Bonk: The Curious Coupling Of Science And Sex Quotes
"It’s not surprising that the study of sexual physiology, with a few notable exceptions, did not get rolling in earnest until the 1970s."
"Imagine a woman who’s been harboring resentment toward her husband for pulling out as soon he’s done (and she isn’t). Were she to learn that her man is not so much insensitive as over-sensitive, her resentment would diffuse."
"All good research—whether for science or for a book—is a form of obsession."
"Sexual dysfunction had to be medicalized, and the pharmaceutical companies had to get interested."
"Whoever the couple was, their heart rates during the encounter ranged from a low of about 80 to a rather shocking 146, the latter recorded at the third of Subject 69’s four orgasms."
"It is hard to overestimate the value of a simple anatomical explanation for a frustrated couple’s complaint."
"The retired British sex physiologist Roy Levin told me that the index of his edition of Essential Medical Physiology, a popular textbook in the sixties, had no entry for penis, vagina, coitus, erection, or ejaculation."
"Penile thrusting on its own—with no foreplay or during-play—is, concluded Alzate, "an inefficient method of inducing female orgasm.""
"The body’s limiting factors seem to get shut off. The organism is driven toward nature’s singular goal—conception, the passing on of one’s genes—and anything that stands in the way is pushed into the background."
"Sexually stimulating a sow while you artificially inseminate her leads to a 6 percent improvement in fertility."
"The smell of the boar is heavy and repugnant."
"The job of a production pig is to produce more pigs, as many pigs as is pigly possible."
"It is possible to purchase a specialty sow vibrator."
"The stimulation plan mimics the boar’s rather uncouth courtship behaviors."
"The original stimulation plan had six steps, not five, but the last has been deemed, 'too much.'"
"A hook now allows the Reflexator to hang benignly on the sperm feeder tube; the vibrations travel along the tube, so that hopefully, nobody has to feel funny."
"You never see anything written about Mrs. Hippocrates or Mrs. Aristotle, but I’d put a few drachmas on the former being the one with the spring in her step."
"I am of the opinion that the vulva of Your Most Sacred Majesty should be titillated for some length of time before intercourse."
"And possibly, if conception is the goal, you don’t want it to be."
"Couples really, really hate that. It’s a very sensitive area."
"The sexual anatomy and responses of the human female are as uniform and predictable as the weather."
"Sex is far more than the sum of its moving parts."
"But you can’t altogether dismiss the parts. If the parts don’t work properly, the sum is moot."
"Like buns which are pushed from the oven we are coming outside."
"Sex physiologist Roy Levin points out that sperm straight out of the penis are not yet up to the job of fertilizing an egg."
"A surprising amount of this went on in the pre-Viagra era, long before the cock ring entered modern vernacular."
"It has now been about four months since the operation, and the party reported to me…that he had had for the first time in nearly three years complete and satisfactory coitus and was now willing to stop trying."
"The logical reason, say Brock and others, is that the body tends to compensate when someone or something destroys or blocks a vein. It grows new veins, and/or the remaining ones get bigger."
"See the difference? Already. Look how engorged."
"I can’t for the life of me answer that question."
"He feels he has a cure for ED and wants it to be used throughout the world, but is, well, impotent to make it happen."
"From the heyday of Freud all the way through the behavior therapy era of the fifties and sixties, the causes of impotence were thought to dwell in the psyche."
"Impotence had morphed into a tidy biological problem treatable with a harmless pill."
"Masturbation and casual sex—particularly with "ugly" women, who sapped one’s vitality faster than the handsome ones—led to all manner of bodily woes."
"It was the Victorian-era version of the anticrack campaigns that you see today."
"Levin speculates that that’s why men masturbate so much: It’s an evolutionary strategy."
"France in the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was really and truly a place where you did not want to be an impotent male."
"For the husband to win his case, he had to prove himself capable of, as they say in modern-day erectile parlance, achieving and maintaining an erection."
"At one point, Brinkley was taking delivery on forty Toggenburgs a week, housed in a corral behind the hospital."
"The penis pump was invented by a tire professional named Geddings Osbon, whose own frequent flats drove him to get creative with the company pneumatics."
"Viagra has an interesting history here in Taiwan."
"Pandas aren’t the only ones for whom Viagra doesn’t do the trick."
"In 2005, a group of professors at the University of the West of England reported in BJU International (British Journal of Urology) that Kegel exercises could cure erectile dysfunction."
"The careless reader might be tempted to draw a conclusion from the preceding paragraphs, and that is that polygamy causes erectile dysfunction. Au contraire!"
"The penis, though operative, was shorter, numb, and often only partway erectable."
"It must have been a bittersweet victory: to feel erections after two years of impotence, yet have no penis with which to take advantage of them."
"It’s like trying to put a parking meter into an oyster."
"Mr. Wang won’t become erect, he’ll just suddenly be erect. His hydraulics have been swapped for an ON/OFF toggle."
"You may be curious as to who got the idea to look into this."
"The vibrator was a godsend, reducing the chore to a few minutes."
"So why weren’t hysteria sufferers simply told to go home and masturbate twice a week? Because, as you will recall from chapter 6, masturbation has a long history as a shameful, dangerous, and much-discouraged act."
"The penis, like the clitoris, ends in a sensitive, nerve-dense, pleasure-yielding bulb of tissue called a glans."
"People with spinal cord injuries provide a unique window onto the workings of human orgasm."
"Studying people with spinal cord injuries might benefit the able-bodied as well."
"Orgasm is a not a surface sensation, it’s an internal sensation."
"Psychological factors also hold sway. Just as emotions affect heart rate and digestion, they also influence sexual response."
"There is something eerie about spinal reflexes: You don’t need a brain."
"The importance of focus fits well with something that Masters and Johnson wrote about back in the 1970s."
"If it’s any solace, even female rats have trouble focusing."
"Women’s genitals may respond indiscriminately to images of sex, but the women themselves will often report being totally unaffected by what they’ve viewed."
"Be all that as it may, it is the mind that speaks a woman’s heart, not the vaginal walls."
"Sex, now, in this country is very secret. The women and the vagina—it’s something very criminal."
"If you never eat a kiwi, you never want a kiwi."
"Hormones can act as the invisible puppet strings behind the discomfiting one-night stand, the shameless flirtation with the bellboy, the unexpected and regrettable kiss between friends."
"The pioneering primatologist C. R. Carpenter first documented the hand slap as a female sex solicitation in the 1940s, but his papers were ignored for years."
"It’s hard to get irritable over a liaison that takes less time to finish than a banana."