Bonk (31 page)

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Max von Frey was an Austrian physiologist who invented a heart-lung machine some time before an American named John Gibbon did. Dr. Gibbon ultimately became known as the machine’s inventor, while von Frey’s name was linked to calibrated pig hairs. Life is unkind.

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A trick also employed to lengthen penises. Though an organ thus freed tends, when erect, to veer off sideways and/or hang down dispiritedly. Anyone considering this should know that an Italian study done in 2002 found that absolutely everyone in a group of 67 men seeking surgical penis lengthening had penises within the normal range (from 1.6 to 4.7 inches, flaccid). “Normal” was determined, rather dauntingly, by measuring 3,300 Italian military recruits. The authors blame abnormally endowed porn stars for the growing epidemic of penile insecurity.

†Far easier to move a neoclitoris, which is the technical term for a transgendered woman’s clitoris, typically fashioned from a stitched-in-place nub of penile glans tissue. Do transgendered women ever request a closer placement? No, says Harold Reed of the Reed Centre for Genital Surgery in Miami. “They are going for looks.” As in, trying to look normal. To that end, Reed places them one inch above the urethra, right smack at average.

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Which does not necessarily include semen breath. Van de Velde claims that a “slight seminal odor” can be detected on a woman’s breath within an hour after intercourse, and that the effect can be very arousing for the man. Or anyway, the man who enjoys smelling semen. Van de Velde’s semen connoisseurship must surely have raised some eyebrows: “The semen of the healthy youths of Western European races has a fresh, exhilarating smell; in the mature man it is more penetrating. In type and degree this very characteristic seminal odour is remarkably like that of the flowers of the Spanish chestnut, which…are sometimes quite freshly floral, and then, again, extremely pungent….” Perhaps Van de Velde’s bitter outlook on the typical marriage (“that morass of disillusion and depression”) was traceable to something deeper than his distaste for his first wife.

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No one in Israel titters over the seeming irony of a sex therapy center in a hospital called Rambam. Rambam is short for the Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon (a.k.a Maimonides). Though I now associate him with rear-entry intercourse, the Rambam, as he is known there, was an important medieval Jewish philosopher.

†The “G” in G-spot stands for Grafenberg. The term was coined by G-spot popularizer and researcher Beverly Whipple. Whipple contemplated calling it the Whipple Spot, but refrained for the sake of her children and other innocent Whipples.

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As an alternative, one culture cuts the nipples off boys, to masculinize them. Bonaparte gives a quote obtained from a nipple-less Janjero tribesman by an anthropologist named Cerulli. “We do this because we do not wish to resemble women in any way.” A journal search turned up no mention of this practice; however, the Janjero were described as fierce hunters rumored to dally in human sacrifice, so presumably nipple-hacking would have been mere fluff to them.

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A fistula is an unwanted passageway that develops between two normally separate body cavities. Like tenors, there are three well-known vaginal fistulas. The Pavarotti of vaginal fistulas is the vesicovagino, linking bladder to vagina and allowing urine to dribble out where it oughtn’t. Ditto the urethral one. Most odiously, there is the rectovaginal fistula (an occasional complication of childbirth), which allows flatus and feces to leak out of the vagina. Nothing to sing about.

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I’m too polite to ask, but Alfred Kinsey wasn’t. In Kinsey’s landmark 1940s survey of American men, 26 to 28 percent of college-age rural males copped to having had “some animal experience to the point of orgasm.” In a few farm communities “where social restraints on this matter are less stringent,” the figure jumps to 65 percent. Calves, burros, and sheep are the preferred partners, probably because they’re the right height. There is no specific mention of pigs, except to say that “practically every other mammal that has ever been kept on the farm enters into the record, and a few of the larger birds, like chickens, ducks, and geese.”

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Or, if you lack a sense of fun, just a can of Boarmate. One two-second spritz at the snout does the trick if the gal’s in heat. Until very recently, you could go on the Web and download a Boarmate Audio File, where you could hear a British man talking very seriously, in an Alistair Cooke sort of way, about “boar odor spray.”

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Upon whom one may, if money is no object, use a Nasco Master Artificial Vagina, the “finest artificial vagina ever offered,” featuring “just right stiffness.” Or, for a stallion, the Nasco Missouri-Style Equine Artificial Vagina. (“The leather case permits the vagina to be carried easily….”)
Men, of course, are simply handed a magazine and a cup. There is a synthetic human vagina—called a syngina—but it is used in tampon R&D. Adman Jerry Della Femina, who once worked on a tampon account, joked in his book that if your campaign went especially well, you got to take the syngina to dinner.

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One of the less prominently known similarities between pigs and men: They both fondle breasts. No other males on the planet regularly do this.

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I love eighteenth-century science writing, because the humanity of it—the exhilaration of discovery and triumph—had not yet been stripped away. Check out Spallanzani’s next line: “Thus did I succeed in fecundating this quadruped; and I can truly say that I have never received greater pleasure upon any occasion since I have cultivated experimental philosophy.” You can practically hear the champagne corks popping, the whelps yipping underfoot.

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Since a male rat will mount and dismount many times before he ejaculates, this experiment required intimate knowledge of rodent sexuality. An unnamed junior staffer trained himself to “infallibly” recognize what he called the Sign of Ejaculation. Bearing no relation to the Sign of the Cross and only a passing similarity to the Mark of Zorro, the Sign of Ejaculation is a “deep final thrust.” This is followed by “a period of inertia” during which the male lies collapsed on the back of the female, provided, that is, that she hasn’t been plucked out from under him in the name of scientific inquiry.

†I find it hard not to project a sliver of sadism upon the scientists. The hamster guys are especially easy to mistrust, having stated in their paper that “the mated female was killed by a blow on the back of the head.”
Who clubs a hamster?
What would you even use to deliver “a blow” to a head that small?

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Finger-fucking.

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For anyone who doubts that bisexuality exists among farm animals, allow me to quote from chapter 4 of
The Artificial Insemination of Farm Animals
. Under item 4 of the section on using teaser cows to arouse a bull before taking his seed, we read that “males are just as effective as females for providing sexual stimulation and are more effective for some bulls.” Also arousing for bulls: the idea of the threesome. “Even two teasers which are ineffective when used singly may bring about stimulation when placed together.”

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Not to be trusted. Talmey also makes the claim that a woman deprived of semen—either because she’s not having sex or her man is using a condom—will suffer a “veritable thirst for sperma” and “eventually become a nervous wreck.” Ridiculous. Or is it? In 2002, a team of SUNY Albany psychologists published a paper called “Does Semen Have Antidepressant Properties?” Of 293 female college students who took a survey, those having sex without condoms were less depressed than condom users and women not having any sex. How depressed the women were was not linked to whether or not they were in a relationship or whether they were on the pill. Reactions to the paper, principal investigator Gordon Gallup, Jr., told me, have been “largely skeptical.”

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It’s especially sensitive when you’re an infertility patient who works as a professional inseminator. Anne Marie Hedeboe related the story of one of her colleagues who was traveling overseas to adopt a child. “You can imagine, he gets a lot of teasing.”

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It’s possible they also revealed Leonardo’s distaste for intercourse. Anatomist A. G. Morris describes one of the coition figures as a “quickly scrawled illustration…on the corner of a page filled with mechanical drawings of cranes, pulleys and levers.” It was as though Leonardo had set out to work on sex but got distracted by engineering—a scenario that no doubt plays itself out in reverse in the notebooks of countless college engineering students. “Copulation,” Leonardo wrote, “is awkward and disgusting.” He is said to have never bedded a woman.

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Scholars (and rubes like me) use Leonardo rather than da Vinci as a shortened print reference because da Vinci isn’t his surname. Da Vinci refers to where he was from: “of Vinci,” a town in Tuscany. Somewhere along the line, these place references began to be treated as regular surnames, sparing us from having to similarly exalt Leonardo DiCaprio.

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The indefatigable Arlene Shaner, at the New York Academy of Medicine, tracked down a portion of this collection for me. Photos arrived in my email box (“I hope you had a lovely Thanksgiving. I am attaching some Dickinson vaginas for you”) and knocked me flat. The castings are presented in beautiful arched alcoves, like bas-reliefs of saints on the walls of a chapel. Next time you’re in Brooklyn, stop by the SUNY Downstate archives and ask to see the Dickinson vulvas. Or, you know, don’t.

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Something of a theme for Marie Carmichael Stopes. Her popular and controversial sex manual
Married Love
was written while she was still a virgin. Either she got some things wrong, or she failed to follow her own advice: Stopes’s 1911 marriage was annulled, unconsummated, three years later.

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You are perhaps envisioning, as I did, a woman with her knees pulled up to her chest. It wasn’t until I reached Dickinson’s Figure 155 that I realized this wasn’t what he meant. The drawing shows a woman on her knees in a modified doggy-style posture, her chest and one ear pressed to the floor, as though listening for hoofbeats.

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A business anthropologist is someone who, among other things, helps corporations avoid cross-cultural misunderstandings. For example, the one that led PepsiCo to run an ad in the Chinese
Reader’s Digest
that said, “Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave!”—rather than the intended “Come alive with Pepsi!”

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“Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Male and Female Genitals During Coitus and Female Sexual Arousal” won the 2000 Ig Nobel Prize in medicine. (The annual Ig Nobel Prize is a parody of the Nobel Prize.) The award afforded Schultz’s team, if nothing else, the opportunity to hobnob with the Scottish emergency room doctors whose paper on toilet-inflicted buttock injuries—“The Collapse of Toilets in Glasgow”—took that year’s Ig Nobel in public health.

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The earliest orgasm on scientific record is that of a three-year-old girl whose mother spied on her and reported her behavior to Alfred Kinsey. Kinsey duly and unwisely—this was 1953—included a detailed description of it in
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
. Though he had no dealings with this child or others described in his book, he was accused of pederasty, a taint that dogged him for years.

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The California Exotic Novelties Web site features five pages of simulated vaginas, many of them crafted from molds of actual porn star orifices. Meaning that it’s altogether possible that, say, Alexis Amore made an appearance in the pages of
Evolution and Human Behavior
.

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The world record belongs to Grandmaster Tu Jin-Sheng, who, along with two fellow practitioners, pulled a flatbed delivery truck across a Taipei parking lot with their penises in October 2000. For those interested in learning the art, or perhaps starting their own penile delivery service, MartialArtsMart.com sells Tu’s video
Iron Crotch
.
I’m a little confused because the
Taipei Times
referred to this technique by the name yin diao gung, or “genitals hanging kung fu”—the fifth of the Nine Mysterious Kung Fus. Mysterious Kung Fu No. Six entails “drawing water back through the urinary tract and into the bladder by use of a drinking straw,” which does not ease my confusion.

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A comforting word about the crooked penis. Dr. Hsu says it is rare to see one that stands perfectly straight. Actually, what he said was: “Most men are communists! Lean to the left! Second most common: bow down, like Japanese gentleman! Number three, to the right. Four, up! Like elephant!”

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Actually, there’s a third, that runs beneath these two, but it’s a lesser player and we’re going to ignore it. Likewise, we are going to ignore the erectile tissue in the lining of the nose—which does, very occasionally, expand when its owner is sexually aroused. It too is made erect by increased blood flow. Nasal congestion is an erection inside your nose.

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Of course, you can use any old ring as a cock ring. In China, I saw rings of animal tail skin being sold for this purpose. Robert Latou Dickinson has a note in one of his files about the eyelids of a sheep, the lashes intended as a sort of ovine French tickler. Also on record: the handle hole in the head of a sledgehammer.
Trouble is, without a release latch, you might not get it back off again. In San Francisco, cock-ring emergencies are so common that they have their own shorthand (“C-Ring”) on the Fire Department teletype. The department’s Heavy Rescue Squad has modified a small circular saw especially for this purpose and occasionally stages practice drills. The latter prove challenging owing to the absence of manipulable genitalia on Resusci-Andy dolls and the refusal of male staff to volunteer as mock victims.
This footnote dedicated to former HR squadder Caroline Paul, who personally liberated four penises, including that of the sledgehammer guy, who did not say thank you.