erotica. He is best known as the author of the 1959 book, The Jewel in the Lotus, the introduction to which was written by the noted sexologist and prolific writer, Albert Ellis. The book, named after a famous mantra, is an amassment of sexual curiosities apparently plucked from a variety of ethnographical and orientalist sources. Throughout the book, one finds a plethora of uncontrolled generalizations concerning the sexual behaviour of non-western populations. Doubt has been cast on the sincerity of its scholarship. A recent study accuses the author of "more than a touch of prurience," and warns that "the guise of orientalist scholarship clearly gives Edwardes leeway to express a surfeit of subconscious homoerotic phantasy." As such, the book is a curious and highly specific example of a more general tendency in Western scholarship—or, in this case, rather pseudo-scholarship—which has been criticized as 'Orientalism'.