Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex

Mary Roach
W.W. Norton

Popular science writer Mary Roach has already served as a delightful tour guide to the world of cadavers and research into the afterlife. But those were just warm-ups for her exploration of the world of sex research. Roach is an intrepid investigator with a sincere admiration for the human quest for knowledge; nevertheless she can't quite take it all entirely seriously. With Bonk Roach has never been more in her element. I imagine her chortling each time she drops a bizarre fact about Victorian gynecology or mentions a scientific paper with an improbable title like "Does Semen Have Antidepressant Properties?" Don't worry; scholarly dryness is no more the order of the day than prurience. Roach is an engaging and often witty writer, tossing off quips like "You need a floor plan to keep track of the vaginas in Human Sexual Response. There are vaginal floors, vestibules, platforms ... are these people having sex or just visiting Crate and Barrel?" As enthusiastic as she is funny, Roach plunges pell-mell into whatever interests her in the last hundred years or so of sex research. Her quest for knowledge takes her to Denmark to watch pig insemination, to San Francisco for a demonstration of automatic sex machines (that's part of her attempt to understand the lost penis-camera of Masters and Johnson), to Taiwan to observe penile surgery, and even into an MRI tube with her husband to personally further the cause. The only possible quibble with this incredibly entertaining book is that it's too eclectic and, even at nearly 300 pages, far too short.