Early studies of sexual physiology came at it sideways, via studies of fertility, obstetrics and gynecology, and venereal disease. Even working in these areas tended to invite scorn and suspicion. Gynecologist James Platt White was expelled from the American Medical Association in 1850, after inviting medical students to observe a (consenting) woman in labor and delivery. His colleagues had been outraged over the impropriety of a male doctor looking at female genitalia.[50] In 1875, a gynecologist named Emo Nograth was booed while delivering a talk on venereal disease at the newly formed American Gynecological Society. The sex researcher and historian Vern Bullough, in the 1970s, landed on an FBI list of dangerous Americans, for his “subversive activities” (e.g., publishing scholarly papers about prostitution and working for the American Civil Liberties Union to decriminalize, among other things, oral sex and the wearing of dresses by men).
With a few notable exceptions, it wasn’t until the past half century that lab-based science embraced the pursuit of better, more satisfying sex. Sexual dysfunction had to be medicalized, and the pharmaceutical companies had to get interested. It’s still an uphill slog. The current conservative political climate has made funding scarce. Meston undertakes large studies on fertility — a subject that’s easy to fund but does not interest her — simply to help keep her lab afloat. Several researchers told me they keep the titles of their grant proposals intentionally vague, using the word physiological, for example, in place of sexual. Meston recalls a Republican senator who had spoken out against the use of federal funds for studies of female sexuality: “He actually said: ‘We already know everything about women’s sexuality.’”
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.
People who write popular books about sex endure a milder if no less inevitable scrutiny. My first book was about human cadavers, and as a result, many 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.
I am obsessed with my research, not by nature but serially: book by book and regardless of topic. All good research — whether for science or for a book — is a form of obsession. And obsession can be awkward. It can be downright embarrassing. I have no doubt that I’m a running joke at the interlibrary loan department of the San Francisco Public Library, where I have requested, over the past two years, papers with titles like “On the Function of Groaning and Hyperventilation During Intercourse” and “An Anal Probe for Monitoring Vascular and Muscular Events During Sexual Response.” Last summer I was in the medical school library of the University of California, San Francisco, Xeroxing a journal article called “Vacuum Cleaner Use in Autoerotic Death”[51] when the paper jammed. I could not bring myself to ask the copy room attendant to help me, but quietly moved over to the adjacent machine and began again.
It’s not just library personnel. It’s friends and family, and casual acquaintances. It’s Frank, the manager of the building where I rent a small office. Frank is a kind and dear man whose build and seeming purity of heart call to mind that enraptured bear in the Charmin commercials. He had stopped by one afternoon to chat about this and that — the Coke machine vandal, odd odors from the beauty school down the hall. At one point in the conversation I crossed my legs, knocking over a copy of a large hardback that was propped against the side of my desk. The book slammed flat on the floor, face up. Atlas of Human Sex Anatomy, yelled the cover in 90-point type. Frank looked down, and I looked down, and then we went back to talking about the Coke machine. But nothing has been quite the same since.
I like to think that I never completely disappear down the pike. I like to think that I had a lot of miles to go before I got to the point where I was as consumed by the topic as, say, William Masters was. Masters is dead, but I met a St. Louis social worker who used to work in the same building with him. This man told a story about a particularly troubling case he was working on. The father in the case had told him, that morning, that he wasn’t all that concerned about his wife gaining custody of their children, because if it happened, he would go and slit their throats. The case was being decided in court the following Monday. The social worker wanted to call the police, but worried that it would be a violation of confidentiality. Distraught, he consulted the only other professional he could find in the building that morning. (It happened to be Thanksgiving.) It was Dr. Masters.
Masters directed the social worker to take a seat on the other side of his enormous rosewood desk, and the man unrolled his dilemma. Masters listened intently, staring at the man from beneath a hedge of chaotic white eyebrows. When the social worker finished talking, there was a moment of quiet. At last Masters spoke: “Have you asked this man whether he has difficulty achieving or maintaining an erection?”
Years ago I wrote for a health magazine that tolerated the wanton use of first person among writers such as myself. One month they ran a first-person piece written by a young woman who was suffering from vaginismus. I was acquainted with this woman — I’ll call her Vicki — and her piece was tastefully and competently written. Nonetheless I could not read it without cringing. I did not want to know about Vicki and her boyfriend and their travails with Vicki’s clamping vagina.[52] I would be seeing her at the magazine’s holiday party in a few weeks, and now I’d be thinking clamping vagina, clamping vagina, clamping vagina as we dipped celery sticks and chatted about our work.
Sex is one of those rare topics wherein the desire for others to keep the nitty-gritty of their experiences private is stronger even than the wish to keep mum on one’s own nittygritty. I would rather have disclosed to my own mother, in full detail and four-part harmony, the events of a certain summer spent sleeping my way through the backpacker hotels of South America, than to have heard her, at the age of 78, say to me, “Your father always had trouble keeping an erection.” I remember the moment clearly. I felt like Woody Allen in Annie Hall, where he’s standing on a Manhattan sidewalk talking to an elderly couple about how they manage to keep the spark in their marriage, and the old man leans over the microphone and says, “We use a large, vibrating egg.”
I’ve been tripping over the cringe factor all year. It is my habit and preference, as a writer, to go on the scene and report things as they happen. When those things are happening to subjects in sex research labs, this is sometimes impossible. The subjects are queasy about it or the researchers or the university’s human subjects review board, and sometimes all three. There are times when the only way to gain entry into the world of laboratory sex is to be the queasy one yourself: to volunteer. These passages make up a tiny sliver of the book, but writing them was a challenge. All the more so for having dragged my husband into the fray. My solution was to apply the in-law test. I imagined Ed’s parents (my own are dead) reading these passages, and I tried to write in a way that would not make them slam shut the book as though a silverfish had crawled onto the page. “Oh, for god’s sake, Billy, she’s taking off her pants!” If they don’t cringe, hopefully you won’t either.
50
Incredibly, Victorian physicians practiced gynecology and urology on women
52
FYI, it’s the newest use for Botox. Because what paralyzes your frowning muscles will just as effectively paralyze your clamping vagina muscles.