2010 Dewey Decimal Project: 612.6 R

[rsadelle]

This month I read Mary Roach's Bonk. You may remember that I read Spook last year and said I would read something else by her.

Bonk is hilarious. I laughed so hard I cried. Unlike Spook, some of the best parts of the book are where she talks about her own experiences:

I sent Dr. Deng an email asking permission to come to London to observe the first scan. He wrote back immediately.

Dear Ms. Roach, Many thanks for your interest in our research. You are welcome to interview me in London. . . . However, to arrange a new in-action would be very difficult, mainly due to the difficulty in recruiting volunteers. If you organization is able to recruit brave couple(s) for an intimate (but non-invasive) study, I would be happy to arrange and perform one.

My organization gave some thought to this. What couple would do this? More direly, who wanted to pay the three or four thousand dollars it would cost to fly them both to London and put them up in a nice hotel? My organization balked. It called its husband.

"You know how you were saying you haven't been to Europe in twenty-five years?"

Ed was wary. It was not all that long ago that his agreeable nature, combined with a touching and foolhardy inclination to help his wife with her reporting, landed him in a Mars and Venus relationship seminar that involved talking to strangers about his "love needs."

I pushed onward. "What if I offered you an all-expense-paid trip to London?"

Ed sensibly replied that he would want to know what the catch was.

The part of the book that made me laugh until I cried also involved Ed, in this case mishearing the instructions on a video Mary was watching for research and coming to investigate. And this is after her prologue where she says, "My solution was to apply the stepdaughter test. I imagined Lily and Phoebe reading these passages, and I tried to write in a way that wouldn't mortify them."

If you're thinking of reading the book, I do have two caveats. First, it's not particularly sciency. It's much more about people doing science than it is is about the science itself (although there's a fair amount of that in there too).

Secondly, most of the book is very heternormative, which, to be fair, is probably true about most sex research throughout the ages. It's pretty vanilla heterosexuality too; she talks, at one point, about inventions designed to prevent erections (from a time when even wet dreams were seen as a negative thing) and doesn't quite get to the point where such things are now used in orgasm denial play. Her last chapter does look at the conclusions of Masters and Johnson's Homosexuality in Perspective: "The best sex going on in Masters and Johnson's lab was the sex being had by the committed gay and lesbian couples. Not because they were practicing special secret homosexual sex techniques, but because they 'took their time.' . . . The other hugely important difference Masters and Johnson found between the heterosexual and homosexual couples was that the gay couples talked far more easily, often, and openly about what they did and didn't enjoy." It's interesting data, but the chapter feels a little tacked on, and she goes right back to the realm of heteronormativity: "It seems to me that heterosexuals have come a long way since 1979."

Still, the book is entertaining, and I would, all in all, recommend it.