Bonk (5 page)

This, to me, is as good as science gets: a mildly outrageous, terrifically courageous, seemingly efficacious display of creative problem-solving, fueled by a bullheaded dedication to amassing facts and dispelling myths in a long-neglected area of human physiology. Kudos to the pair of them.

But I have a question. Who
were
these women having orgasms from nothing more than the straight-on, in-and-out motions of a plastic phallus? Some 70 percent of women report that intercourse—ungarnished by any add-on clitoral stimulation—reliably fails to take them all the way to the spin cycle. Remove foreplay and love and lust from the equation, and the orgasms of Masters and Johnson’s “artificial coition” subjects are a rather startling achievement.

Especially if you buy what Masters and Johnson had to say about vaginal orgasm: i.e., that it doesn’t exist. The team compared the physiological elements of orgasms from (clitorally) masturbating and from intercourse, and they concluded that all the orgasms were, physiologically, the same. And all of them, they maintained, owed their existence to the clitoris. Yet I’m guessing that the artificial-coition machine, because you could not straddle it or position it just so atop you, maintained a frosty distance from the clitoris. (Subjects were either on their backs or on all fours, doggy-style.) So what, then, was bringing these women to their peak? “Penile traction on the labia minora,” said Masters and Johnson: Penis going into vagina pulls on labia, which in turn pull on clitoris.

In 1984, a team of Colombian researchers cast doubt on the notion of labial traction as an instigator of female orgasm. Heli Alzate was a physician and professor of sexology at Caldas University School of Medicine, and Maria Ladi Londoño, his coauthor, was a psychotherapist with a diploma in psychology.
*
The team brought sixteen prostitutes (paid $16 each—several times the going rate of a Colombian trick)
†
and thirty-two unpaid feminists into their lab to map the erotic sensitivity of the vagina. Like this:

The examiner, with his or her hands washed, inserted his or her lubricated index and/or middle fingers in the subject’s vagina and proceeded to systematically friction both vaginal walls, applying a moderate-to-strong rhythmic pressure at an angle to the wall, going from lower to upper half of the vagina.

When Alzate or Londoño located a subject’s sweet spot—which for most was on the front wall, but for some, the lower back wall—the spot was simultaneously pressed and stroked (a maneuver I have seen elsewhere described as a “come here” motion). More than three-quarters of the prostitutes Alzate “frictioned” in this manner had a vaginal orgasm. (Londoño brought no subjects to climax; the women said that this was because she wasn’t pressing as hard as Alzate.) Only four of the feminists, though aroused, reached orgasm. Perhaps they were feeling uncomfortable with what many feminists might perceive to be an exploitative scenario.
*
Or perhaps they were simply less accustomed to sexual encounters with strangers.

Alzate was creating vaginal orgasms, but you couldn’t use a penis-camera to bring them on. A male organ in the missionary position travels parallel to the vaginal walls, not at an angle. To prove that their subjects’ orgasms were not being caused by traction created by the thrusting motions of the researcher’s fingers, Alzate and Londoño set up a separate “simulated intercourse” test. This time no one came.

Six paid subjects that easily reached climax by stimulation of their vaginal erogenous zones were examined. The examiner rhythmically stimulated the lower third of the vagina with his index and middle fingers, mimicking the movements of the penis during coitus, and for the time required to elicit an orgasm by stimulation of the vaginal erogenous zone. Although a clear traction on the labia minora was evident, all subjects felt only a slight to moderate erotic sensation.

Penile thrusting on its own—with no foreplay or during-play—is, concluded Alzate, “an inefficient method of inducing female orgasm.”

Yet Masters and Johnson’s artificial coition subjects were getting off on nothing but the thrust. How so? Were they turned on by the idea of sex with a machine? Is there something about mechanical sex that I’m failing to grasp? William Masters is dead, and Virginia Johnson—communicating via her son Scott—resisted repeated wheedling, I mean requests, for an interview. (She is eighty-one, and in declining health.) But perhaps I could at least pay a visit to the penis machine.

m
asters and Johnson were tight-lipped on the topic of their artificial-coition machine. As far as I can tell, the most informative written material is this passage from
Human Sexual Response
:

The artificial coital equipment was created by radiophysicists. The penises are plastic and were developed with the same optics as plate glass. Cold-light illumination allows observation and recording without distortion. The equipment can be adjusted for physical variations in size, weight, and vaginal development. The rate and depth of penile thrust is initiated and controlled completely by the responding individual. As tension elevates, rapidity and depth of thrust are increased voluntarily, paralleling subjective demand.

The only other information the pair provided had to do with the equipment also being used for testing barrier-type contraceptive devices, which made sense, and “in the creation of artificial vaginas,” which made less sense. There was a footnote related to this latter bit, which made reference to two circa-1930 papers by Robert Frank and S. H. Geist, experts on the topic of vaginal agenesis. Some women, about 1 in 5,000, are born without a vagina, and some gynecologists—Frank and Geist prime among them—have made it their life’s calling to give them one. Before Frank and Geist came along, this might entail fashioning an ersatz vagina out of a piece of the woman’s intestine or—less (or possibly more) attractively—her rectum.

Frank and Geist thought it better and safer to simply stretch to its maximum the vaginal membrane the women had been born with. This was done by pushing in on it with a Pyrex tube
*
several times a day. When “a narrow canal at least 2½ inches long” had been established, the women then widened the cavity by placing gradually larger Pyrex tubes inside their fledgling vaginas and leaving them in while they slept. Masters and Johnson realized that a few rounds with the artificial-coition machine might be a way to speed the process along.

The Frank and Geist papers, diverting though they were, did little to alter my impression of the artificial-coition machine as an artless and unarousing partner. I remained determined to see it. A 1996 A&E Television biography of Masters and Johnson mentioned the apparatus, but the producers told me they had not been given access to it or to any subjects who’d experienced it—or, for that matter, to any penis-camera footage.

I sent another letter to Virginia Johnson’s son. I told him that I only wanted to visit the artificial-coition machine or see some footage of it in action. Virginia Johnson need not even pop her head in to say good morning.

No reply. I phoned again. Scott gave me the sort of hello that wants very badly to be a good-bye. He said that any archival material—including anything relating to the artificial-coition sessions—had “probably been destroyed” to ensure the anonymity of the subjects. What about the machine? Surely it too hadn’t been destroyed.

He wouldn’t talk about it. He said: “We’re really not interested in getting involved.
Follow?”
(I later learned from sex researcher Roy Levin that before William Masters died, he told one of Levin’s research partners that the artificial-coition machine had been dismantled.)

And now you understand why I paid $20 to attend an event billed as follows:

SEX MACHINES: Book Talk, Slide Show & Machine Play Party!

Masters and Johnson, it turns out, are not the only sex-machine game in town. An entire subculture exists, with enthusiasts all over the country trading tips on Internet listservs. With the 2006 publishing of
Sex Machines: Photographs and Interviews,
they even have their own coffee-table book. Coincidentally, a few days after the dispiriting Scott Johnson conversation, a newspaper editor I know forwarded me the press release for the
Sex Machines
event.

Now I’d be able to see, firsthand, whether and how the mechanical dick delivers.

t
he Center for Sex and Culture does not court the curious passerby. No sign is posted on the outside of the building or inside the entryway. It is a nonprofit in a plain brown wrapper.
*
Eventually, you notice the street number, 298, on a window near the door. There is an intercom with a buzzer labeled CSC. When you ring it, a voice says simply, “Hello?” forcing you to announce that you are HERE FOR THE SEX-MACHINE EVENT. This being San Francisco—on a block where, not two minutes ago, a man in a cotton skirt descended from his flat to the sidewalk on a telescoping fire escape ladder and trotted away—no one finds the pronouncement to be worthy of especial notice.

On-time arrivals are asked to wait in the hall outside the door, because the machinists are not quite ready. Soon the line reaches all the way down the staircase. We are a mild-looking group. Based on appearances, we could be people in line at a Safeway or a Starbucks. A short man with a cane and a pencil-thin mustache has come with a conservative-looking woman in a navy and beige raincoat. One man I talk to is a physicist; one woman is a journalist. Mostly, I see couples and solo men who do not appear to be any particular type other than curious. A few gay couples are in line, but the event, like the machines themselves, seems to lean hetero.

CSC’s founder, the irrepressible and incandescent Carol Queen, a cultural sexologist, steps up to address the audience (“Ladies and gentlemen and everyone else!”), who have by now filed inside and settled into chairs. Queen introduces Timothy Archibald, the author-photographer of
Sex Machines
. Archibald is dressed in baggy orange painter pants and a red plaid shirt. He holds a bottle of Corona and occasionally reaches up to feel his shaved head. Archibald’s default expression is a relaxed smile. It is easy to see why the builders, with some cajoling, agreed to pose for him. Archibald is a respected fine art photographer, and his book (really and truly) is a fine art photography book. No one was photographed using the machines; the images are portraits of the inventors, all men, in their homes and garages, posing with their machines like 4-Hers with their stock. The friend who passed along the press release also gave me a review copy of the book, and it lay around in our living room enjoying pride of place with the other art books until my husband’s parents came out to visit.

The typical scenario, Archibald says, is a married guy “who likes building things.” He comes across someone else’s sex machine, is fascinated, decides to build one himself. “He presents it to his wife, who goes, ‘Wha?’ and then he sells it on eBay.” Only one of the machines here tonight is manufactured for general sale.

Someone has plugged in a homemade machine on the floor behind Archibald. The motor housing is the size of a lunchbox and is raised on one end, like a slide projector. A flesh-colored phallus on a stick slides quietly in and out. The erotic appeal seems limited. It would be like dating a corn dog. This is the basic setup for most of these machines and, I imagine, for Masters and Johnson’s device: electric motor attached to piston attached to phallus. Or as Archibald puts it: “something out of shop class, with a human appendage stuck to it.” The more sophisticated models include, as Masters and Johnson’s did, a control box allowing the user to vary the speed and the depth of the thrusting. A few of the phalluses can be set to vibrate, but most just go in and out, in and out.

Archibald winds up his talk and invites questions. A woman in wire-rimmed glasses and a green T-shirt raises her hand. “What we’re seeing is a lot of dildos going in and out of orifices. Given that the majority of women don’t orgasm this way, do any of these machines pay attention to the clitoris?”

Archibald concedes that the machines represent a stereotypically male notion of what women enjoy. Only one machine that he knows about—it is not here tonight—attends to the clitoris. Another woman raises her hand. So what, in that case, is the appeal? “Is it the eroticization of being fucked by a machine, or the regularity of the thrusting?” Archibald looks at his builders. No one seems to have a solid answer.

William Harvey had an answer. In 1988, long before the current Internet-fueled sex-machine boom, this man obtained a patent for a Therapeutic Apparatus for Relieving Sexual Frustrations in Women Without Sex Partners. Unlike the machinists here tonight, Harvey was very clear on the purpose of his machine. “Vibrators and sex aids…cannot satisfy the true needs of a partnerless woman who wants not only the ultimate climax or orgasm, but also the feeling that she is actually having sex with a partner.”

The partner Harvey invented took the form of a toaster-sized, unadorned metal box with a motor inside and a “continuously erect yet resiliently pliable artificial penis,” a.k.a. “penial assembly,” sticking out of the front of it. The box was mounted on a track, upon which it rolled to and fro, finishing each stroke with “a rapid cam-operated thrust.” On some level, Harvey must have sensed that certain aspects of an actual partner were missing—warmth, say, or personality, arms and legs, a head, a soul. Harvey could not provide these things, but he could provide “the look and feel of a male’s pubic hair.” At the base of the penial assembly was a wide, black, wiry cuff of “fur-like or hair-like material.” For the partnerless woman who wants not only the ultimate climax or orgasm, but also the feeling that she is actually having sex with a shoe buffer.