Despite her status as a best-selling author of books about cadavers and the afterlife, a signing event with science writer Mary Roach is great fun. Over a hundred people abandoned this evening’s cool spring air to listen to Roach speak about her newest work, “Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex,” at the Brookline Booksmith, an independent bookstore near the Coolidge Corner T stop. Luckily, sex research is anything but sober, and the audience laughed out loud as Roach candidly discussed some of the more surprising findings.
One of her favorites was the list of items emergency room employees regularly remove from patients’ rectums. From light bulbs to spectacles and a magazine, the list goes on and on. Another surprise, learned from her interviews with scientists. is the number of recipes for synthetic semen used for experiments. Each recipe, said Roach, yields one ejaculate, to which she joked about doing a “Bonk” cookbook. Another notable interview, Roach mentioned, was with a woman who could think herself to orgasm within a minute. Roach asked the woman if she did this constantly. ”I’m usually too tired by the time I get home,” the woman responded.
“Doing a book on sex, there’s a lot of room for embarrassment,” Roach said. This couldn’t have been more true when she and her husband “performed coitus“ as Dr. Jing Deng, a senior lecturer in medical physics at University College London Medical School, took a 4-D ultrasound. She compared the experience to getting a colonoscopy because of its medicalization. Plus, said Roach, ”I was taking notes the entire time.”
Roach also shed light on the rate at which sex researchers historically experimented on themselves and their staff. ”Everyone in the Kinsey Institute was performing on film,” said Roach, referring to Alfred Kinsey, the biologist famous for his research into human sexuality throughout the mid-1900s. The current practice today, says Roach, is to entice undergraduate students with course credit.
For more on these stories and answers to questions like – Can a woman find happiness with a machine? – and - Is the clitoris a tiny penis? – be sure to pick up a copy of “Bonk” today.