Participatory journalist
Mary Roach has made a tidy career for herself from breezy pop-science books
with one-syllable titles: Stiff (what happens to
cadavers?) and Spook (how do you investigate the afterlife?).
But with her latest work, Bonk: The Curious Coupling
Of Science And Sex,
Roach might just have found the book she was born to write. Her fearless (or is
that shameless?) style perfectly suits this exploration of sex in the
laboratory, both historical and contemporary. From Kinsey to Viagra to coitus
in an MRI machine, Bonk reveals with incessant
good humor how little we know about our basic reproductive drive, and how
difficult it is to design experiments to find out what we might want to know.
For example, one area of
scientific ignorance is the chemistry of female ejaculate. Various researchers
have reported that it's identical to urine, or that it has compounds related to
semen, or that it doesn't exist at all. When one considers the difficulty of
collecting and isolating the fluid, it ceases to be surprising that we remain
in the dark. And the same goes for the nature of the female orgasm (clitoral?
vaginal? multiple?) and the relative importance of the brain, as opposed to
simple reflexes, in arousal and climax. When possible, Roach observes
researchers doing ghastly penis surgery or quantifying bonobo mating behavior
or manufacturing artificial vaginas. But when privacy is an issue, the author
gamely inserts probes while watching pornography, and even enlists her husband
to have very scientific intercourse with her while being recorded
ultrasonically.
Bonk obviously isn't for the
prudish, but it also isn't for the squeamish. (Those who feel light-headed at
the thought of objects being inserted into the male urethra are advised to read
in a reclining position.) Its one minor fault is a tendency to downplay
chronology in favor of a good yarn; Roach prefers to hook her history onto
firsthand contemporary narrative, so Masters and Johnson, along with other
sex-research classics, tend to pop up whenever they're needed. But her
humorous, frank style—frequently digressing to hilarious effect in the
footnotes—seems to have matured completely in her third outing. Perhaps that's
because sex and science are both poignant efforts to attach meaning to
fundamental human desires. (There's a reason there's a Biblical connotation of the
verb "to know.") Laughter is a perfectly appropriate response to both.