Includes bibliographical references (p. 535-576) and index.

Preface: Why a book about a bedtrick? -- Introduction: Sex, text, and masquerade. -- How to commit adultery with your own spouse. -- Approach one: Philosophy, or love/sex = mind/body? -- The rope of the false mother. -- Approach two: Psychology. -- Waking up in bed with an animal. -- Approach three: Zoology. -- The lovely/loathly lady. -- Approach four: Feminism, or Women are good to think with. -- The cuckolds of the heart. -- Approach five: Theology, or When God has lipstick on his collar. -- Designated hitters. -- Approach six: Law, or Loopholes in the penal code. -- Color, class, and clout. -- Approach seven: Weapons of the weak. -- Cross-cultural cross-dressing. -- Approach eight: Queer theory and the theater of deception. -- Incest. -- Approach nine: Sexual rhetoric. -- Real sex and fantastic sex. -- Approach ten: Structuralism. -- Conclusion: Carnal ignorance and carnal knowledge. -- Appendix: Bedtricks in Stith Thompson's Motif-index.

"The Bedtrick brings together hundreds of stories from all over the world, from the earliest recorded Hindu and Hebrew texts to the latest item in the Weekly World News, to show the hilariously convoluted sexual scrapes that people manage to get themselves into and out of. Here you will find wives who accidentally commit adultery with their own husbands. You will read Lincoln's truly terrible poem about a bedtrick. And you will learn that President Clinton was not the first man to be identified by an idiosyncratic organ."--BOOK JACKET.