Bonk – Mary Roach

Following explorations of death and scientific investigations into the afterlife, Roach turns her attention to sex, specifically the “curious coupling of sex and science” – what research has discovered, where researchers are heading, and an insight into the lives of sex researchers. Sparked by a random finding while procrastinating in a university library, Roach started thinking about the fact that sex (like other aspects of human physiology) has been investigated scientifically but “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 face – raised eyebrows, suspicious wives, gossiping colleagues.”
This last is a persistent theme – getting approval to perform many of the experiments is difficult, with many researchers resorting to obfuscation, describing the work as non-specifically as possible. If the death researchers were seen as ghoulish, that’s nothing to the prurient voyeurism projected on to sex researchers.
I discovered a number of fascinating facts about sex practices around the world: particularly interesting – Roy Levin’s paper “Wet and Dry Sex,” comparing Western preferences for vaginal lubrication with the perception in parts of Haiti, Indonesia and Africa that extreme dryness indicates a disease-free state, resulting in women inserting “all manner of drying agents” – ouch!
Roach beautifully combines strongly grounded data and meticulous explorations of the literature with a highly readable style and embarrassingly amusing observations (often as footnotes) that lead me to splutter with laughter in public on several occasions. Her writing incorporates her reactions, as a layperson, to the research, the field, and the results of data, often reflecting the impressions of the reader.
After reading Bonk I’m no aware of research being done across the field – high tech and medical, from MRI imaging of what happens during ejaculation and orgasm, treatments for erectile dysfunction (and how Viagra reduced the condition’s social stigmatisation), surgical extension and reattachment of male genitalia, to the real functions and dimensions of the clitoris; lab work looking at what happens to lower-order mammals at the moment of male ejaculation; historical investigations into hysteria and the medical role of inducing female climax; biochemistry involving how hormones affect arousal in both primates and humans (the oral contraceptive pill mutes sex drive, but this is not a listed side-effect and most women aren’t told about it when it’s initially prescribed); and why lesbians have better sex than gay men and straight couples. - Alex