Can a Woman Find Happiness with a Machine?
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et me state it simply. Women came into Masters and Johnson’s laboratory and had sex with a thrusting mechanical penis-camera that filmed —from the inside— their physical responses to it. The team shot footage of—as they put it, making arousal and orgasm sound like washing machine functions—“hundreds of complete cycles of sexual response.” The dildo-camera[12] unmasked, among many other things, the source of vaginal lubrication: not glandular secretions but plasma (the clear broth in which blood cells float) seeping through capillary walls in the vagina. It tackled the sucking cervix debate and uncovered the bizarre phenomenon of vaginal tenting (both of which we’ll get to later).
This, to me, is as good as science gets: a mildly outrageous, terrifically courageous, seemingly efficacious display of creative problem-solving, fueled by a bullheaded dedication to amassing facts and dispelling myths in a long-neglected area of human physiology. Kudos to the pair of them.
But I have a question. Who were these women having orgasms from nothing more than the straight-on, in-and — out motions of a plastic phallus? Some 70 percent of women report that intercourse—ungarnished by any add-on clito — ral stimulation—reliably fails to take them all the way to the spin cycle. Remove foreplay and love and lust from the equation, and the orgasms of Masters and Johnson’s “artificial coition” subjects are a rather startling achievement.
Especially if you buy what Masters and Johnson had to say about vaginal orgasm: i. e., that it doesn’t exist. The team compared the physiological elements of orgasms from (clitorally) masturbating and from intercourse, and they concluded that all the orgasms were, physiologically, the same. And all of them, they maintained, owed their existence to the clitoris. Yet I’m guessing that the artificial — coition machine, because you could not straddle it or position it just so atop you, maintained a frosty distance from the clitoris. (Subjects were either on their backs or on all fours, doggy-style.) So what, then, was bringing these women to their peak? “Penile traction on the labia minora,” said Masters and Johnson: Penis going into vagina pulls on labia, which in turn pull on clitoris.
In 1984, a team of Colombian researchers cast doubt on the notion of labial traction as an instigator of female orgasm. Heli Alzate was a physician and professor of sexology at Caldas University School of Medicine, and Maria Ladi Londono, his coauthor, was a psychotherapist with a diploma in psychology.* The team brought sixteen prostitutes (paid $16 each—several times the going rate of a Colombian trick)t and thirty-two unpaid feminists into their lab to map the erotic sensitivity of the vagina. Like this:
The examiner, with his or her hands washed, inserted his or her lubricated index and/or middle fingers in the subject’s vagina and proceeded to systematically friction both vaginal walls, applying a moderate-to-strong rhythmic pressure at an angle to the wall, going from lower to upper half of the vagina.
When Alzate or Londono located a subject’s sweet spot—which for most was on the front wall, but for some, the lower back wall—the spot was simultaneously pressed and stroked (a maneuver I have seen elsewhere described as a “come here” motion). More than three-quarters of the prostitutes Alzate “frictioned” in this manner had a vaginal orgasm. (Londono brought no subjects to climax; the women said that this was because she wasn’t pressing as hard as Alzate.) Only four of the feminists, though aroused, reached orgasm. Perhaps they were feeling uncomfortable ^Unfortunately for Londono, this meant that while Alzate has an M. D. after his name, she must appear in print as a DipPsy.
tWhich, in 1976, was $2.50. I learned this from another of Alzate’s papers, “Brothel Prostitution in Colombia,” this one researched via interviews and “by means of participant observation” (!).
with what many feminists might perceive to be an exploitative scenario.[13] Or perhaps they were simply less accustomed to sexual encounters with strangers.
Alzate was creating vaginal orgasms, but you couldn’t use a penis-camera to bring them on. A male organ in the missionary position travels parallel to the vaginal walls, not at an angle. To prove that their subjects’ orgasms were not being caused by traction created by the thrusting motions of the researcher’s fingers, Alzate and Londono set up a separate “simulated intercourse” test. This time no one came.
Six paid subjects that easily reached climax by stimulation of their vaginal erogenous zones were examined. The examiner rhythmically stimulated the lower third of the vagina with his index and middle fingers, mimicking the movements of the penis during coitus, and for the time required to elicit an orgasm by stimulation of the vaginal erogenous zone. Although a clear traction on the labia minora was evident, all subjects felt only a slight to moderate erotic sensation.
Penile thrusting on its own—with no foreplay or during — play—is, concluded Alzate, “an inefficient method of inducing female orgasm.”
Yet Masters and Johnson’s artificial coition subjects were getting off on nothing but the thrust. How so? Were they turned on by the idea of sex with a machine? Is there something about mechanical sex that I’m failing to grasp? William Masters is dead, and Virginia Johnson—communicating via her son Scott—resisted repeated wheedling, I mean requests, for an interview (She is eighty-one, and in declining health.) But perhaps I could at least pay a visit to the penis machine.
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asters and Johnson were tight-lipped on the topic of their artificial-coition machine. As far as I can tell, the most informative written material is this passage from Human Sexual Response:
The artificial coital equipment was created by radiophysicists. The penises are plastic and were developed with the same optics as plate glass. Cold — light illumination allows observation and recording without distortion. The equipment can be adjusted for physical variations in size, weight, and vaginal development. The rate and depth of penile thrust is initiated and controlled completely by the responding individual. As tension elevates, rapidity and depth of thrust are increased voluntarily, paralleling subjective demand.
The only other information the pair provided had to do with the equipment also being used for testing barrier-type contraceptive devices, which made sense, and “in the creation of artificial vaginas,” which made less sense. There was a footnote related to this latter bit, which made reference to two circa-1930 papers by Robert Frank and S. H. Geist, experts on the topic of vaginal agenesis. Some women, about 1 in 5,000, are born without a vagina, and some gynecologists—Frank and Geist prime among them—have made it their life’s calling to give them one. Before Frank and Geist came along, this might entail fashioning an ersatz vagina out of a piece of the woman’s intestine or—less (or possibly more) attractively—her rectum.
Frank and Geist thought it better and safer to simply stretch to its maximum the vaginal membrane the women had been born with. This was done by pushing in on it with a Pyrex tube[14] several times a day. When “a narrow canal at least 2Vi inches long” had been established, the women then widened the cavity by placing gradually larger Pyrex tubes inside their fledgling vaginas and leaving them in while they slept. Masters and Johnson realized that a few rounds with the artificial-coition machine might be a way to speed the process along.
The Frank and Geist papers, diverting though they were, did little to alter my impression of the artificial-coition machine as an artless and unarousing partner. I remained determined to see it. A 1996 A&E Television biography of Masters and Johnson mentioned the apparatus, but the producers told me they had not been given access to it or to any subjects who’d experienced it—or, for that matter, to any penis-camera footage.
I sent another letter to Virginia Johnson’s son. I told him that I only wanted to visit the artificial-coition machine or see some footage of it in action. Virginia Johnson need not even pop her head in to say good morning.
No reply. I phoned again. Scott gave me the sort of hello that wants very badly to be a good-bye. He said that any archival material—including anything relating to the artificial-coition sessions—had “probably been destroyed” to ensure the anonymity of the subjects. What about the machine? Surely it too hadn’t been destroyed.
He wouldn’t talk about it. He said: “We’re really not interested in getting involved. Follow?” (I later learned from sex researcher Roy Levin that before William Masters died, he told one of Levin’s research partners that the artificial — coition machine had been dismantled.)
And now you understand why I paid $20 to attend an event billed as follows: