"Bonk" (Mary Roach) highlights
This, to me, is as good as science gets: a mildly outrageous, terrifically courageous, seemingly efficacious display of creative problem-solving, fueled by a bullheaded dedication to amassing facts and dispelling myths in a long-neglected area of human physiology. Kudos to the pair of them.Read more at location 459
Note: Masters and Johnson machine for sex with women in Mary Roach's "Bonk" Edit
But I have a question. Who were these women having orgasms from nothing more than the straight-on, in-and-out motions of a plastic phallus? Some 70 percent of women report that intercourse—ungarnished by any add-on clitoral stimulation—reliably fails to take them all the way to the spin cycle. Remove foreplay and love and lust from the equation, and the orgasms of Masters and Johnson’s “artificial coition” subjects are a rather startling achievement.Read more at location 461
Note: Who were these women? Edit
William Harvey had an answer. In 1988, long before the current Internet-fueled sex-machine boom, this man obtained a patent for a Therapeutic Apparatus for Relieving Sexual Frustrations in Women Without Sex Partners. Unlike the machinists here tonight, Harvey was very clear on the purpose of his machine. “Vibrators and sex aids…cannot satisfy the true needs of a partnerless woman who wants not only the ultimate climax or orgasm, but also the feeling that she is actually having sex with a partner.”Read more at location 558
Martin, Morten, and Thomas are in the break room, eating bread with jam and drinking coffee from a slim steel thermos. They are uncomfortable speaking English, and I speak no Danish. We are dependent on Anne Marie Hedeboe, a visiting pig production researcher whose colleague Mads Thor Madsen drafted the Five-Point Stimulation Plan for sows. The mood in the room is a little starched. I called Morten Martin. I referred to the owner of the farm as “Boss Man,” which sounds like the Danish for “snot.” Unspoken questions hover in the air: Do you find it arousing to stimulate a sow? How often are young male farmworkers caught getting fresh with the stock?* For their part, the inseminators must be wondering why on earth I’ve come here.Read more at location 875
Note: Farmers, sows, sexual stimulation and Danish farm productivity Edit
“The male giant pandas do not know where to put it,” a zoologist named Chen is quoted as saying in Inside China Today. “Sometimes they climb on the females’ heads and start pushing.” Seeking to enlighten clueless male pandas, Wolong staff set about making an instructional video, which the media gleefully dubbed “panda porn.” The BBC even referred to the footage as “explicit,” though given the animal’s thick fur and diminutive penis*—erect, about as big as a man’s thumb—it’s hard to imagine that the pandas were able to glean much detail from the tapes. Likely more of a This End Up sort of deal.Read more at location 1741
Note: genuine panda porn! Edit
Of the many ways to quantify a woman’s sexual fires, MRI is the least intrusive, in that nothing need be inserted, suction-cupped, or otherwise affixed. This is sexological measurement at its most demure.Read more at location 1972
Note: Mary Roach is witty,insightful and sensitive Edit
Lack of desire (HSDD) is the most common of women’s sexual complaints, and we will get to this later. (Monkeys will be involved. Do not change the channel.)Read more at location 1981
i can recall, many years ago, being told that a clitoris* is a vestigial penis. The feminist in me, who is small and sleeps a lot but can be scrappy when provoked, took umbrage at this description. I resented the implication that men have the real deal, while women make do with a sort of miniaturized, wannabe rendition. But it is true. Male and female fetuses both begin life with something closer to a clitoris. The male’s expands into a penis, while the female’s remains more or less as is.Read more at location 2001
At the end of each story, he’d pause, and then he’d say, “I’n’ that something?” Every now and then, he said, women call to ask where their clitoris is.* “They’re pumping on something else. It’s like, holy smokes, people!”Read more at location 2052
Note: anatomical knowledge sought Edit
The company bio of the late John Wahl notes that he served not only as Wahl president but also in a leadership capacity at St. Mary’s Catholic Church. And that his brother Raymond Wahl is a monsignor. I’m not saying there’s a link between Catholicism and sex toys. I’m just saying I’ve got a brand-new interpretation of Isaiah 49:2 (“The Lord…hath made me a polished shaft”).Read more at location 2187
Note: Mary Roach with more wit Edit
Testosterone levels were significantly higher when the women were having sex, as compared to the days when their partners weren’t there. (The participants promised not to masturbate for the duration of the study.) “It’s looking like sex in and of itself can be therapeutic,” says Meston. “It makes you enjoy sex more and want to have sex more. I think the whole use-it-or-lose-it thing definitely applies to women.”Read more at location 2196
Note: self or other - sex seems healthy Edit
On the fourth day, still hiccuping, the man had sex with his wife. His condition persisted all the way through the act, and then, once he ejaculated, the hiccups stopped. Canadian Family Physician published a case report about the man, under the title “Sexual Intercourse as a Potential Treatment for Intractable Hiccups.” Unattached hiccuppers were advised that “masturbation might be tried.”* Are there other nonsexual health benefits to be derived from orgasm? Affirmative, say Rutgers University sex researchers Barry Komisaruk and Beverly Whipple. Their readable and comprehensive The Science of Orgasm says that people who have regular orgasms seem to have less stress and enjoy lower rates of heart disease, breast cancer, prostate cancer, and endometriosis.Read more at location 2209
Note: stopping persistent hiccups Edit
Note: sex for health Edit
Bohlen concluded that sex was, at best, “light to moderate” exercise of short duration. However, given that “the mask used to collect the husband’s expired air kept him from kissing…, and the ECG electrodes and blood pressure cuff hoses restricted body movement,” it is possible that the sex being had in Dr. Bohlen’s lab was less exuberant than usual.Read more at location 2226
Note: restricted sex for scientists Edit
People with spinal cord injuries may derive a unique benefit from orgasm. If you are paralyzed, say, or you have multiple sclerosis, you may find that orgasm relieves you of the leg stiffness and muscle spasms collectively known as spasticity.Read more at location 2229
Note: orgasm for MS Edit
An independent woman may believe herself to be subject to no one and nothing beyond her own volition. And much of the time she is. But there are times, times when certain hormones peak and fertility is at its maximum, that she may find herself behaving in ways that later puzzle her. Hormones can act as the invisible puppet strings behind the discomfiting one-night stand, the shameless flirtation with the bellboy, the unexpected and regrettable kiss between friends. Your genes want you to get pregnant, and hormones are their magic wand.Read more at location 2793
Note: Hormones can grip us Edit
When they are not close to ovulation, female rhesus monkeys have little to do with males. For the most part, they avoid them. But when they are fertile, they pursue the males constantly, initiating about 80 percent of the sexual encounters they will have.Read more at location 2805
Furthermore, adult male rhesus monkeys—if you’re a female rhesus—are big and intimidating. “Imagine it,” says Wallen. “You’re this little teeny female, you’ve done nothing with the adult males for all of your preadolescent period, and all of a sudden you wake up one day and say, ‘You know, this guy is really attractive.’”Read more at location 2823
Part of the reason it took primatologists—who were, in pre-Jane Goodall days, all men—so long to acknowledge the female rhesus monkey’s role in initiating sex was that the solicitations were so, well, forward. “There was a very strong predisposition not to be looking for that,” Wallen says. The pioneering primatologist C. R. Carpenter first documented the hand slap as a female sex solicitation in the 1940s, but his papers were ignored for years.Read more at location 2842
Note: Females can be direct and bold Edit
What the Pill does, specifically, is raise levels of sex-hormone-binding globulin (SHBG), a protein in the blood that binds itself to testosterone, taking the hormone out of commission. And going off the Pill might not restore libido. In a 2006 study, urologist Irwin Goldstein looked at women’s levels of SHBG and of their free (unbound) testosterone while they were on the Pill and after they’d gone off it. Their SHBG didn’t decrease after they stopped taking the Pill, and their testosterone levels—and, presumably, their libido—didn’t recover.Read more at location 2880
Note: The Pill and women's drive Edit
Why hasn’t low libido been listed as a side effect for oral contraceptives? “The FDA doesn’t consider behavior and in particular sexual behavior to be something they’re concerned about,” says Wallen. And why don’t doctors mention it to women before they pick up the prescription pad? In part because not that many women on the Pill complain about low libido. One in four is the statistic I’ve heard. For many women, the freedom from worrying about pregnancy cancels out any mid-cycle dip in libido; they’re having more sex then, not less. The Pill doesn’t make women enjoy sex less, it doesn’t change their responsiveness; it just mutes their drive. A lot of them don’t even notice, and for some, it’s a price worth paying.Read more at location 2884
Note: Less sex drive may be worth it Edit
have a better suggestion for Cutler’s customers. Stop wearing cologne. Women don’t find it attractive.Read more at location 2942
Note: Men should stop wearing cologne Edit
At the top of the women’s turn-on list was, mysteriously, a mixture of cucumber and Good ’n’ Plenty candy. It was said to increase vaginal blood flow by 13 percent.*Read more at location 2946
I suspected that the secrets uncovered in this lab would have less to do with vasocongestion or vaginoclitoral distance or hormones than with how the two people on the bed in the laboratory felt—about one another, and about sex. And that those feelings would color and inspire the things they did. And that without those feelings you could play the overture and hit the crescendos just fine, but the music would not take you to the same rapturous place.Read more at location 2961
Note: Mary Roach thought sex researchers would find this Edit
I learned about the project in a New York Times health column. Jane Brody had described the book and its conclusions the week it came out. The subheads the paper had supplied were vague and coy:* “Persons Studied in Pairs,” said one. It was like writing up the Million Man March under the headline “Persons Walking in a Group.” In a sentence at the end of a paragraph describing study protocols, Brody notes simply: “Some were assigned partners.” The casual reader, alighting here, might have mistaken the column for a piece about square dancing. I immediately tracked down a copy of the book.Read more at location 2973
Note: Looking at sex itself in Masters and Johnson 1979 book Edit
Masters and Johnson’s heterosexuals failed to grasp that if you lost yourself in the tease—in the pleasure and power of turning someone on—that that could be as arousing as being teased and turned on oneself. “Not only were committed lesbians more effective in satisfying their partners, they usually involved themselves without restraint…far more than husbands approaching their wives.” The straight man, in most cases, “became so involved in his own sexual tensions that he seemed relatively unaware of the degree of his partner’s sexual involvement.Read more at location 3005