Stiff assured me that Bonk was about the science of sex, that Mary Roach would be the trustworthy guide I wanted her to be, that she would be funny and sympathetically human, and that she would provide me with the gentle handholding (dragging may be the better term) I needed to enter the Museum of Human Sexuality and by proxy and long-delayed result, my own psyche. Happily, Mary Roach gave me all of these things.
As foreign as some of the battery operated sex machines, rubber anuses, and sheep testicle transplants in this book are, Roach treats them with respect, and, as she already knew or finds out as she explores their history and the history of the people that surround these objects, they are testament to the ways we try to find out more about ourselves. To make ourselves happier. Or, as in the case of the penile pricking ring in chapter six, save our souls from the dangers of masturbation. Thank God times have changed, and thank God sex today can be about fun.
Roach also knows that the unbiased, unaffected scientist who denies her own involvement in a project she is unavoidably affected by, is outmoded. She knows that her humanness makes her a better guide, one that we can commiserate with to get through the cringe moments, those moments that strip sex of it’s mythology and it’s emotionality and put it in a petri dish. She reminds us that all of this science is about being happier and having more fun.
Which is why Roach’s sense of humor is important. Sex is so scary, uncomfortable, awkward, and silly that without the jokes, Roach’s exploration would seem more like work and less like fun. I can imagine Roach (the nightingale I take into the coal mine of sexuality) researching, or like in the footnote on page 212, spending half an hour on Merriam-Webster making the dictionary say “CLIT-oris” and “Vagina” and “Penis.”
Unlike science’s need to argue something in order to be successful, what makes Roach, and therefore Bonk, so successful and readable is the fact that she refrains from coming to any conclusions, preaching, or sliding into didacticism.
Roach could have argued that all women should tell their partners what feels good and where, exactly, they ought to be rubbing, and then provided the scientific evidence for said argument. That would have been good advice. Instead, she explains the myriad hilarious ways in which others (scientists) have made that argument and come to that conclusion. As well as a twenty other conflicting conclusions.
She doesn’t condemn science for its vagaries and lack of sensitivity, either, which would amount to preaching from the other side of the glass. Instead, she is the best kind of guide, one that would like to understand sex, but really just wants to know more about it. Importantly, Mary Roach does what I am afraid to do: find out for herself, through experiment, research, and good humor, what sex, is, does, and will be.
All thirteen chapters have titles that, like “The Upsuck Chronicles: Does Orgasm Boost Fertility, and What Do Pigs Know About It?” evince the extent to which Roach plumbs sex (ha ha). She explains medieval legislation against masturbation, but also explores contemporary laboratory studies of sex, one of which, having found that gay and lesbian couples have more intense and pleasurable sex than heterosexual couples, still wants to “help” homosexual couples into straight relationships.
While she is a trustworthy and fallible guide, Roach doesn’t talk about her own sex life, except when she convinces her husband to have sex in an MRI in order to better understand body parts during coitus. It is this emotional stake she puts into this project, and not her story, that make me want to call her Mary and not Roach, give her a hug, and laugh with her about the time when she was observing (through a small window) a woman with multiple sclerosis masturbate. Mary climbed up on a desk to see through the window and lost her balance, starting a Rube-Goldberg of loud crashing noises and undoubtedly distracting the poor woman on the other side of the glass.
It disappoints me that Mary Roach didn’t give me an easy out by lining up my symptoms with some rare but incurable sexual disorder from which I will never be rescued, so that I can just go ahead make plans for a life without sex, romance, and relationships. It disappoints me, because that would have been easy. But Mary Roach is not a stick-your-head-in-the-sand kind of woman. Instead, I feel like she sat me down and said, “There is no one answer, Claire. Your physiology is keeping you from achieving orgasm, but so is your brain, and so is everything else. But now that you know all of this, buck up. Be happy. Do what you can with what you have. And isn’t there a lot of stuff out there that you can do?”
Despite this feeling, reading Bonk was difficult. Writing about it has been much harder, because I keep trying to say that Bonk was good because it was frank and funny and interesting. But what I am feeling is anxious, and despite all of Roach’s unstoppable enthusiasm and the extent to which she puts her own emotions on the line, I still want to give up. I am trying to figure out why this is when my eyes fall on the LA Times blurb on Bonk’s cover.
I have finished the book, and am looking at the cover, which has an image of a couple embracing under a magnifying scope. Beside two couples embracing under a magnifying scope are fifteen words that suddenly make me uncomfortable. For your information, Stiff is the title of Roach’s first book, which explored the wondrous lives of the recently and very dead. I thought it was brilliant as well. “If Stiff made me glad I wasn’t dead,” Tara Ison says, “Bonk makes me happy to be alive.” Yes, Tara of the LA Times, I found this book lively and fun to read, but “happy to be alive?” I want to ask you what your sex life is like.
Are you one of the women, who like the woman on page thirty, can “bring herself to orgasm five times in quick succession” without any physical contact? If so, I envy you. Even if you could only do it once, I would envy you.
That is not the blurb I would have written for the cover of this book. I might have said, “Mary Roach makes good sex sound like more work than I want it to be,” but that is me on a pessimistic day, when I am not remembering how much fun I had when I read Bonk, and what I took away from it: Enjoy knowing more about yourself.
On a better day I might say, “Thank you, Mary Roach, for not making a decision about who I am, and for making sex funny.” But that would not go over well with the publishers, so instead, I might say, “Bonk is a great book,” and leave it at that.
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Claire Stephens penned this fabulous essay. She's fast on her bike. I dare you to race her.
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