Bonk (11 page)

In his most recent paper, Deng filmed a 4-D “erecting penis.” With genital imaging, the hope is that the technology might afford better diagnostics and more detailed insights into surgical options for patients with vascular or structural abnormalities, such as Peyronie’s disease, in which scar tissue in the erectile chamber on one side of the penis causes painful, crooked erections.

Deng is the first to gather moving images of internal sexual anatomy, but not the first to use ultrasound to study sex. In 2007, a team of French researchers scrutinized images of a woman’s clitoris as she contracted a certain pelvic floor muscle (the levator ani). They noticed that this contraction—which other researchers have shown to be triggered reflexively during penetration—pulls the clitoris closer to the front wall of the vagina. “This could explain the particular sensitivity of the G spot and its role in orgasm,” the team wrote. And without ultrasound, no one would ever have known.

In the penis paper, Deng mentioned the possibility of one day soon capturing an ultrasound sequence of real-time two-party human coitus. Though the first few scans would be dry runs to see if the technique works and whether it reveals anything new about coital biomechanics, Deng envisions the scan as a potentially useful diagnostic tool—for instance, in teasing apart the possible causes of dyspareunia (painful intercourse).

I sent Dr. Deng an email asking permission to come to London to observe the first scan. He wrote back immediately.

Dear Ms. Roach, Many thanks for your interest in our research. You are welcome to interview me in London…. However, to arrange a new in-action would be very difficult, mainly due to the difficulty in recruiting volunteers. If your organization is able to recruit brave couple(s) for an intimate (but noninvasive) study, I would be happy to arrange and perform one.

My organization gave some thought to this. What couple would do this? More direly, who wanted to pay the three or four thousand dollars it would cost to fly them both to London and put them up in a nice hotel? My organization balked. It called its husband.

“You know how you were saying you haven’t been to Europe in twenty-five years?”

Ed was wary. It was not all that long ago that his agreeable nature, combined with a touching and foolhardy inclination to help his wife with her reporting, landed him in a Mars and Venus relationship seminar that involved talking to strangers about his “love needs.”

I pushed onward. “What if I offered you an all-expense-paid trip to London?”

Ed sensibly replied that he would want to know what the catch was.

I read aloud to him from an information sheet that Dr. Deng had emailed.
“Dynamic 3D ultrasound imaging is a noninvasive and harmless technique which has been used for clinical imaging of activities of unborn babies. We are investigating whether this technique can be used to reveal more information on how various body parts work during various activities….”

Ed wanted to know
which
various body parts. I skipped ahead on the information sheet. For instance, I skipped the paragraph that says, “
For a dry penile scan, a volunteer is asked to lie on the bed facing down, and place his penis through a hole in the bed into an artificial vagina. The ‘vagina’ is made of (harmless) starch jelly.
”

“Um, let’s see,” I said. “
‘Volunteers will be asked to place their body parts of interest…
’ So it’s basically just the body parts of interest. We could take a day trip to Stonehenge, see a couple plays. Jeremy Irons is in something, he has a big beard now.”

Ed doesn’t care about Stonehenge or Jeremy Irons. But he agreed anyway.

i
t is a simple and noble goal:
To reveal more information on how various body parts work during various activities.
In the case of the activity known as sexual intercourse, it is an undertaking that began five centuries ago. In 1493, the artist, inventor, and anatomist Leonardo da Vinci drew a series of sketches of the commingled nether regions of a man and a woman. Known as “the coition figures,” these cross-sectional cutaways were meant to reveal the arrangement of the reproductive organs during sex.
*

Leonardo
*
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.”

But the coition figures were not drawn from cadavers. In the frankly titled journal paper “On the Sexual Intercourse Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci,” South African anatomist A. G. Morris points out that Leonardo’s dissecting years commenced some twenty years
after
the sex figures were drawn. Leonardo was working from a series of ancient, and anatomically fanciful, Greek and Arabic medical texts. If he’d been working from a careful dissection of cadaver loins, presumably Leonardo would not have left out the ovaries and the prostate. Nor would he have drawn a tube connecting the woman’s womb and breast, reflecting the medieval belief that breast milk was formed from (gack!) diverted menstrual blood. Not surprisingly, the mechanics of the act are also misportrayed. The penises in some of Leonardo’s sketches have pushed clear through the cervix, which has opened up, Pac-Man–like, to accommodate them.

The next artist-cum-scientist to apply his motley talents to sex was the gynecologist Robert Latou Dickinson. From the 1890s to the 1930s, Dickinson gathered data for his eclectic and groundbreaking
Atlas of Human Sex Anatomy.
He did make use of cadavers—preserved parts, not whole bodies—but he regarded them askance, for, as he put it, “there is marked contrast…between the quick and the dead…. The post-mortem uterus droops, the scrotum sags, the anus gapes widely.” Whenever he could, Dickinson took his data from the living. He made tracings of wombs from X-rays and crafted, over the years, 102 plaster casts of patients’ hymens, vulvas, and vaginas in all their various forms and states.
*

It would seem, from looking through Dickinson’s books, that there was no line of inquiry or request that the man shied away from. Including, “Would it be okay if I slid this test tube up your vagina?” The test tube was sunk repeatedly at differing angles, yielding the surprisingly varied profiles of women’s vaginal cavities. Figure 57 in his
Atlas
shows us three life-size outlines, one inside the other, in the manner of those humane society logos with the bird silhouette inside the cat silhouette inside the dog. In place of pets, we have “long post-menopause” inside “virgin” inside “vigorous and varied coitus.” The last one is as big as a grown-up’s mitten.

The test tube also served as Dickinson’s solution to the challenge of drawing the genitals during the actual act of sex. He assumed that the glass tube would follow the trajectory of the penises that had come before it. Thus, he could tell the angle of the penis relative to the woman’s various reproductive organs and, by shining a light into the test tube and peering down the length of it, he could see where the tip made contact during sex. Figure 91 shows a cutaway of a vagina with the tube inside and the words “Test-Tube of 1¾ Inch Demonstrates Penis Action” written along its side like a slogan on a hardware store yardstick.

Dickinson was eager to rebut claims being made that a man’s penis, during sex, drives straight on into the cervix and that the two interlock, as Leonardo had drawn. Among Dickinson’s papers is a manuscript of a 1931 article by Marie Carmichael Stopes, entitled “Coital Interlocking.” Stopes, best known for founding Britain’s first family planning clinic, was a bit out of her element here.
*
She had no M.D. She had trained as a paleobotanist, not as an anatomist. Nonetheless, Stopes claimed to have observed forty-eight examples of the cervix opening wide and then “closing round the glans penis as a result of the stress of sexual excitation.” The first case, she writes, was a “direct observation in myself.” Stopes’s claims were, to use her terminology, “poo-poohed” by gynecologists—including Dickinson, who penciled exclamation marks up and down the margins of his copy of her paper. Still, you have to marvel at a woman who, in the 1920s, in the name of science, was masturbating with a speculum in place and a mirror between her legs.

Dickinson, wielding his test-tube spyglass, found that interlocking—or at least its precursor, head-on penis-cervix contact—was a far rarer occurrence than Stopes had suggested. It seemed to be limited to women whose cervix and uterus were abnormally positioned and to those in the “knee-chest” posture.
*

Dickinson’s discovery landed loudly in the fledgling field of fertility. Many physicians at that time were preaching that the failure of a couple to achieve a good interlock resulted in infertility. Now they’d need to look elsewhere for the culprit. Developers of early birth control techniques paid heed as well. Stopes had claimed that because the penis docked inside the cervix and thus delivered its payload directly into the uterus, a dose of spermicide in the vaginal cavity was of no use. This was wrong. (It was of
limited
use, but useful nonetheless.)

If the cervix truly did open wide and then clamp down on the tip of the penis, this could spell trouble for condom users. Indeed, Stopes cites a letter to the editors of the
British Medical Journal,
in which a Dr. Maurice B. Jay was called upon to see a woman with a unique and troubling situation down under. She explained that during sex earlier that day, something inside her had grabbed and torn away a piece of her husband’s condom and then gripped it so firmly that she couldn’t pull it free. Upon examining the woman, Dr. Jay determined that the rottweiler inside was her own cervix. Jay writes in his letter that he found two inches of the sheath “firmly fixed in the cervical canal,” adding that “some force was required to pull it out.”

A letter published the following week questioned Dr. Jay’s conclusions and nominated muscle spasms in the vagina as the mystery condom ripper. Either Dr. Jay was in need of a gynecological refresher course, or the woman did indeed have a grasping cervix. 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.

i
t would be eighty years before someone took the coital-imaging baton from Dickinson and ran with it. In 1991, Dutch physiologist Pek van Andel was looking at a cross-sectional MRI of a professional singer’s mouth and throat as she put up with what must surely have been the worst acoustics of her career and sang “aaaah” inside an MRI tube. The image, van Andel said, brought Leonardo’s sex figures to mind, and he found himself wondering whether it would be possible to “take such an image of human coitus.”

Van Andel teamed up with gynecologist Willibrord Weijmar Schultz, radiologist Eduard Mooyaart, and business anthropologist
*
Ida Sabelis. Dr. Sabelis’s anthropological role in the project is not explained in the paper; however, as you will see from her account of the project, no one can accuse her of being a lame duck in the proceedings:

In the autumn of 1991, Pek phoned my partner Jupp. Whenever he does that, he mostly has something special on his mind. The point was to visualize with a modern scan how it really shows when a man and a woman are making love…. Pek suggested it should be just something for us, [because] we are slim, and because of our background as acrobats….

After some shifting of dates, 24 of October was fixed as the day. I was worried, now it was really going to happen…. What should colleagues say? And neighbors, friends, family?…How shall it be in such a sterile white tube?…What shall we do when one of us shall get not any sexual arousal in that thing?…

Willibrord was waiting for us in the hall…. Eduard has tuned the machinery. The window between [the MRI tube] and control-panel is covered with large blue pieces. But how can someone starts such a thing? Again, as in the first conversation with Willibrord, with a talk about the weather. Pek…is telling us about an article he’s going to write…. Another cup of coffee and then I say, “Jupp, shall we do something…”

We undress ourselves, lying down on the sledge-bed and are slided in by Eduard. We are lying on our side and facing each other…. Confined by the space we make the best of it…. The first shots are taken: “Now lay down very still and holding your breath during the shot!”…We are giggling a lot, because…an erection…simply sinks down like an arrow when you have to hold your breathe during many seconds….

It’s becoming pleasantly warm in the tube and we truly succeed in enjoying each other from time to time in a familiar way. When the microphone is telling us that we may come—insofar possible—we burst out into a roar of laughter and some moments later we do what is the purpose…. Sniggering we lay down a while before we announce that we just now like to go out. Like buns which are pushed from the oven we are coming outside.

Enthusiasm everywhere, it works and, we get dressed quickly to look at the shots in the control room. Of course some are blurred because of movement. But some other are of an amazing beauty: that we are! Not so much a passport photo for daily use, but surely a shot that shows so much that it makes me speechless. There, it’s my womb and surely, on that place is Jupp, naturally in a way as I know from my own sensation: below the cervix. Two days later I’m feeling a kind of pride: we tried and succeeded!