Foreplay

man sits in a room, manipulating his kneecaps. It is 1983, on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles. The man, a study subject, has been told to do this for four minutes, stop, and then resume for a minute more. Then he can put his pants back on, collect his pay­ment, and go home with an entertaining story to tell at suppertime. The study concerns human sexual response. Kneecap manipulation elicits no sexual response, on this planet anyway, and that is why the man is doing it: It’s the control activity. (Earlier, the man was told to manipulate the more usual suspect while the researchers measured whatever it was they were measuring.)

I came upon this study while procrastinating in a medical school library some years ago. It had never really occurred to me, before that moment, that sex has been studied in labs, just like sleep or digestion or exfoliation or any other pocket of human physiology. I guess I had known it; I’d just never given it much thought. I’d never thought about what it must be like, the hurdles and the hassles that the researchers faced—raised eyebrows, suspicious wives, gossiping colleagues. Imagine a janitor or a freshman or the president of UCLA opening the door on the kneecap scene without knocking. Requesting that a study subject twiddle his knees is not immoral or indecent, but it is very hard to explain. And even harder to fund. Who sponsors these studies, I wondered. Who volunteers for them?

It’s not surprising that the study of sexual physiology, with a few notable exceptions, did not get rolling in earnest until the 1970s. William Masters and Virginia Johnson said of their field in the late 1950s, “… science and scientist con­tinue to be governed by fear—fear of public opinion, . . . fear of religious intolerance, fear of political pressure, and, above all, fear of bigotry and prejudice—as much within as without the professional world.” (And then they said, “Oh, what the hell,” and built a penis-camera.) The retired Brit­ish sex physiologist Roy Levin told me that the index of his edition of Essential Medical Physiology, a popular textbook in the sixties, had no entry for penis, vagina, coitus, erection, or ejaculation. Physiology courses skipped orgasm and arousal, as though sex were a secret shame and not an everyday bio­logical event.

One of Levin’s earliest projects was to profile the chemical properties of vaginal secretions, the only bodily fluid about which virtually nothing was known. The female moistnesses are the first thing sperm encounter upon touchdown, and so, from a fertility perspective alone, it was an important thing to know. This seemed obvious to him, but not to some of his colleagues in physiology. Levin can recall overhearing a pair of them sniping about him at the urinals during the conference where he presented his paper. The unspoken assumption was that he was some­how deriving an illicit thrill from calculating the ion con­centrations of vaginal fluids. That people study sex because they are perverts.

Or, at the very least, because they harbor an unseemly interest in the matter. Which makes some people wary of sex researchers and other people extremely interested. “People invariably draw all these conclusions about me, about why I’m studying this,” says researcher Cindy Meston of the University of Texas at Austin. That Meston is blond and beautiful compounds the problem. If you are sitting next to Cindy Meston on a plane and you ask her what she does, she will either lie to you or she will say, “I do psychophysi­ological research.” She loses most of them there. “If they persist, I say something like, ‘Well, we use various visual and auditory stimuli to look at autonomic nervous system reactivity in various contexts.’ That usually does the trick.”

Even when a researcher carefully explains a sex-related project—its purpose and its value—people may still suspect he or she is a perv. Last year, I was conversing by e-mail with an acquaintance who was investigating the black mar­ket in cadaver parts. She came into possession of a sales list for a company that provides organs and tissues for research. On the list was “vagina with clitoris.” She did not believe that there could be a legitimate research purpose for cadaver genitalia. She assumed the researcher had procured the part to have sex with it. I replied that physiologists and people who study sexual dysfunction still have plenty to learn about female arousal and orgasm, and that I could, with little trouble, imagine someone needing such a thing. Besides, I said to this woman, if the guy wanted to nail the thing, do you honestly think he’d have bothered with the clitoris?

Early studies of sexual physiology came at it sideways, via studies of fertility, obstetrics and gynecology, and vene­real disease. Even working in these areas tended to invite scorn and suspicion. Gynecologist James Platt White was expelled from the American Medical Association in 1851 after inviting medical students to observe a (consenting) woman in labor and delivery. His colleagues had been outraged over the impropriety of a male doctor looking at female genitalia.* In 1875, a gynecologist named Emo Nograth was booed while delivering a talk on venereal dis­ease at the newly formed American Gynecological Society. The sex researcher and historian Vern Bullough, in the 1970s, landed on an FBI list of dangerous Americans for his “subversive activities” (e. g., publishing scholarly papers about prostitution and working for the American Civil Lib­erties Union to decriminalize, among other things, oral sex and the wearing of dresses by men).

It wasn’t until the past half century that lab-based sci­ence embraced the pursuit of better, more satisfying sex. Sexual dysfunction had to be medicalized, and the pharma­ceutical companies had to get interested. It’s still an uphill slog. The current conservative political climate has made funding scarce. Meston plans to seek funding to research fertility—a subject that’s easy to fund but does not interest her—simply to help keep her lab afloat. Several researchers told me they keep the titles of their grant proposals inten­tionally vague, using the word physiological, for example, in place of sexual.

This book is a tribute to the men and women who dared. Who, to this day, endure ignorance, closed minds, righteousness, and prudery. Their lives are not easy. But their cocktail parties are the best.

^Incredibly, Victorian physicians practiced gynecology and urology on women without looking. Even a catheter insertion would typically be done blind, with the doctor’s hands under the sheets and his gaze heading off in some polite middle distance. Fortunately, budding M. D.’s were allowed to look upon—and rehearse upon—cadaver genitals, and that is how they learned to practice the Braille edition of their craft.

eople who write popular books about sex endure a milder if no less inevitable scrutiny. My first book was about human cadavers, and as a result, people assumed that I’m obsessed with death. Now that I have written books about both sex and death, God only knows what the word on the street is.

I am obsessed with my research, not by nature but serially: book by book and regardless of topic. All good research—whether for science or for a book—is a form of obsession. And obsession can be awkward. It can be down­right embarrassing. I have no doubt that I’m a runningjoke at the interlibrary loan department of the San Francisco Public Library, where I have requested, over the past two years, papers with titles like “On the Function of Groan­ing and Hyperventilation During Intercourse” and “An Anal Probe for Monitoring Vascular and Muscular Events During Sexual Response.” Last summer, I was in a medi­cal school library xeroxing a journal article called “Vac­uum Cleaner Use in Autoerotic Death”[1] when the paper jammed. I could not bring myself to ask the copy room attendant to help me, but quietly moved over to the adja­cent machine and began again.

It’s not just library personnel. It’s friends and family, and casual acquaintances. It’s Frank, the manager of the building where I rent a small office. Frank is a kind and dear man whose build and seeming purity of heart call to mind that enraptured bear in the Charmin commercials. He had stopped by one afternoon to chat about this and that—the Coke machine vandal, odd odors from the beauty school down the hall. At one point in the conversation, I crossed my legs, knocking over a copy of a large hardback that was propped against the side of my desk. The book slammed flat on the floor, face up. Atlas of Human Sex Anatomy, yelled the cover in 90-point type. Frank looked down, and I looked down, and then we went back to talking about the Coke machine. But nothing has been quite the same since.

I like to think that I never completely disappear down the pike. I like to think that I had a lot of miles to go before I got to the point where I was as consumed by the topic as, say, William Masters was. Masters is dead, but I met a St. Louis social worker who used to work in the same building with him. This man told a story about a particularly trou­bling case he was working on. The father in the case had told him, that morning, that he wasn’t all that concerned about his wife gaining custody of their children, because if it happened, he would go and slit their throats. The case was being decided in court the following Monday The social worker wanted to call the police, but worried that it would be a violation of confidentiality. Distraught, he consulted the only other professional he could find in the building that morning. (It happened to be Thanksgiving.) It was Dr. Masters.

Masters directed the social worker to take a seat on the other side of his enormous rosewood desk, and the man unrolled his dilemma. Masters listened intently, staring at the man from beneath a hedge of chaotic white eye­brows. When the social worker finished talking, there was a moment of quiet. Then Masters spoke: “Have you asked this man whether he has difficulty achieving or maintain­ing an erection?”

ears ago, I wrote for a women’s magazine that tolerated the wanton use of first person among writers such as myself. One month they ran a first-person piece written by a young woman who had had vaginismus. I was acquainted with this woman—I’ll call her Ginny—and her piece was tastefully and competently written. Nonetheless, I could not read it without cringing. I did not want to know about Ginny and her boyfriend and their travails with Ginny’s clamping vagina.[2] I would be seeing her at the magazine’s holiday party in a few weeks, and now I’d be thinking clamping vagina, clamping vagina, clamping vagina as we dipped celery sticks and chatted about our work.

Sex is one of those rare topics wherein the desire for others to keep the nitty-gritty of their experiences pri­vate is stronger even than the wish to keep mum on one’s own nitty-gritty. I would rather have disclosed to my own mother, in full detail and four-part harmony, the events of a certain summer spent sleeping my way through the back­packer hotels of South America than to have heard her, at the age of seventy-nine, say to me, “Your father had some trouble keeping an erection.” (I had it coming: I’d asked about the six-year gap between my brother’s birth and mine.) I remember the moment clearly. I felt like Alvy in Annie Hall, where he’s standing on a Manhattan sidewalk talking to an elderly couple about how they keep the spark in their marriage, and the old man says, “We use a large, vibrating egg.”

I’ve been tripping over the cringe factor all year. It is my habit and preference, as a writer, to go on the scene and report things as they happen. When those things are hap­pening to subjects in sex research labs, this is sometimes impossible. The subjects are queasy about it or the research­ers or the university’s human subjects review board, and sometimes all three. There are times when the only way to gain entree into the world of laboratory sex is to be the queasy one yourself: to volunteer. These passages make up a tiny sliver of the book, but writing them was a challenge. All the more so for having dragged my husband into it. My solution was to apply the stepdaughter test. I imagined Lily and Phoebe reading these passages, and I tried to write in a way that wouldn’t mortify them. Though I’ve surely failed that test, I remain hopeful that the rest of you won’t have reason to cringe.

I promise, no vibrating eggs.