Written in the Flesh

The human body is only just coming to real life. With the Greeks it gave a lovely flicker, then Plato and Aristotle killed it, and Jesus finished it off. But now the body is really coming to life, is really rising from the tomb.
-- Lady Chatterley's Lover

D.H. Lawrence's 1928 novel of adultery, scandalous in its time, is a kind of template for Edward Shorter's Written in the Flesh. Buried deep within the neural pathways of our brains, argues Shorter, is the desire for sexual pleasure -- and for what he calls "total body sex." What, you might want to know (or be afraid to ask), is that? For Shorter, a University of Toronto professor of medical history, it means the expansion of erotic focus from face and genitals to include the sensual delights of the entire body. This biological drive can be channeled underground for a time -- in the case of Medieval Europe, for over a millennium -- by a combination of social control (religion) and social conditions (hunger, disease, lack of privacy). But in the end, desire will out...more here