Bonk (27 page)

The rickety notion of rhesus—and, by implication, human—sex pheromones can be traced to a rhesus monkey research colony in the U.K. and to the behavioral neuroendocrinologist who observed it. In 1971, Richard Michael claimed to have pinpointed compounds in the vaginal secretions of his females that, when sniffed, caused the male monkeys to initiate sex. (But not very many of them. Critics point out that just two males accounted for 50 percent of the data.) Michael called the purported rhesus pheromones “copulins,”
*
a word I cannot write without picturing a race of small, randy beings taken aboard the starship
Enterprise
.

Other endocrinologists had doubts about Michael’s claim. D. A. Goldfoot and three colleagues at the Wisconsin Regional Primate Research Center made “lavages”—a pretty French word for the liquid they got from washing out the vaginas of rhesus monkeys in heat—and smeared the substance onto the back ends of neutered (i.e., non-hormone-producing) females. The expectation was th at if copulins were for real, the males would try to mate with the lavage-anointed, neutered females. The males did not.

Michael’s sex-pheromone work got tremendous media coverage nonetheless, which is unfortunate, as it sent our understanding of female hormones and female sexual behavior way off down the wrong boulevard. It implied that when it came to sex, the female primate was a passive receptacle with no drive or interest of her own.

However, I cannot hold this against Dr. Michael, for his work inspired a highly diverting period of scientific inquiry. In 1975, for example, a team of researchers from the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia launched an investigation of changes in the “pleasantness” of women’s vaginal odors across their monthly cycle. Seventy-eight subjects were asked to sniff tampons that four women had worn during the various phases of their cycle. (For obvious reasons, the women were asked not to eat onions, garlic, or asparagus for the duration of the study. Less obviously, the women were discouraged from eating broccoli, brussels sprouts, cabbage, chili, curry, kale, sauerkraut, and pineapple.) The supposition was that the odors might be more appealing during a woman’s ovulatory phase than at other times during her cycle. And they were: Subjects judged them slightly more pleasant and less intense than at other times. However, the authors reported, the data did not go so far as to “support the notion…that vaginal secretion odors are particularly pleasant to human males.”
*

There was one other nominee for human sex-pheromone status: A compound called androstenone was found to exist in men’s underarm sweat. Androstenone had long been known as a potent swine sex pheromone; when a pig in heat sniffs it, she becomes receptive to being mounted by a boar. Hence its presence in male bodily secretions sent endocrinologists into frenzies of speculation. Its actual effect on women proved unclear—though not for want of trying. For years, psychologists and endocrinologists took to sneaking around in public spaces spraying furniture and bathroom stall doors with cans of Boarmate, a synthetic, aerosolized version of androstenone.

Occasionally, the studies seemed to turn up an effect. M. D. Kirk-Smith and a colleague at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. sprayed Boarmate on what had been determined to be an unpopular seat among women visitors to a dentist’s waiting room. The aim was to see if more women would now be attracted to this chair. The seat’s popularity was secretly observed by receptionists. The Boarmate appeared to work its charms on the women, who sat in the chair significantly more often than they had before Kirk-Smith and the can of Boarmate hit the scene.

What does the dentist chair project prove about women and men and their interactions with each other? Nothing, says George Preti, of the Monell Chemical Senses Center, who was dismissive of the study and critical of its methodology. The bottom line is that men’s armpit secretions are unlikely to serve as an attractant to any species other than the research psychologist.

Despite the washy evidence that androstenone has an effect on human sexual behavior, it wasn’t long before someone patented an androstenone-based human sex attractant. Winnifred Cutler used to work with George Preti. The two parted ways when she began placing ads in the backs of men’s magazines for Athena Pheromone 10X (“Raise the Octane of Your Aftershave”). Cutler published a study stating that men who added 10X to their cologne were having significantly more dates and more sex than a control group. She concluded that her product had made the men more sexually attractive. Preti, in turn, claimed that Cutler had failed to demonstrate solid evidence that this was so. And to this day, no amount of 10X can bring the two together at industry gatherings.

I have a better suggestion for Cutler’s customers. Stop wearing cologne. Women don’t find it attractive. If you don’t believe me, here is a quote from a press release from the Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago: “Men’s colognes actually reduced vaginal blood flow.” Foundation director Al Hirsch hooked women up to a vaginal photoplethysmograph and had them wear surgical masks scented with ten different aromas or combinations of aromas. (To be sure the women weren’t just getting aroused by dressing up in surgical masks, Hirsch put unscented masks onto a control group.) In addition to the smell of cologne, the women were turned off by the scent of cherry and of “charcoal barbeque meat.” 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.
*

Though the existence of human pheromones remains open to debate, sexuality does seem to play a role in how men and women respond to the scent of each other’s hormones. Researcher Ivanka Savic of Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute asked straight women and gay men to sniff a particular hormonal component of male sweat. As they did so, their hypothalamus lit up on a PET brain scan, suggesting a sexual response rather than just an olfactory one. The same kind of brain response showed up when Savic had straight men—and, in a second study, lesbians—sniff an estrogen-like compound found in women’s urine. Savic emphasized that the sweat and urine compounds did not—as would a true pheromone—prompt any changes in behavior, except, possibly, refraining from signing up for future Ivanka Savic studies.

“Persons Studied in Pairs”

The Lab That Uncovered Great Sex

w
hen I began this book, I harbored a naïve fantasy that I would find a team of scientists working to discover the secret to amazing, mind-rippling sex. They would report to work late at night in a windowless, hi-tech laboratory and have unplaceable accents and penetrating stares. Week after week, couples would be hooked up to instruments, measured, interviewed, filmed. Data would be analyzed, footage reviewed, and one day one of the researchers would set down her pen and nod knowingly.

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.

One day, with only two months to go before I turned in the manuscript, I found that lab. In 1979, William Masters and Virginia Johnson published
Homosexuality in Perspective
, a book to which I had never before seen or heard a reference. For five years, Masters and Johnson observed and compared the laboratory sexual encounters of straight, gay and lesbian, and “ambisexual” couples. (The team coined the term to refer to nonmonogamous sexual opportunists who show no preference between men and women throughout their very busy sex lives.)

To keep the subjects’ identities secret, the researchers did indeed schedule the sessions late at night or on weekends, when no one was in the building. The rest of it surpassed even my own imagination. While some of the subjects were having sex with their spouses or long-term partners, others were doing it with a stranger—not a stranger of their choosing, but one assigned to them by Masters and Johnson. These latter men and women would show up at the lab, chat with the researchers, and, following a short orientation session, get down to business with a man or woman they had never before laid eyes upon. While Masters and Johnson observed.

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.

As always, and like most sex researchers, Masters and Johnson were stingy with the irrelevant details. I can tell you that the thermostat was set at 78, presumably because the couples were naked and, of course, had no covers over them. I can tell you that some of the participants asked for background music, though I cannot tell you which albums, just as I could not tell you the titles of the “stimulative literature” used to arouse subjects in
Human Sexual Response
twenty years before.

The team did mention that many of the men and women who had been assigned a partner worried that this person wouldn’t find them attractive. Oddly, the reverse anxiety never surfaced—no one seemed concerned about whether they themselves would feel any attraction to the stranger whose genitals they were about to experience in almost every way imaginable: manually, orally, coitionally.
*
Catching something wasn’t a concern, because everyone was screened for venereal disease, and AIDS hadn’t yet surfaced. The researchers themselves had but one qualm. They worried at first that some of the subjects might come on to them and/or make small talk, I cannot tell which, for they phrased it as “the problem of study subjects attempting social interchange” with the researchers.

Unlike
Human Sexual Response
, this project did not primarily concern itself with the physiology of arousal and orgasm. Everything Masters and Johnson had observed in their heterosexual subjects in the fifties (a subset of whom became the later project’s hetero group), they found, applied to homosexuals. Having now observed “hundreds of cycles of sexual response” in gays as well, they quickly concluded that arousal and orgasm are arousal and orgasm, whether a couple has one, two, or zero penises between them.

A large chunk of the book is spent comparing “functional efficiency” and “failure incidence” of the different groups: gay versus straight versus ambi, long-term versus assigned. Table after table with titles like “Functional Efficiency of Ambisexuals in Manipulative Stimulation and Coition.” This was Masters and Johnson as their critics saw them: the mechanizers of sex, obsessively focused on “effective stimulation,” reducing passion to a series of impersonal physical manipulations.

But ultimately the team set aside their stopwatches and data charts and turned a qualitative eye upon their volunteers. What emerged were two portraits. There was efficient sex—skillful, efficient, goal-directed, uninhibited, and with a very low “failure incidence.” Here there were no significant differences among the study groups. Basically, anyone who signed on as a Masters and Johnson volunteer—gay, straight, committed or not—tended to have, as they say, 100 percent orgasmic return. Because really, why would people who knew themselves to be iffy responders volunteer for this project?

But efficient sex was not amazing sex. The best sex going on in Masters and Johnson’s lab was the sex being had by the committed gay and lesbian couples. Not because they were practicing special secret homosexual sex techniques, but because they “
took their time.
” They lost themselves—in each other, and in sex. They “tended to move slowly…and to linger at…[each] stage of stimulative response, making each step in tension increment something to be appreciated….” They teased each other “in an obvious effort to prolong the stimulatee’s high levels of sexual excitation.”

Another difference was that the lesbians were almost as aroused by what they were doing to their partner as was the partner herself. Not just because, say, fondling a breast turned them on, but because their partners’ reactions did. 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. There were only a few instances when the husband seemed fully aware of his wife’s levels of sexual excitation and helped her to expand her pleasure…rather than attempting to force her rapidly to higher levels of sexual involvement.”

The same criticisms applied to straight women: “This sense of goal orientation, of trying to get something done…was exhibited almost as frequently by the heterosexual women as by their male partners.” They ignored their husband’s nipples and just about everything else other than his penis. Meanwhile, the homosexual men lavished attention on their partners’ entire bodies. And the gay men, like the gay women, were adept at the tease. Unlike the wives: “Rarely did a wife identify her husband’s preorgasmic stage…and suspend him at this high level of sexual excitation….”