Book review Sue Lees, Ruling Passions, Buckingham: Open University Press, 1997, ISBN 0-335-19613-6, pp. vii and 190. Price £12.99. Ruling Passions collates and updates some of Sue Lees’ most valuable contributions to research into sexual violence, reputation and the law. Readers who have encountered Lees’ work before may already be familiar with the chapters on the policing of girls in everyday life, sex education, and the representation of men and women in femicide cases. New additions include chapters on male rape, marital rape, and the representation of the body in rape trials. Lees’ arguments are well illustrated throughout with statistics, interview material and case studies. The failure of the state to secure justice for most victims of sexual violence in Britain is a primary theme, well argued and presented in a highly readable format. In the first two chapters Lees updates her widely acclaimed research into the policing of female sexuality. Lees demonstrates how the double standard of morality signified by the term ‘slag’ operates to control girls’ lives by placing them in a permanent state of vulnerability. Lees shows how taken for granted assumptions about sexuality structure both boys’ and girls’ subjectivities through language. In the subsequent chapters Lees explores how this double standard impinges on the construction of culpa- bility in rape and murder trials. Inaccurate and irrelevant information about women’s sexual history and physiology are still commonly introduced in rape trials. The female body becomes a “spectacle of degradation” as the culpability for rape is shifted from perpetrator to victim, effectively reaffirming false notions about the uncontrollable nature of men’s sexual desire, and women’s responsibility to acquiesce with it. In her chapter on male rape, Lees reports on a victim survey under- taken for the television series Dispatches in 1995 and sets out carefully what social research has told us about this much neglected topic. The implications of the widening of the legal definition of rape in the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 are discussed and Bob Connell’s (1995) ‘masculinities’ approach is harnessed as a sociological explanation for male rape. Lees’ account is instructive, although I am unsure whether this explanation alone accounts for the greater prevalence of female rape over male rape, the predominating heterosexuality of offenders, and individual sex offenders’ consistent preferences for particular groups of victims, i.e. Feminist Legal Studies 7: 215–218, 1999. © 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.