Bonk (24 page)

Regardless of the mechanisms that may or may not explain a rape victim’s physical state, a rapist’s defense based upon evidence of arousal has, to quote Levin, “no intrinsic validity and should be disregarded.”

t
he Fruit Machine is a fine example of the perils of trying to make sexual conclusions about folks based solely on measurements of their bodily responses. In the 1950s and ’60s, in a laboratory in Canada’s National Defence Medical Centre, the government commenced a secret project to pinpoint a simple, trustworthy physical indicator of a man’s sexual preferences. John Sawatsky, author of
Men in the Shadows: The RCMP Security Service
, says the goal was to rout homosexuals from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and other civil service positions—but to do it scientifically, so that no one was dismissed solely on the basis of hearsay. A bowl of poison with a cherry on top.

What they came up with was pupil response—and an elaborate chair-mounted contraption, nicknamed the Fruit Machine, to measure it. Experiments had shown that people’s pupils enlarge when they’re interested in what they’re looking at. The technique had been used in the past by food marketers to test the appeal of different types of packaging. Canada’s Security Service had heard about this and decided to apply it to sexual preferences. If a man’s pupils widen while he looks at a naked man, they figured, then that must indicate a preference for the male package.

Trouble set in almost immediately. The team couldn’t test the thing because the Department of Defence claimed it had no gays, and because Mounties were reluctant to volunteer as control subjects. Wisely enough, as it turned out: The scientists had forgotten to take into account differences in the brightness of the images on the screen. When the screen got darker, the viewer’s pupil would, naturally, enlarge to let more light in—regardless of who or what the image was. Meaning that if an RCMP recruit looked at an image of a dark brown horse, the Fruit Machine operator would have had to assume that the Mountie and his mount were engaging in something other than national security.

Years after the Fruit Machine project had been shelved, someone got the bright idea of measuring changes in the circumference of a man’s penis—rather than of his pupils—while he looked at naked people. Even phallometrics, as this technique is sometimes called, is not a reliable indicator of sexual preference. A strongly motivated man—for instance, an accused pedophile—can learn to control his genital response to an image that he finds erotic.

He can also, with a little training, develop a brand-new one. In 1968, researchers S. Rachman and R. J. Hodgson used classical, Pavlovian conditioning to create a fetish for women’s boots. Five men were outfitted with phallometric devices. Over and over, the team showed the men images of nude or provocatively dressed women, followed by images of a pair of knee-high, fur-lined boots. Eventually it worked: In three subjects, the boots by themselves plumped the men’s penises as much as the images of the women originally had. Two of the men were also aroused by high-heeled black shoes and by “golden sandals,” though no conditioning had been done to these images.

No man got an erection from looking at “brown string sandals.”

Many years ago, Cindy Meston, one of Rachman’s former students, decided to see if it would be possible to replicate the effect in female subjects. (The incidence of fetishism is far higher in men than in women.) This time the object of the fetish was the voice of the chairman of the psychology department at the University of British Columbia, one Tony Phillips. Meston had taken a snippet from a voiceover of an old student orientation film, and played it over and over as the women looked at erotic images:
Welcome to the department of psychology….
Sadly, for Dr. Phillips anyway, the attempt was unsuccessful.

i
f you want to unlock the mysteries of female arousal—the kind the females actually notice and appreciate—the brain is probably the place to turn. After the costly failure of Viagra for women, pharmaceutical companies shifted their attention from drugs that affect genital blood flow to drugs that act directly on the brain. The showiest hopeful to date is bremelanotide, nicknamed “the Barbie drug” because it (a) stimulates the cells that make skin tan, (b) suppresses the appetite, and (c) ups libido. Like Viagra, bremelanotide’s sexual properties were discovered by accident—in this case, while the drug was being tested as a sunless tanning agent (under the name Melanotan). The tanning application didn’t pan out—“blotchy freckling” and “scrotal moles” are complaints posted by the trial subjects on www.melanotan.org—but some of the women in the study reported feeling randier than usual. And a drug that can make a woman with “black dots on face” feel sexy is a drug to look into further.

Michael Perelman, director of the Human Sexuality Program at New York’s Weill Medical College of Cornell University, ran the most recent bremelanotide trial. Twenty-seven postmenopausal volunteers with female sexual arousal disorder went in for treatment: once with a placebo, the other time with a nasal spritz of bremelanotide. Each time, not knowing what they’d been given, they filled out questionnaires—one shortly after the treatment, another a day later. The drug prompted statistically significant increases in the women’s perceptions of how aroused they were after receiving the drug, as well as increases in sexual activity and desire in the twenty-four hours that followed. Bremelanotide is expected to be in Phase III clinical trials (the final stage in the FDA approval process) by late 2008.

The other contender trotted out at the most recent meeting of the International Society for the Study of Women’s Sexual Health is a central nervous system drug called flibanserin. This one was originally being tested as an antidepressant. Because diminished libido is a common side effect of antidepressants, researchers were keeping an eye on subjects’ sexual feelings. They were surprised to find that flibanserin enhanced, rather than dampened, women’s libido. As of 2007, flibanserin is also in Phase III trials.

The FDA tends to be cautious with drugs that affect the brain—especially when they’re being used for what some in the medical community view as a lifestyle change. Because of this, and because no one yet understands the mechanism by which flibanserin works, approval may prove thorny.

The drugs come and go: pilot studies, high hopes, fanfare, silence. Apomorphine was the star a couple of conferences back; now you barely hear of it. I asked Cindy Meston whatever happened to it. She laughed. “It made you nauseous.”

What Would Allah Say?

The Strange, Brave Career of Ahmed Shafik

d
r. Ahmed Shafik wears three-piece suits with gold watch fobs and a diamond stick pin in the lapel. His glasses are the thick, black rectangular style of the Nasser era. He owns a Cairo hospital and lives in a mansion with marble walls. He was nominated for a Nobel Prize.
*
I don’t care about any of this. Shafik won my heart by publishing a paper in
European Urology
in which he investigated the effects of polyester on sexual activity. Ahmed Shafik dressed lab rats in polyester pants.

There were seventy-five rats. They wore their pants for one year. Shafik found that over time the ones dressed in polyester or poly-cotton blend had sex significantly less often than the rats whose slacks were cotton or wool. (Shafik thinks the reason is that polyester sets up troublesome electrostatic fields in and around the genitals. Having seen an illustration of a rat wearing the pants, I would say there’s an equal possibility that it’s simply harder to get a date when you dress funny.)

Dr. Shafik published five studies on the effects of wearing polyester, and then moved on to something else. If you print out a list of Shafik’s journal articles—and you will need a roll of butcher paper, because there are 1,016 so far—it is hard to say what his specialty is. He has wandered through urology, andrology, sexology, proctology. If you ask him what he is, what he writes under “Occupation” on his tax form, he will smile broadly and exclaim, “I am Ahmed Shafik!”

It is a full-time job. Though Shafik, now seventy-three, is retired from teaching, he continues a heavy schedule of surgery and research, the former funding the latter. (His surgical specialty, as best I can gather, is despots with colorectal issues. He says he has worked on Castro’s plumbing, though not recently, and that of the late Mobuto Sese Seko.) Self-funding affords Shafik the freedom to indulge his more esoteric interests
*
—research projects with no obvious practical ramifications or corporate appeal. In this way he is, as his office manager Margot Yehia has pointed out, a holdover from the nineteenth century, when science was undertaken simply for the sake of understanding the world.

Shafik’s work is far-ranging, but it is not random. The common thread that runs through it is reflexes. In the field of sexology alone, Shafik has planted his flag into twenty new reflexes. If you look at sex through the fabulous black spectacles of Ahmed Shafik, you see more than just a couple expressing their love, or perhaps merely their lust, through the actions of their bodies. You see muscles responding reflexively, without the conscious contributions or consent of their owner, in response to physical stimuli that take place during sex. When a penis hits a cervix in a certain way, for instance, this is a stimulus. In response, a woman’s adductor muscles reflexively contract, pulling her thighs together and—in what might be a protective mechanism—limiting the depth of the man’s thrusts.

Here’s another. When the lower third of a woman’s vagina widens—as it does during penetration—several reflexes get triggered. The vaginocavernosus reflex may sound dry or arcane on paper, but it is the basis of what appears to be a remarkable physical synergy between male and female anatomy during sex. When the cavernosus muscles reflexively contract—as they do upon entry—this boosts blood flow to the clitoris. The effect was documented in 1995 by a French team who took Doppler ultrasound images of clitoral blood flow while an inflatable probe was inserted into ten volunteer vaginas.
*
At the same time as the vaginocavernosus reflex is affecting the clitoris, Shafik found, it’s also putting the squeeze on the man’s dorsal vein, helping trap blood in the penis and keeping it firm. If there’s an intelligent designer in the cosmos, he’s got at least one of his priorities straight.

Shafik has published papers on a total of eighty-two anatomical reflexes that he has discovered and named. Because other physiologists rarely try to replicate his findings, the reflexive response of the sex research community is to be mildly skeptical. Says Roy Levin, “That man’s got more reflexes than I’ve had hot dinners!” Though Levin concedes that, in general, the study of sexual reflexes has been illuminating and worthwhile—at the very least for having “drawn attention to the female reproductive tract as not simply a passive conduit…but as a responsive, active canal.”

Since each stimulus prompts unique reflexive responses, each must be studied independent of the rest. To mimic an erect penis expanding the opening of the vagina, for instance, Shafik puts a condom-shaped balloon at the end of a catheter, inserts it, and inflates it. Mock bumping of the cervix is done with a sponge on a rod, the sponge having been carved to resemble the head of a penis. (The reflexive responses to these motions are identified via needle electrodes in the muscles of the vagina, cervix, uterus, what have you.)

It is noteworthy that Shafik has managed to find dozens of women in a Muslim country who will agree to be, say, penetrated by a balloon penis. How does he manage?

I’ll know soon. Though no relevant studies are planned for this year, Shafik has arranged for me to see a demonstration of the vaginal reflexes of intercourse. How this will work and on whom they’ll demonstrate remains unclear.

o
n my first morning in Cairo, I wander into a museum near my hotel: the Agriculture Museum. I am the only tourist, a lone adult pushing upstream through currents of happy, shrieking schoolchildren. The museum must have been built around the 1930s and remains charmingly unspoiled by modern advances in museum design. Insect specimens are presented not in their natural environmental niche—e.g., boll weevils on a cotton plant—but in anthropomorphic slice-of-life tableaus: “The Mole Cricket at Home.” “The Earwig as a Mother.”
*
The staff taxidermist must have quit at some point, or lost his mind, for some of the animal skins appear not stuffed, but inflated. A sort of hyena pool float hangs on the wall along the staircase, torso bloated, legs sticking straight out from its sides.

I go downstairs to the main exhibit hall, with its full-scale scenes of Egyptian village life: plaster mannequins of men in djellabas, sifting grains and guiding plows. A museum attendant falls into step beside me. He speaks no English, but it’s clear he has something to show me. He points to a low wooden door behind a diorama of dusty date-sellers and gestures for me to follow him. He unlocks the door and switches on the lights. We are alone inside a narrow orange-walled hallway that appears to have been, at one time, part of the museum. More village scenes line the sides. Here are women weaving, women telling fortunes, women combing their children’s hair. Then I realize: As in real life, the women have been sequestered from men’s gazes.

If even inanimate Egyptian women are protected and concealed, how on earth has Ahmed Shafik convinced dozens of flesh-and-blood women to lift up their robes for science?

I pay the guide his baksheesh and go home to take a nap. Around two, I set out again, on foot, to find the Ahmed Shafik Hospital, which I know to be close by. I assumed I could simply ask someone to point me in the right direction, in the same way you can ask anyone in Rochester, Minnesota, how to get to the Mayo Clinic. But hospitals in Cairo are a neighborhood affair, owned by families and small affiliations of doctors and indistinguishable (to the non-Arabic reader) from apartment buildings. I am quickly, deeply lost.