Bonk
Mary Roach, Norton, 2008

Bonk, Mary Roach, Norton, 2008

Last week my sixth-grader came home and informed me that his class in the next week would be studying a unit on “Human Sexual Reproduction.” He pronounced the words slowly, from memory, making clear that he had no idea what the phrase meant. He then said that his teacher had informed the class that they needed to stay cool while they were studying the unit, because they would be talking about things that make some people laugh. “Don’t worry,” I thought (but didn’t say, because I’m a responsible parent), “you’ll get plenty of chances to laugh at it the rest of your life.” Considering that sex is the subject of about 99 percent of comedy in our culture, a middle-school sex education class is probably the last time any of us were forced to keep a straight face when confronted with a sexual subject. Bestselling science writer Mary Roach takes advantage of our tendency to laugh nervously whenever someone says something frank about sex in Bonk, a funny and bizarre survey of the history of sex research. 

Roach has built her reputation on writing unflinching, humorous books on taboo topics in the world of human scientific endeavor (as well as coming up with irreverent one-word titles for them). Stiff, her first book, uncovered the purposefully ignored realities of human death, while in Spook she turned her talents on the little known history of scientific research into the possibilities of an afterlife. With Bonk she returns from the abyss of human oblivion to the beginning of human life: the reproductive act. She is not concerned with conception so much, though. She’s more interested in copulation – or, more accurately, she’s interested in the scientists who have been interested in copulation.

The most challenging aspect of reviewing Roach’s book is finding a way to write about it that is suitable for a family-friendly publication. Roach, as always, is entirely uninhibited, and sex is something that very few of us have been uninhibited about since we were tittering sixth graders. She writes about experiments involving body parts that many of us have never even seen and acts that few of us (the lucky or unfortunate few, as the case may be) have even considered. Surprisingly, though, after only a few pages only the most conservative reader will be able to resist the playful way in which Roach presents this stuff. As bizarre and kinky as it all gets, it never ceases to be entertaining. 

That we might find the subject bizarre or kinky at all is a central theme in Roach’s book. Sex researchers have, from the very beginning of the discipline, been viewed with suspicion, she explains. Anyone who wants to devote his or her life to studying sex must be some variety of pervert, public opinion generally held, and their experiments could hardly be scientifically legitimate. Research funding has always been difficult to obtain, and early research was sometimes carried out in secret to avoid controversy and possible prosecution. 

It doesn’t help that some sex researchers, the quality and legitimacy of their research aside, were unquestionably a little on the kinky side. It was not unheard of, at least in the field’s early days, for scientists to participate in their own research (a lack of willing test subjects is a convenient excuse), and the nature of some of the experiments certainly pushed the bounds of mainstream sexuality. Alfred Kinsey, perhaps the most famous sex researcher, was especially problematic in these areas. Although his work illuminated human sexuality in an unprecedented way, his personal quirks made his techniques suspect at worst and creepy at best. 

If you’re wondering more about the specific content of Bonk, well, I really can’t tell you much about it here. Roach leaves no stone unturned, and she finds lots of surprising things under each one. She tells us much more than we ever wanted to know about artificial insemination in pigs, and she introduces us to the inventors of machines that we, hopefully, never imagined existed. A large portion of the book is devoted to female physiology and sexuality, which might be surprising if you consider that female sexuality was an especially strong taboo until recently (likely because most sex scientists have been men). 

There’s something infectious about Roach’s approach to this sometimes uncomfortable topic, and by the end it’s likely that most readers will have loosened up a bit in their attitudes toward sex. Roach herself is caught up in it enough to actually have volunteered to participate in an experiment or two. It’s her hands-on (yes, I used those words intentionally) approach to her subjects, as well as her unrestrained humor, that makes Bonk, along with her other books, a thoroughly enjoyable way to examine the murkier side of science.

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