Bonk (6 page)

I wanted to ask Mr. Harvey how many units he has sold to partnerless women, and whether the women are sexually gratified by it. Whoever he is, he no longer lives in the town listed on the 1988 patent. A Web search turned up dozens of William Harveys. One had an email address. For the heck of it, I sent a note asking if he was the William Harvey who owns U.S. Patent 4,722,327, a Therapeutic Apparatus for Relieving Sexual Frustrations in Women Without Sex Partners. A reply arrived the following morning: “I am not the correct William Harvey, but your research does sound very interesting.”

Archibald takes one last question, and then the audience is invited to mingle with the machinists. Allen Stein, inventor of an elaborate, chair-mounted nightmare called the Thrillhammer, has an answer to the appeal question. Stein, an attractive, sturdy former marine waste engineer,
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is the “chief visioneer” for a company that makes videos featuring models in flagrante with sex machines. Stein says the site appeals to men who like heterosexual pornography but are uncomfortable looking at the naked men that the naked women are having sex with. It is, he says, “porn for homophobes.” Additionally, Stein says, some couples buy sex machines because the idea of a threesome appeals to them, but they are nervous about inviting a stranger into their lives. (A similar trepidation also prompts the occasional closeted gay man to experiment with a machine.) Stein puts his hand on the seat of the Thrillhammer. “Here’s a third party who’s safe, who’s not going to take over the relationship.” The Thrillhammer is eight feet tall and makes a sound like an off-balance washing machine.

“I don’t know about that, Allen.”

When asked whether he knew of any women who get off solely on repetitive mechanical thrusting, Stein says he doesn’t keep in touch with his customers, so he doesn’t really know. “Ask her,” says Stein. The woman with the wire-rim glasses is preparing to board the Thrillhammer. She has changed out of the green T-shirt and into a floor-length black satin nightgown. The eyeglasses are gone. This woman, it turns out, is a friend of the CSC and something of a luminary in the San Francisco sex scene. It’s possible she’s participating as a favor to CSC, to try to get the thus-far-nonexistent “play party” aspect of the event rolling. Or she may simply be curious. I did not ask. Allen shows her how to work the controls, and then retreats to the sidelines to check his BlackBerry.

Very few people have noticed that a woman is poised to mount a machine, or vice versa, I’m not really sure. The audience members are standing around chatting, holding plastic cups of wine and looking at the machines as though they were sculptures at a gallery opening.

Eventually, a small throng gathers beside the Thrillhammer. The woman in the nightgown says that she is sixty-eight years old. I would have guessed fifty. She climbs onto the machine, which is mounted on a nineteenth-century gynecologist’s chair. Back then there were no stirrups, but instead long upholstered extensions where you rested your legs. She leans back and passes the control panel to a stranger, a quiet, suburban-looking woman with naturally blond hair and strappy, heeled sandals. “Surprise me,” this woman is told.

Allen hands the nightgown woman what looks like a microphone. “I include one of these free with every purchase,” he says to the onlookers. This might be more than I can take: a woman in her Social Security years, singing karaoke while being delved by a plunging, vibrating phallus. The woman places the microphone between her legs. It’s a vibrator—a Hitachi Magic Wand.

It is more interesting to watch the woman who is manning the Thrillhammer control toggles. She is making the sort of face I make when I watch those plastic surgery shows or pull off a Band-Aid. She seems worried that she might be inflicting damage. The woman in the nightgown reports that she finds the motion of the Thrillhammer’s flesh-tone appendage to be distracting. She has the blond woman slow it down and tries to focus on the magic of the Wand. Presently, the woman in the nightgown reaches a tidy peak. Watching her is no more erotic or awkward than watching a stranger sneeze.

To get back to the question at hand, we did not see a sex machine—at least, without help from Hitachi—escort a woman through even one complete cycle of sexual response. But there is at least one woman who has, as she put it, “had orgasms just off the machine.” She appears in a photograph in Archibald’s book, curled up nude on a floral couch with an unnamed machine parked on the carpeting at her feet. “I like it because I have total control,” she is quoted as saying. “If it were a guy he’d be doing it for himself, his own pleasure, but this is all about me.” Masters and Johnson observed this as well, noting in one of their books that “the biggest detriment for effective female response was male control of thrusting pattern.” In other words, a phallus is a welcomed addition to female pleasure, as long as the woman has some say about it—its speed, its angle, its depth, its outfit.
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In Alfred Kinsey’s sample of 8,000 women, 20 percent reported occasionally making some kind of “vaginal insertions” when they masturbated—though usually in addition to doing something directly clitoral. It was Kinsey’s opinion that many of these women penetrated themselves because their husbands liked to watch them, or because they didn’t know any better. It’s more likely that these women had discovered their G-Spot (or female prostate, or front-wall erotic zone, or whatever you wish to call it), and that they weren’t simply thrusting straight-on, like a penis in the missionary position. If vaginal stimulation didn’t contribute in any way to women’s pleasure, why would “rabbit”-style vibrators (with both a clitoral and an internal component) be the sales phenomenon that they are?

Some time later, I came across an explanation of the Masters and Johnson coition-machine mystery in a paper by feminist Leonore Tiefer, a professor of psychiatry at the NYU School of Medicine and a vocal critic of the medicalization of women’s sexual concerns. Tiefer points out that near the end of
Human Sexual Response
, Masters and Johnson reveal that in order to be accepted as subjects, women were required to have “a positive history of…coital orgasmic experience.” Far from being randomly selected representatives of average American womanhood, they were cherry-picked to be easily orgasmic.

Marie Bonaparte, the great-grandniece of the little guy in the wide hat, claimed to have found a simple answer to the question of why some women climax readily from intercourse alone and others don’t. She found it using nothing more elaborate than a measuring tape.

The Princess and Her Pea

The Woman Who Moved Her Clitoris, and Other Ruminations on Intercourse Orgasms

o
nce upon a time, there was a princess named Marie. She had long, thick curls and beautiful brown eyes, and her clitoris was three centimeters away from her vagina. This last bit was very depressing for the princess. She could never manage an orgasm during intercourse, and she felt certain that the far-off placement of her clitoris was the reason. Princess Marie—whose last name was Bonaparte and whose great-grand-uncle was Napoleon—was a passionate woman with a commanding libido. Yet sex left her unsatisfied. Her troubles had partly to do with her husband, Prince George of Greece, a latent homosexual,
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who, she wrote in her diary, took her on their wedding night “in a short, brutal gesture, as if forcing [himself]…and apologized, ‘I hate it as much as you do. But we must do it if we want children.’” But you could not hang the princess’s discontent entirely upon the gigantic handlebar mustaches of Prince George. For intercourse with the prime minister of France also left her cold, as did intercourse with her husband’s aide-de-camp and the three other lovers that she took while married to George.

Marie, who lived mainly in France, went so far as to seek scientific proof for her anatomical theory of frigidity. Bonaparte was not a physician, but she played one from time to time, and well enough to have published a paper in a 1924 issue of the medical and surgical journal
Bruxelles-Médical
. She used a pseudonym, A. E. Narjani, but readers surely sensed this wasn’t the handiwork of the customary
Bruxelles-Médical
contributor. Here she is in the journal’s pages, describing women like herself:

They remain, despite all the caresses, even with all the tender gestures that should fulfill their heart, eternally unsatisfied by their bodies. Because, for these women, the moment which should bring them the greatest escape to joy, brings each time instead the torture of the ancient Tantalis. The ecstatic smile of the truly satisfied woman never shines on the face of these women tantalized by love…. And as happiness is for them unattainable, they are fated to pursue it, from lover to lover, in a hopeless hunt, until the knell of old age tolls.

Princess Bonaparte, working with doctors she knew, put the ruler to 243 women and interviewed them about their sex life. The subjects landed in one of three categories, based on the distance between their vagina and their clitoris. The women with the lengthiest span, a distance longer than two and a half centimeters (an inch), she labeled
téléclitoridiennes
. They made up 21 percent of her sample. Women in this category, she claimed, were incapable of
volupté
—or “normal voluptuous reaction,” meaning orgasm—during intercourse.
Téléclitoridienne
means simply “female of the distant clitoris,” but it had a lovely, aristocratic ring to it—calling to mind a career woman in heels and sweater set, cabling reports from her home in Biarritz. At the very least, it had a nicer ring to it than “frigid.”

The luckier women were the
paraclitoridiennes
(
para
-meaning “alongside”). These women, 69 percent of Bonaparte’s sample, had clitorises less than an inch distant and, she said, were almost guaranteed a voluptuous reaction from the in-and-out thrust of a penis. (This does not jive with more modern data, which puts the figure for women who have orgasm from intercourse alone at about 20 to 30 percent.) The remaining 10 percent of Bonaparte’s women, the
mesoclitoridiennes
, whose distance lay right at the one-inch cutoff point, inhabited the “threshold of frigidity.” They fell upon either side, depending on their mood, their husband’s compensatory skills, his feelings about Greek sprinters, and what have you.

Luckiest of all, Bonaparte wrote, are mares and cows. “Nature has favored domestic animals over womankind,” she lamented in her paper, pointing out that the clitorises of these animals were “located right on the border of the genital orifice.” Given that the average horse or cow liaison is over in a matter of seconds, these creatures sorely need a clitoral leg up. It’s just as well Bonaparte never investigated the private bits of the domestic sow, whose clitoris sits
inside
its vagina.

i
f the distance is less than the width of your thumb, you are likely to come.” This catchy anatomical ditty was penned not by Marie Bonaparte, but by Kim Wallen, an Emory University professor of behavioral neuroendocrinology. Wallen spends most of his time studying sex hormones at the Emory-based Yerkes National Primate Research Center on the outskirts of Atlanta, but he has of late been researching the physiology of intercourse. Wallen, who has a starring role in chapter 14, was the person who first told me about the princess and her clitoral travails. He was intrigued by Bonaparte’s findings, but he did not, at first, put much stock in them, mainly because the science of statistics in 1924 was relatively primitive. Then he ran her numbers himself. The vaginal-clitoral distances, he said, turned out to perfectly predict which women would have orgasms in intercourse and which wouldn’t. The cutoff point, as Bonaparte had noted, lay at around an inch—the width of a typical thumb. I asked him if he was going to trademark his “rule of thumb.”

“Yes,” he deadpanned. “And I’m going to start selling a little custom-made ruler.”

Bonaparte includes only 43 of the 243 subjects’ measurements in her paper, so Wallen’s data were limited to those. Nonetheless, the data are so consistent that 43 turns out to be more than enough to say that there is, as he puts it, a very powerful, statistically reliable relationship. “Certainly strong enough to say there’s something here that’s worth looking at.” Wallen plans to do a larger study himself, as soon as he has time.

A more recent study of genital variations among fifty women confirmed the range of distances Bonaparte found: from a half inch to almost two inches, with an average at around an inch. This study, by U.K. gynecologist Jillian Lloyd and colleagues, had nothing to do with orgasm. Lloyd sought to document the truly remarkable degree of variation in the size and shapes of women’s genital features.
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The hope was to reassure those who worry that their clitoris, say, is abnormally large or their pubic hair too rangy. Pornography, Lloyd points out, exposes us to idealized, highly selective images, making women needlessly self-conscious (and labia-reduction surgeons rich).

Wallen, like Masters and Johnson, thinks it’s possible that a majority of the so-called vaginal orgasms being had during intercourse are in reality clitoral orgasms. But unlike Masters and Johnson, he doesn’t suggest that most women are having them easily. He believes, like Bonaparte, that the women having them—the
paraclitoridiennes
of the world—are an anatomically distinct group whose sexual response is different from that of the majority of women. And that maybe these women are “where the whole notion of the vaginal orgasm originally came from.”

I offered to be a statistic in Wallen’s new study. He sent me detailed instructions on how to do the measuring. It’s not as simple as it sounds, because Bonaparte’s measurements—and thus Wallen’s too—were from the clitoris to the urethra (where urine exits the body), rather than from clitoris to vagina. (The urethra is dependably close to the clitoris and makes a more precise measuring point.) A clitoris is easy to find, but urethras are sometimes hidden inside the opening to the vagina, and often hard to see. I emailed Wallen twice with questions.