Talk to Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex like its author wrote you back.
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What it argues
Bonk is Mary Roach's investigation into the science of human sexuality — not the pop psychology of relationships, but the actual research: what scientists have done inside laboratory settings to understand how sex works, what they've discovered, and why the field has been so difficult to pursue given institutional and cultural resistance. Roach approaches the subject with the same combination of scrupulous reporting and self-aware humor she brought to cadavers in Stiff, and the result is a book that manages to be simultaneously educational and genuinely funny.
The historical material is often jaw-dropping. Roach traces experiments going back to the 19th century, including surgeons grafting animal testicles onto men in the 1920s, Kinsey's meticulous but ethically contested research methods, and the extraordinary work of Masters and Johnson, who spent years observing human sexual response in a laboratory with volunteer subjects and instrumented equipment. The chapter on the history of vibrator research alone rewrites most of what popular culture claims about Victorian medicine.
What it gets right
- 1.
Scientific study of human sexual response is far more recent and methodologically limited than most people assume, hampered by funding restrictions and institutional discomfort.
- 2.
Masters and Johnson's laboratory research in the 1950s and 60s was genuinely groundbreaking — and ethically complicated. Their methodology would not pass modern review boards.
- 3.
The anatomy of female sexual response was poorly understood for most of medical history, partly because male researchers dominated the field and partly because of cultural avoidance.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Mary Roach is an American science writer known for bringing humor and rigorous reporting to subjects most writers avoid. She is the author of seven books, including Stiff, Packing for Mars, Gulp, and Grunt, each exploring a different area of human biology or applied science. Roach has written for National Geographic, Outside, and Wired, among others. Her books reliably combine firsthand reporting, archival research, and a willingness to ask experts the questions everyone else is too polite to raise.
