transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] If you're going to have sex in front of a researcher with an ultrasound wand, Dr. Dang would be a good, you know, he's just so kind of matter of fact.

Speaker 2:
[00:09] He did offer to play some music, right, as well?

Speaker 1:
[00:12] Oh, God, yeah, he did. Yeah, he goes. And I was kidding, and I said, where's the romantic lighting and music? And he goes, oh, wait, on my laptop, I have the soundtrack to Les Mis?

Speaker 3:
[00:27] Okay.

Speaker 4:
[00:28] Okay. Do do do science chats with our favorite nerds.

Speaker 2:
[00:41] Hi, I'm Wendy Zukerman, and today on the show, we are talking about the science of sex, and in particular, how scientists have desperately and awkwardly tried to study sex for decades. Yes, today we bonk, which is possibly the best word for sex, followed closely by shtup. But bonk is also the title to Mary Roach's best-selling book on this very topic. Even though bonk was written a hot minute ago, it is still this fabulous, highly relevant book, The Science is still mind-blowing. Today, we are talking to Mary about her book. We uncover the mysteries of orgasms, we'll tell you how to sexually stimulate a pig, also a human. Yes, we'll talk about how to have mind-rippling sex. If you are listening to this on Spotify, you could be watching it too. It's on video. After the break, my interview with the amazing Mary Roach. Coming up.

Speaker 5:
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Speaker 6:
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Speaker 2:
[03:04] Welcome back today on the show, my interview with the amazing science writer, Mary Roach, and we're talking about her book, Bonk, which is absolutely fabulous. So, let's just get into it. Mary Roach, I'm so excited. It's the, you know, they say never meet your heroes, but here we are. So, thank you so much for joining us on the show.

Speaker 1:
[03:26] My pleasure.

Speaker 2:
[03:27] I have heard you say that in high school, you thought science was a drag. What changed for you? When did you start to kind of fall in love with science?

Speaker 1:
[03:38] Well, I had that sense of, you know, science was, I equated it with science homework and, you know, the textbooks that I had to read. And I, it just, it seemed like a slog. And then I started, I started out doing just mainstream journalism, was given these assignments that were just, that were so interesting and they were so, I mean, there was a lot of traveling and I began to realize that science is basically you, your body, your computer, your dog, the world. I mean, how could it be boring? It's basically how the world works. Science is, it's all about following your curiosity and just sort of asking why and how and.

Speaker 2:
[04:20] So then what made you want to write a book about sex or really this is the science of sex?

Speaker 1:
[04:27] Yeah, that was, well, I was looking around for another book topic. This is my third book and around that time, I was looking through, it was an old back issue of some film, some really kind of nerdy film journal. I don't remember why or what waiting room I was in, but there was a reference to the colposcopic films of Masters and Johnson. And I was thinking colposcopy, that's something to do with this cervix. And I'm like, holy crap, did they actually film inside a woman's body? And in fact, they did, they made a penis camera and they put it in and the woman was like having sex with this phallus with a light source and a camera. And I was like, holy crap, that's my next book, Sex Research. Because like, how delightfully awkward is that to bring people into a laboratory setting and have them do sexual things and you're the researcher in your white coat. And I just thought that scene is very Mary Roach. Got to do a book about that.

Speaker 2:
[05:32] What made it, I mean, it's delightful and awkward and fabulous scene. What made it Mary Roach?

Speaker 1:
[05:38] It's just science that you don't really expect. And I think also, I'm drawn to the human body just because it is this kind of weird foreign planet. You know, when you get beyond, you know, we walk around mostly as minds, thinking of ourselves as this personality and this mind. But we're in this big bag of meat and bones and stuff and all this weird crap's going on. And that's kind of cool. You know, it's almost like travel. I used to love to do a lot of travel for my reporting. And I at some point realized that the human body is kind of a foreign planet that is fun to play around on.

Speaker 2:
[06:17] Yeah, for sure. And particularly all these very important areas, but that we just don't probe or talk about that much. All the more the dark side of the moon or whatnot. Yeah. Now, there's this wonderful quote that comes from your book. It's from the psychologist John B. Watson, writing in the early 20th century. And basically, he was a bit miffed at science's reluctance to study human sexuality, which I would say still exists today. And he says that we should have our questions answered not by our mothers and grandmothers, not by priests and clergymen in the interests of middle class Moors, nor by general practitioners, not even by Freudians. We want them answered by scientifically trained students of sex.

Speaker 3:
[07:07] And I love this.

Speaker 2:
[07:09] It's true. And it's even more true today. We don't have so many Freudians, but we have influences in our own version of this. Why did you sort of open with this? It comes early in your book. I could see you smiling as you're remembering. What does this passage mean to you?

Speaker 1:
[07:28] Oh, well, it was amazing to me. When you think about the act of sex, even independent from fertility, just sex, this is a biological, physiological thing. And yet, even up through the mid-1900s, nobody was, you wouldn't find it in a textbook, like a classic physiology textbook, there'd be no mention of like intercourse arousal, orgasm, like doesn't exist. Move along, move along, you know, and particularly for people who are having any kind of trouble sexually or, you know, with whether or not just not satisfied or not conceiving or whatever, you know, it behooves us to understand. And it's not just, it's good to know because of the sake of knowing, it was also actually really helpful for people to know what could be going wrong. I mean, you look back at Robert Latue Dickinson, who was the one who got Kinsey interested in sex research. Kinsey had been studying gall wasps. Dickinson was like, hey, I got something a little more interesting for you. What about sex? Yeah. Dickinson was this amazing guy who had, he was a gynecologist, but he was very open with his patients. And he talked about how, you know, he would have patients who were having trouble conceiving because they didn't realize, like, the penis has to actually go in there. Like, they didn't know how to do it.

Speaker 3:
[09:01] And in which hole?

Speaker 7:
[09:02] It can't go in the butt.

Speaker 6:
[09:04] It can't go in the butt, you know.

Speaker 1:
[09:05] Yeah. No, not that hole. This hole.

Speaker 4:
[09:07] This hole.

Speaker 1:
[09:07] Well, maybe that hole later.

Speaker 4:
[09:12] Exactly.

Speaker 1:
[09:13] People felt so uncomfortable bringing it up. Who do you ask? And who do you talk to? People didn't feel like they could talk to their partner or their doctor. And so, anytime you can break down a taboo like that, I think it's a good thing. And it was really hard for Kinsey and Masters and Johnson, the early researchers. It was so taboo.

Speaker 2:
[09:35] What did you kind of learn about what it was like to be a trained student of sex or a science researcher back then? Not only difficult and it's such a taboo even more than today, but they were also quite creative, as you mentioned, with the penis cameras.

Speaker 1:
[09:52] Yeah. And I really wanted to see that penis camera. I mean, it should be in the Smithsonian. And I tried to find it. Virginia Johnson's son was like, look, we don't want to talk to you. I'm like, well, where, just where is it? I finally heard that it had been dismantled, like it doesn't exist anymore.

Speaker 4:
[10:12] Are you kidding me?

Speaker 1:
[10:13] Yeah, you know, it was attached to a motor and it was like, and the woman could control the speed and like they were cranking it up and it was, and Kinsey didn't even have a lab. Kinsey was using his attic. People were coming up to the attic and just, you know, the creativity was kind of amazing. At one point, there was this, there was a belief that when a couple was having trouble conceiving, it's because the sperm, the semen wasn't coming out enough. It was like it wasn't shooting out. And there was this belief that it should be shooting out. And Kinsey was like, no, it doesn't, it just kind of glops. And I'm going to prove this. And he went out, he hired a bunch of male prostitutes, and set up a camera, and put down two, I remember it was oriental carpets, and had them jerk off and then filmed the stuff coming out, and did show that it mostly just glops, although there were some people with some very projectile ejaculations. But anyway, I'm like, he had a question and he figured out a way to answer it.

Speaker 3:
[11:20] Yeah, and that is super important because if you expect it to shoot out, so many people would think there was something wrong with them.

Speaker 1:
[11:30] And people who are having trouble conceiving would be like, oh my God, my stuff isn't coming out right. It's like, no, no, it is. You're good.

Speaker 2:
[11:38] It just needs to glop.

Speaker 3:
[11:39] Don't worry.

Speaker 1:
[11:40] It's a gloppy thing. It's not like a glorious fountain.

Speaker 2:
[11:47] And in your book, you mentioned you have a favorite line, because obviously you were reading Kinsey and Masters and Johnson. What is your favorite line of Kinsey's from sexual behavior in the human female?

Speaker 1:
[12:02] Okay, here's my favorite line. There's lots, but this is the favorite. Okay, cheese crumbs spread in front of a pair of copulating rats will distract the female, but not the male. I just love that. And you know that he did that. He put the crumbs out and he watched, you know. And the female's like, oh, what's that? Oh, something to eat. And the male's like, what are you talking about? Why are you even, oh my god.

Speaker 2:
[12:35] So one of the big questions you tackle in this book is female orgasm. It's sort of this mystery of why female's orgasm at all. Why, for those who've never really thought about it, why is this a mystery?

Speaker 1:
[12:49] Well, with men, orgasm is obviously tied to reproduction. You know, you have ejaculation which delivers the semen, and that is how conception happens. So it's obvious what function it serves. And with women, it wasn't so clear. But there was, for centuries, this belief that it was tied to conception and that the contractions, uterine contractions that happened during orgasm, they thought there was this belief that they were sucking up the semen, like delivering it more quickly. And therefore, boosting the odds of conception. You know, as far back as the 1700s, there was this belief that, and it was good for women because if a woman was having trouble conceiving, they sort of take the man aside and go, like there was a famous line, who knows if it's true, Empress Maria, the Habsburg Monarchy, Maria Theresa was having trouble conceiving, and the royal physician takes the husband aside and goes, it is, you know, the opinion of the physicians that the vulva of her majesty should be titillated for some time prior to intercourse. Like, yeah, so let's make sure she's enjoying this. You know, so that was, you know, hundreds of years, that was a belief.

Speaker 6:
[14:18] Wow, how wonderful.

Speaker 1:
[14:20] Yeah, how wonderful, exactly.

Speaker 2:
[14:23] But to answer this question and really get into the deep mysteries of female orgasm across the animal kingdom, you went to Denmark to meet some pigs. Can you tell me about this adventure?

Speaker 1:
[14:40] Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[14:40] Tell me, how did you feel when you got that invite as well?

Speaker 1:
[14:45] I'm always very excited when somebody agrees because I send these emails like, oh, hello, you don't know me. And you guys inseminate sows and I've heard that you sexually stimulate the sow before you deliver the semen and that that boosts the odds of conception. And can I come watch you do this? So, and they're like, sure, come on down. And I'm always very excited, you know, when somebody says, yeah, you can come watch us stimulate the sows in the barn. So, yeah, this was the national committee for, the Danish National Committee for Pork Production was, I believe, the name of the group. And, yeah, there's this, I think it's a 6% increase in the farrowing rates, which is the, you know, how many piglets does it produce?

Speaker 2:
[15:36] So they had found that, right, that if you sexually stimulate a female pig a sow, while artificially inseminating her, it leads to a 6% improvement in fertility. So how exactly do you sexually stimulate a female pig?

Speaker 1:
[15:57] Oh, Wendy, I'm glad you asked me that. I actually, they gave me a poster of the different steps. I mean, what you do is not, with the exception of one step, it is not like anything you do with a human partner. Okay?

Speaker 2:
[16:14] Okay, I feel like I should be taking notes.

Speaker 1:
[16:18] The male, the boar, that is, is using his snout, and he does stuff like he sticks his snout in the inguinal fold, which is where the thigh meets the torso and kind of lifts her up a little bit, which I guess is exciting for the sow.

Speaker 2:
[16:32] Yeah, so far it's sounding pretty similar to what we do, right?

Speaker 1:
[16:37] Just lifting up and dropping a little bit for a while, very exciting, and then kind of poking around the vulva, also with the snout, because he doesn't have hands.

Speaker 3:
[16:49] Right.

Speaker 1:
[16:49] Yeah, he doesn't have hands.

Speaker 3:
[16:50] I can see some similarities, right?

Speaker 1:
[16:53] The snout comes in handy.

Speaker 3:
[16:55] Uh-huh.

Speaker 1:
[16:55] So, that's what the worker, the inseminators are doing. They'll go and lift the sow up, like that, lift her up, and then drop her down a little bit, and then poke around the vulva of the sow, and they also, and here's the overlap, pigs and people, they lie on the sow's back, which mimics the weight of the boar on the sow's back, and then they reach around and kind of fondle the mammaries, the teats a little bit. And that's the part where I think the Danish pig farmers felt a little uncomfortable.

Speaker 2:
[17:37] Oh, that was it. That was what tipped them over the edge.

Speaker 1:
[17:40] That was what did it, yeah. There's a scene in the video where, and I felt it was intentional.

Speaker 2:
[17:47] This is an instructional video, right?

Speaker 1:
[17:49] Yes, it was exactly an instructional video. And they have this handsome blonde Danish young man. And at one point, they kind of zoom in on his hand as it's down near the teats. And you can see he's wearing a wedding ring. It's kind of like, I felt that they were kind of going, you know, we just want to reassure you, there's nothing weird going on with the pig. He's happily married. But I have the poster if you want to see it.

Speaker 2:
[18:20] Please, I want to see the poster, yes.

Speaker 1:
[18:22] It's totally disintegrating, because this has been a while, and they must have used, oh my God, it's just falling apart. It's like a little, I know, yeah. It's in Danish.

Speaker 2:
[18:33] It looks like a pirate's treasure map at this point. It does.

Speaker 1:
[18:38] It's totally crumbling. It's called optimal reproduction.

Speaker 3:
[18:44] Did the sow look like she was having a good time?

Speaker 1:
[18:48] No, the sow looked very bored, but they, she's like, where are the cheese crumb? No, not but, but they told me or someone told me, look, a pig, like a dog, expresses its emotion and its delight, et cetera, with its ears more. Emotion in animals is often with the ears, and I was looking at the eyes and the mouth. So, I wasn't tuned in to how the sow might have been showing her delight. Wow. Yeah. Pigs have a, I feel, the pig, the pigs have a very vibrant sex life. Not only is the ejaculation going on for minutes at a time, five minutes apparently, the female, the clitoris is right just inside the vagina, so it's getting stimulated. So, if the sow is enjoying things, then it does affect conception. And I was like, whoa, does that mean, whoa, how do we jive that with, does this mean that women, in women does this happen also? Because there's a number of studies. There was like hamster and gerbil and other rodent studies that maybe it did affect fertility. So along come Masters and Johnson. Masters and Johnson to the rescue. They're like, I don't think so. I don't think so at all and we're going to prove it. And so they did. Here again, the creativity of these researchers was amazing. And they're like, okay, here's what we do. We make some artificial semen. Okay. And I had the recipe in the book. I think it involved cornstarch. Anyway, it had to be the right viscosity and everything. They put it in a sort of a cervical cap and installed it or the woman put it in. And then they set it up in front of an x-ray machine. And she masturbated and they took x-rays because the radio opaque so it'll show up. So the semen will show up so they can see if it's being sucked up during orgasm. And that's what they did and they didn't see any up suck.

Speaker 2:
[20:59] So when the women orgasmed, the sperm didn't move more inside them?

Speaker 1:
[21:04] No, they didn't find that that happened. Also, someone else pointed out that the uterine contractions are expulsive. They're not sucking in. They're shooting out. Like they're pushing out. Like they do during a woman's period. They kind of help the material, the blood come out. So there was that argument. Someone else then came along and said, well no, it cycles during certain parts of the woman's cycle. It's sucking in and then certain parts of the cycle is going. So anyway, amazing that all this confusion and work that's been done in the name of proving or disproving up-suck. Personally, I just like to say up-suck because it's a great word.

Speaker 2:
[21:49] It's an excellent word.

Speaker 1:
[21:50] Up-suck.

Speaker 2:
[21:52] And then I have looked, I did look into the research pool since you published your book to see if there's been any new studies, new exciting studies exploring what's going on with female orgasm, why do those with vaginas orgasm? And I did, it's funny that the more things change, the more they stay the same because I did find this study from just a couple of years ago that looks like it could have come straight out of Masters and Johnson. They got six women, put a sperm stimulant into their vaginas, and then they were asked to masturbate, but with the flip of a coin, it decided whether they were going to orgasm or not orgasm. And then they put a moon cup into their vagina and walked around for an hour. And then the researchers looked at what fell out.

Speaker 1:
[22:45] How much dropped out and how much was sucked up?

Speaker 3:
[22:48] Exactly. Exactly.

Speaker 2:
[22:50] And in this study of only six people, they found that there was more retention of this sperm stimulant if they were to orgasm. It was large by about 15%, leading, of course, to the tabloids in the UK to scream, women up to 15% more likely to get pregnant if they orgasm.

Speaker 1:
[23:12] Oh, wow. Well, this is, yeah, it's okay. Good.

Speaker 2:
[23:15] Good.

Speaker 1:
[23:16] Let them believe that. Let them believe that.

Speaker 2:
[23:18] Yes, exactly. Which is not that the study did not test actual pregnancy. So yes. But yeah, as you said, so we keep going back and forth on this, why does this orgasm happen? And I'm excited to say the research will continue.

Speaker 1:
[23:34] It will continue.

Speaker 2:
[23:35] So in your book, you look at some fascinating sexual discoveries that have been made by scanning people either in an MRI or an ultrasound. And there is one case report that I cannot get out of my mind. In the book, you called it jaw dropping. Do you remember, do you know which case report I'm talking about?

Speaker 1:
[24:00] The seven-month-old in utero. Okay, this is a seven-month-old male.

Speaker 2:
[24:07] A fetus.

Speaker 4:
[24:09] Wow.

Speaker 1:
[24:10] Yeah. And this was a sonogram, ultrasound sonogram. And the researcher, this was just written up as a letter to the editor in a journal like, hey, I saw this and it's pretty weird. Pretty interesting. And they have two still images from the ultrasound. One is there's the fetus and his little hand is right on his little penis. Uh-huh. Oh, no, near it. It's near it. And then the second image, he's grasping it. So it's two stills. But then the art, if you read the letter, he says the researcher, Israel Meisner, says that he observed a little guy playing with himself for like 15 minutes.

Speaker 3:
[24:57] 15 minutes.

Speaker 1:
[24:58] Yeah. Yeah. But when you think about it, I mean, there's nothing to do in there. You're seven months old.

Speaker 3:
[25:06] It's true.

Speaker 1:
[25:08] If you discovered that, you'd be like, oh, this is going to make the time go faster.

Speaker 3:
[25:12] Exactly. It must have happened a lot.

Speaker 2:
[25:17] If we've got one case of it, there must be doctors who have seen this and they're just turning a blind eye. You would think so.

Speaker 3:
[25:25] Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1:
[25:25] You would think so, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[25:27] What did you think when you saw the images and read that case report?

Speaker 1:
[25:33] I just sprinted to the copy machine. This is going in the book.

Speaker 8:
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Speaker 5:
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Speaker 9:
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Speaker 5:
[28:48] This segment is brought to you by the all-new Audi Q3. Here's an impressive fact. The Q3 features a roomy, comfortable, refreshed interior with a 12.8-inch touchscreen. Now let's go to Dinner Party Genius. Meryl Horn, and in this segment, sponsored by Audi, will give you a fun and delightful science fact that's sure to impress your friends and get the conversation going at your next party. And to talk about this, I'm here with producer Ekedi Fausther-Keeys. Hey, Ekedi.

Speaker 10:
[29:22] Hey, Meryl.

Speaker 5:
[29:23] So do you struggle with small talk at parties?

Speaker 10:
[29:26] Yeah, sometimes. I really don't like when a lot of people are looking at me and expecting me to say something funny.

Speaker 5:
[29:30] Right. Yeah, it can be hard, but I have a fun science fact for you to help you out. And it's about nightmares. Do you struggle with nightmares?

Speaker 10:
[29:40] I do. There's this one that comes up quite a bit, where I'm being chased through a building by a tiger, and the tiger can bust through different walls and climb through really small spaces even though it's ginormous.

Speaker 5:
[29:53] That sounds terrifying. I'm sorry. But nightmares are super common, but we are not helpless. Science has a way to help us to stop having these scary dreams. So yeah, there's this technique. Here's how it works. So first, you take your scary dream, but you kind of reimagine it so that instead of the tiger just like, you know, catching you and mauling you or whatever, you kind of give it a happy ending. So maybe you're thinking of the dream, the tiger's chasing you, and then you have like a magic wand and you turn around and go like presto and change the tiger into a little kitten. And then the kitten's just like, meow, meow, meow, hi, Ekedi. And it's not scary anymore, because it's a cute kitten. And so, and then, so after you have your happy version of the dream, when you're awake, you just think about that version of the dream again and again and again and again, until it kind of gets cemented into your brain. And so the idea is to kind of retrain your brain while you're awake so that the next time you actually have the dream, that happy version will like kick in and you'll like end up with a cute kitten at the end.

Speaker 10:
[30:59] Oh my gosh, that's so awesome. I would love to have a cute kitten that's just like crawling over me as opposed to a tiger that's mauling me. That sounds like way better.

Speaker 6:
[31:06] Right? Yeah.

Speaker 5:
[31:07] I didn't know science did this. Yeah. And so several studies find that this works like really well. So yeah. And you know, not only will you have a cute dream, but you'll have a great conversation starter at your next party. So do you think you'll use this next time you're at a party?

Speaker 10:
[31:22] Oh yeah. Next time someone's telling me about their nightmares, I'm going to come in like Doctor Who and just be like, well presto, this is what you do.

Speaker 5:
[31:31] Perfect. Thanks Ekedi.

Speaker 10:
[31:33] Thanks Meryl.

Speaker 5:
[31:34] That segment was brought to you by the all new Audi Q3. Here's a few more fun facts. The all new Audi Q3 features more power and more space than ever before. Plus Quattro all wheel drive gets you there with confidence. It's built to impress, kind of like you at your next dinner party. Say yes to the all new Audi Q3, made for the yes life. Learn more at audiusa.com.

Speaker 2:
[32:00] Welcome back. The brilliant, best selling science writer, Mary Roach is here with us. We're going to keep bonking along. You and your husband signed up to be guinea pigs in an ultrasound experiment. Tell us about this.

Speaker 1:
[32:17] Well, you know, it wasn't my plan to be a subject in this study. This was, again, an ultrasound study. So you could take this sort of moving image, three-dimensional image of whatever the body part was. And the researcher in question had done this three-dimensional imaging of a penis, erect penis. And the idea being if somebody had, say, Peyronie's disease where the erect penis goes crooked, which can be kind of painful, like he could preview by having, you know, by taking a 3D ultrasound movie of the patients erecting penis, he could get a sense of what he was going to do in the surgery. That was the idea. And so I wrote to this doctor, Dr. Dang, D-E-N-G, and I was like, wow. And then in that paper he said, you know, and then my next act, I'm going to bring a couple in and I'd like to, you know, film genitals in sexual Congress. And I'm like, I need to be there for that. So I wrote to him, you know, and I'm like, would it be okay if I came to London and saw, was there for to observe why you did this project? And he's like, yeah, we could arrange that, but I've been unable to find a couple who want to do this. So if your organization can provide a willing couple, so my organization called its husband. And I'm like, yeah, you know, I said you haven't been to London in a long time.

Speaker 10:
[34:00] Let's go to London.

Speaker 1:
[34:02] We could go see a play, like, yeah, Jeremy Irons is in something, we can go see a play and we'll go out to eat and we have to have sex in front of some guy with an ultrasound. And my husband is such a good sport. You know, he's like, yeah, I mean, because early on he'd been like, oh, sex research signed me up for that. You know, I'm like, okay, here's your chance. And it was so awkward though. Oh my God.

Speaker 3:
[34:27] Tell me everything.

Speaker 1:
[34:29] It was just so, you know, because we're in the, it was after hours, we're in the radiology department, there's no one around and we were in, you know, first we're waiting for a while and we're sitting in the hallway and then, like, we see him coming down the hall and Ed goes, Ed's my husband. He's like, here he comes. Oh my God. He was like, we were both just, why did we say yes? This is so weird. And, you know, it was, if you're going to have sex in front of a researcher with an ultrasound wand, Dr. Dung would be a good, you know, he's just so kind of matter of fact and he's making conversation while this is going on. We had a lie, he had the wand up to my belly, so this had to be a from behind situation, right?

Speaker 2:
[35:16] He did offer to play some music, right, as well?

Speaker 1:
[35:19] Oh, God, yeah, he goes, and I was kidding and I said, or no, Ed said, where's the romantic lighting and music? Because we're in this lab with fluorescent lights, and he thought Ed was being serious, and he goes, oh, wait, on my laptop, I have the soundtrack to Les Mis? Okay. Also, he gave Ed some stimulative literature to quote Masters and Johnson's term for porn, but it was an issue of men's health or some like with Esquire where there's like one kind of, not naked, but scantily clad woman. He's like, okay, okay, great. We're wearing those horrible hospital Johnnies. Oh, with the gowns. But with the back. So he's like, yeah, with the back open. It's kind of chilly, so he's like, you can leave your socks on. So you got the scene. You have the scene. Afterward, Ed's like, I can't believe it. Well, also, Viagra was involved.

Speaker 2:
[36:29] Okay.

Speaker 3:
[36:29] I was going to say, how could you possibly?

Speaker 2:
[36:32] So Viagra was used. Exactly. You go through all this effort, you fly to London, and then- Right. Was it enjoyable at all?

Speaker 1:
[36:42] No. No, no, no, no, no. No. But yes, in the sense that I'm taking notes, and I'm writing down what's happening, and I'm like, this is going to be so fun to write up. So I'm like the female with the cheese crumbs, because I've got a notepad, and I'm writing, and I'm like, I don't know what's going on back there, but whatever. But I did feel bad that I dragged Ed into this. I felt bad.

Speaker 2:
[37:11] The instructions from the doctor that you describe in the book are quite funny. Now, he said, now please make some sort of movement in and out.

Speaker 1:
[37:25] Yeah. And then at one point he goes, I think it was something like he's asking about, and the littlest one, how old is she now? And then he's like, you can ejaculate now.

Speaker 3:
[37:39] Oh, my God. Wow. But Ed was able to ejaculate in that situation?

Speaker 1:
[37:44] Yeah. I think so.

Speaker 2:
[37:47] Wow.

Speaker 1:
[37:48] It's a people pleaser. He's a people pleaser. It's like, yeah, the worst sex ever for me.

Speaker 2:
[37:56] Did you learn any, did you get to see the images at the end, and did you learn anything?

Speaker 1:
[38:00] He did send me an image, and at some point I sent it to Slate, and they had it online. So it was on the Internet. It's like two seconds long. It's the most G-rated, X-rated footage you will ever. It's just like boop, boop, it's in and out.

Speaker 2:
[38:13] In and out.

Speaker 1:
[38:15] Yeah. It's not very sexy.

Speaker 2:
[38:17] Yes. The last experiment I'm going to ask you about that you signed up for is, you did use a vaginal photoplethismagraph.

Speaker 1:
[38:27] Plethismagraph.

Speaker 2:
[38:28] Plethismagraph.

Speaker 1:
[38:31] Probe.

Speaker 10:
[38:31] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[38:32] Which you describe in the book as Cinderella's tampon.

Speaker 1:
[38:36] If you have good see-through, it's glass. It's glass. It's like a little glass tampon. Yeah. This is a device for measuring arousal. It goes in the vagina and the photoplethismagraph is measuring blood flow in the vagina. If you're aroused, there's more blood flow to the vagina. So it's sending out like a light signal and depending on how aroused you are, how thick and aroused and engorged the walls of the vagina are, it sends a signal back. But this little see-through thing that's about the size of a tampon and you put it in, and then this was a study about female arousal. And so I was a subject in that study.

Speaker 2:
[39:31] The interesting thing about when you study penises and them getting aroused, it's fairly obvious. When they get erect, they get aroused.

Speaker 6:
[39:40] Not always, not always.

Speaker 2:
[39:41] You can obviously feel arousal without erection. But if you have a vagina, it's more complicated, right? Because sometimes you can feel arousal, but you don't get wet. So it's not so clearly one for one.

Speaker 1:
[39:54] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so there's the work of, this is Cindy Meston at the University, UT Austin, University of Texas, Austin. She was studying arousal in women. It's interesting because if you show them stimulative literature, sorry, porn, stimulative media, pornography, women tend to respond across the board, whether it's gay, lesbian, straight, I mean, hetero, animals, whatever, women tend to have a response. Men are much more, men are like, that's what I like to see and that's what arouses me. So women will respond, but the difference compared to men is they don't necessarily realize it because they're not getting a boner. It's like there's some something going on in there and you can measure it with a photoplethysmograph. You measure it, but then afterward, you interview the person, as they did me, and they said, so that, were you aroused? How aroused did you think that you were from this part of the film and then that part of the film? And if you say, you know, it didn't do anything for me. It was like some really creepy porn. The guy was disgusting, he had a horrible mustache. The sex was boring. I wasn't aroused at all. They'll look at the ratings or the data that they're getting and go, actually, you were. You were responding.

Speaker 2:
[41:20] Very interesting. Does that mean that we're not being honest with ourselves about what truly arouses us, or more that we genuinely weren't aroused, but some physiological reaction happened?

Speaker 1:
[41:32] There's physiological arousal, but it's not necessarily tied to a psychological arousal. In terms of you having a satisfying sex life, it's not like somebody is going to say, well, we put a little see-through device in your vagina. In fact, you were responding. You were having a good time, and you'd be like, no, I wasn't.

Speaker 2:
[41:52] Yes.

Speaker 3:
[41:52] No.

Speaker 2:
[41:54] Moving on to then, I guess we've been talking about sex the whole time. I don't know how I'm going to just segue into more sex. In your book, you look at the many things that can trigger orgasms. Sex, obviously, or good sex, dreams. Tell us the story of a woman from Taiwan.

Speaker 1:
[42:15] Yeah. Well, orgasm is a reflex, and it can be triggered in ways that you wouldn't imagine. It doesn't sort of jive with how you imagine orgasm, but they're all manner of, people are wired very differently. So, anyway, this woman would have an orgasm when she brushed her teeth. And I would think that that'd be a delightful thing. You'd be like, you'd have really great gum health. You'd be like, I don't need to go to the dentist because I'm brushing like three times a day.

Speaker 3:
[42:50] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[42:52] But it bothered her, and she was avoiding. I mean, there was a woman in the book who had spontaneous orgasm, and she was a practicing Muslim. And it was, you know, sometimes it would happen during devotional periods, and it was very upsetting, very disturbing. And there was someone else like rubbing her eyebrow. What was interesting, after I did a TED Talk that was based on things in the book, and after that talk was put online, I got a lot of interesting email from people saying, well, they thought I was a researcher. So people would write to me this, you know, I got a woman who said, on a good day, putting lip gloss on will do it. And another guy wrote to me and said, you know, every time I ride a bicycle, I have an orgasm. And when I go somewhere, I'm anticipating it's going to happen. And if it hasn't happened, I'll kind of ride around for a while, and it makes me late. It was this whole story. Wow. So just, you know, people are wired in different ways.

Speaker 3:
[44:00] Right. Then it can somehow get that response going.

Speaker 1:
[44:03] It just triggers that response, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[44:06] In Bonk, you visited Dildo Manufacturing Store, which had the model of an anus, which is based on a porn star. And in your book, you have in Caps Lock, the guy's showing you around this factory. And he goes, you know, here you have an anus in Caps Lock. When it comes to the anus, I mean, it is so taboo. I've heard you talk about how people don't even describe when they have anal cancer and there's no ribbons for, you know, brown ribbons for anal cancer or what not. Or there's no day for anal cancer. Like, it's like anything to do with the butt.

Speaker 1:
[44:41] Right.

Speaker 3:
[44:43] Why do you think this is?

Speaker 2:
[44:44] And again.

Speaker 1:
[44:45] Why? Because it's where crap comes out, where s*** comes out. It's just it's very personal and it's smelly and germy. And so it is, there's all kinds of reasons why it would be taboo. But the fact that it is taboo, there's risks associated with that. Like you mentioned, you know, there was no, there's no ribbon for anal cancer. And Farrah Fawcett died of anal cancer. And in the news, it just was reported as colon cancer. It was like down there cancer. Like nobody really even talked about it. And I remember reading about the early days of anatomy, partly because this was before air conditioning. And you know, it was often hot, or room temperature, or warm in the dissecting room. And the colon was, you know, stinky and full of bacteria. So they would take the whole thing out and throw it away. So nobody was really even, nobody was looking at it. Nobody's studying it. You know, and you know, even today, I imagine, the guy who does my colonoscopies, he said that his son, for a long time, believed that surgeons were assigned a specialty. Because he's like, why else would you become the guy who's looking up everybody's asshole? He's like, you mean you chose this? But you know, with any taboo, whether it's the asshole or it's just something relating to sex, if somebody feels that they can't speak about it openly with their partner or with their doctor, then they're unhappy. They're putting their health possibly at risk. And so it's, I think it's just healthy to talk about it. I mean, when the book came out, I remember my publicist saying, Mary, how are you going to promote this book? Are you going to just stand in front of like a hundred strangers and say things like clitoris and orgasm? I'm like, yeah, that's what I'm going to do. And I think the audience really appreciated that because it would come to the question and answer time and people would actually ask pretty personal questions and I got the sense that people appreciated having the freedom to just ask things. And that's why I felt like these researchers were so heroic in a way, that they dared to break down that taboo, especially the 40s when Kinsey was working, the 50s and 60s, Masters and Johnson, and Robert Latue Dickinson before all of that. And so it's, I don't know, I had a lot of respect for people who do this work.

Speaker 2:
[47:35] Yeah. It's interesting having reported on a bunch of different sex topics, how I had thought we were so much more advanced than we are, but they still say it's so hard to get funding, it's so hard to be taken seriously.

Speaker 1:
[47:53] Oh, yeah, yeah, there was, Roy Levin talked about how he was at a, I think it was a conference of urologists, maybe, and he was, he did a paper about, I think it was vaginal secretions. He's like, nobody knows, nobody has ever looked at vaginal secretions, what's in them, how are they secreted, what, I mean, nobody had looked at that. So he's like, I'm going to look at that. Yeah. And he described being in the men's room and inside the stall and hearing people like joking about him in the bathroom, you know, just, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[48:31] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[48:31] And these are, yeah, these are MDs.

Speaker 2:
[48:33] Now, your last chapter of Bong opens with this line. When I began this book, I harbored a naive fantasy that I would find a team of scientists working to discover the secret to amazing mind-rippling sex. So, Meryl, what's the closest you got?

Speaker 1:
[48:52] You know, I wasn't finding very many papers just about like, what works best for amazing sex? But then I found these papers from 1979, and it was Masters and Johnson, and they have brought in, they called them reacting units, couples. They were couples. They were couples. The reacting units, he brought in hetero reacting units, gay and lesbian reacting units, and he had them. He actually had people hooking up. So he found that the couples that were actually in relationships, particularly gay and lesbian relationships, were having the best sex. And part of that, he was saying, was gender empathy, which is to say, if you're a man, you know what feels best. And if you're a woman, you know what feels best. And so the gay and lesbian couples, it was very easy for them to, based on their own experience of their own bodies, to know kind of what to do and what feels good. Whereas in the hetero couples, the men would complain that the woman wasn't holding the penis hard enough. And the women would be like, hey, you're too rough, stop it. So it would be like this kind of mismatch. But also, he talked about just how the couples who were very attuned to the reactions and the arousal of their partner. And they were aroused by that arousal. So it was this really, there was this connection there.

Speaker 2:
[50:28] Yeah. You wrote that they did watch the couples having sex with stopwatches and data charts, as you wrote.

Speaker 1:
[50:39] But then they eventually- Got to have the stopwatch. Otherwise, you're just a pervert. You're not a scientist.

Speaker 3:
[50:45] Exactly.

Speaker 1:
[50:46] You need a clipboard and you need a stopwatch. And then you can come in and watch.

Speaker 2:
[50:51] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[50:51] You're right.

Speaker 2:
[50:52] The best sex, which was being had by committed gay and lesbian couples, they took their time they lost themselves in each other, moved slowly, lingered.

Speaker 1:
[51:02] Yep.

Speaker 2:
[51:02] So that's if you're in a relationship with someone with different genitals to yours, there's ways to overcome this empathy gap with communication, I suppose. To cap us off, we have a lightning round of oddball questions, which I suppose is sort of funny in the context of some of the questions I've been asking you about. But here we go. Are you ready?

Speaker 1:
[51:26] I'm ready.

Speaker 2:
[51:27] Yeah, we might even have a jingle by the time this episode comes out. What was your favorite title to a paper that you read while researching this book?

Speaker 1:
[51:39] Oh, definitely. Sexual intercourse as a potential cure for intractable hiccups.

Speaker 4:
[51:47] Oh.

Speaker 1:
[51:49] Yeah. Somebody had some guy was reporting like if you have sex, the hiccups go away. And then he's like, I don't know if it's intercourse or orgasm that's doing it. But, you know, unattached hiccups, I love the demographic, unattached hiccups could try masturbation. This is a journal paper. Again, ran to the copy machine. I got a copy of that. Yes.

Speaker 2:
[52:14] Attached hiccups are also allowed to masturbate.

Speaker 1:
[52:18] Yeah, right.

Speaker 2:
[52:18] Stop the hiccupping. Amazing. Amazing. All right. Finish the sentence. Now that I know blank, I'll never look at my blank the same way again.

Speaker 1:
[52:29] Oh, yeah. Now that I know how a bolus is formed inside the mouth when you're chewing before you swallow. Bolus formation, like you eat food, like you take it apart and then your tongue forms this bolus, this sort of like pickle-shaped thing that you swallow. I don't know, the study of chewing and mouth stuff to me was like so gross that I began to think people should have sex in public but then eat in a room on their own. It's disgusting. They're chewing, they're bolus forming, they're... So yeah, it kind of ruined eating out for me for a while.

Speaker 2:
[53:17] Funnest object sitting in your house.

Speaker 1:
[53:20] You know what? I brought an object.

Speaker 4:
[53:23] Really?

Speaker 1:
[53:24] It's called the Feminine Personal Trainer. It's resistance training combined with kegeling. You insert it in the vagina and you're lifting this weight. You want to see it?

Speaker 4:
[53:36] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[53:36] Oh my God.

Speaker 4:
[53:36] Of course I want to see it.

Speaker 3:
[53:37] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[53:41] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[53:47] Depending on which side goes in, if you have that heavy side down, that's hard to lift. So that's the advanced kegeling, right?

Speaker 3:
[53:56] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[53:57] I only used it once.

Speaker 4:
[53:58] How was it?

Speaker 1:
[54:02] It looked like I was giving birth to a doorknob. This thing. You're supposed to walk around the house. You're supposed to walk around with it in.

Speaker 3:
[54:14] Walk around with that? Wow.

Speaker 1:
[54:16] But that's dangerous because if that sucker drops out on your toe, you're going to have a broken toe.

Speaker 3:
[54:21] Is it heavy?

Speaker 1:
[54:22] I use it as a paperweight.

Speaker 2:
[54:24] Not during our interview.

Speaker 1:
[54:28] I just pulled this out. Right now, it's a little damp. I wrote about it actually years ago for a column I used to write, and the guy, the company, it's like this Christian company, and I'm like, really? He goes, why is that surprising to you? He said, good sex is a gift from God.

Speaker 4:
[54:48] I'm like, okay.

Speaker 10:
[54:49] That's wonderful.

Speaker 3:
[54:52] Thank you so much, Mary. This was so, so much fun.

Speaker 1:
[54:56] Oh, my God, Wendy, thank you so much. I thoroughly enjoyed myself. It was so fun. It's such a great podcast.

Speaker 2:
[55:02] Thank you.

Speaker 1:
[55:03] Thanks. And if you want to try the Feminine Personal Trainer, I'll send it to you. It's just collecting dust.

Speaker 2:
[55:15] Mary Roach's new book, Replaceable You, is about Adventures in Human Anatomy and Replacing Body Parts. And it's out now. I'm Wendy Zukerman and I'll back to you next time.