Syzdekistan

Over the holiday weekend, I read an excellent book by Mary Roach called Bonk — The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex. This very entertaining and often hilarious book explores the physiology of sex and the people daring enough to research sex. It turns out, sex researchers are generally not perverts. The author’s willingness to put herself (and her very understanding husband) into some strange situations and write about it with grace and humor had me laughing out loud and sharing hilarious anecdotes with Hot Wife.

For example, while at a research lab studying sexual response in people with spinal cord damage:

It is a testament to Sipski’s reputation in the the disabled community community that more than a hundred men and women have traveled to her lab to be part of a study. Unless you are extremely comfortable with your sexuality, masturbating to orgasm in a lab while hooked up to a heart-rate and blood pressure monitor is, at best, an awkward proposition. It’s even more daunting when you have a spinal cord injury. Among those who can reach orgasm, it takes on average about twice as long to get there. Though Sipski’s subjects are alone behind a closed door, they can hear voices and sounds on the other side of the wall. They can tell people are out there, timing them, monitoring them, waiting for them to finish.
The people out there this morning are uncommonly disruptive. That is because one of them is me, and because Sipski’s colleague Paula Spath said that by climbing up onto her desk and pressing my nose up to the one-way glass, I could get a peak at the experimental setup. I have on a skirt that does not lend itself to scaling office furniture. I lost my balance and crashed into Paula’s monitor, which slid across the computer it was standing on, knocking off a row of knickknacks and causing Paula to leap back and let out the sort of high pitched exclamation that might more appropriately be heard on the yonder side of the wall. It’s a wonder anyone invites me anywhere.

I highly recommend this book. You can buy Bonk here.