I read this book by Mary Roach about a month ago and I’ve been wanting to write about it ever since. Usually, when I encounter a book about sex that’s written for a general audience, I’m cautious. Too often it’s like reading a Cosmo article and I’m either snoozing or fuming, and very rarely happy. This time, however, I was pleasantly surprised.
Bonk is a really good and well-researched, up-to-date volume of what’s what in sex research. She goes back in sex research history quite a ways while bringing us to the possible future, in a fun, easy-to-read text. (Sorry. No pictures!) The chapter titles do conjure some images to mind however. Try titles like:
The Sausage, the Porcupine, and the Agreeable Mrs. G; The Upsuck Chronicles; The Lady’s Boner; and Mind over Vagina. The chapter titles are kind of goofy, but when you look at the endnotes and bibliography you can tell this chick really did her homework.
There are some laugh out loud moments, like picturing Mary and her husband trying to have sex in an MRI machine to help a study on what happens to human physiology during sex. There’s also an interesting chapter about a doctor in Egypt trying to study the vagina, in a country where vagina’s aren’t supposed be acknowledged much less studied. He’s funny, too!
Mary Roach does write in a quirky kind of style, though. There are a lot of bizarre footnotes throughout the text that might just win you a wedge in Trivial Pursuit, but I kind of found them taking away from what I really wanted to read.
Anyway, give it a read and enjoy “The curious coupling of science and sex.”