Bonk (12 page)

It almost didn’t happen. Lacking funds, the team was initially forced to use the MRI at their local hospital, part of Groningen University. This was an older model that required the couple to hold perfectly still for almost a minute, which is how snails but not people have sex. All but one man lost his erection. Only Ida and Jupp were able to “perform coitus adequately” in the MRI tube, which was a mere twenty inches high. Schultz speculates that their success had to do with their experience as amateur street acrobats: They were accustomed to performance anxiety and odd physical feats.

Eventually, the team secured permission from a better-equipped hospital whose MRI required scanees to hold still for only twelve seconds. Alas, it was around that time that a Dutch tabloid got wind of the project. The paper ran a trumped-up story quoting patients with life-threatening conditions who claimed they were having to wait for their MRIs because creepy sex researchers were tying up the machines. Shortly thereafter came the letter from the hospital director, rescinding his welcome.

Fortuitously, Schultz’s local hospital had by now upgraded to an MRI with the speedier exposure time, and the team moved their base of operations back to Groningen. But even with the truncated hold time, the men’s erections wilted. The project was shelved for another six years, until a “godsend,” as Schultz put it, arrived on the scene: Viagra. At last, in 1998, two more couples joined Ida and Jupp in the 20-Inch High Club, and the prestigious
British Medical Journal
published the team’s paper.
*

Aside from the intriguing link between street acrobatics and erectile function, what has mankind gained from Jupp and Ida? Mankind has gained a tremendous fudge factor should mankind wish to boast about the length of its penis. Before Schultz’s MRIs, few had realized how much of the penis lies hidden below the surface of the skin. The “root” is nearly two thirds again the length of the “pendulous part.” So if your erection is, say, six inches long, go ahead and say it’s ten. I’ll back you up.

At the very least, the paper laid to rest the hokum about penises routinely interlocking with cervixes. Also, we learned that the penis—root and stalk together—“has the shape of a boomerang” during intercourse. (Leonardo had drawn it stick-straight.) But not its precise dynamics. If you hurl an uprooted penis into the air, it will not come back to you. It will most likely, and who can blame it, want nothing to do with you.

By far the most jaw-dropping sexual discovery to come to us courtesy of real-time genital scanning is set forth in Israel Meizner’s “Sonographic Observation of In Utero Fetal ‘Masturbation,’” a letter to the editor published in the
Journal of Ultrasound in Medicine
. Still images, two of which accompany Meizner’s letter, detail a fetus, seven months old. The first shows the teensy hand poised for action. The second shows the fetus a moment later, “grasping his penis in a fashion resembling masturbation movements.” This went on for some fifteen minutes, during which time Meizner stayed tuned but did not document an in utero fetal orgasm.
*

b
lessedly, the ultrasound department is running behind. Ed and I have a half-hour reprieve while the day’s last patients are scanned. We wander up and down the corridor. At one end is a door with a sign that reads
DISCHARGE LOUNGE
. “Ew,” says Ed. We find a café and order tea. Ed stares at his shoes. He is concerned about his ability to, as Schultz put it, perform adequately. He has taken a “god-send,” however, so he’ll likely manage fine.

“Here we go,” Ed says grimly. Dr. Deng walks toward us. He wears khaki trousers and a white lab coat. His age is hard to guess. His hair, though graying, spikes youthfully in all the right places. Though he moved to London ten years ago, he speaks English cautiously and with few decorative touches. An occasional “Brilliant” or “Cheers” is the only trace of England in his words. Nuances of humor, like sarcasm, seem to elude him, or maybe he is just preoccupied with his tasks. Dr. Deng shows us where the changing room is.

“Regarding the position,” he says when we return in our johnny tops. He wants us on our sides, spoons-style. (This was explained, sort of, in the instruction sheet:
We will ask the penis to be inserted into the vagina from his partner’s back.
) “I think facing the wall is better,” says Dr. Deng. As opposed to facing him. “That will be more romantic,” he adds. On the wall, someone has hung a painting of a hillside harbor town. As though by looking at it we could convince ourselves that we were off on the Amalfi Coast—or, just as good, that Dr. Deng was. “And I will switch off the lights.”

“Where are the candles and soft music?” says Ed.

“Oh, I am sorry,” says Dr. Deng, straight-faced, chagrined. Then he brightens. “I can turn on my laptop. I have the soundtrack to
Les Miz
.” His efforts are sweet though pointless. There is no way to make this situation romantic, normal,
sexual.
It feels like a medical procedure, something to be got through.

Dr. Deng goes next door and returns with a 9-by-11 envelope and hands it to Ed. Inside is a copy of a U.K. version of
Maxim
. “This is very erotic,” he assures Ed. The implication being, I suppose, that the sight of one’s wife in a baggy knee-length hospital johnny and threadbare socks is not.

There comes a moment in cheesy horror films when a man with evil intent reaches up and bolts a door. This is the audience’s cue to fear for the heroes. Fear for us. Dr. Deng has pressed the doorknob lock. I’m running my sentences together. “That’s some fancy machine you’ve got, how did you get interested in radiology, is there a good pub nearby, we’re going to need it.”

Dr. Deng never tells us to lie down, but it seems that that is what must happen.

Ed is pretending to be absorbed by his magazine. I nudge him. “Jupp, shall we do something?”

We get into position while Dr. Deng applies ultrasound gel to the end of the ultrasound wand. The gel conducts ultrasound waves better than air does. Ultrasound gel looks and feels (and works) like the product euphemistically known as personal lubricant.

Dr. Deng starts by taking some still images. He reaches across Ed to hold the ultrasound wand to my belly. His arm rests on Ed’s hip, a curiously intimate touch in an encounter otherwise strangely devoid of intimacy. For the still images, we must hold still for several seconds, like Victorians posing for a tintype, only not like Victorians posing for a tintype.

“Now please make some sort of movement,” says Dr. Deng. And then, in case it’s not clear, in case Ed might be contemplating flapping an elbow or saluting the flag, he adds, “in and out.”

Dr. Deng says he’s pleased with the result. “It’s actually much clearer than I thought it would be. It’s very—Hm. Can you just hold there, for a while? We saved too many data.” Dr. Deng needs to reboot. Fortunately, it takes only a few seconds, sparing Ed the necessity of also rebooting.

Ed keeps up an idle, disaffected rhythm. He and Dr. Deng chat about their children. I’m taking notes. Or half of me is. I feel like a secretary in a ribald French comedy, sitting calmly at her desk, taking a letter, while the mail-room guy hides in the footwell with his face between her legs.

“You look so young to have a fifteen-year-old,” Ed is saying. “How old are you?”

“I’m forty-five in August.”

“And the little one? How old?”

“Just two and a half. You can ejaculate now.”

a
s far as I’m concerned, the only downside to direct imaging of real people having sex is that there will no longer be call for researchers to go out and buy dildos and pliable plastic vaginas from California Exotic Novelties and then bring them back to the lab and make them have sex together. In 2003, a team of evolutionary behaviorists at the State University of New York at Albany published a paper called “The Human Penis as a Semen Displacement Device.” They theorized that man evolved a penis with a ridged glans in order to scoop out the competitors’ semen before depositing his own. (The single gal of prehistory must have been fantastically promiscuous.) This would fit in with the little-known fact that the last portion of a man’s ejaculate contains a natural spermicide—not intended to kill his own soldiers, obviously, but to annihilate the seed of any who come after him.

You can’t buy simulated human semen from California Exotic Novelties, and so the Albany team concocted their own. Several recipes were tried and “judged by three sexually experienced males.” Here is the winning recipe chosen by the judges:

Human Semen

7 milliliters room-temperature water

7.16 grams cornstarch

Mix ingredients together. Stir for five minutes.

Yield:
one ejaculate

The simulated semen was ejaculated, via syringe, into the vagina, which had been anointed with lubricant (also from California Exotic Novelties). With a video camera rolling, three different phalluses—including a Control Phallus with no ridge—were inserted and withdrawn. To see how much competitor semen each phallus had managed to scoop out, the vagina
*
was weighed before and after. The results backed the team’s theory: Both of the lifelike phalluses (or “dongs,” to CEN shoppers) displaced 91 percent of the semen, while the unridged control dong left 65 percent of it behind.

The experiment went on for six more pages, but to be honest, they lost me at:

To my mind, what happened in Dr. Deng’s exam room bore no more relation to sex than a smile held for a camera does to the real thing. It was perfunctory, self-conscious, distracted sex. Other than the parts involved, it bore very little resemblance to what goes on between my husband and myself when there’s not a strange man on one side of us and an ultrasound wand on the other. Though they no doubt have their uses, ultrasound movies are a superficial rendering of the complex and varied body-mind meld that we call sex. 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. For some 18 million American men, they don’t work as they ought to or, at least, as they once did. Next up: the occasionally noble, sporadically ghastly, ever-surreal world of erectile science.

The Taiwanese Fix and the Penile Pricking Ring

Creative Approaches to Impotence

a
man having penis surgery is the opposite of a man in a fig leaf. He is concealed face-to-feet in surgical sheets, with only his penis on view. It appears in a small, square cutout in the fabric, spotlit by surgical lamps. To lie completely naked would preserve more modesty, for then the onlooker’s gaze is bound to stray. There are moles and chest hair to look at, knees, nipples, Adam’s apples. This way, all eyes stay on the organ.

But a man, even an impotent man, needn’t feel self-conscious under the gaze of Geng-Long Hsu. Dr. Hsu, who practices in his native country, Taiwan, has been a urological surgeon for twenty-one years. Whatever one might come here for, it is safe to assume Dr. Hsu has seen worse. He has seen smaller, crookeder, pinker, limper. He has seen penises with implants poking through their tips like collar stays. One day this year, he repaired a penis that had ruptured during a performance of jui yang shen gong, an obscure martial art.
*
“He tried to lift one hundred kilograms with his penis!” Dr. Hsu exclaimed yesterday while we rode the elevator to the lobby.

Dr. Hsu runs the Microsurgical Potency Reconstruction and Research Center in Taipei, where he has been researching and honing a surgical treatment for impotence. The operation, which involves tying off and removing some of the veins of the penis, has fallen out of favor elsewhere in the urological community, but Dr. Hsu believes that if it is done correctly and thoroughly, it can help up to 90 percent of men with erectile dysfunction (known among urologists as ED, to the minor chagrin of Eds the world over).

The dysfunctional penis in the spotlight this morning has been so for the last eight of its forty-seven years. The patient has tried Viagra, with limited success. The organ sits alone on its little skin stage, looking vulnerable. I find myself feeling nervous for it, as one might for a fifth-grader before a solo recital.

Once the anesthesia takes effect, Dr. Hsu will begin “degloving” the organ. The verb “skinning” would get the idea across more efficiently, but it is more pleasant, I suppose, to picture an aristocrat gently loosening the fingers of his opera gloves.

Dr. Hsu makes a cut in the flesh just above the penis. He slips his blade into the wound, and slides it underneath the skin.

“Remember the night market?” he says. Last night, Dr. Hsu took me to Huahsi Street, a market known for the lurid shows put on by its snake-medicine vendors. Unlike snake shows in Morocco or India, Taiwanese snakes are not charmed. Pretty much the opposite of charmed. They are skinned alive, bled, and made into stews.

Dr. Hsu works his scalpel down the shaft of the penis, detaching the skin from the pulpy pinkness underneath. “Very like the night market!”

Dr. Hsu speaks English with great enthusiasm and fitful syntax. This is occasionally frustrating but mostly just endearing. Yesterday he took me and his business associate Alice Wen on a tour of Taipei city sights. “Okay!” he exclaimed as we piled out of the car. “Let’s experience!” He is patient, polite, and unwaveringly generous. As we set off into the crippling midday heat, he doled out sun visors and baseball caps, taking the one no one picked for himself: a China Youth Camps cap with a pink bunny motif.