| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 59

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Edward Shorter, Written in the Flesh: A History of Desire (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2005)

IN HIS LATEST BOOK, Written in the Flesh: A History of Desire, Edward Shorter, the current Jason A. Hannah Chair in the History of Medicine at the University of Toronto, argues that human brains are hard-wired to experience the desire to give and to receive what he labels "total body sex." The term refers to sensual pleasure involving every part of the body rather than just the face and the genitals. According to Shorter, the brain drives the individual toward total body sex. The mind assesses how that drive can or cannot be exercised based on external constraints. In sum, says Shorter, human desire can be understood as "the history of the almost biological liberation of the brain to free up the mind in the direction of total body sex."

To bolster his thesis, Shorter puts into place three caveats. First, he asserts that he is speaking only of the history of Europe and the Anglo-Saxon world because he is unfamiliar with non-Western cultures. Second, he claims that his work is based on the sexual practices of the more "innovative" segments of society. Third, he contends that research illustrating the existence of pleasure pathways in the brain indicates that desire can be brain driven.

The bulk of the book charts chronologically the tug-of-war between the brain's drive toward total body sex and the external constraints under which the mind must labour. Shorter periodizes this battle, insisting that Roman and Greek antiquity constituted a hedonist smorgasbord of sexual activities. But from the Middle Ages onward, the sexual "baseline" changed. Apart from the elites, most men adopted "the vaginal focus, missionary position, and ram-it-home approach." Women's baseline was similar to that of men's. However, because of the fear of an unwanted pregnancy they had few opportunities to exercise their sexual desires. Gay men engaged mainly in "buggery," meaning anal sex. Lesbians were limited to "tribadism," or the rubbing of pelvises together to produce an orgasm. Often, this activity was undertaken while one played butch and the other, femme.

Shorter explains that the sexual baseline narrowed over time not only because of the anti-hedonist teachings of the Church but also because of the obstacles presented by everyday life. These ranged from the serious — chronic pain, disability, and death — to the vexatious — poor hygiene, infestations of lice, disfiguring infections, lack of privacy, and community mores. However, as educational, economic, medical, and technological improvements accelerated in the late 19th century, a sexual breakout occurred, culminating in the sexual revolution of the 1960s and onward. Straights and gays increasingly engaged in oral and anal sex, nipple play, fetish displays, sex toys, and sado-masochism.

Shorter's book is fast-paced, entertaining, and, at times, amusingly salacious. However, as a work of serious scholarship the book frustrates. Shorter's thesis is not bold, as the dust jacket praise would hold, but old. It smacks of the kind of essential biological determinism that reigned among academics more than 30 years ago. Since then, historians of sexuality have proposed that sexual desire is not merely the product of essential biological drives. Rather, it is the socially constructed outcome of complex interactions between the individual and time, place, and culture. Shorter is not a fan of social constructionism. He relegates poor Michel Foucault, pioneer of the social constructionist approach to the history of sexuality, only to a brief textual appearance in which Shorter has Foucault experiencing total body sex in a Toronto gay bath house. Shorter does allow that although the brain's drive predominates, sexual desire is the combined result of both nature and nurture. Reconciliation between the essentialist and social constructionist viewpoints is sorely needed. However, this book is too flaccid an instrument for the job.

By his own admission, Shorter is dealing with a putative shift toward total body sex in a very select group. This group consists of literate individuals of European and Anglo-Saxon origin living in the Western world. Shorter introduces diversity and complexity into this group by including straights and gays. Yet Shorter does not question the polymorphous sexual experiences of many of these individuals, the origins of classifications of heterosexual and homosexual, or the rigid division he invokes between these classifications. Rather, he insists only that homosexuality has a biological predisposition and leaves the situation at that. Moreover, Shorter has chosen to explore exclusively the sexual behaviour of the supposedly more innovative segments of this group. When Shorter refers to the sexual revolution of the 1960s, his reference point narrows even further, to the United States. His dubious and rather imperialistic claim that other parts of the world now also display a similar "massive convergence" toward total body sex does not distract from the fact that any extrapolation about human sexual desire from such a limited population sample is suspect.

Suspect as well is the cursory information Shorter provides about the science of the brain and its relationship to total body sex. How exactly are studies on trained rats, hormones, and the biological basis of homosexuality related to frolics in black leather and matching fur handcuffs? Indeed, the overwhelming majority of Shorter's evidence for the brain's drive is not based on medical mappings of that organ but on a jumble of cultural fragments left behind by the limited population sample he studies. The drawings on Greek vases, diary entries, autobiographies, popular magazines, poems, letters, sex surveys, pornography, paintings, films, postcards, novels, photographs, and television shows are the highlight of the book. Unfortunately, Shorter makes no value distinction between say, Franz Kallman's twin studies and a note by D.H. Lawrence, a comment by a pornographic filmmaker and an episode from Sex and the City. He lumps together academic and popular culture sources to point relentlessly in the direction of total body sex.

Much of what Shorter observes, particularly in the 20th century, has less to do with the brain's drive toward total body sex and far more to do with capitalism's drive toward total body commodification. Sex sells, and has sold, literally and figuratively. Nowhere is this commodification more apparent than when Shorter discusses women's sexual history. For example, Shorter declares that once oral contraceptives released women from the fear of an unwanted pregnancy, they assumed control of their own sexual desires. However, one of the best-known criticisms second-wave feminists levelled against the birth control pill was that the drug had turned women's bodies into profitable sexual commodities for men and for pharmaceutical companies. Instead of tracing how birth control technologies may have cemented a lucrative penetrative imperative for many heterosexual women, thereby working against total body sex, Shorter dismisses this criticism of the pill and remarks upon feminism's "deadening hand." Instead, he waxes contentedly about what amounts to the ongoing sexual commodification of the bodies of straight and gay women — the development of muscular female physiques, lesbians' participation in pornography, and the mainstreaming of sado-masochism in heterosexual couples — solely as proof of the movement toward total body sex.

It is difficult to believe that a book that deals with total body sex does not tackle the topic of HIV/AIDS. Even in his Epilogue, Shorter shies away from the subject, preferring to caution that while the brain's drive toward total body sex cannot be ignored, individuals' hedonist behaviour has resulted in disaffection from community life. Herein Shorter misses a golden opportunity to converse more profoundly about total body sex in regard to the complexities of sexual desire and the fallout of that desire. In some quarters, the advent of HIV/AIDS has renewed calls for sexual abstinence. In others, it has sparked strategies for safe sex, meaning not only condom use but also non-penetrative sexual activities. Has the threat of HIV/AIDS moved individuals to practise more or less total body sex?

Shorter's most valuable contribution may be to set the stage for finer-grained analyses of sexual desire, nature, and nurture. Such analyses might chart the impact of larger social justice movements such as civil rights, feminism, and gay rights on the biology of sexual desire. They may illuminate the workings of the heart — a cultural symbol for love — on the brain and the body. Perhaps such analyses may ultimately discover why sexual desire, even under optimal conditions of both nature and nurture, does not occur, or appears and then disappears, or remains unspoken, unreciprocated, and unrequited.


Christabelle Sethna University of Ottawa

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