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Except from Mary Roach’s Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Sex and Science
Read on for Mary Roach’s introduction to her groundbreaking new work Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Sex and Science, published by Canongate in May 2008.
(£12.99; ISBN 978-1-84767-226-1)
A man sits in a room, manipulating his kneecaps. It is 1983, on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles. The man, a study subject, has been told to do this for four minutes, stop, and then resume for a minute more. Then he can put his pants back on, collect his payment, and go home with an entertaining story to tell at suppertime. The study concerns human sexual response. Kneecap manipulation elicits no sexual response, on this planet anyway, and that is why the man is doing it: It’s the control activity. (Earlier, the man was told to manipulate the more usual suspect while the researchers measured whatever it was they were measuring.)
I came upon this study while procrastinating in a medical school library some years ago. It had never really occurred to me, before that moment, that sex has been studied in labs, just like sleep or digestion or exfoliation or any other pocket of human physiology. I guess I had known it; I’d just never given it much thought. I’d never thought about what it must be like, the hurdles and the hassles that the researchers faced — raised eyebrows, suspicious wives, gossiping colleagues. Imagine a janitor or a freshman or, best of all, the president of UCLA, opening the door on the kneecap scene without knocking. Requesting that a study subject twiddle his knees is not immoral or indecent, but it is very hard to explain. And even harder to fund. Who sponsors these studies, I wondered. Who volunteers for them?
It’s not surprising that the study of sexual physiology, with a few notable exceptions, did not get rolling in earnest until the 1970s. William Masters and Virginia Johnson said of their field in the late 1950s, “…science and scientists 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.)
Even in the sixties, little was known and less was talked about. The retired British sex physiologist Roy Levin told me that the index of the first edition of Essential Medical Physiology, a popular textbook at that time, had no entry for penis, vagina, coitus, erection, or ejaculation. Physiology courses skipped orgasm and arousal, as though sex were a secret shame and not an everyday biological event.
One of Levin’s earliest sex projects was to profile the chemical properties of vaginal secretions, the only bodily fluid about which virtually nothing was known. The female moistnesses are the first thing sperm encounter upon touchdown, and so, from a fertility perspective alone, it was an important thing to know. This seemed obvious to him, but not to some of his colleagues in physiology. Levin can recall overhearing a pair of them sniping about him at the urinals during the conference where he presented his paper. The unspoken assumption was that he was somehow deriving an illicit thrill from calculating the ion concentrations of vaginal fluids. That people study sex because they are perverts.
Or, at the very least, because they harbor an unseemly interest in the matter. Which makes some people wary of sex researchers, and other people extremely interested. “People invariably draw all these conclusions about me, about why I’m studying this,” says University of Texas at Austin researcher Cindy Meston. That Meston is blonde and beautiful compounds the problem. If you are sitting next to Cindy Meston on a plane and you ask her what she does, she will either lie to you or she will say, “I do psychophysiological research.” She loses most of them there. “If they persist, I say something like, ‘Well, we use various visual and auditory stimuli to look at autonomic nervous system reactivity in various contexts.’ That usually does the trick.”
Even when a researcher carefully explains a sex-related project — its purpose and its value — people may still suspect he or she is a perv. Last year I was conversing by email with an acquaintance who was investigating the black market in cadaver parts. She came into possession of a sales list for a company that provides organs and tissues for research. On the list was “vagina with clitoris.”[49] She did not believe that there could be a legitimate research purpose for cadaver genitalia. She assumed the researcher had procured the part to have sex with. I replied that physiologists and people who study sexual dysfunction still have plenty to learn about female arousal and orgasm, and that I could, with little trouble, imagine someone needing such a thing. Besides, I told this woman, if the guy wanted to nail the thing, do you honestly think he’d have bothered with the clitoris?