Katie Healey is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Program for the History of Science and Medicine at Yale. She studies deaf and disability history in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. In her limited free time, she trains in improv comedy with the Upright Citizens Brigade in NYC and tries out comic material on her loyal kitty, Marlee Catlin.
 |
| Cover of
Mary
Roach's Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex. New York: W.W.
Norton, 2008.
|
NSFW—the internet shorthand warning
“not safe for work”— has rather ambiguous implications for scientists. In her 2008
book Bonk: The Curious Coupling of
Science and Sex, Mary Roach shows that when it
comes to questions of sex, nothing is off-limits for sexologists,
gynecologists, and other sex researchers. Roach examines their investigations
of intimate questions concerning the purpose of the female orgasm and of whether
sexually stimulating livestock during artificial insemination increases
fertility. However, she also documents the struggles to legitimize their work
on such sensitive subjects. Bonk,
therefore, explores how scientists participate in and justify their research in
order to attract both funding and experimental subjects.
Roach
dedicates her book to those who devote their lives to studying sex. She reveals
that such work is actually an arduous undertaking, and even the most successful
scientists are forever vulnerable to accusations of perversion. Sexologists William
Masters and Virginia Johnson, the inspirations for Showtime’s popular series Masters of Sex,
explained in the late 1950s that scientists studying human sexual arousal “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.” Thankfully,
Masters, Johnson, and others steadfastly continued their work despite such fear.
 | ||||||
| Alfred Kinsey in 1948 at Indiana University. |
Although
sex researchers’ aims to improve sex lives or increase fertility might reflect
altruistic intentions, their methods are not always selfless. In fact, they
often use their own bodies as sites of experimentation. “Rather
than risk being fired or ostracized by explaining their unconventional project
to other people and trying to press those other people into service, researchers,”
Roach explains, “would simply, quietly, do it themselves” (29). Take Alfred Kinsey, for instance, the
famous American sexologist who interviewed thousands of people about (and
sometimes even observed) their most intimate details to publish his reports in the 1940s and 1950s
on the sexual behavior of men and women. Kinsey also masturbated on camera
while inserting a swizzle stick up his urethra, all in the name of research
(his other self-experiments on urethral insertions involved a toothbrush, bristles-side
up, and perhaps lends new meaning to NSFW).
In
addition, the British sex researcher Giles Brindley, who self-experimented with
a homemade electroejaculator, shocked a roomful of urologists at a conference
in 1983 by showing slides of his own
penis after various doses of a new drug for erectile dysfunction. He then
dropped the pants of his blue track suit, revealing the effectiveness of his
most recent dose, and euphemistically offered the audience an “opportunity to
confirm the degree of tumescence.” Brindley’s unorthodox unveiling of results inspired
eyewitness Laurence Klotz to publish an article entitled “How (Not) to Communicate
New Scientific Information” (315).
Roach
herself engages in some participant observation, squeezing a penile prosthesis,
having sex with her
husband while being filmed in 4-D ultrasound, and borrowing an Eros Clitoral Therapy
Device for review (it became a gift; the lender didn’t want it back).
Roach
also describes researchers’ efforts to legitimize their work. Acquiring funding
for sex-related projects, for instance, often proves challenging. Though Kinsey
was well funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, he had to resort to some
semantic subterfuge in order to pay his photographer as part of his “mammalian
behavior studies” (33). Acquiring human experimental
subjects proves equally challenging. People often hesitate to voluntarily
engage in sexual practices for research. But Roach explains that it’s helpful
to “so thoroughly bedeck your participants in the trappings of science that
what they [are] doing no longer look[s] like sex” (30). Tangles of EKG wires,
esoteric terminology, and “artificial-coition machines” are helpful in this
regard. Roach provides abundant examples, such as William Harvey’s patented Therapeutic Apparatus for Relieving Sexual
Frustrations in Women Without Sex Partners, complete with “penial
assembly” (56). Sex researchers often must paint even the practical results of
their research in the most clinical of terms. Despite promises of discreet
packaging, many women shy away from purchasing vibrators to assuage their sexual
arousal disorder. But,
Roach explains, the guise of FDA approval and a doctor’s prescription makes use
of the Eros Clitoral Therapy Device less taboo.
Roach’s
book is exceedingly descriptive but occasionally light in analysis. Readers may
find themselves wondering, for instance, how shifting political climates
impacted sex research. A welcome addition would be a more critical examination
of the categories of gender, race, and class.
For instance, Roach mentions nothing of Kinsey omitting his plentiful information
on the sex lives of African Americans in his ostensibly comprehensive reports
on American sexuality, or of how socioeconomic factors influence who seeks
contraception or fertility treatments and why. Finally, her statement that
Brinkley’s exposure shocked “urologists and their wives” might make feminist
readers (or least members of the Society of Women in Urology) cringe. She does,
however, include insightful information about the oft-overlooked category of
disability. For example, she reveals Kinsey’s observations that orgasms improve
muscle spasticity in people with cerebral palsy for up to eight hours. In
addition, she describes current research on sexuality among people with spinal
cord injuries and diseases.
Roach
shines in documenting sex researchers at work in their laboratories (or in
Kinsey’s case, the attic), but their human objects of study are often denied
agency. This is perhaps best illustrated in the anesthetized patient whose new penile
prosthesis, unbeknownst to him, Roach squeezes. Nonetheless, Bonk is a highly engaging, detailed,
humorous—and dare I say pleasurable— read.
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