Getting it on for science

Bonobo porn, MRI sex, female Viagra. "Bonk" author Mary Roach on the scientific quest to understand arousal -- and how little we still know.

By Katharine Mieszkowski

Read more: Mary Roach, Sex, Viagra, Science, Orgasm, Clitoris, Katharine Mieszkowski, Vaginas, Life, Salon Conversations

April 4, 2008 |

Mary Roach is that unflappable science writer who isn't shy about playing guinea pig in the lab, even if it means convincing her husband to participate in a "coitus" study while a doctor stands by waving an ultrasound wand over the couple.

Roach, a former Salon columnist, is best known for treating the human corpse with surprising humor and respect in her 2003 bestseller, "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers." After the dead, she moved right along to science's attempt to grapple with the afterlife in "Spook." For her latest adventures in weird science, she ventured back to the land of the living for "Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex." Roach finds that, over the centuries, doctors have gone to some funky extremes to try to improve their patients' sex lives. But first, they had to try to figure out what the heck is going on during sex, which turns out to be harder than it might sound.

As a read, "Bonk" is more clitoral surgery than cleavage. There are few cheap thrills here, but Roach finds much to be fascinated by -- and laugh at -- from prescription-strength vibrators to the surgical testicular implants for neutered dogs. (Hint: It's really about making the dog's owner feel better.) She travels to Taiwan, London, Denmark and Egypt, witnessing penile implant surgery and watching pig farmers titillate sows for artificial insemination along the way. But observing hot live action in the field of sex studies can be harder than achieving multiple orgasms without foreplay. There is the privacy of the research subjects to consider, and, besides, much research on human sexuality is now done through behavioral questionnaires rather than bonking away in the lab. In the end, sometimes Roach just has to go under the microscope herself with a vaginal photoplethysmograph probe or, of course, her husband, Ed.

What's most delightful about "Bonk" is not only the bizarre things it reveals about the history of sexual beliefs -- if two testicles are good, aren't three better?! -- but also how little is still known about some basic mechanics of human sexuality. Salon spoke with Roach about the science of sex in our offices in San Francisco.

Who were the earliest sex researchers?

Leonardo da Vinci did a lot of amazing physiological, anatomical drawings from cadavers. He got interested in what happens when people have intercourse. He just tried to imagine it, and he drew the coition figures. They're these detailed -- unfortunately not very accurate -- drawings. I like to think of him as the original.

Fast-forward a bazillion years to Robert Latou Dickinson, who was this amazing guy, who got Kinsey started. Kinsey had been studying gall-wasp speciation -- sex not on the radar -- and he met Dickinson. Robert Dickinson was a gynecologist in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and he began interviewing patients about their sexual practices. First, he just started asking them questions, and then he had them actually demonstrate how they masturbate. For the time, it was kind of astounding.

You'd think: "Oh, he must have been some sort of pervert with an ulterior motive," but he wasn't at all. Dickinson felt very strongly that bad sex was laying waste to a lot of marriages. He had people coming in who thought that the outer labia was as far as the penis was supposed to go. They thought they were having sex, and couldn't figure out why they were not getting pregnant.

Does this idea that the people who study sex are kind of perverts persist even today?

Oh, yeah. This woman Cindy Meston, who has a lab at the University of Texas at Austin, said: "If somebody on an airplane says 'Well, what do you do?' I don't say, 'I'm a sex researcher.'" Because they inevitably think you're a pervert, or you must really dig sex. Whereas if you're a geneticist, people don't think: "Oh, you must really dig genes!" Sex researchers get that all the time -- a lot of raised eyebrows.

How does this attitude hovering around sex researchers and research affect their funding?

It definitely makes it harder for them, especially in the age of the Internet because now conservative groups can go to these databases of government-funded research and plug in keywords, like "sexual" or "penis," and then get a listing of these researchers whom they want to then "expose" as "spending government dollars on frivolous, immoral research."

So how do the researchers get around that?

They use a vague term. So instead of "sexual," you would say "physiological" responses. Research tends to gravitate where the funding money is, and for the past 10 years, really since Viagra came out, there has been a push toward finding a "female Viagra."

Obviously, you can't just use Viagra. They tried. Believe me, they tried.

It just doesn't work at all?

What happened is that it does cause an increase in blood volume in the genitals, but not to the point where the women were really noticing. If you did a physiological measurement: Yes, there was a difference, but when you asked questions, the women were like: "Huh, I didn't notice anything." So, it wasn't significant. On paper it was a significant difference, but not in their lives.

There can be a split between what the sex researchers measure happening in their genitals, and what women report feeling?

When sex researchers are doing female arousal studies, they tend to use sexually explicit clips -- porn. One researcher found that women say that they prefer female-centered porn. In other words, the guy is attending to the female's sexual needs, rather than just banging away. Women will say: "That is more arousing to me. That other stag film, I hated that one. It had no effect on me." But if you look at their blood volume, they were responding to both of them the same. So, it's just all much more subtle for women.

Next page: "It doesn't matter who is having sex in the video, women have a physiological response"