If Two Are Good, Would Three Be Better? W hen you are eighty-two years old and you have sixty — four wives, you need all the help you can summon. For Kamil Pasha, a vizier (bigwig) in the Ottoman Empire, help took the form of testicle consomme. The broth, which the Pasha quaffed daily, was […]

Creative Approaches to Impotence a man having penis surgery is the opposite of a man in a fig leaf He is concealed face-to-feet in surgical sheets, with only his penis on view. It appears in a small, square cutout in the fabric, spotlit by surgical lamps. To lie completely naked would preserve more modesty, for […]

The Diverting World of Coital Imaging t hough two will lie down, the bed is a single. It is a hos­pital bed, but more enticing than most. The bottom sheet is crisp and smoothed, and the bedclothes have been turned down invitingly, at an angle. Two sets of towels and hospital johnnies are stacked neatly […]

Does Orgasm Boost Fertility;and What Do Pigs Know About It? t he inseminators wear white. Their coveralls are white and their boots are white, and they themselves are white too, it being the tail end of a long, dark winter in Denmark. Their names are Martin, Morten, and Thomas, and they have twenty sows to […]

The Woman Who Moved Her Clitoris,and Other Ruminations on Intercourse Orgasms O nce upon a time, there was a princess named Marie. She had long, thick curls and beautiful brown eyes, and her clitoris was three centimeters away from her vagina. This last bit was very depressing for the princess. She could never manage an […]

Masters and Johnson, it turns out, are not the only sex — machine game in town. An entire subculture exists, with enthusiasts all over the country trading tips on Internet listservs. With the 2006 publishing of Sex Machines: Photo­graphs and Interviews, they even have their own coffee-table book. Coincidentally, a few days after the dispiriting […]

Can a Woman Find Happiness with a Machine? I 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 […]

Highlights from the Pioneers ofHuman Sexual Response a lbert R. Shadle was the world’s foremost expert on the sexuality of small woodland creatures. If you visit the library at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, in Bloomington, Indiana, you will find six reels of audio recordings Shadle made of “skunk and […]

a 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, […]