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My first book was about human cadavers, and as a result, people assumed that I’m obsessed with death. Now that I have written books about both sex and death, God only knows what the word on the street is.
For example, did you know that “defecating” can briefly bring your heart rate down by eight beats per minute?
I understand why Bartlett did not include photographs in his Journal of Applied Physiology article, but I have not forgiven him.
He filmed Kinsey himself masturbating, in one instance, by pushing a swizzle stick* up his staff.
Who but a biologist would have documented the activity of the salivary glands with the approach of orgasm? “If one’s mouth is open when there is a sudden upsurge of erotic stimulation and response,” Kinsey writes, “saliva may be spurted some distance out of the mouth.”
“We were unable to obtain any lesbians,” Pomeroy says, as though perhaps they hadn’t been in season, or his paperwork wasn’t in order.)
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. Fevers and muscle aches, Kinsey claimed, briefly abate. Temperature extremes go unnoticed, which must have been a relief for the couples in Kinsey’s attic, as it was, depending on the season, either very hot or very cold up there. Handily, the gag reflex is eliminated, even “among individuals who are quite prone to gag when objects are placed deep in their mouths.”
Heart rate and blood pressure, it turns out, are more reliable indicators of orgasm than they are of deceit.)
William Harvey had an answer. In 1988, long before the current Internet-fueled sex-machine boom, this man obtained a patent for a Therapeutic Apparatus for Relieving Sexual Frustrations in Women Without Sex Partners.
At the base of the penial assembly was a wide, black, wiry cuff of “fur-like or hair-like material.” For the partnerless woman who wants not only the ultimate climax or orgasm, but also the feeling that she is actually having sex with a shoe buffer.
The vaginal-clitoral distances, he said, turned out to perfectly predict which women would have orgasms in intercourse and which wouldn’t. The cutoff point, as Bonaparte had noted, lay at around an inch—the width of a typical thumb. I asked him if he was going to trademark his “rule of thumb.”
Neuhaus quotes the 1935 edition of Sex Practice in Marriage: “Should a man be unable to restrain himself and have an orgasm before his wife, he must keep up the clitoris stimulation until his wife has reached the climax.” It was a good time to be a woman.
Freud was no friend of the clitoris. Freudian theory holds that grown women who derive their sexual satisfaction from their clitoris are stuck in a childlike state. This “phallic” phase is supposed to end at puberty, when a woman embraces her proper role as a passive, feminine being. “With the change to femininity,” he wrote in New Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis, “the clitoris should wholly or in part hand over its sensitivity, and at the same time its importance, to the vagina.”
Marriage manual author Theodoor Van de Velde quotes an imperial physician’s advice to eighteenth-century Habsburg empress Maria Theresa, who was slow to conceive: “I am of the opinion that the vulva of Your Most Sacred Majesty should be titillated for some length of time before intercourse.” Evidently, it was sound advice; she eventually had sixteen children.
Fifty menstruating women masturbated with a wide-open speculum in place, such that it provided the researchers with an unobstructed view of the cervix. “During the terminal stages of orgasmic experience…menstrual fluid could be observed spurting from the external cervical [opening] under pressure. In many instances, the pressure was so great that initial portions of the menstrual fluid actually were expelled from the vaginal barrel without contacting either blade of the speculum.” I do so hope they wore lab glasses.
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
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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.
Before Schultz’s MRIs, few had realized how much of the penis lies hidden below the surface of the skin. The “root” is nearly two thirds again the length of the “pendulous part.” So if your erection is, say, six inches long, go ahead and say it’s ten. I’ll back you up.
Also, we learned that the penis—root and stalk together—“has the shape of a boomerang” during intercourse. (Leonardo had drawn it stick-straight.) But not its precise dynamics. If you hurl an uprooted penis into the air, it will not come back to you. It will most likely, and who can blame it, want nothing to do with you.
“You look so young to have a fifteen-year-old,” Ed is saying. “How old are you?” “I’m forty-five in August.” “And the little one? How old?” “Just two and a half. You can ejaculate now.”
“Please tell those smart-aleck scientists and those big drug companies to work on a cure for cancer and quit ruining the lives of millions of women who have earned a rest.”
t here are images that stay with you your whole life, whether you want them to or not. Here is one that I imagine will make the cut. 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.
For ten-plus centuries, the womb was considered less an organ than an independent creature, able to move about the woman’s body like a badger in its den.
I’m not saying there’s a link between Catholicism and sex toys. I’m just saying I’ve got a brand-new interpretation of Isaiah 49:2 (“The Lord…hath made me a polished shaft”).
Bohlen concluded that sex was, at best, “light to moderate” exercise of short duration.
Sipski defines orgasm as a reflex of the autonomic nervous system that can be either facilitated or inhibited by cerebral input (thoughts and feelings).
Sipski was describing the bulbocavernosus reflex, which tells you whether the sacral reflex arc is intact. The test entails slipping a finger into the patient’s rectum and using the other hand to either squeeze the end of the penis or touch the clitoris. If the rectum finger gets squeezed, the reflex is working.
When a woman is turned on by something or someone, her brain sends a signal to open up more of the capillaries in her womanly recesses. This ups the amount of blood in her vaginal walls, and some of the clear portion of it seeps through the capillaries and coats the vagina. Hello, lubrication.
Meston says that although Viagra has not been approved for use by women, doctors often prescribe it anyway—mainly because they don’t have anything else to prescribe.
“Cheese crumbs spread in front of a copulating pair of rats may distract the female, but not the male.”
Women, both gay and straight, will show immediate genital arousal (as measured by a photoplethysmograph) in response to films of sexual activity, regardless of who is engaging in it—male, female, gay, straight, good hair or bad. Men, contrary to stereotype, tend to respond in a limited manner; they are aroused only by footage that fits their sexual orientation and interests.
Shafik won my heart by publishing a paper in European Urology in which he investigated the effects of polyester on sexual activity. Ahmed Shafik dressed lab rats in polyester pants.
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.
Incredibly, Victorian physicians practiced gynecology and urology on women without looking. Even a catheter insertion would typically be done blind, with the doctor’s hands under the sheets and his gaze heading off in some polite middle distance. Fortunately, budding M.D.’s were allowed to look upon—and rehearse upon—cadaver genitals, and that is how they learned to practice the Braille edition of their craft.
Derogatis estimates 11,250 sex-related sudden deaths in the United States each year, putting it on a par with hepatitis C, brain cancer, and food poisoning.
Fillmore’s last words (upon tasting a soup): “The nourishment is palatable.”
Only in the mutant universe of sexology could a man with his fingers in a woman who is exhibiting “hyperventilation,…rhythmic pelvic movements, vocalizations, and perspiration” not be considered erotically involved.
One of the less prominently known similarities between pigs and men: They both fondle breasts. No other males on the planet regularly do this.
“Copulation,” Leonardo wrote, “is awkward and disgusting.” He is said to have never bedded a woman.
Marie Carmichael Stopes. Her popular and controversial sex manual Married Love was written while she was still a virgin. Either she got some things wrong, or she failed to follow her own advice: Stopes’s 1911 marriage was annulled, unconsummated, three years later.
The nerve-dense bit of tissue on the underside of the penis, where shaft meets glans. “Along with the tip and the testicles, these are the sensitive parts,” says Marty. “The whole rest of the penis, you could throw away.”
The female earwig is renowned for her maternal fastidiousness. She cleans her eggs obsessively with her saliva, which contains an antifungal. If someone—and it is unclear to me who this might be—enters her den and scatters her eggs, she will dutifully gather and repile them. However, if this happens once too often, she will eat them. Even earwigs have their limits.
