Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex Mary Roach (W.W. Norton)
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Roach, in fact, doesn’t want to discuss those experiments, at least not at any length. In the first place, she notes, they are “ghastly,” hardly in keeping with her sunny, sex-positive tone. But she also believes they “may tell us something about sadism in human beings but not a whole lot about copulation.”
That might seem like a fair point—except that sadism is inherently sexual. The term was coined in the early 1900s by psychiatrist Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing, who, inspired by the writings of de Sade, used it to describe the derivation of sexual pleasure from the infliction of pain. Freud popularized it by making it central to psychoanalysis; he called sadism and masochism “the most common and important of all perversions.” In popular usage, sadism can mean deriving any sort of pleasure from pain, but the suggestion of sex still hovers in the background—is it an accident that torture at Abu Ghraib slipped toward specifically sexual forms? Roach wants to say the sex researchers who practiced vivisection were sadists. All right—but then, to paraphrase Nietzsche, as those researchers were staring into sex, sex was staring back into them. Is it too much of a leap to suggest that scientists who are interested in sex might have some sexual motivations?
On one of her research trips, Roach and her husband have sex in a clinic. While they perform, a researcher stands beside them and waves an ultrasound wand over their bodies to get an image of what’s happening to all the nonvisible bits. This isn’t very romantic, Roach points out, observing that “sex is far more than the sum of its moving parts.” But, she adds, “if the parts don’t work properly, the sum is moot.” This sounds eminently rational—which is the problem. For Roach, the irrational part of sex and the part that can be measured by science can exist more or less happily together. You figure out how everything works, fix it all up, and then add the special ingredient that makes it go, like gas in a car.
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