[WT Sharpe]

Just finished reading Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach. The book was in turns both informative and hilarious, frequently both at the same time.

Spoiler:

Right from the dedication in the front of the book, I suspected this one was going to be special. At the very least, I thought it was quite appropriate.

Dedication
For Woody

Reading this book is a wonderful way to discover things about sex you might never want to know, such as:

Research by the Department for Nutrition and Reproduction at Denmark’s National Committee for Pig Production showed that sexually stimulating a sow while you artificially inseminate her leads to a 6 percent improvement in fertility. This in turn led to a government-backed Five-Point Stimulation Plan for pig farmers, complete with instructional DVD and color posters to tack on barn walls.

If that's not enough detail about life on a pig farm:

[T]he inseminators are working side by side. Morten is lagging behind slightly. He is just now inserting a semen feeder tube into the pig he’s working on. He wears the look of concentration and vague worry that my husband wears while snaking the bathroom drain. He tugs gently, making sure the placement is good and then holds up the semen pouch like an IV bag. Next he climbs on the sow’s back. This is intended as a substitute for the weight of the boar. He bounces slightly to mimic the male’s movements. All three men are now sitting on the backs of a sow. They look like people on an antique merry-go-round where everyone, not just the last two to board, has to ride a pig. One by one, the semen bags are drained. It happens abruptly, sometimes after a few seconds, sometimes after a few minutes. Patience is key. You never rush a sow. (For this reason, there is no clock in the insemination area.) Thomas is said to have a way with the sows. His focus is unwavering. He never talks on his cell phone, as Kaj sometimes does. He pushes the sow’s mammaries with his boots and rubs the sow’s neck and behind her ears, though these things are not prescribed on the poster.

I'll bet that's a mental image that will stay with you a long time.

But, of course, it's human sexuality that takes center stage, as she focuses her attention on sex researchers past and present. On Kinsey, she writes:

Kinsey had hired a commercial photographer named Bill Dellenback, whose pay, not entirely fraudulently, came out of the institute’s budget for "mammalian behavior studies."

You will learn history:

Leonardo [da Vinci] learned about anatomy by studying cadavers. When I came across the coition figures, I assumed—erroneously, ludicrously, you might even say—that Leonardo had managed to wrestle two cadavers into the missionary position, and then cleave the joined couple lengthwise. The assumption wasn’t entirely far-fetched; the anatomist spoke of dissecting hanged murderers (the only bodies made available for dissection), whose corpses, owing to the hanging, often, as Leonardo wrote it, "have this member rigid."

Her own insights are provided with a healthy dose of wit:

My conclusion, a conclusion you will encounter many times in the course of these pages, is that the sexual anatomy and responses of the human female are as uniform and predictable as the weather.

You'll learn many wonderful things in this book, such as the fact that defecating can briefly bring your heart rate down by eight beats per minute, and that men lose their erection when they hold their breath. You will learn how paraplegics have sex. You'll learn about Orgasm-induced defecation. And you'll finally get the answer to that question which has perplexed us all for years: Can dead people have orgasms?

I highly recommend this book. I could give many, many more examples of Ms. Roach's wit and observations, but the post would grow onto unmanageable proportions. I'll close this post with just one more:

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.

Perhaps the best advice in the entire book, no matter what your sexual orientation.

Note: When reading this book, don't skip over the footnotes. They are frequently some of the funniest parts of the book.