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Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex | Paperback
Mary Roach
WW Norton
Science / Life Sciences - Biology / Life Sciences - Human Anatomy & Physiology / Psychology / Human Sexuality (see also Social Science - Human Sexuality)
Published Oct 4, 2022
"The best-selling author of Stiff turns her outrageous curiosity and infectious wit on the most alluring scientific subject of all: sex.
"The study of sexual physiology--what happens, and why, and how to make it happen better - has been a paying career or a diverting sideline for scientists as far-ranging as Leonardo da Vinci and James Watson. The research has taken place behind the closed doors of laboratories, brothels, MRI centers, pig farms, sex-toy R&D labs, and Alfred Kinsey's attic. Mary Roach, "the funniest science writer in the country" (Burkhard Bilger of The New Yorker), devoted the past two years to stepping behind those doors. Can a person think herself to orgasm? Can a dead man get an erection? Is vaginal orgasm a myth? Why doesn't Viagra help women - or, for that matter, pandas? In Bonk, Roach shows us how and why sexual arousal and orgasm, two of the most complex, delightful, and amazing scientific phenomena on earth, can be so hard to achieve and what science is doing to slowly make the bedroom a more satisfying place.
An excerpt:
"France in the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was "really and truly a place where you did not want to be an impotent male. This was the era of the ""impotence trial."" Compared to the magistrates of these Reformation-era trials, Dr.Bumstead is the Gumdrop Fairy. When theologians elevated marriage to the status of a sacrament, impotence was likewise elevated, from a source of frustration to an actual crime. And because impotence was thought to arise from the intemperate spilling of one's seed, it was assumed that a man who could not get hard for his wife had been spending too much time doing so for others. Or, at the veryleast, that he was an immoderate masturbator. Be that all as it was the main reason a man's erectile capacity found its way into the courts was that impotence was a legal ground for divorce."
Then.. the author describes how the impotence test was performed..
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