Bonk (10 page)

Kendall reported that when a female colleague watched one of the “experimental sessions,” she found it hard to believe that the ape was having an orgasm, because the animal’s face registered so little emotion or pleasure—even while Kendall was “palpating intense vaginal contractions.”

And there is your answer. Female animals can have orgasms, after very little stimulation, and without it registering on their faces.

And sometimes
with
it registering on their faces. Endocrinologist D. A. Goldfoot studied stump-tailed macaques, a primate species in which the female is occasionally observed making the same round-mouthed “ejaculation face” that the males make. (A photograph is included in the paper; picture a person blowing smoke rings.) Interestingly, the face was observed most often on females that had mounted another female and been making thrusting motions.

To be sure the stump-tails’ facial expression corresponded to orgasmlike contractions—rather than being merely an imitation of male behavior—Goldfoot put a strain gauge in the uterus of an especially enthusiastic female “mounter” and then put her in an enclosure with five other females. A graph charting the force of the monkey’s uterine contractions appears in the study. During the nine seconds that she wore her ejaculation face, an enormous protracted peak appears on the graph.

Alfred Kinsey brings us additional evidence of female-to-female bliss in the animal kingdom. Cows mounting and thrusting upon other cows, he writes in
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
, will sometimes give “a sudden lunge at the peak of response…then drop back into inactivity as though they had experienced orgasm.”
*
Kinsey’s source for the cow “data” is our old friend Dr. Shadle, at that time a lecturer at the University of, delightfully, Buffalo.

w
hile it is often true that people are pigs, it is never the case that pigs are people. If you really want to know how sperm make their way into a woman’s uterus and whether orgasm has anything to do with it, you should probably study a woman rather than a pig or a monkey. This fact was not lost on history’s gynecologists, and they have done their best, if not always their brightest. A nineteenth-century physician named Joseph Beck writes in his 1874 paper “How Do the Spermatozoa Enter the Uterus?” that inquiring medical minds have upon occasion done autopsies of women who died suddenly during sex. Beck does not say how the women died, but let us assume—or anyway hope—that they died of a heart attack or stroke brought on by an intense orgasm, and not a blow to the back of the head by an overzealous man of science. As with the hamsters and the dogs and the rats, sperm were typically found to have already made their way to the woman’s uterus.

Beck felt confident that some sort of uterine upsuck happened during orgasm, and that this was pulling the sperm along toward the egg. The only way to know for sure, he wrote, would be to watch the cervix “during the sexual orgasm.” And that is what he did. Helping him out was a thirty-two-year-old blonde with a prolapsed uterus (and, Beck adds, for no particular reason, persistent constipation and acne). In other words, this woman’s cervix—the gateway to her uterus—was parked in plain view, directly inside the opening of her vagina. Conveniently, this was a woman of such “passionate nature,” as she herself warned Beck, that he must be careful in his examinations. For she was “very prone…to have the sexual orgasm induced by a slight contact of the finger.”

Beck took advantage of this rather exceptional set of circumstances. “Carefully, therefore, separating the labia with my left hand, so that the [cervix] was brought clearly into view in the sunlight, I now swept my right forefinger quickly three or four times across the space between the cervix and the pubic arch, when almost immediately the orgasm occurred, and the following is what was presented to my view:…Instantly that the height of excitement was at hand, the [cervix] opened itself to the extent of fully an inch, as nearly as my eye could judge, made five or six successive gasps as it were….” To bolster the case for upsuck, Beck points out that the cervix reminded him “precisely” of the pendulous upper lip and round mouth of a freshwater fish called the sucker.

Beck had convinced himself that “the passage of spermatic fluid into the uterus is explained fully, satisfactorily, and in every way beyond the shadow of a doubt.” Just in case, he throws in a quote from a noted peer: gynecologist Marion Sims. Sims envisioned the cervix as “an India rubber bottle slightly compressed so as to expel a portion of its contents before placing its mouth in a fluid.” “Hear him!” cries Beck, adding, in an impressive display of professional upsuck, “Indeed words are powerless to express my admiration for his acuteness.”

Beck carries on with corroboration from his colleagues, each of whom had stumbled onto his own version of Beck’s excitable, prolapsed blonde. Either women have changed since the early 1900s, or gyno exams have. Hear this: A Dr. Wernich describes patients who are aroused by “the mere sight…of the preliminary preparations for an examination.” Wernich, in turn, relates the experience of his colleague Dr. Litzmann: “I myself recently had occasion to observe, while examining a young and very excitable female, that the uterus suddenly took on a vertical position and sank down into the cavity of the pelvis; that the mouth of the womb became…rounded, softer and more easily entered by the exploring finger; and that at the same time the high grade of sexual excitement under which the patient was laboring, manifested itself in her hurried respiration and tremulous voice.”

Then there was Dr. Talmey,
*
who, writing in a 1917 issue of the
New York Medical Journal
, relates the tale of a patient who suddenly sat up during an exam, exclaimed, “Doctor, what are you doing?” looked the examiner over “from head to foot,” smiled and said, “Oh, it is all right” and lay back down again. The reason, she later confesses, is that she “experienced an orgasm during the examination of the same quality as in erotic congress and hence thought she was being abused.”

I described these men’s findings to my own gynecologist, Mindy Goldman, an associate clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California, San Francisco. “Interesting…” said Goldman in an email reply, adding that she had not, in thirteen years, encountered a woman who responded this way during an exam. The cervix, she pointed out, is relatively insensitive to touch—so much so that biopsies are often done without anesthesia. In a small investigation by Alfred Kinsey, 95 percent of the women whose cervix was stroked with a Q-tip or metal probe were unable to feel it.

Masters and Johnson, for their part, were vigorous upsuck skeptics. In
Human Sexual Response
, they point out that the uterine contractions of orgasm are “expulsive, not sucking or ingestive in character.” They originate at the far end of the uterus and make their way toward the cervix, just as they do when they help expel a baby or a placenta. The pair obtained graphic evidence of these expulsive contractions while undertaking a study of masturbation as self-medication for menstrual cramps and backache. Fifty menstruating women masturbated with a wide-open speculum in place, such that it provided the researchers with an unobstructed view of the cervix. “During the terminal stages of orgasmic experience…menstrual fluid could be observed spurting from the external cervical [opening] under pressure. In many instances, the pressure was so great that initial portions of the menstrual fluid actually were expelled from the vaginal barrel without contacting either blade of the speculum.” I do so hope they wore lab glasses.

Critics of this work point out that uterine contractions—minor peristaltic versions of which are happening all the time, not just during orgasms—have been shown to reverse direction over the course of a woman’s menstrual cycle. Around ovulation, when a woman is most fertile, they pull material in toward the uterus; during menstruation they expel it. (The reproductive system is smarter than you think, and utterly goal-directed. Not only do sex hormones orchestrate the direction of your uterine contractions, they dilate only the fallopian tube that contains the ovum, so that more semen ends up on that side. They even oversee the quantity and viscosity of your discharge. Around ovulation, cervical mucus becomes more abundant and takes on the stringy consistency of an egg white, providing sperm with a sort of rope ladder into the uterus.)

In a follow-up study, Masters and Johnson outfitted a squadron of masturbating women, six in all, with cervical caps that had been filled with a substance similar to semen: same surface tension, same density. The substance was radiopaque, meaning that it would show up on X-rays. So if indeed it were sucked into the uterus during the women’s orgasms, the researchers would be able to document it. X-rays were taken during and again ten minutes after orgasm. In the end, there was no evidence of even “the slightest sucking effect.” Here again, there are critics of this work. Some say that the cap would have made suction impossible.

Masters and Johnson had other reasons to be dubious. Their internal home movies had shown no evidence of gasping, sucking, or otherwise fish-mouthed cervixes. What they had shown was a bizarre cervical by-product of late-stage arousal called “vaginal tenting,” wherein the cervix begins to pull away from the other side of the vagina, creating a peaked space—or “seminal reservoir”—akin to the upper reaches of a circus tent. (One theory is that this tenting evolved because it improves the odds of conception by creating a pocket to hold the sperm at the upper end of the vagina, preventing what one team of researchers—sounding more like economists than sexologists—dubbed “flowback losses.” Of course, if the woman isn’t on her back, the reservoir would be upside down.) But Masters and Johnson make the point that the tenting cervix is pulled away and out of contact with the semen. And if the cervix isn’t in contact with the semen, it hardly matters whether it’s sucking or not. The straw isn’t even in the pop.

And possibly, if conception is the goal, you don’t want it to be. Sex physiologist Roy Levin points out that sperm straight out of the penis are not yet up to the job of fertilizing an egg. They need time to capacitate. If all the sperm were immediately sucked up into the uterus, you’d be presenting the egg with duds. “Arguably, on this basis,” Levin writes, “coitally induced orgasms and reproductive fitness could be
in
compatible.”

t
ime to check in with some modern fertility experts. See what they have to say on the subject of orgasm and sperm transport. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine supplied, as a spokesman on the topic, an adjunct professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California, San Francisco. “My whole professional career for the last thirty years has been just infertility,” said Bob Nachtigall. “And I have never had a patient ask me about that.”

And if one did, what would he say?

“To the degree that orgasm sets up uterine contractions, you could argue that it could potentially be useful in sperm transport.”

“You could, but you won’t?”

He sighed. “I think by now you know how science is. You think you know a lot until you start to ask some really basic questions, and you realize you know nothing. I know a lot about artificial insemination, but I have no idea about the answer to your very simple question.”

So why hasn’t anyone done a study comparing women’s conception rates following sex with and without orgasm? Because it wouldn’t be simple, Nachtigall said. “You’d need sperm counts on all the men. You’d need physiological proof of whether or not the woman had an orgasm. And because we know it’s possible to get pregnant without having an orgasm, you’d need a very large subject pool to prove that it wasn’t just random chance.”

There is perhaps another reason this study will not get done. “By the time a couple gets to an infertility doctor,” said Nachtigall, “their sex life is shot. The intimate, fun, stress-reducing aspect of it is long gone. It’s
work
. I for one would not want to interject orgasm into the strategy plan for infertility. If we were even to give them the faintest whiff of ‘Gee, if you had more orgasms….’” Nachtigall said that infertility is often perceived as a challenge to one’s sexual identity. “The implication is always, ‘Oh, you’re not doing it right.’ Couples really, really hate that. It’s a very sensitive area.”
*

a
s far back as Dr. Beck and as recently as Masters and Johnson, there was no such thing as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and medical ultrasound was in its infancy. I found myself wondering whether modern-day high-tech imaging techniques have shed any light on the secret processes of fertility—or on anything else about sex. And, if so, about how you convince someone to have sex in front of an ultrasound technician or inside an MRI tube.

What’s Going On in There?

The Diverting World of Coital Imaging

t
hough two will lie down, the bed is a single. It is a hospital bed, but more enticing than most. The bottom sheet is crisp and smoothed, and the bedclothes have been turned down invitingly, at an angle. Two sets of towels and hospital johnnies are stacked neatly at the foot. The effect is not unlike that of the convict’s last meal: a weak bid for normalcy and decency in what will shortly be a highly abnormal and, to some people’s minds, indecent scenario.

For the first time ever—after hours and behind locked doors in an exam room in the Diagnostic Testing Unit of London’s Heart Hospital—a scientist is attempting to capture three-dimensional moving-picture (or “4-D,” time being the fourth dimension) ultrasound footage of human genitalia in the act of sexual congress. Jing Deng, a senior lecturer in medical physics at University College, London, Medical School, has made his name developing a new technique for viewing anatomical structures in motion. His Web site includes fairly astonishing 4-D ultrasound footage of, for instance, beating hearts. This kind of imaging gives surgeons a preview of the structure they’ll be operating on, in motion and from any perspective. It allows them to see precisely what the problem is and how they might best approach it, long before picking up the scalpel. Deng’s paper on the imaging of the musculature of a pair of puckering lips—undertaken to help a plastic surgeon hone his strategy in a cleft palate follow-up operation—made it into the
Lancet
, more or less the
New Yorker
of medical journals.