Bonk (33 page)

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We have three Houston researchers to thank for this statistic. In 1985, the trio attached a pressure gauge to the tip of a penis-shaped Plexiglas rod and penetrated a small group of female volunteers. It seems to me that if they wanted to approximate the surface friction that exists in real intercourse, slippery-smooth Plexiglas was a poor stand-in for penis skin. Though I suppose that when you are doing an experiment that involves penetrating coeds in your lab, surface friction is less of a concern than, say, human subjects review board friction.

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Research suggests that these women are rare. In a study of genital self-assessment, fifty women were asked to estimate the size of their clitoris. One of the options was “I cannot locate my clitoris.” Happily, no one checked that box.

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What is it with pathology journals and autoerotic deaths? Every other issue seems to have a case report of some heedless, autoasphyxiated corpse with ill-fitting briefs and a black bar across his eyes. Occasionally, they seem to be in there for sheer color, as in the case of the young Australian who perished from “inhalation of a zucchini.” This one raises more questions than it answers. Was he trying to intensify his climax by vegetally choking himself, or was it a case of overexuberant mock fellatio? (We do learn that the zucchini was from his wife’s garden, admittedly a nice touch.)

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The nerve-dense bit of tissue on the underside of the penis, where shaft meets glans. “Along with the tip and the testicles, these are the sensitive parts,” says Marty. “The whole rest of the penis, you could throw away.”

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Merriam-Webster OnLine’s preferred pronunciation is CLIT-oris. If you click on the little speaker icon, you can hear a nice lady saying “CLIT-oris” out loud for you, over and over, as many times as you click. The nice lady will also say “cervix” and “nipple,” but it is the nice man who gets to say “vagina,” “vulva,” and “orgasm,” plus all the male genital words. Smelling sexism, I entered “housewife,” which was read aloud by the woman, as was “maid,” “stewardess,” and “flower.” However, it is also the woman who pronounces “linebacker,” “doctor,” “president,” and “fireman.” So never mind. Can you say “waste of half an hour”?

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Or, if they are followers of sixteenth-century naturalist Li Shih-chen, sun-dried, powdered wolf epiglottis. Li’s hiccup remedy, found in the
Chinese Materia Medica
, is probably quite effective, for in the time it takes to track a wolf and sun-dry its epiglottis, even the most stubborn case of hiccups will invariably have passed.

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I can’t speak for Butt, but Dorcus was once a popular and desirable name. There was a magazine for “embroiderers and needle artisans,” popular in the early twentieth century, titled
Dorcus
.

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Far from the worse thing that ends up in rectums. “Rectal Foreign Bodies: Case Reports and a Comprehensive Review of the World’s Literature” includes a list of objects doctors have removed from rectums over the years. Highlights: a frozen pig tail (one of the 7 female cases in the total caseload of 202), a bottle of Impulse Body Spray (“incarcerated” in a thirty-seven-year-old lawyer), a parsnip, a plantain (with condom), a dull knife, a cattle horn, a salami, a jeweler’s saw, and a plastic spatula. Multiple holdings in the same rectum are listed under the heading “Collections.” These include several that could pass as still-life titles (“oil can with potato,” “2 apples,” “402 stones”), several that probably couldn’t (“umbrella handle and enema tubing,” “lemon and cold cream jar”) and one that suggests a quiet evening in the Biltmore (“spectacles, suitcase key, tobacco pouch, and magazine”).

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“Obtained” being a handy euphemism. Paralysis disables the sphincter that normally closes to keep semen from heading off into the bladder. Thus, electrically prompted ejaculations are often “retrograde,” disappearing into the manly recesses unless someone “milks” the semen out into the light of day.

†A Brindley tradition. At a 1983 urology conference, Brindley delivered a lecture about a new impotency drug, papaverine, that produced robust erections when injected directly into the penis. He began by showing his audience, a group of around eighty urologists and their wives—many en route to the conference cocktail party and dressed in formal attire—a series of slides of his own penis, after various dosages. He then revealed that, five minutes earlier, he had injected himself with papaverine. He pulled the fabric of his track suit tightly against his hips to reveal the outline of his medicated member. Not satisfied, he then pulled down his pants, revealing, in the words of eyewitness Laurence Klotz, “a long, thin, clearly erect penis.” Klotz’s account of the event was published in
BJU International
in 2005. “He paused, seeming to ponder his next move. The sense of drama in the room was palpable. He then said, with gravity, ‘I’d like to give some of the audience the opportunity to confirm the degree of tumescence.’ With his pants at his knees, he waddled down the stairs…. As he approached [the audience], erection waggling before him, four or five of the women in the front rows threw their arms up in the air…and screamed…. The screams seemed to shock Professor Brindley, who rapidly pulled up his trousers…and terminated the lecture.”

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Which perhaps explains the dearth of ejaculator references on alternative-sex Web sites. I found just one, a reference to the Bailey Ejaculator, in the Yahoo Mechanical Sex newsgroup. “It sounds rather captivating,” says the posting. “It sounds awesome moreover. Has anyone got any info?” Ed Lehigh, assistant vice president at Western Instruments, where they make the Bailey, told me he was unaware of a recreational side market for his product, though he recently got an order for three livestock ejaculators from an L.A. porn producer, perhaps seeking to boost productivity among the cast.

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“High-amplitude” meaning that the part that vibrates back and forth travels a longer distance in each direction. The FertiCare surpassed both an Oster and a Sunbeam vibrator in “An Analysis of 653 Trials of Penile Vibratory Stimulation in Men With Spinal Cord Injury.” It was news to me that either of the aforementioned wholesome small appliance companies made vibrators. They surely do not flaunt them. It is easier to track down an Oster animal nail grinder or an Oster arepa maker than an Oster vibrator.

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“The catheter can be folded back over the penis and both the penis and catheter covered with a condom.”

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Vereen came in for rehabilitation after he was struck by a car (though not paralyzed) while walking on the Pacific Coast Highway some years back. Sipski recruited Vereen to do the introduction on
Sexuality Reborn
, which he undertook with admirable dignity and no dancing.

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For years, Dr. Woog had been aware that women were using his invention as a vibrator. Every now and then, returned toothbrushes that passed through quality control “clearly seemed to have been used in that way,” said his son Lionel Woog, who oversees marketing for the vibrator company Advance Response. At a certain point, a lightbulb went on in the elder Woog’s head, and he set to work on a vibrator. “It’s the same idea,” said Lionel. “You want to stimulate the tissue without damaging it.” Lionel told me the story of the Eskimos, and how their gums deteriorated when they moved to settlements and began eating processed foods instead of raw animal parts. Vigorous chewing, he explained, stimulates bone growth and keeps gums healthy. Woog’s Broxodent electric toothbrush used to be given to marines on nuclear submarines. “They ate a lot of canned foods,” said Woog, and the toothbrush helped keep their gums in shape. It was a popular item with the men, maybe even for that reason. As Lionel Woog says, “You have to masticate.”

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The most interesting being the woman in Taiwan who, once or twice a week, would have an orgasm (followed by a mild nonconvulsive seizure) when she brushed her teeth. The smell of toothpaste alone wouldn’t trigger it, nor was it limited to any specific brand. It didn’t happen when she poked at her gums with a chopstick or when she moved her empty fist back and forth in a tooth-brushing motion. Curious neurologists at Chang Gung Memorial Hospital gave her a toothbrush and toothpaste and hooked her up to an EEG. Sure enough, after thirty-eight seconds of the “highly specific somatosensory stimulus” we call toothbrushing, it happened. The woman, whose case report appears in a 2003 issue of
Seizure
, was neither delighted nor amused by the situation. She believed she was possessed by demons, and soon switched to mouthwash for her oral hygiene.

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Highly decorated in both pursuits, Sprinkle holds a Ph.D. in human sexuality as well as a spot on the Adult Star Path of Fame in Edison, New Jersey. The Path of Fame was the brainchild of Mike Drake, manager of the Edison porn emporium Playtime. Drake also oversaw the contents of Playtime’s Adult Time Capsule, which include an autographed CyberSkin replica of Sprinkle’s vagina. Other items bound to confuse the earthlings of 2069 include nipple clamps, a Decadent Indulgence Vibrator with rotating pleasure beads and “clitoral hummingbird vibrator,” and a set of “starter anal beads.”

†She figured this out by borrowing a perineometer, a contraction-measuring device first built by Arnold Kegel to document the vaginal strength gains of Kegeling women. To this same end, Kegel made Before and After plaster casts of women’s vaginas, to show that their Kegeling regime had rendered them firmer and less “gaping,” to use the terminology of Kegel’s colleague Marilyn Fithian. “You had to get the plaster out before it got too hard,” Fithian told me in an interview years ago. Otherwise, it would get stuck, and no amount of pelvic floor muscle strength was going to help you. “You had to break it inside the vagina,” said Fithian, who was in her seventies then and still Kegeling.

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Dickinson’s descriptions of the female secretions read, in places, like a WD-40 advert: “It is clear as glass, tenacious and persistent, without being sticky. No other lubricant can compare with it in efficiency for a certain smooth and slippery quality….”

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If you think there’s no link between sex and sewing machines, think again. Early sewing machines were treadle-powered, and medical complaints among seamstresses common. Somehow, the men of Victorian medicine decided that the rhythmic pumping of the treadles was arousing women and leading them down the scarlet path to wanton masturbation—and that this “self-abuse” was the cause of their complaints. Wrote J. Langdon Down in the
British Medical Journal
in 1867, “I was struck with the similarity of some of the effects presented to those which my observations at Earlswood had taught me to connect with habits of masturbation.” Earlswood meaning the Royal Earlswood Asylum for Idiots. (Where Down was a physician, not a patient. I think.)

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You just never know what you’re going to see when you sign up for a sexual arousal study. At a sex conference I attended last month, a researcher gave a presentation about an arousal assessment technique called thermography. To make sure that nonsexual reactions like laughter weren’t causing the increase in temperature, the subjects’ genitals were also thermographically filmed while they watched clips from a Mr. Bean movie.

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Artistic representations of vaginal lubrication tend, historically, toward hyperbole. Old Japanese woodcuts show it sloshing forth as though from a garden hose. Dickinson writes in his
Atlas
that men who played the roles of women in classical Greek comedies would be shown during love scenes with “bags of fluid” hanging between their legs.

†Films by the porn-star-turned-director Candida Royalle are a sex-lab favorite. Meston likes the one about the guy who had the meaning of life tattooed on his erect penis. Alas, he can’t get it up (and won’t just
tell
anyone what it says), and so a cavalcade of existentially inquiring hotties tries to make big the writing tablet.

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Nominations for a Nobel Prize, I found out when I contacted the Nobel Foundation to try to verify Shafik’s, remain secret for fifty years. You make the claim, and nobody can prove otherwise until after you’re dead. Add one to your résumé today!

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For instance, who else would have funded a study of “the passage of flatus at coitus”? Flaturia, as Shafik has musically named it, is distinct from embarrassing vaginal fart sounds caused by air getting trapped behind the penis during sex. In flaturia, intestinal gas “leaks loudly” from the rectum during sex. Blessedly, it is rare: an affliction of women with a weak internal anal sphincter.

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While reflexes like the vaginocavernosus may serve to heighten a woman’s passion, they cannot stand in place of it. Eight of the ten Frenchwomen “were indifferent” to the overtures of the ballooning pressure probe.

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The female earwig is renowned for her maternal fastidiousness. She cleans her eggs obsessively with her saliva, which contains an antifungal. If someone—and it is unclear to me who this might be—enters her den and scatters her eggs, she will dutifully gather and repile them. However, if this happens once too often, she will eat them. Even earwigs have their limits.

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Ditto humans. In 1973, researchers put a group of students (who’d never met) in a pitch-dark room for an hour, after telling them each would leave alone and never see the others. In other words, no judgment, no consequences. Meanwhile, infrared cameras were rolling. Ninety percent touched a stranger, 50 percent hugged one, and an unspecified number “necked.” When the experiment was repeated in a lighted room, no one made physical contact.
A boy who admitted to necking with a stranger named Beth said: “We expressed it as showing ‘love’ to each other. Before I was taken out, we decided to pass our ‘love’ on. So…Laurie took her place.”
“People share strong yearnings to be close to each other,” concluded the authors. “However, social norms make it too costly to express these feelings. Perhaps these traditions have outlived their usefulness.” Oh, probably not.