What is Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex about?

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.

The contemporary reporting visits researchers studying arousal physiology, pain and pleasure overlap, erectile dysfunction treatments, and spinal cord injury. Roach participates in some of the research herself — she and her husband agree to be subjects in an ultrasound study that images the anatomical mechanics of intercourse. These sections are written with the right balance of specificity and good humor.

What distinguishes Bonk from the many popular books that purport to be about "the science of sex" is that Roach actually talks to the scientists and reads the papers. The conclusions are more modest and more interesting than popular accounts suggest: human sexual response is idiosyncratic, context-dependent, and surprisingly poorly understood. The book takes a serious subject and makes it approachable without dumbing it down.