Bonk (3 page)

Watson’s original scientifically trained student of sex may or may not have been Rosalie Rayner, a nineteen-year-old student of his at Johns Hopkins University, with whom he was carrying on an affair. A friend of Watson’s, Deke Coleman, says Watson and Rayner “took readings” and “made records” of Rayner’s physical responses while they had sex, which would make the pair America’s first experimenters (and first subjects) in the laboratory study of human arousal and orgasm. Coleman further claimed that Watson’s wife found the notes and data from the experiments, and that these were used as evidence in the ensuing divorce trial.

Watson’s biographer Kerry Buckley dismisses the story about the trial as innuendo. Watson was indeed having an affair with Rayner, and the affair did, to use Watson’s phrasing, shipwreck his life: When he refused to stop seeing Rayner, he was asked to leave the university and never again managed to work in academia. But Buckley says there is no evidence to support the rumor of the arousal studies making an appearance in the trial. (Mrs. Watson’s lawyer did, however, introduce as evidence a cache of love letters, quoted in a different biography of Watson, by David Cohen. Watson expresses his feelings as only the father of behaviorism could do: “My total reactions are positive and towards you. So, likewise, each and every heart reaction.”) Buckley is also dubious of the allegation that Rayner and Watson studied their own sexual responses.

Though it would appear that Watson did study
somebody’s
. In 1936, a box with John Watson’s name on it was discovered in a basement on the Johns Hopkins campus. Inside the box were four scientific instruments. One was a speculum; the other three were a mystery. In the late 1970s, yet another historian, working on a
Journal of Sex Research
article about Watson, heard about the box and contacted its keeper, stating that he wanted to get an expert opinion on the instruments. A photo was taken and mailed to a team of sex researchers in California. “The bent tube with a cage-like end certainly was [an] instrument to insert into the vagina…,” began the researchers. I believe them, though I got the sense that an egg beater might have produced the same reply.

The amazing thing about Watson is that, offered a choice between, on the one hand, holding onto respect, prestige, financial security, and tenure at Johns Hopkins and, on the other hand, holding onto the source of his heart reactions, Watson went with the girl.
*
Human behavior isn’t quite as predictable as the behaviorists made it out to be.

a
decade would pass before medical research summoned its courage and hooked up its instruments to live human sex. It was 1932. The researchers, Ernst Boas and Ernst Goldschmidt, knew better than to publish their results in a journal. Their findings appeared quietly on chapter 4 of their book
The Heart Rate
. If you are extremely interested in the things that raise or lower a person’s heart rate, and exactly how much they raise or lower it, here is a book for you. For example, did you know that “defecating” can briefly bring your heart rate down by eight beats per minute? Or that when a heterosexual man dances with another man—and here I like to picture the two Ernsts in a vigorous foxtrot—his heart rate may rise twenty beats per minute less than it rises when he dances with a woman? The authors include no data on what reading
The Heart Rate
does to one’s heart rate, but personal observation puts it solidly between “sitting” and “sleep.”

It was Subject No. 69 who agreed to go No. 2 while under cardiac surveillance, and it was also 69 who had sex with her husband, Subject 72, while tethered to the scientists’ equipment. Boas and Goldschmidt used a cardiotachometer, which looks from a picture to have been assembled from pieces of Mr. Peabody’s Wayback Machine and the control panel of a B-10 bomber. Subjects wore electrodes held in place by black rubber straps encircling their chests. Boas and Goldschmidt include a photograph of a naked female chest modeling the black rubber harness, lending a glint of illicit eroticism to their otherwise staid endeavor. I’m guessing it’s Subject 69’s bare bosom on display. Goldschmidt’s wife Dora is thanked in the acknowledgments for her contributions to the “experiments that extend over a good part of the day and night,” so I’m going to go even further out on a limb and speculate that Subject 69 is Dora and that Subject 72 is hubby Ernst.

Because that’s what researchers did back then. Rather than risk being fired or ostracized by explaining their unconventional project to other people and trying to press those other people into service, researchers would simply, quietly, do it themselves.

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. From the standpoint of sex research, Boas and Goldschmidt’s documentation, in 1932, of a woman’s multiple orgasms is of far more interest than the rather obvious fact that one’s heart beats a lot faster during sex. Alfred Kinsey’s data on the prevalence of multiple orgasms, revealed twenty years hence, was met with skepticism on the part of certain segments of the populace who were still adjusting to the notion that women were orgasmic at all. In part, this has to do with the social conservatism of the era. The twenties and thirties were a much looser time than the forties and fifties. I came across a 1950 journal article in which a team of researchers, G. Klumbies and H. Kleinsorge, had recruited a woman who could bring herself to orgasm five times in quick succession. But the authors weren’t studying the phenomenon of multiple orgasms; it was a simple study of blood pressure during orgasm. The subject—“our hypersexual woman,” as the researchers called her—had been recruited, it would appear, simply for the efficiency and productivity of her orgasmic output. And because she could do it hands-free. (She was using fantasy.) The team had found a way to do its study without recruiting people to have sex at the lab (a risky undertaking in the fifties) or appearing to condone masturbation. “Development and subsidence of the orgasm reflex took place without any physical interference,” Klumbies points out in the very first paragraph. In other words,
it’s okay—she didn’t touch herself.

Another way to get around the seeming impropriety of laboratory fornication was to so thoroughly bedeck your participants in the trappings of science that what they were doing no longer looked like sex. As was the case in R. G. Bartlett, Jr.’s 1956 study “Physiologic Responses During Coitus.” Picture a bed in a small “experimental room.” On the bed are a man and a woman. They are making the familiar movements made by millions of other couples on a bed that night, yet they look nothing like these couples. They have EKG wires leading from their thighs and arms, like a pair of lustful marionettes who managed to escape the puppet show and check into a cheap motel. Their mouths are covered by snorkel-type mouthpieces with valves. Trailing from each mouthpiece is a length of flexible tubing that runs through the wall to the room next door, where Bartlett is measuring their breathing rate. To ensure that they don’t breath through their noses, the noses have been “lightly clamped.” On either side of the bed are buttons for the pair to press, signaling “intromission, orgasm, and withdrawal.” When I first read this I pictured an ATM keypad, with different buttons for each event. Then I realized it was simply one button, which I imagined as being attached to a buzzer, providing a madcap game show air, as though at any moment a disembodied voice might ask them, for $500, to name Millard Fillmore’s vice presidential running mate.
*

I understand why Bartlett did not include photographs in his
Journal of Applied Physiology
article, but I have not forgiven him.

n
one of the trappings of the Respectable Scientific Endeavor were on hand during the project Alfred Kinsey referred to as “Physiological Studies of Sexual Arousal and Sexual Orgasm.” No one was hooked up or plugged into anything other than his or her partner. The studies took place on a mattress laid out on the pine floor of Kinsey’s attic in Bloomington, Indiana.

Kinsey is of course best known for his daring, encyclopedic surveys of sexual behavior. (In the 1940s and early ’50s, Kinsey—with colleagues Wardell Pomeroy, Clyde Martin, and Paul Gebhard—interviewed 18,000 Americans about their sex lives and published his findings in two ground-breaking, best-selling, ultimately career-tanking volumes.) But Kinsey, a biologist by training, was interested in the physiology of sex, not just the habits of its practitioners. In 1949, Kinsey had plans to set up a dedicated experimental laboratory as part of the Kinsey Institute when it moved to a larger building. He wanted, in essence, to do what Masters and Johnson would do ten years down the road: observe, document, and understand the responses of the human body to sexual stimulation.

The lab never materialized. Kinsey must have sensed it was too risky to go public with such an undertaking. So he went ahead in secret. Thirty couplings—some heterosexual and some homosexual—and a similar number of “masturbatory sessions” were observed and filmed in the attic of Kinsey’s house. Kinsey had hired a commercial photographer named Bill Dellenback, whose pay, not entirely fraudulently, came out of the institute’s budget for “mammalian behavior studies.”

Because the work was done in secret, Kinsey didn’t recruit his subjects from the public at large. Outsiders—including, says Pomeroy, several “eminent scientists” who had visited the Institute—were filmed if they volunteered and if it was felt they could be trusted, but for the most part, it was an inside project. Kinsey wanted Dellenback to film his own staff. There are three ways to read that sentence, all of them true. Dellenback filmed Pomeroy and Gebhard having sex with their wives and sometimes other people’s wives, and he filmed them masturbating. He filmed Kinsey himself masturbating, in one instance, by pushing a swizzle stick
*
up his staff. Dellenback himself, says Kinsey’s other biographer James Jones, reluctantly agreed to masturbate at an attic gathering, though he drew the line at filming himself.

It is difficult to read about the attic sessions and not suspect that there was at least an undercurrent of something beyond research going on up there. Jones describes Kinsey as a voyeur. But the passage Jones uses to illustrate Kinsey’s voyeurism, to me, makes an equally strong case that he was simply a biologist studying sex as obsessively as he had studied gall wasps.

…Kinsey was virtually on top of the action, his head only inches removed from the couple’s genitals…. Above the groans and moans, Kinsey could be heard chattering away, pointing out various signs of sexual arousal as the couple progressed through the different stages of intercourse. In [his colleague] Beach’s estimation, no observer had a keener eye for detail. Nothing escaped Kinsey’s notice—not the subtle changes in the breast’s skin tone that accompanied tumescence during arousal, not the involuntary twitch of the muscles in the anus upon orgasm—Kinsey saw everything. At one level, it was all very analytic and detached. As Beach looked closer, however, he was certain he detected a gleam of desire in Kinsey’s eyes, a look that grew more intense as the action built to a climax.

I wanted to see the purported gleam and decide for myself. I wanted to watch one of the films. Did Kinsey look like a scientist doing research, or did he look like a Peeping Tom? Was he taking measurements? Jotting down notes? Perhaps I could see those too. I contacted Shawn Wilson, the likable gatekeeper for the Kinsey Institute’s library and special collections. He replied that if—as Wardell Pomeroy states in his book—notes were taken and data compiled from the sessions in the attic, the institute did not have them. The films themselves, he said, were “not available”—meaning, I think, that they still exist but very few people, and certainly not Mary Roach, get to watch them. In his email, Wilson referred to the footage as “the Kinsey stag film,” a fitting enough description, but not one that contributed greatly to its status as scientific documentation.

Kinsey didn’t publish research papers about what he learned from watching his colleagues, but he did include it in his second sex volume, in the chapter “Physiology of Sexual Response and Orgasm.” There can be no doubt, in reading this chapter, that Kinsey had a biologist’s eye trained upon the proceedings. A Peeping Tom might have noticed that “the anal sphincter may rhythmically open and close” during orgasm, but only a biologist would have noted that people’s earlobes swell when they’re aroused, or that “the membranes which line the nostrils may secrete more than their usual amounts of mucus.” Who but a biologist would have documented the activity of the salivary glands with the approach of orgasm? “If one’s mouth is open when there is a sudden upsurge of erotic stimulation and response,” Kinsey writes, “saliva may be spurted some distance out of the mouth.”

Kinsey didn’t supply the average distance covered by the saliva, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d calculated it. Some years earlier, he measured the average distance traveled by ejaculated semen. Three hundred men, recruited by a well-connected male prostitute, were paid to masturbate on film in the home of an acquaintance of Kinsey’s in New York City. Physicians at the time were claiming that “the force with which the semen is thrown against the cervix,” quoting Kinsey, was a factor in fertility. Kinsey thought it was bunk, that semen was rarely spurted, squirted, or “thrown,” that it mostly just slopped onto whatever surface was closest. In three-quarters of the men, as Kinsey anticipated, that is what it did. In the remainder, the semen was launched anywhere from a matter of inches to a foot or two away. (The record holder landed just shy of the eight-foot mark.) Not one but two sheets were laid down to protect the Oriental carpets.

Kinsey’s original plan had been to film
2,000
men ejaculating. It would be easy to think that Kinsey—who was enthusiastically, though not publically, bisexual—was bringing all these men in because he enjoyed watching them. But if you knew much of anything about Alfred Kinsey, you might, alternatively, take this as an example of the famous Kinsey overkill. In all, the Kinsey team interviewed 18,000 Americans about their sex lives, but Kinsey’s hope had been to keep going until they’d talked to 100,000. In his gall wasp days, Kinsey traveled 32,000 miles and collected 51,000 specimens.