In the broad strokes, Shorter is successful in making his case for an increasingly sensual element in our sexual expression, but one concern remains starkly undeveloped — the recent impact of HIV/AIDS. Shorter is at pains to detail the explosion of enthusiasm with which the gay male population, in particular, has embraced total body sex, but only notes in passing that most of his sources of information regarding gay sex during the 1980s are now dead.

Has fear of infection and death introduced a new hindrance on the path to a total sensuality? Can we draw parallels to the medieval experience of infectious diseases? Or is this merely a hiccup on the line of a larger trend? And what of the church? Is its renewed interest in issues of contraception and homosexuality nothing more than an opportunistic attempt to introduce doctrine on the coat-tails of fear? Or might the church yet have a measurable impact on the way we experience sexual pleasure? Because such questions persist, one is left feeling that the history of our desire is a work in progress, with a fresh chapter emerging in the next decade or so.

The final word:  if normally you are shy about reading books that come from academic presses, you may want to make an exception in this case. Written in the Flesh: A History of Desire is highly readable and entertaining. With this romp through more than two millennia of human sexuality, it becomes apparent that some things really are new under the sun, that slowly but inexorably, we are learning to loosen up and to enjoy all our bodies are capable of experiencing.