Bonk (4 page)

With sex research, unlike, say, engineering or genome research, almost everything a scientist does can appear—to the uninformed or close-minded outsider—to be motivated by a perverse fascination with the subject. When, in fact, there’s a clear logic to these things. That Kinsey filmed gay male prostitutes and their pals for his ejaculation/fertility study could be viewed as a reflection of his own sexual fixations or it could be viewed as simply the most expeditious approach. If you needed three hundred men willing to perform sexually in exchange for quick cash, in 1948, whom would you turn to? In his chapter about the attic sessions, Pomeroy explains that Kinsey’s team simply “found it easier to obtain the consent of homosexual couples.” (By “homosexuals,” he means men. “We were unable to obtain any lesbians,” Pomeroy says, as though perhaps they hadn’t been in season, or his paperwork wasn’t in order.)

Kinsey is admittedly a bit of an extreme case, and it is easy to understand the suspicion that he was perhaps at the very least, as Jones put it, mixing business with pleasure. Even Kinsey’s colleague Clyde Martin, now eighty-eight, was uncomfortable with the attic project. Martin refused to be filmed having sex with his wife—or anyone else. “I was not in favor of that,” he told me. “I was not part of that. I was married at the time, and I had a wife I loved very much.”
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On the other side of the mattress is Wardell Pomeroy, who was adamant about the scientific purity of the project. “The layman can scarcely imagine viewing a sexual scene without having feelings either of stimulation or of disgust, depending on the state of his inhibitions,” he wrote in
Dr. Kinsey and the Institute for Sex Research
. “We experienced neither emotion…. Speaking for myself I cannot recall a single instance of sexual arousal on my part when I was observing sex behavior, and I am certain this was equally true of Kinsey….”

To be fair to Kinsey, it should be pointed out that gay men weren’t the only special-interest group he recruited. Stutterers, amputees, paraplegics, even those with cerebral palsy were observed. Kinsey wanted to document the full spectrum of human sexuality, but it was more than that. He believed these people might have things to teach us about the physiology of sex. And he was right. These groups alerted Kinsey—and the scientific community as a whole—to the complicated and crucial role of the central nervous system in sex and reproduction. Kinsey had noted that a stutterer in the throes of sexual abandon may temporarily lose his stutter. Similarly, the phantom limb pain some amputees feel temporarily disappears. Even the muscle spasticity of cerebral palsy may be briefly quieted. The body’s limiting factors seem to get shut off.
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The organism is driven toward nature’s singular goal—conception, the passing on of one’s genes—and anything that stands in the way is pushed into the background. Sensory distractions become imperceptible: noises go unheeded and peripheral vision all but disappears—a fact some prostitutes use to their advantage, working with “creepers” who emerge from the shadows when the action heats up and go through the john’s pockets as easily as if he were unconscious.

The most dramatic example of this biological priority shift is a sexually mediated disregard for pain and physical discomfort. Whatever ails you pretty much stops ailing you during really hot sex. Fevers and muscle aches, Kinsey claimed, briefly abate. Temperature extremes go unnoticed, which must have been a relief for the couples in Kinsey’s attic, as it was, depending on the season, either very hot or very cold up there. Handily, the gag reflex is eliminated, even “among individuals who are quite prone to gag when objects are placed deep in their mouths.” (Objects! Har.)

To explore the limits of this phenomenon, Kinsey observed and filmed sadomasochistic sex. Which makes sense, but at the same time leaves the reader just a tad bit queasy. Kinsey’s “experimental data” indicated that arousal can render a person “increasingly insensitive to tactile stimulation and even to sharp blows and severe injury.” If there are cuts, he says, they bleed less. In his discussion of temperature extremes, cigarette burns make a cameo appearance. He is occasionally coy about the source of these injuries, but more often he is baldly straightforward: “The recipient in flagellation or other types of sadomasochistic behavior may receive extreme punishment without being aware that he is being subjected to more than mild tactile stimulation”—surely a source of comfort to anyone who read the toothbrush footnote on chapter 1.

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t was 1954 when William Masters embarked on his own investigation of sexual physiology. Kinsey was under fire from conservatives. The Rockefeller Foundation, partly because of its funding of Kinsey’s work, was the subject of a congressional investigation. (As a result, the foundation pulled Kinsey’s funding. He died less than two years later.)

Given the political climate, it was exceedingly brave of Masters—then a gynecologist at Washington University in St. Louis—to undertake such a project. This was to be a large (nearly 700 participants), nonclandestine observational study of human sexual arousal and orgasm. To try to get funding and permission for such a venture in 1954 must have been, well, like trying to do it in 2007. Understandably, Masters went to great lengths to appear as scientific, objective, and morally upstanding as he could. His hiring of a female associate, Virginia Johnson, helped ward off accusations of impropriety (though she was mainly brought on board, Masters said, as a sort of “interpreter” to help him understand a woman’s subjective experience of sex). Where Kinsey had actively sought out people on the fringes of American sexuality, Masters made a point of screening out “all individuals with sociosexual aberrancy.” (The team observed gays and lesbians in the lab but did not include them in the sample for this project. More on them later.) The 276 couples who came to his lab were heterosexual, and they were married. Most of them worked or taught at the university. The work was done under the auspices of the Reproductive Biology Research Foundation—no mention of sex—and it was done in a laboratory setting, amid scientific instruments and professionals in white lab coats.

Yet, at the core of it, you had couples fornicating on film. You had women and men masturbating in front of other men and women. You had a man scrutinizing—whether in person or by watching footage—the genitalia of women having orgasms. Moreover, you had prostitutes serving as your beta test. Masters and Johnson interviewed 145 sex workers and from them chose the cream of the crop—eight women and three men with “obvious intelligence, diverse experience in prostitution, ability to vocalize effectively, and…a high degree of cooperation”—to come down to the lab and help the team hone their investigative techniques. (Kinsey had avoided using female prostitutes for his observational studies, because, he said, they readily and convincingly faked orgasms.
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Masters didn’t have to worry about his prostitutes faking it. His subjects were rigged up to a machine that measured heart rate and blood pressure—essentially a lie detector. Heart rate and blood pressure, it turns out, are more reliable indicators of orgasm than they are of deceit.)

Masters and Johnson launched their book-length write-up of the project,
Human Sexual Response,
in 1966. (Medical journals had rejected the team’s papers, deeming them pornographic.) “The hate mail was unbelievable,” Masters recalled during a talk at the 1983 meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex. “For the next year and a half, we had extra secretaries…just answering mail….”

Eventually, the rancor cooled, and the book went on to become an enduring bestseller and a classic in the field. It is hard to say which contributed most to its acceptance: the cloak of formal science that Masters so assiduously pinned to his work, or the simple fact that times had changed. Nineteen sixty-six was worlds away from 1954.

Unfortunately, the cloak of science was pinned so tight that the book kind of suffocates. A couple under observation is a “reacting unit.” An orgasm is rarely just an orgasm; it’s “orgasmic phase expression” or an “orgasmic release of sexual tension.” A woman who has one during half her sexual encounters is experiencing “a 50 percent orgasmic return.” Porn is “stimulative literature,” and not getting it up is a “failure of erective performance.”

If you can machete through the lingo and the obfuscated writing, you will find an extraordinary body of work. Kinsey—and everyone else who came before—missed a variety of extraordinary things going on between a woman’s legs. Take, for instance, the outer labia. Overlooked and ignored, they were thought of simply as packaging. Kinsey was dismissive of the labia majora’s role in the sexual chain of events, saying there was no evidence that they “contribute in any important way.” Masters and Johnson noticed that, in fact, they do contribute. While other parts swell and even protrude during arousal—because of the extra blood in the tissues—the outer labia thin and flatten. They also, he observed, pull away from the “vaginal outlet.”
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Masters speculated, in characteristic multisyllabic manner, that this might be “an involuntary neurophysiologic attempt to remove any exterior impediment to the anticipated mounting process.” They’re making way for the big guy.

No one had expected this, possibly because their inner cousins expand so much. The labia minora enlarge by two or three times their normal diameter. They also, as both Masters and Dickinson observed, change color, turning pink, bright red, or, occasionally, in women who’ve given birth, a deep wine color. In all of the 7,500 female sexual response cycles that Masters and Johnson watched, no woman who had an orgasm failed to display this “florid coloration” just beforehand. If a man wants to know whether a woman is faking her orgasms he could, barring some logistical hurdles, look for this “sex-skin reaction.” Which, by the way, is not to be confused with the “sex flush” (red blotches that may appear on a woman’s chest when she’s aroused). And the “sex flush,” in turn, has nothing to do with the “urge to void during or immediately after intercourse.”

Here’s something else no one but Masters had noticed. The clitoris hides at a certain point in the proceedings. In the stage of arousal just before orgasm, the visible portion of the clitoris retracts under its tiny foreskin. It disappears from view, potentially creating great confusion and consternation on the part of the person doing the stimulating. Masters points out that the clitoris, at this point, is likely to be too sensitive for direct contact anyway. The shroud of academia pulls away like a foreskin, revealing the readable writer within: “In direct manipulation of the clitoris there is a narrow margin between stimulation and irritation.”

Masters and Johnson provide a similar service for men. In the penis chapter,
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they describe what they called “postejaculatory glans sensitivity.” For many men, once they’ve ejaculated, continued thrusting on behalf of their partner is chivalrous but exceptionally uncomfortable. The solution to the oversensitive glans scenario, be it penile or clitoral: “Vocalization.” Speak up. Throughout
Human Sexual Response
, the researchers encourage open and straightforward communication between partners. It comes as no surprise that they moved on to sex therapy (giving, not getting) following the eleven-year physiology project. Their therapy techniques and writings—as well as the hundreds of therapists they inspired—are the answer to every person who questions the point of Masters and Johnson’s lab work. It is hard to overestimate the value of a simple anatomical explanation for a frustrated couple’s complaint. Imagine a woman who’s been harboring resentment toward her husband for pulling out as soon he’s done (and she isn’t). Were she to learn that her man is not so much
in
sensitive as
over-
sensitive, her resentment would diffuse or, at least, hang its hat on something other than his penis.

Here’s another example. Masters and Johnson discovered all manner of physical changes going on in women’s vaginas when they’re aroused. “Advanced excitement” prompts a portion of the vagina to expand. One theorized purpose is to create an “anatomic basin” to hold the semen near the opening to the uterus and thereby up the odds of conception. But the expansion can have an unwanted side effect: “The overdistended excitement-phase vagina gives many women the sensation that the fully erect penis is ‘lost in the vagina.’” Sometimes to the extent that the woman mistakenly thinks it’s gone limp.

Some of you may be wondering—and some of you really, really may not be—how Masters made his pioneering vaginal discoveries. Two answers. Sometimes subjects were asked to masturbate with an open speculum in place—as Dickinson had had women do years before—while the researcher peered intently up their midline. But Masters didn’t want to limit his findings to the arousal and orgasms of masturbation. He wanted to know what was going on with the cervix and the vagina during a typical round of bonk. Obviously, there are logistical problems here. You can’t see the hangar when the airship’s in the building. William Masters needed a penis that could see.

And so he had one built.

Dating the Penis-Camera

Can a Woman Find Happiness with a Machine?

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et me state it simply. Women came into Masters and Johnson’s laboratory and had sex with a thrusting mechanical penis-camera that filmed—
from the inside
—their physical responses to it. The team shot footage of—as they put it, making arousal and orgasm sound like washing machine functions—“hundreds of complete cycles of sexual response.” The dildo-camera
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unmasked, among many other things, the source of vaginal lubrication: not glandular secretions but plasma (the clear broth in which blood cells float) seeping through capillary walls in the vagina. It tackled the sucking cervix debate and uncovered the bizarre phenomenon of vaginal tenting (both of which we’ll get to later).