Book Review: Written In The Flesh, A History Of Desire

Total body sex is the idea that all parts of the body can give and receive pleasure; that erogenous zones are not limited to the genitals and face. This is the goal of all sexual pleasure.

Written in the Flesh, A History of Desire, takes a look at what kind of sex people have always had and what kind of sex people have when social constraints are lifted.

This drive for pleasure is biologically based and is what our bodies are programmed to do, Edward Shorter writes. As soon as cultural constraints are lifted total body sex is what each culture progresses towards.

This is a very interesting book and explores topics like gay and lesbian sex, religious constraints, contraception, constraints of living conditions (whole families to one room, parents and kids sleeping together, bed bugs and lice, hygiene), and bondage/dominance and sadomasochism (BDSM).

Any student of hedonics will be impressed by the phenomenon: we don’t choose desire; desire chooses us. We have relatively little rational control over the pleasures we seek out. Instead, we are driven to them. Anyone who recalls the recurring nature of his or her first masturbatory fantasies realizes the truth of this. It is the deeper neural circuits of desire that push us towards the pleasures we select. Rationality plays little role in what we fantasize about in the bathtub, regard on the street, or undertake in bed.

The chapter on BDSM examines this wide-spread phenomenon as an example of how everyone is heading towards a life of total body sex. This was

once considered a hideous perversion…now accepted as a more or less legitimate band of the sexual spectrum and is called in polite circles role playing because people do not really hurt one another in the sense of causing tissue damage.

With an epilogue about the consequences of total body sex, that is, a withdrawal from public life into private life, this is a fascinating read that explores the history of desire and sex and I would recommend this to anyone interested in the subject (and the pictures aren’t at all bad either!).