Bonk

Bonk is a book about "the curious coupling of science and sex". I just finished reading it and as a little tease wanted to give a taste of what you’d find should you read it.

Here are a few lines and passages that I moved me -- one way or another:

“Word spread. By 1916, the nut graft had gone mainstream.”

“The next step in the operation, Dr. Hsu has named the "inside out" maneuver. Though it is not so much “inside out” as “just out”. Using his gloved fingers, Dr. Hsu pulls the man’s penis up and out of the skin, through the three-inch slit, by its midshaft.”

“The vaginal photoplethysmograph probe that I will be—holding? containing? wearing?—is, for the moment hygienically sequestered in a Ziplock bag …”

“Dr. Hsu’s nurse is unwrapping the second implant, for the other erectile chamber. This one does not go gently. The insertion is done in two stages. One end is submerged down to the pubis bone"

“In addition to the smell of cologne, women were turned off by the scent of cherry and of charcoal barbecue meat. At the top of the women’s turn on list was, mysteriously, a mixture of cucumber and Good and Plenty candy. It was said to increase vaginal blood flow by 13%.”

“Masters points out that the heterosexuals were at a disadvantage as they do not benefit from what he called “gender empathy”. Doing unto your partner as you would do unto yourself only works well when you are gay.”

Bonk is by Mary Roach, who also wrote Stiff, the Secret Life of Cadavers. My wife Darby read that and said it was great. Not surprising, as the writing in Bonk is informative, funny, sly and be warned, cringe worthy at times.

Roach says: The study of sexual physiology—what happens, and why, and how to make it happen better—has been going on for centuries, behind the closed doors of laboratories, brothels, Alfred Kinsey's attic, and, more recently, MRI centers, pig farms, and sex-toy R&D labs. Bonk takes you inside all these places.