Bonk (30 page)

Goldfoot, D. A., et al. “Lack of Effect of Vaginal Lavages and Aliphatic Acids on Ejaculatory Responses in Rhesus Monkeys: Behavioral and Chemical Analyses.”
Hormones and Behavior
7: 1–27 (1976).

Kirk-Smith, M. D., and D. A. Booth. “Effect of Androstenone on Choice of Location in Others’ Presence.” In
Proceedings of the Seventh International Symposium on Olfaction and Taste.
London and Washington: IRL Press, 1980.

Levin, Roy J. “Smells and Tastes: Their Putative Influence on Sexual Activity in Humans.”
Sexual and Relationship Therapy
19 (4): 451–462 (2004).

Martin, David E., and Kenneth G. Gould. “The Male Ape Genital Tract and Its Secretions.” In
Reproductive Biology of the Great Apes
. Edited by Charles E. Graham. New York: Academic Press, 1981.

Michael, R. P., and E. B. Keverne. “Pheromones in the Communication of Sexual Status in Primates.”
Nature
218: 746–749 (1968).

Morris, Naomi M., and J. Richard Udry. “Pheromonal Influences on Human Sexual Behavior: An Experimental Search.”
Journal of Biosocial Science
10: 147–157 (1978).

Simon, J., et al. “Testosterone Patch Increases Sexual Activity and Desire in Surgically Menopausal Women with Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder.”
Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism
90 (9): 5226–5233 (2005).

Tutin, Caroline E. G., and Patrick R. McGinnis. “Chimpanzee Reproduction in the Wild.” In
Reproductive Biology of the Great Apes
. Edited by Charles E. Graham. New York: Academic Press, 1981.

Wallen, Kim. “Desire and Ability: Hormones and the Regulation of Female Sexual Behavior.”
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews
14: 233–241 (1990).

———. “Risky Business: Social Context and Hormonal Modulation of Primate Sexual Desire.” In
Reproduction in Context
, edited by Kim Wallen and J. E. Schneider. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000.

———. “Sex and Context: Hormones and Primate Sexual Motivation.”
Hormones and Behavior
40: 339–357 (2001).

Wysocki, Charles J., and George Preti. “Facts, Fallacies, Fears, and Frustrations with Human Pheromones.”
Anatomical Record Part A: Discoveries in Molecular, Cellular, and Evolutionary Biology
28 (1): 1201–1211 (2004).

fifteen | “Persons Studied in Pairs”

Masters, William H., and Virginia Johnson.
Homosexuality in Perspective
. Boston: Little, Brown, 1979.

^*
Incredibly, Victorian physicians practiced gynecology and urology on women
without looking
. Even a catheter insertion would typically be done blind, with the doctor’s hands under the sheets and his gaze heading off in some polite middle distance. Fortunately, budding M.D.’s were allowed to look upon—and rehearse upon—cadaver genitals, and that is how they learned to practice the Braille edition of their craft.

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They don’t mean to tidy up afterward. See chapter 10.

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FYI, it’s the newest use for Botox. Because what paralyzes your brow-knitting muscles will just as effectively paralyze your clamping vagina muscles.

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Six hundred forty-two members and counting.

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For example, the pedophile who dabbled in incest (seventeen relatives, including Grandma) and bestiality. Kinsey’s inclusion in
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
of this man’s observations of preadolescent orgasms—and his tacit acceptance of the man’s behavior—got him into a pot of hot water that he never really got out of.

^*
Watson married Rayner and spent the remainder of his career in advertising. Cohen describes a market research assignment early on in Watson’s career at the J. Walter Thompson agency. The mighty John B. Watson was going door-to-door in towns along the Mississippi River, interviewing people about their feelings about rubber boots. Which is not, I suppose, all that far off from a career in psychology.

^*
It may comfort you to know that the autopsy data on fatal heart attacks during sex suggest that they are rare. In 1999, a team of German researchers reviewed 21,000 autopsy reports and found only 39 cases. It may or may not comfort you to know that “in most cases sudden death occurred during the sexual act with a prostitute.”
Sex researcher Leonard Derogatis cautions that autopsy statistics are misleading. When men die during sex with their mate (as opposed to in a motel room with a stranger), there usually is no reason to do an autopsy. If conjugal sex is taking place, say, three times as often as illicit sex, posits Derogatis in “The Coital Coronary: A Reassessment of the Concept,” then those 39 deaths would reflect a truer figure of 156. Derogatis estimates 11,250 sex-related sudden deaths in the United States each year, putting it on a par with hepatitis C, brain cancer, and food poisoning.

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A trick question! Fillmore had no vice president and he never ran for office. He came into power when Zachary Taylor died, and failed, despite repeated efforts, to win a second term. Random quotes suggest his oratory skills might have been the problem. Fillmore’s last words (upon tasting a soup): “The nourishment is palatable.”

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More famously, Kinsey employed a toothbrush (bristle end first) for this purpose. This, among other things, caused Jones to describe Kinsey as a masochist, driven by the demons of his repressive upbringing. A past director of the Kinsey Institute told Kinsey’s other biographer, Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, that he viewed the urethral insertions simply as an idiosyncratic form of self-stimulation and that everything else was conjecture. Gathorne-Hardy was invited to the Kinsey Institute fiftieth-anniversary bash, and Jones was not.
A toothbrush, by the way, is alarming but not all that unusual.
Urological Oddities
, a 1948 compendium of memorable cases, includes an “elderly fellow” with a corsage pin that got away from him, a man who died from infection after inserting a twig from the family Christmas tree, and a farmer who “lost a rat’s tail.” There is always an explanation. The man toting three sets of three-inch surgical steel forceps, for example, insisted that Nos. 2 and 3 had gone in in an effort to remove Nos. 1 and 2, a story that collapsed upon examination, when all three turned out to be in there handle-first. As embarrassing as these hospital visits must have been, they pale in comparison to the Houston man who was taken away, on his back in an ambulance, with a large water tank from a public commode stuck on his penis. “The patient had attempted intercourse with the water-tank hole,” reports B. H. Bayer, M.D., in one of those rare, shining moments when urology approaches high comedy.

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Martin’s brief and somewhat reluctant affair with Kinsey was made public in both the recent Kinsey biographies. If you bring up homosexuality, he will quickly change the subject but appears to bear no grudge against his former boss. “I must say, working with a man like Kinsey is a tremendous stimulation,” he told me, not choosing his nouns as carefully as he might.
Martin made use of his unique talents, going on to do interviews of his own at Johns Hopkins University. But while Kinsey used his data to promote tolerance and expand notions of sexual “normalcy,” Martin pulled a 180, looking for links between promiscuity and disease. His work helped uncover the link between sexually transmitted disease and cervical cancer.

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The able-bodied, as well, Kinsey observed, enjoy expanded physical prowess under the influence of sexual arousal: “The doubling of the body which is necessary in self-fellation…may become possible for some males as they approach orgasm.” Or, according to a 2001
Hustler
article, as they master the yoga pose “the plow” (on one’s back, legs flipped up and over the head). Further tips can be gleaned by renting
Blown Alone
or other videos starring superlimber porn star Al Eingang. Wikipedia says that the god Horus was said to engage in autofellatio “every night because ingesting his own semen kept the stars in their places.” Only gods get away with excuses like that.

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How did he know this? It’s not what you think. He and a colleague would on occasion hide—with the women’s permission—in brothel bedrooms, jotting down observations. At least I think they hid. It’s possible they drilled a hole in the wall or rigged up something more high-tech, but I enjoy picturing the two of them peering from behind a set of lurid velour draperies. Because that’s the kind of sicko I am.

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You need a floor plan to keep track of the vaginas in
Human Sexual Response
. There are vaginal floors, vestibules, platforms, barrels, and outlets. Are people having sex, or are they just visiting Crate and Barrel?

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“The Penis.”

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You can’t buy a penis-camera like M & J used, but you can buy a Personal Pelvic Viewer. The PPV is described in the patent as an insertable video camera that enables a “lone female in a room” to watch real-time images of her cervix or her sexual responses on a TV or computer screen. The phrase “lone female in a room” or “lone female at home” is repeated nineteen times, lending a melancholy cast to the typical technicalities of a patent paper. The PPV, at the time I inquired, was being sold by an organization called School of One—no doubt the alma mater of the lone female.

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Unfortunately for Londoño, this meant that while Alzate has an M.D. after his name, she must appear in print as a DipPsy.

†Which, in 1976, was $2.50. I learned this from another of Alzate’s papers, “Brothel Prostitution in Colombia,” this one researched via interviews and “by means of participant observation” (!).

^*
Alzate insisted these encounters were “ethically acceptable as long as the examiner keeps from being erotically involved with the subject.” Only in the mutant universe of sexology could a man with his fingers in a woman who is exhibiting “hyperventilation,…rhythmic pelvic movements, vocalizations, and perspiration” not be considered erotically involved.

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Pyrex’s first visit to the human body cavity, but not its last. Because of its strength and refusal to shatter or splinter when broken, Pyrex is popular among safety-conscious dildo and butt-plug manufacturers. Ovenware is the mere tip of the Pyrex iceberg. Beakers and test tubes are often made of Pyrex, as are bongs, water pipes, and the Mount Palomar telescope mirror. Pyrex was originally invented as a lantern glass for trains; regular glass overheated and then cracked when snow hit it. It wasn’t until Bessie Littleton, the wife of a Corning Glass scientist, baked a cake in a sawed-off Pyrex battery jar that the baking dish application got rolling. The Pyrex Web site includes a 1965 photograph of Bessie and husband Jesse “re-creating the kitchen discovery scene” for a Pyrex fiftieth-anniversary celebration. The company has no plans to re-create the Pyrex anal-plug discovery scene for future anniversary events.

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In addition to book events and art exhibits, CSC sponsors sexuality workshops and “practical skills-building events” (e.g., “Sex Club Etiquette,” “Safer Sex,” “G Spot Stimulation,” “Positions and Toys for Plus-Sized Partners”) and holds an annual fund-raiser called the Masturbate-a-Thon.

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Company motto: “Number 1 in the Number 2 Business.” And Number 45 on the list of companies that come up on Google claiming the same motto. The list includes port-a-potty rentals, septic tank emptiers, Dr. Merry’s PottyPal Potty Seats, and, above all, pooper-scooper services. There are so many of these that they have their own professional group (the Association of Professional Animal Waste Specialists) with its own Statement of Philosophy. Members are obliged to “operate in such a manner as to reflect honor upon the animal waste industry” and “to place service to…the animal waste industry above personal gain,” and you’d need a pretty big scoop for
that
load.

^*
In 1998, a woman in Saline, Michigan, received a patent for a Decorative Penile Wrap intended to “heighten sexual arousal of a male and female prior to intercourse.” The patent includes three pages of drawings, including a penis wearing a ghost outfit, another in the robes of the Grim Reaper, and one dressed up to look like a snowman. I tried to call the examiner listed on the patent, Michael A. Brown, but he has left the U.S. Patent and Trade Office. And who can blame him.

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Marie was unaware of her prince’s proclivities when they married. Her suspicions were roused by the drawings of Greek athletes that George hung on his dressing room walls and, later, by his decision to serve as the gymnastics examiner at the Panhellenic Games. Marie had just given birth to their first son and complained in her diary that while she was home all day “suckling Peter,” George was off, well, suckling peter.

^*
The width of a single inner labium, for instance, ranged from just under a third of an inch to two full inches. Gynecologist and early sex researcher Robert Latou Dickinson mentions a patient whose paired labia minora, in “fullest stretch,” covered a nine-inch span.

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In parts of Africa, Haiti, and Indonesia, the wet, welcoming vagina is a turnoff. Men describe it as tasteless or diseased, and women insert all manner of drying agents to deliver the “dry sex” preferred by their men. “All manner” meaning: shredded newspaper, cotton, rock salt, detergent, bark, dried animal excreta. I was aghast until I read Levin’s paragraph about superabsorbent tampons, which, one study claimed, can cause the outer layer of vaginal cells to dry out so severely that it peels away.