The Shortest History of Sex review: A new book on sex that will charm your pants off

The Shortest History of Sex review: Now we know that while the evolution of sex is 2 billion years old, flirting began only 2.3 million years ago. (Images via Wikimedia Commons and Picador India)

Books on sex tend to veer towards erotica, titillation and downright porn, so this hot new book by David Baker detailing the why and how of coitus interrupts our slow journey through smut. The Shortest History of Sex (Picador India) will turn-on anyone on the path of academic data and stats on intercourse from when intercourse first began. Everything we wanted to know about sex but didn’t know whom to ask is finally here. For a species born because of furious and regular sex by their ancestors, we are a bit shy when it comes to how we got here on the planet.

‘What we think we know about sex is just the tip of the iceberg,’ says media personality Simon Whistler in the foreword. He also concedes ‘rare is to find a piece of writing where “bukkake” parties are mentioned in the same breath as DNA replication’. Ha ha, that sets the tone. The index – and subheads – go from foreplay to afterglow with the neatest bedhead wordplay. From ‘An Unfuckable Universe’ to ‘Sex, Starvation and Hannibal Lecter’, these almost break the fourth wall.

Baker (Photo via X/@davidcanzuk)

Starting with our DNA, the acid and chemical of it, to toe-curling orgasms, the cosmos has had to witness many moans and groans. Now we know that while the evolution of sex is 2 billion years old, flirting began only 2.3 million years ago. And the word ‘love’, that poets throw about, first started to evolve only 1.9 million years ago. From 50 years ago, in our own lifetime, promiscuity goes up and the sexless lonely hearts reach an all-time high almost in tandem.

Enter Prokaryotes, the blobs that began to inhabit Earth in innocent asexual abandon, then comes the fishy sex of amphibians, before slithering into the reptilian age, segueing into primate play dates, and then onwards to the era of orgasms – it is a gasping ride. ‘Between 66 million and 315,000 years ago, sexual stimulation became so intense and had such a profound effect on the physiology of the body that the mere word “pleasure” doesn’t even begin to describe it,’ we learn. Men felt ‘as though an earthquake had happened in their loins’ and female orgasms were euphoric. Nerve endings came into the limelight.

In this book is explained the power of an alpha ape, when the first porn film was made (in France in 1895), and all about the first vibrator (invented in 1880). Hetero unions had their own trajectory; two people coming together for sex is lauded because a child cloned merely from a dad ‘would simply be a beautiful idiot’. Also, the rise of the super-sexy modern phenomenon – divorce, which sees happy kids in single-parent units. And horror of horrors, the singletons. And the slow march of time when marriage brokers were replaced by online dating sites.

Fetishes, kinks, dirty talk, BDSM, the age-old sex for food practice, clitorectomies, this is a come-hither book for all ye curious. With its irreverent, light tone, and the tongue-in-cheek narration it will simply charm your pants off.