The Old Weblog

Salon interviews Mary Roach on her new book “Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex.” It turns out that we know very little about sexual behaviors. The study of physiological underpinnings of sexual arousal is an active area of scientific research, although it not a very easy topic to discuss through behavioral questionnaires.

Roach briefly talks about Kinsey, who’s life achievements found its way to celluloid in an extremely well renowned biopic of the same name. The challenges faced by Kinsey in the early 1900s still persist for sex researchers. Roach talks about how sex researchers are still thought of “kind of perverts.”

“If somebody on an airplane says ‘Well, what do you do?’ I don’t say, ‘I’m a sex researcher.’” Because they inevitably think you’re a pervert, or you must really dig sex. Whereas if you’re a geneticist, people don’t think: “Oh, you must really dig genes!” Sex researchers get that all the time — a lot of raised eyebrows.

Not surprisingly, this attitude also ends up affecting the funding flowing to sex researchers.

… in the age of the Internet because now conservative groups can go to these databases of government-funded research and plug in keywords, like “sexual” or “penis,” and then get a listing of these researchers whom they want to then “expose” as “spending government dollars on frivolous, immoral research.”

The interview is a candid look into what troubles sex researchers of today and how they work around these societal barriers.

I’m placing Bonk on my bookshelf of to-reads.