Written in the Flesh: A History of Desire (review)

This generally well-written book's guiding presumption is that "we are driven willy-nilly by our bodies in the historic search for pleasure" (17). To help his readers understand what this means, Edward Shorter claims to provide a history of desire in the West, which begins with the "free-and-easy sexuality of classical antiquity," presented over the course of four pages in Chapter One. The subsequent three sections gloss, firstly, "night falls over Christian Europe" (ancients until the Victorians); secondly, the "initial breakout" around the fin de siècle; then, thirdly, the 1960s to the present, when significant numbers of people in the West (and wannabes the world over) finally became free to pursue "total body sex" (3). Shorter, I should note, has mastered the dubious art of inventing his own personal jargon: as with his insistent (although not consistent) references to the study of "hedonics," "total body sex" means just what it appears to mean. Why he thinks it's a useful historical category, on the other hand, requires a bit of explaining.

Shorter believes that biology drives human desire, as it drives all social developments: "Human sexuality is in the control of biology, and Master Desire is flogging the beast forward" (168). Since biology constantly pushes all humans toward the fulfillment of desire, yet the historical record suggests that most did not live a life dedicated to "total body sex," what was it that stopped them? This gets to the heart of what Shorter imagines as the historian's task: "to understand change in history, we must understand how external limitations on this drive are abolished" (6). He claims that "the victory of total body sex [was won] over the repressiveness of Christian Europe, want, disease, and stench" (238). Shorter romps through what he seems desperate to call the Dark Ages ("the long Christian centuries between the fall of the Roman Empire and the great changes of the 1800s" [65]) in three chapters: "Sex, a Baseline," "A Baseline for Gays and Lesbians," and "Hindrances." Shorter knows that there are three groups of human beings—straight, gay, and lesbian—which he treats distinctly in each section. Each group follows the same progression toward total body sex, although lesbians keep falling behind. Into the 1800s, to take one example, this means that most straights were limited to the "missionary position," while gays had nary an option except for anal sex and lesbians had rubbing pelvises together (tribadism). How does Shorter know this? Rather than waste time on explaining his choice of sources, method, or epistemology, the author prefers to ruminate on questions of the genre: "is there a historic continuity in lesbian culture that values such symbols as the colour purple or special rings?" (75); or "Where does SM-fetish come from? Does it represent some biological drive? Or are SM and fetish part of the new empowerment that women, for example, have received under feminism . . . ? This," he helpfully clarifies, "is the same kind of biology versus social-construction dilemma that has bothered us at other points" (204).

Let's clear up that uncertainty: like everyone else, Shorter recognizes that "it is nature not nurture that drives desire." In his telling, "in gay studies it is now almost universally assumed that sexual orientation is inborn." Don't trust those people? Shorter reminds us that "one can train rats to administer repeatedly to themselves small electrical doses that excite the brain. So there clearly is some kind of biological, brain-based component in desire that presumably is part of the basic wiring of our nervous systems" (4). Having gotten the "some kind of" and "presumably" pussyfooting out of the way, Shorter can now move forward to say whatever he feels like. Those who don't agree are caught up in what Shorter, drawing from the work of the legal scholar Nadine Weidman, terms "biodenial" (17). Those who don't agree, however, might actually follow up the Weidman...