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Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex | 
| Author: Mary Roach
Creator: Sandra Burr
Publisher: Brilliance Audio on MP3-CD Lib Ed
Category: Book
List Price: $39.25
Buy New: $25.51
You Save: $13.74 (35%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  13 reviews
Sales Rank: 314444
Format: Audiobook, Mp3 Audio, Unabridged
Media: Audio CD
Edition: Library
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.1
Dimensions (in): 7.5 x 5.1 x 0.6
ISBN: 1423316711
Dewey Decimal Number: 612.6
EAN: 9781423316718
ASIN: 1423316711
Publication Date: April 7, 2008
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
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Product Description
The study of sexual physiology ? what happens, and why, and how to make it happen better ? has been a paying career or a diverting sideline for scientists as far-ranging as Leonardo da Vinci and James Watson. The research has taken place behind the closed doors of laboratories, brothels, MRI centers, pig farms, sex-toy R&D labs, and Alfred Kinsey?s attic.
Mary Roach, ?The funniest science writer in the country? (Burkhard Bilger of The New Yorker), devoted the past two years to stepping behind those doors. Can a person think herself to orgasm? Can a dead man get an erection? Is vaginal orgasm a myth? Why doesn?t Viagra help women ? or, for that matter, pandas? In Bonk, Roach shows us how and why sexual arousal and orgasm - two of the most complex, delightful, and amazing scientific phenomena on earth - can be so hard to achieve and what science is doing to slowly make the bedroom a more satisfying place.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 8 more reviews...
 Sex, Science, Mary Roach: how can you go wrong? May 1, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Mary Roach's first big book was a kind of multidisciplanary exploration of the history of human cadavers, and it friggin' rocked. Her latest, Bonk: the Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, follows a similar pattern: vast piles of scholarly research, some fun and disturbing field trips, and a lot of unlikely facts wrapped up in a book as clear and fun to read as a best-selling novel.
The only accusation that I could launch at Bonk with the hope of it sticking would be that its organization is loose, almost like a stream of consciousness conversation or a series of loosely realted articles. Each chapter is quite good in and of itself, and they all relate back to the main topic, but they're mostly hung together with loose segues that amount to "that made me wonder about [insert topic of next chapter here]".
That being said, Bonk is a great read: ranging from stuff you probably already know a few things about (like orgasms), to stuff you'd never have guessed (surgically adding an extra ball was very popular once). Roach, as is her great talent, manages to take a dizzying array of information and present it in a manner that's not merely accessible, but genuinely funny. When I read the footnote about Priapus - the roman god for whom four hour-plus erections are named - I laughed so hard I drooled a little.
That's about the only drooling I did when I was reading Bonk; for a book about sex, it's surprisingly unerotic. Then again, it's a book about science, and if anything could excise the eros out of sex, it's probably the rigors, repetitions, and incredibly dry language of science. Roach herself sometimes reads as frustrated by the arid descriptions and piles of lifeless data she had to sift through to find drops of interesting imagery. These she presents upon a golden platter of prose, as relieved to have found something entertaining to write about as the readers are to skip the boring research.
If you like science, and you like sex, you'll probably like this book. Or, to follow that logic to its conclusion, if you don't like this book, you're probably a moron and a liar.
 Roach is awesome and funny as usual.... May 1, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
As usual, Mary Roach delivers a funny and entertaining book you would be talking about during a conversation about sex. Every chapter is full of interesting anecdotes on how scientists and psychologists do sex research. If you loved "Stiff: the curious lives of human cadavers" you will like "Bonk; the curious coupling of science and sex".
Mary Roach is the best! April 25, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
I have eagerly awaited this book's release. I have Mary's other books: Stiff and Spook. She makes science fun!
 Best Selling Author of Stiff April 20, 2008
11 out of 29 found this review helpful
When Bonk arrived and I saw that it was by the "best-selling author of STIFF", I got kind of worried. The byline "The Curious Coupling of Science of Science and Sex" had suggested that this was a treatment of, well, science and sex. But one written by the best-selling author of STIFF? I considered the implications and thought about sending back the book.
But I didn't.
As it turns out, Stiff is not about what you might think it is. In fact, it deals with "The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers". Relieved by this finding and thinking therefore that the book I had just purchased was not simply smut, I waded into Bonk.
It begins, "Albert R. Shadle was the world's foremost expert on the sexuality of small woodland creatures".
OK...
From here Roach moves deftly and with much humor through the work of well known investigators such as Kinsey and Masters and Johnson, as well as a host of less well known and sometimes seemingly prurient practitioners such as Robert Latou Dickinson, Giles Brindley, and Dorcus Butt.
Dorcus Butt? Is it possible that there is actually a sex researcher by this name? Apparently so - a fact uncovered by the author's relentless research.
Eventually though, the book bonks (this is also a terminology to describe what happens to an endurance athlete expending too much energy and hitting the wall). Ultimately the exploration of material more and more bizarre and over the top just becomes too much.
For instance, the author travels to Taiwan to observe a penile implant operation.
When complete, and clearly in the interest of science, Roach asks Dr. Hsu (the surgeon) "May I squeeze it?" He answers, "Mary, you have traveled a long way. You can do whatever you want".
I guess this should have been expected given that it's written by the "best selling author of STIFF".
The View from the Sexual Research Frontier April 16, 2008
6 out of 10 found this review helpful
"I think by now you know how science is", says a researcher to Mary Roach. "You think you know a lot until you start to ask some really basic questions, and you realize you know nothing." That's perhaps a koan-like exaggeration, but it is certainly true that good research answers questions only to turn up more questions. This might be even more true in the arena of sexual research, the topic of Roach's enormously entertaining and informative _Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex_ (Norton). Roach has before written books about scientific evaluation of the physical and spiritual afterlife of the dead, and if she could make such macabre topics engaging and funny, you can count on a lively treatment of how science investigates sex. Part of the reason this book is so interesting is, of course, that everyone is interested in sex, and there is a great tangle of complicated hormones, engorgements, and reflexes that operate to give us sexual joy and we cannot even feel many of them operating. Another reason is that we got a late start in the scientific evaluation of the subject. Kinsey and Masters & Johnson were pioneers in a sphere where few others had gone before, because of a taint of naughtiness. Another reason the book is so interesting is that you can read all the books on chemistry, physics, or cosmology you want, and you will never find experiments as funny as those of the Egyptian researcher who monitored the coital rates of rats who wore polyester pants. And that's just one example of the experiments here.
Roach loves her subject, which she says is "as good as science gets" because it involves researchers who display "a mildly outrageous, terrifically courageous, seemingly efficacious display of creative problem-solving, fueled by a bullheaded dedication to amassing facts and dispelling myths in a long-neglected area of human physiology." She certainly gets into the spirit of the effort by recruiting her good-sport husband to be the first couple scanned in coition by 3D sonography."For the still images, we must hold still for several seconds, like Victorians posing for a tintype, only not like Victorians posing for a tintype." Roach reports on most of the other research without participating in it, like a paper from five years ago called "The Human Penis as a Semen Displacement Device". Not only did our male evolutionary forebears want to deposit their own semen into vaginas, they wanted to scoop out any semen from predecessors, and it turns out the shape of the glans at the end of the penis is just right to do this. This experiment involved no humans except for the experimenters. They used artificial semen (the recipe is given in the book), an artificial vagina from California Exotic Novelties, and three different artificial phalluses, one of them a control without a glans. The lifelike phalluses expelled 91% of the standing semen, while the cylindrical control expelled only 35%.
Roach has an appealing jocular prose, and her subjects in one chapter after another are, well, the sorts of scientists that would study such things, so they make for entertaining interviews. This does not keep her book from being packed with information, some of it at the cocktail-chatter level and some decidedly deeper. Here is the vaginal photoplethysmograph probe, and to balance that, the nocturnal penile tumescence monitor. Here is how Danish pig farmers stimulate sows so that artificial insemination has a better chance of success. Here is a report of the "inside-out" maneuver performed during surgery on the penis. Here are reflections about how doing sexual research was almost forbidden in the fifties, and then it became acceptable and fundable, but now in an era of "just say no" it has become difficult again. Here are explanations of how victims of paraplegia, who ought not to have sensation below the waist, can get orgasms. Here is evaluation of the famous upsuck theory of female orgasm, and an admission that studies comparing conception rates of women who have sex with orgasm and those who have sex without have simply not been done. Here are descriptions of sexual quackery from the past, including during the witch craze when witches were busy collecting men's penises by magic and putting them in the nests of birds who helpfully kept them alive with a diet of oats and corn. Here is the shorthand code used by the San Francisco Fire Department for sex toy emergencies. And here are some results from a forgotten study that issued from the lab of Masters & Johnson. The most fulfilling sex seems to have been that between committed gay and lesbian couples. Roach says, "Not because they were practicing special secret homosexual sex techniques, but because they `_took their time_.'" They moved slowly and lingered over each other's pleasure. They teased. They talked. Well, perhaps Roach examined research with more revolutionary lessons, but nonetheless, it might be practical to put this one into action.
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