Technically speaking, bestselling author Mary Roach has a sex tape on the Internet, and anyone can look it up. “It’s G-rated,” she says dismissively.
That all depends on what you consider suitable for children. The short clip shows Roach and her husband Ed in flagrante delicto –from the inside and in four dimensions. That means the black and white footage is extremely blurry, and it’s unlikely anyone could get off on it. Roach certainly didn’t. “It was very perfunctory, distracted, terrible sex,” she says. “It’s not sex you’d want to have. And there’s a guy right there.”
That guy was Dr. Jing Deng at University College in London, who successfully made Roach the first woman to be filmed, with ultrasound technology, doing the nasty. Talk about nerd porn. The whole uncomfortable situation came together in the course of Roach’s research for her latest book, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, which she will be speaking about at the Capitola Book Cafe this evening.
The inspiration came in the form of a brief and puzzling mention in a movie buff magazine of a film by sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson using some sort of a penis cam. “It suggested kind of an interesting scenario – bringing sex into the lab, because sex is a private, intimate thing, but it’s also anatomy and physiology, and it needs to be studied,” she says. The book is the result of two years’ worth of combing that body of work searching for studies that actually had subjects in one way or another petting, pumping, stroking and bonking while in the sterile confines of a research laboratory, and under very watchful eyes. “I love that scientists are willing to face ridicule and embarrassment to answer a question,” she says. “You think, wow, that must have been awkward, and God love those people for doing it.”
Though her research, in the bowels of many a medical library, turned up plenty of studies, only the “stuff that you open up and go, holy shit” made it into the book, thereby rendering it a cocktail party conversationalist’s Bible. For instance, Roach reports that the human nose is also made of erectile tissue, and congestion is a kind of nose boner. In Thailand, there was once an epidemic of wives castrating their cheating husbands. Many, many animals have achieved climax courtesy of hands that went on to pen the tomes that fill our most hallowed academic halls. She discovered all this in papers and books with names like “Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique” and “Five-Point Stimulation Plan” (for pigs).
She also met many researchers currently broaching the field of human sexual behavior. In her cast of characters are an Egyptian doctor who must keep his work secret in the conservative Arab world and a penis repairman in Taiwan. “All of them that I met were really nice, very smart, very funny, very open minded people. They’re all people you’d love to sit next to on a plane,” she says.
The consistently snarky humor and refusal to cave in to being uncomfortable makes it clear that sitting next to Roach on a plane wouldn’t be so bad either. Her exuberance for the topic comes through quite clearly in the constant and sometimes tangential footnoting throughout the book–she just can’t get enough of this stuff.
However, it didn’t exactly have the greatest effect on her own sex life. “Masters and Johnson go through everything that happens to the human body. We’re talking swelling earlobes and over active salivary glands,” she says. “When you’re reading this, you become a bit of voyeur in your own bed. It’s sort of a distracting thing that takes you out of the moment. I don’t really recommend it.”
And she may have scarred her husband for life with that tryst in Deng’s lab. “He said, ‘It really creeps me out that I was able to do that,” she says.
Mary Roach will talk and sign books on July 21 at 7:30pm at Capitola Book Café, 1475 41st Ave., Capitola.
