Written in the Flesh: A History of Desire

John Stanley is a senior policy advisor in the Corporate Policy Branch
Management Board Secretariat, Government of Ontario. He is co-editor of
Nation and History: Polish Historians from the Enlightenment to the
Second World War.

This volume provides a short overview of sexual behaviour between
antiquity and the contemporary world. Its author, Edward Shorter, a
retired University of Toronto history professor, once wrote a Toronto
Star column. The book’s thesis argues that “sexual behaviour and
sensual pleasure are the product of biologically driven desire rather
than of fashion or social conditioning.” In Shorter’s view, the
brain is the “engine of hedonism,” but his discussion reduces the
brain to “deep neural programs.” The book aims at establishing a
“history of the almost biological liberation of the brain to free up
the mind in the direction of total body sex.” The thesis also posits a
universal underlying sexual desire that will always appear unless
“hindrances,” such as body odour, lack of privacy, guilt, fear,
hygiene, and disease, interfere. He insists that sexual experience
changes little from century to century and that homosexuality is
biological in nature. It’s an interesting point of view and Shorter
repeats it frequently, but advocacy is not proof.

Shorter sees the breakthrough to total body sex as occurring at the end
of the 19th century. “After 1900, the drive towards sensuality becomes
unilinear, continuous, and irreversible.” It’s a bold statement, but
his periodization is odd since most evidence—including his
own—points to a secularizing mentality in the late 18th century. For
example, he himself notes that the Versailles of the ancien régime
provided a “glimpse of total body sex for the first time in
history.” He also curiously dismisses the Romantics, although the
heroic sexual outlaw, as witnessed by Lord Byron, worked a great change
in attitudes and behaviour. He does provide a specific focus on
homosexual as well as fetish behaviour, but since he stuffs such
activity into the same framework, he doesn’t take his readers far.

Shorter’s past work has been criticized for basing a sweeping thesis
on narrow evidence, and this difficulty appears here too. Although the
scope of the study is allegedly the “Western world,” the anecdotes
are drawn almost exclusively from the United States, England, Germany,
France, and Italy. (For a Canadian author and publisher, the paucity of
Canadian material is striking.) He frequently makes a broad
statement—say, about the Middle Ages—without any proof to accompany
it. On another occasion, he cites statistics for the United States that
turn out to be exclusively from Massachusetts. Shorter attempts to
justify his scope and use of evidence by noting that he can do only what
he is qualified to do, but surely readers have the right to expect that
an author will equip himself with the skills necessary to develop his
argument rather than setting goals by the limits that constrain him?

Shorter’s treatment boils down to a journalistic overview with a weak
scholarly framework, an approach that satisfies neither the needs of a
general reader nor those of the scholar.