Bonk (2 page)

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.

p
eople 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, 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 a medical school library xeroxing a journal article called “Vacuum Cleaner Use in Autoerotic Death”
*
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. Then Masters spoke: “Have you asked this man whether he has difficulty achieving or maintaining an erection?”

y
ears ago, I wrote for a women’s 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 had had vaginismus. I was acquainted with this woman—I’ll call her Ginny—and her piece was tastefully and competently written. Nonetheless, I could not read it without cringing. I did not want to know about Ginny and her boyfriend and their travails with Ginny’s clamping vagina.
*
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 nitty-gritty. 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 seventy-nine, say to me, “Your father had some trouble keeping an erection.” (I had it coming: I’d asked about the six-year gap between my brother’s birth and mine.) I remember the moment clearly. I felt like Alvy in
Annie Hall
, where he’s standing on a Manhattan sidewalk talking to an elderly couple about how they keep the spark in their marriage, and the old man 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 entrée 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 it. My solution was to apply the stepdaughter test. I imagined Lily and Phoebe reading these passages, and I tried to write in a way that wouldn’t mortify them. Though I’ve surely failed that test, I remain hopeful that the rest of you won’t have reason to cringe.

I promise, no vibrating eggs.

The Sausage, the Porcupine, and the Agreeable Mrs. G.

Highlights from the Pioneers of Human Sexual Response

a
lbert R. Shadle was the world’s foremost expert on the sexuality of small woodland creatures. If you visit the library at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, in Bloomington, Indiana, you will find six reels of audio recordings Shadle made of “skunk and raccoon copulation and post-coitus behavior reactions.” (Nearby you will also find a 1959 recording of “Sounds during heterosexual coitus” and a tape of the “masturbatory sessions” of Subject 127253, which possibly explains why no one ever gets around to listening to the raccoons.)

Shadle was a biologist at the University of Buffalo in the 1940s and ’50s, back before biology had figured out most of the basics of life on earth. While today’s biologist spends the days peering through a scanning microscope at protein receptors or sequencing genomes, the biologist of the fifties could put some animals in a pen and watch them have sex. Said Shadle in a 1948
Journal of Mammalogy
article on the mating habits of porcupines, “Many facts about these interesting animals await discovery.” It was Shadle who dispelled the myth that porcupines have to have sex face-to-face; the female protects the male from her spines by flipping her tail up over her back as a shield.

Here is another fact Shadle discovered by watching Prickles, Johnnie, Pinkie, Maudie, Nightie, and Old Dad in the University of Buffalo porcupine enclosure: One of the males, when sexually aroused, would “rear upon his hind legs and tail and walk erect towards the female…with his penis fully erected.” (Why do I think it was Old Dad?) This was followed by what Shadle describes as an unusual “urinary shower,” the particulars of which I’ll spare you. Additionally, an amorous porcupine may hop about “on one front leg and the hind legs, while he holds the other front paw on his genitals.”

My point is that if you want to understand human sexual response, then studying animals is probably not the most productive way to go about it. However, for many years this was in fact the way scientists—wary of social censure and career demerits—studied sex. As always, before science gets its nerve up to try something out on a human being, it turns first to animals. And it took science a very long time to get its nerve up to put sexually aroused human beings under scientific scrutiny. Even the fearless Alfred Kinsey logged weeks on the road filming animal sex for study. One particularly productive field trip to Oregon State Agricultural College yielded 4,000 feet of stag film featuring cattle, sheep, and rabbits, though no actual stags. Given the brevity of most animal liaisons, the lessons learned were rudimentary. Basically, what it came down to was that, regarding sex, humans are just another mammal. “Every kind of sexual behavior we had observed or known about in humans could be found in animals,” wrote Kinsey colleague Wardell Pomeroy, who obviously never dropped in to the Yahoo Clown Fetish Group.
*

Quite a few scientists in the forties and fifties drove the animal bus way past simple observation and on into the laboratory. I don’t want to delve into these experiments because (a) they don’t tell us much about people, and (b) they’re ghastly. A study that concludes that “removal of the eyes and the olfactory bulbs and deconstruction of the cochlea fails to abolish copulatory responses in the female cat or rabbit” may tell us something about sadism in human beings but not a whole lot about human copulation.

Many people think that the first to dip a toe in the potentially scalding waters of research into human sexual response was William Masters (aided by his associate—and, later, wife—Virginia Johnson). But long before Masters and Johnson and Kinsey became household names, Robert Latou Dickinson was undertaking the unthinkable, in his sunny, cheerfully appointed gynecology practice in Brooklyn Heights, New York. Beginning in 1890, as part of each patient’s initial examination, Dickinson would take a detailed sexual history. His patients ran the gamut of turn-of-the-century womanhood; though plenty were well-to-do, he carried a caseload of charity patients as well. Some of these histories were astoundingly intimate.

Subject 177

1897—…At 16…slept with another girl—they masturbated each other—suction on her nipples…. Coitus first at 17 and ever since—masturbation was vulvar, vaginal, cervical, mammary…. Friction against clitoris gives strong pleasure—best is from friction on clitoris to start, then friction against cervix with index finger of other hand…. Clitoris not very large but erectile—she has used a clothespin and sausage….

Dickinson writes in the introduction to one of his books that he was inspired and emboldened by “the frank speech” of some of his tenement house patients. Not only were these women at ease talking about their sexuality, but a few eventually allowed him to make observations (with a nurse in the room, always).

Subject 315

1929: Week after period demonstrated climax: legs crossed—her 2 fingers making about inch stroke about 1 to 2 a second—not hard pressure but sway of pelvis and contraction of levator and thigh adduction—rhythmically once in 2 sec or less. Second orgasm, no levator throb—most of desire and feeling outside but “I like inside too.”

It might be tempting to dismiss Dickinson as an iconoclastic pervert, but nothing could be further from the truth. He simply believed that lame sex destroyed more marriages than did anything else, and that “considering the inveterate marriage habit of the race,” something ought to be done. It was Dickinson who ushered the clitoris into the spotlight. He was an early proponent of the more clitoris-friendly woman-on-top position. Through measurements and interviews he debunked some persistent clitoral myths. For instance, that the bigger ones are more sensitive, and that good girls don’t play with them. (Masturbation, he wrote, was “a normal sex experience.”)

It was Dickinson’s work that inspired Alfred Kinsey to pursue sex research. Kinsey had been, at the time, applying his bottomless research energies to gall wasp speciation. According to Kinsey biographer James Jones, Dickinson—then in his eighties—gave Kinsey his first contacts in the gay and lesbian communities and turned over dozens of case files of “unorthodox”
*
patients he’d come across through the years.

Last but, okay, least, we have Dickinson to thank for the innovation of the relaxing picture on the gynecological exam room ceiling. The courtesy was inspired by a grueling afternoon spent staring at the blank ceiling above Dickinson’s dentist’s chair. I may be dating myself (a turn of phrase that now hits my ears as a euphemism for masturbation), but back in the early eighties, no women’s health center was complete without the ceiling poster of a ring of redwood trees shot from below. So ubiquitous was this image that I cannot, to this day, look at a redwood and not feel as though I should scoot down a little lower and relax.

t
he first research scientist to make the case for bringing sexual arousal and orgasm into the formal confines of a laboratory was the psychologist John B. Watson. Watson is best known for founding, in 1913, the psychological movement called behaviorism. It held that human behavior, like animal behavior, was essentially a series of reactions to outside events, an entity easily shaped by reward and punishment. Watson’s fame, in no small part, derives from his willingness to study human behavior in a laboratory setting. Most of his subjects were children, most notably Little Albert (no relation to Fat), the eleven-month-old boy in whom he conditioned a fear of white rats. But Watson saw no reason not to bring adults into the lab as well.

Watson chafed at science’s reluctance to study human sexuality as it studies human nutrition or planets or porcupine sexuality. “It is admittedly the most important subject in life,” he wrote. “It is admittedly the thing that causes the most shipwrecks in the happiness of men and women. And yet our scientific information is so meager…. [We should have our questions] answered not by our mothers and grandmothers, not by priests and clergymen in the interest of middle-class mores, nor by general practitioners, not even by Freudians; we…want them answered by scientifically trained students of sex….”