Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex

by Mary Roach

“…science and scientist continue to be governed by fear—fear of public opinion,…fear of religious intolerance, fear of political pressure, and, above all, fear of bigotry and prejudice—as much within as without the professional world.” (And then they said, “Oh, what the hell,” and built a penis-camera.)

This book is a tribute to the men and women who dared. Who, to this day, endure ignorance, closed minds, righteousness, and prudery. Their lives are not easy. But their cocktail parties are the best.

It was Dickinson who ushered the clitoris into the spotlight. He was an early proponent of the more clitoris-friendly woman-on-top position. Through measurements and interviews he debunked some persistent clitoral myths. For instance, that the bigger ones are more sensitive, and that good girls don’t play with them. (Masturbation, he wrote, was “a normal sex experience.”)

The most dramatic example of this biological priority shift is a sexually mediated disregard for pain and physical discomfort. Whatever ails you pretty much stops ailing you during really hot sex.

Heart rate and blood pressure, it turns out, are more reliable indicators of orgasm than they are of deceit.)

The labia minora enlarge by two or three times their normal diameter. They also, as both Masters and Dickinson observed, change color, turning pink, bright red, or, occasionally, in women who’ve given birth, a deep wine color. In all of the 7,500 female sexual response cycles that Masters and Johnson watched, no woman who had an orgasm failed to display this “florid coloration” just beforehand. If a man wants to know whether a woman is faking her orgasms he could, barring some logistical hurdles, look for this “sex-skin reaction.”

This, to me, is as good as science gets: a mildly outrageous, terrifically courageous, seemingly efficacious display of creative problem-solving, fueled by a bullheaded dedication to amassing facts and dispelling myths in a long-neglected area of human physiology. Kudos to the pair of them.

The stereotypical ideal female—Barbie tall with Barbie big breasts—is the one least likely to respond to a manly hammering.

uterine contractions—minor peristaltic versions of which are happening all the time, not just during orgasms—have been shown to reverse direction over the course of a woman’s menstrual cycle. Around ovulation, when a woman is most fertile, they pull material in toward the uterus; during menstruation they expel it.

(The reproductive system is smarter than you think, and utterly goal-directed. Not only do sex hormones orchestrate the direction of your uterine contractions, they dilate only the fallopian tube that contains the ovum, so that more semen ends up on that side. They even oversee the quantity and viscosity of your discharge. Around ovulation, cervical mucus becomes more abundant and takes on the stringy consistency of an egg white, providing sperm with a sort of rope ladder into the uterus.)

My conclusion, a conclusion you will encounter many times in the course of these pages, is that the sexual anatomy and responses of the human female are as uniform and predictable as the weather.

This would fit in with the little-known fact that the last portion of a man’s ejaculate contains a natural spermicide—not intended to kill his own soldiers, obviously, but to annihilate the seed of any who come after him.

To produce an ejaculate with optimum potential for fertilization, Levin recommends a holding time of five days.

i can recall, many years ago, being told that a clitoris* is a vestigial penis. The feminist in me, who is small and sleeps a lot but can be scrappy when provoked, took umbrage at this description. I resented the implication that men have the real deal, while women make do with a sort of miniaturized, wannabe rendition. But it is true. Male and female fetuses both begin life with something closer to a clitoris. The male’s expands into a penis, while the female’s remains more or less as is.

A man in a blue smock and a hairnet walks across a factory floor with an armload of enormous chocolate-brown dildos. He is loaded down to the point of absurdity. He is Audrey Hepburn leaving Bergdorf’s in some 1960s romantic comedy, her arms piled so high with packages that she can barely see over the top. I want to trip him, not out of meanness, but just to see the penises fly through the air and rain down around us.

Sipski defines orgasm as a reflex of the autonomic nervous system that can be either facilitated or inhibited by cerebral input (thoughts and feelings).

“Cheese crumbs spread in front of a copulating pair of rats may distract the female, but not the male.”

Hormones can act as the invisible puppet strings behind the discomfiting one-night stand, the shameless flirtation with the bellboy, the unexpected and regrettable kiss between friends. Your genes want you to get pregnant, and hormones are their magic wand.

The rickety notion of rhesus—and, by implication, human—sex pheromones can be traced to a rhesus monkey research colony in the U.K. and to the behavioral neuroendocrinologist who observed it.

*You need a floor plan to keep track of the vaginas in Human Sexual Response. There are vaginal floors, vestibules, platforms, barrels, and outlets. Are people having sex, or are they just visiting Crate and Barrel?

*And from HAFD, hyperactive acronym formation disorder. The condition has reached epidemic proportions in the sex research community.

surgical correction of a crooked penis (due to Peyronie’s disease). The surgery repairs the crook but takes as much as an inch off the length. Meston called the questionnaire the Washington Examination of Expected Negative Identity Post-Peyronie’s: the WEENI PP.

In a study of male and female genital slang carried out at five British universities, respondents came up with 351 ways to say penis (e.g., veiny bang stick, custard chucker, one-eyed milkman, bishop) and only three for clitoris: bean, button, and the little man in the boat. The authors felt this reflected society’s disregard of female pleasure, which is probably true, but I simply bemoan the lack of useful synonyms.