The Upsuck Chronicles

Does Orgasm Boost Fertility;
and What Do Pigs Know About It?

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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 inseminate before noon. An informal competition exists among the inseminators of 0eslevgaard Farm, I am told—not to inseminate more sows than any­one else, but to inseminate them better. To produce the most piglets.

To win requires patience and finesse in an area few men know anything about: the titillation of the female pig. Research by the Department for Nutrition and Reproduc­tion at Denmark’s National Committee for Pig Produc­tion showed that sexually stimulating a sow while you artificially inseminate her leads to a 6 percent improve­ment in fertility. This in turn led to a government-backed

Five-Point Stimulation Plan for pig farmers, complete with instructional DVD and color posters to tack on barn walls. It also led to a certain amount of awkwardness on the part of Danish pig farmers, most of whom do inseminations themselves. (Gone are the days of the roving Boar Truck, a man and a pig who drove the length and breadth of Den­mark, servicing sows—and unwittingly spreading pig dis­ease from farm to farm.)

Martin, Morten, and Thomas are in the break room, eating bread with jam and drinking coffee from a slim steel thermos. They are uncomfortable speaking English, and I speak no Danish. We are dependent on Anne Marie Hede — boe, a visiting pig production researcher whose colleague Mads Thor Madsen drafted the Five-Point Stimulation Plan for sows. The mood in the room is a little starched. I called Morten Martin. I referred to the owner of the farm as “Boss Man,” which sounds like the Danish for “snot.” Unspoken questions hover in the air: Do you find it arousing to stimulate a sow? How often are young male farmworkers caught getting fresh with the stock?[26] For their part, the inseminators must be wondering why on earth I’ve come here.

I could not adequately explain to them, but I will explain to you. Please don’t worry. This chapter is not about pig sex. It is about female orgasm and whether it serves a purpose
outside the realm of pleasure. What is accepted dogma in the pig community—that the uterine contractions caused by stimulation and/or orgasm draw in the sperm and boost the odds of conception—was for hundreds of years the subject of lively debate in medical circles. You don’t hear much these days about uterine “upsuck”—or “insuck,” as it was also known—and I’m wondering: Do the pigs know something we don’t know?

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he job of a production pig is to produce more pigs, as many pigs as is pigly possible. The sows of 0eslevgaard shuttle back and forth between the “service” (insemination) barn and the open-floored nursing and weaning barns, where they sprawl flank-to-flank, a mounded porcine land mass. Anne Marie and I are standing around in the insemi­nation barn. Here the sows are briefly confined in narrow pens separated by metal railings. It’s like living inside a shopping cart. They seem to be in good spirits nonetheless. This may have to do with boar No. 433, a brown and white Duroc with testicles as big as a punching bag.

Thomas has hold of No. 433’s tail, steering him from behind into a large enclosure that flanks the pens of the twenty sows in heat. No. 443 is a “teaser boar.” His pres­ence in the barn primes the sows for what’s to come. It is not a quiet presence. The grunts of a sexually aroused boar are a soundtrack from a horror film: the deep, guttural, satanic noises of human speech slowed way down on tape. When I replayed my cassette, weeks later, I tried speeding it up to see if it would sound like speech. Perhaps I would decipher the secret language of pigs. It just sounded like someone retching.

The boar moves along the row of sow snouts protrud­ing through the bars, rubbing each one with his own. “This is what he does,” yells Anne Marie over the grunting and the banging of metal grates. “He slobbers on them.” Boar saliva has a pheromone—a chemical that primes a sow in heat for mating. Strictly speaking, you do not need a boar, because you can buy a Scippy[27]—a remote-controlled plas­tic boar doused with Boarmate synthetic boar odor spray. Anne Marie’s coworker Mads, who resembles a Danish Javier Bardem, if that is possible, told me about them. Mads has an endearing affection for absurdity, which must serve him well in this line of work. He dug up a picture of Scippy on his computer while I was there. “See? He’s nice and pink, and he goes on wheels. It’s very nice. He just has to smell and grunt. He has an MP3 player.” Then Mads sank a little lower in his chair. “We bought one and tried him, and he didn’t work, and the farmers didn’t want him.” Scippy lives in the closet now.

Number 433 has a politician’s deft timing, staying just long enough to make each contact seem personal, but never lingering so long that the other sows lose patience. They seem not to mind that a viscous, salival froth clings to the boar’s chin like a Santa Claus beard.

The smell of the boar is heavy and repugnant. Anne Marie said that when she flies back from farms in northern Denmark, businessmen coming down the aisle often ask if they may sit beside her. Anne Marie is young and pretty. “I say, ‘It’s alright, but I smell.’ They think it’s a joke, and they sit down.” And regret it the whole way home.

Anne Marie has short, mahogany-hued hair set off by a pair of stylish green eyeglasses. We too are wearing coveralls and boots, to protect the pigs from any patho­gens on our clothes and to protect our clothes from the smell. A full day after leaving the farm, I realize that a noticeable pall of boar stink clings to my pen and note­pad. Anne Marie must wash the enviable glasses after each visit. When we go to lunch, a couple seated behind us gets up and moves.

Anne Marie’s beauty and style belie a down-and-dirty education in the particulars of practical AI (artificial insem­ination). She has milked a boar of his prodigious ejacu­late—over two hundred milliliters (a cup), as compared to a man’s three milliliters—and she has done it with her hand. For, unlike stallions and bulls,[28] boars don’t cotton to artificial vaginas. (In part, because their penis, like their tail, is corkscrewed.) AI techs must squeeze the organ in their hand—hard and without letup—for the entire duration of the ejaculation: from five to fifteen minutes. “You should see the size of their hands,” she says, of the men and women who regularly ejaculate boars.

Anne Marie’s training also covered the use of artificial vaginas (for bulls). As the bull mounts a dummy cow—a sort of heavy-duty ironing board with hair—a techni­cian, seated alongside, quickly slips the organ into a hand­held artificial vagina. It is important to stay focused. “Our instructor was talking to us, not really paying attention, and the bull mounted his coat sleeve.” Fortunately for the man and his dry cleaner, the bull ejaculates a scant eight milliliters.

Martin, Morten, and Thomas are making sure the twenty sows are still in heat. A simple indicator is the ears, and whether they are standing up straight. Normally, they flop forward and there is a coy sweetness to the way a sow peeks out from under. (Apologies to the margarine people, but the Blue Bonnet lady comes to mind.) The other way to tell is to sit on her back; if she lets you, she’s in heat.

The steps of the stimulation plan mimic the boar’s rather uncouth courtship behaviors. Martin places his hand—though the boar would use his snout—at a sow’s inguinal fold, the place where the back leg meets the belly, and then lifts her an inch or so off the ground. He does this four times. Boars are not gentle and so the inseminators are not either. Martin hefts the sow and lets her drop, bounc­ing her up and down as though testing her shocks.

Now he moves around behind her. He pushes rhyth­mically just below the pink fleshy bulge that is her vulva. Again, the boar would be using his snout. Martin and Thomas use their fist. Morten, who is working up the sow two stalls down, is using his knee.

“Morten?” I want to ask him if he feels odd doing this.

Anne Marie leans over to speak in my ear. “That is Martin.”

Martin indicates that maybe he did at first, but he does not now. As Kaj, the farm’s owner, said earlier, “It’s just how it is.” There is, however, a limit to what a pig farmer will do in the name of higher farrowing rates. I asked Anne Marie whether they had tried stimulating the sow’s clitoris.

“We thought of trying this. But actually it was a big hurdle just to get farmers to touch underneath the vulva.”

And in pigs, lucky pigs, the clitoris is inside the vagina. “So we thought, let’s not mention the clitoris right now.” How­ever, it is possible to purchase a specialty sow vibrator. The Reflexator is made by a Belgian agricultural supply com­pany called Schippers-MS. Mads keeps one hidden behind a row of binders on his bookshelf but brings it out with almost no prodding. The design was recently modified so that no insertion is required of the farmers, who tend, even in a progressive country like Denmark, to be conservative. A hook now allows the Reflexator to hang benignly on the sperm feeder tube; the vibrations travel along the tube, so that hopefully, quoting Mads, “nobody has to feel funny.” Except that they do. Mads estimates that fewer than 1 per­cent of Danish pig farmers Reflexate their sows.

The original stimulation plan had six steps, not five, but the last has been deemed, says Anne Marie, “too much.” The training video—but not the poster—includes a shot of a handsome, suntanned Dane lying on a sow, his chest pressed to her back. With one hand, he reaches down beneath her to rub her mammaries and squeeze her teats.[29] A close-up highlights a gold wedding ring, as though to reassure the viewer that nothing untoward is going to hap­pen between these two.

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he linking of sexual delight and fertility, for right or for wrong, dates as far back as Western medicine itself. Hip­pocrates, the famous Greek “Father of Medicine,” believed that female orgasm was linked, like men’s, to a bursting- forth of seed—in this case, deep within the unfathomable female interior. The commingling of male and female seed was thought to spark conception. No orgasm, no babies. Then along came that other famous Greek, Aristotle, to make the point that it is altogether possible for women to get pregnant from an interlude that did not culminate in orgasm. You never see anything written about Mrs. Hippo­crates or Mrs. Aristotle, but I’d put a few drachmas on the former being the one with the spring in her step.

Happily for Western women, it was the Hippocratic version that stuck. Even long after the concept of wom­anly seed had been debunked, the notion that simultaneous orgasm bettered the chances of conception lingered on. It made a great deal of intuitive sense. If the man’s climax was essential to the makings of new life, surely the woman’s was similarly invested. Indeed, for centuries, physicians routinely advised men on the importance of pleasuring their wives. Marriage manual author Theodoor Van de Velde quotes an imperial physician’s advice to eighteenth — century Habsburg empress Maria Theresa, who was slow to conceive: “I am of the opinion that the vulva of Your Most Sacred Majesty should be titillated for some length of time before intercourse.” Evidently, it was sound advice; she eventually had sixteen children.

Ironically, given the goings-on in the swine farm today, it was artificial insemination that put the formal kibosh on medically sanctioned titillation. In 1777, inquisitive Italian scientist Lazzaro Spallanzani “chose a bitch of moderate size, . . . confined her in an apartment and kept the key” so as to prevent insemination of the more usual variety. Twenty-three days later, when she was clearly in heat, he “attempted to fecundate her artificially in the following manner. A young dog of the same breed furnished me, by a spontaneous emission, with 19 grains of seed.” The semen was syringed into the vagina of the bitch, who, sixty-two days later, “brought forth 3 lively whelps.”[30] The experi­ment raises important questions. Who agreed to let Spal­lanzani lock a stray dog in their apartment for twenty-three days? Did he really expect us to buy the bit about the male dog spontaneously ejaculating? But the main point here is that the needle of a small syringe is unlikely to cause a bitch much pleasure, and thus pleasure could be assumed irrelevant—or certainly not necessary—when it came to conception.

In 1840, a different dog, breed unknown, reopened the case file on orgasm as an aid to conception. A German anatomist named Hausmann killed a bitch while she was mating and then—presumably allowing a moment or two to disengage the flummoxed male from the proceedings— picked up his scalpel and opened her up. Though the male had ejaculated only moments before, semen had already reached the uterus. This suggested that something other than the sperms’ lashing tails was propelling them through the reproductive tract. Uterine contractions seemed a likely candidate. Since these contractions are a hallmark of orgasm, Hausmann supposed that it was some version of canine bliss that served to suck the sperm through the cer­vix and into the uterus. It makes intuitive sense: Orgasm causes a release of oxytocin—the “joy hormone,” also involved in nursing—and oxytocin is known to cause uter­ine contractions.

Five years later, a second dog experiment confirmed what Hausmann had found, as did an 1853 guinea pig experiment, a 1930 rat experiment,[31] a 1931 rabbit experi­ment, and a 1960 golden hamster experiment. t In all cases the sperm were found to have traveled, within seconds or at most a few minutes, a distance that would take the sperm considerably longer to traverse under their own steam. But since none of these animals can be assumed to possess the same anatomical responses as a woman, the studies are inconclusive as regards human fertility.

The other trouble with these studies was that none of these researchers could say for sure that it was the female’s sexual bliss that was causing the contractions that moved the sperm along, rather than some other facet of the mating process. Human semen, for instance, contains a hormone called prostaglandin, which causes powerful contractions when it comes in contact with a woman’s uterus. (For this reason, when fertility doctors place sperm in a woman’s uterus, they use a la carte sperm, “washed” of its semen.)

This is why a team of fearless Illinois researchers, in 1939, took to sexually stimulating rabbits themselves; they wanted to take semen out of the equation. The stimulation was done, they wrote, “with the finger,” a phrasing that seems to suggest a piece of specialty lab equipment or a disembodied digit of unknown ownership rather than the flesh and blood of the researcher himself. Happily, these rabbits’ lives were spared, for the observations were made via fluoroscope. Before the stimulating commenced, a dye was injected into the rabbit’s vagina. This was then seen on the fluoroscope screen, poststimulation, to have spread upward into the uterus within two to five minutes.

The best animal evidence that sexual responses produce uterine contractions comes from the old water-balloon — in-the-cow study. In 1952, a different team of Illinois researchers inserted the thumbs of latex gloves into the uteri of four cows and filled them with water. The balloons were linked to a device that registered the movements of the cows’ uteri as pressure on the balloon. As the research­ers expected, powerful uterine contractions were detected after a bull was brought in to “mount, copulate, and ejacu­late” (a process clocked, tragically, at under five seconds). More surprising was that, with all four cows, the machine began registering uterine contractions the moment the bull walked into sight.

What does this mean? Does a cow have a mild orgasm when she merely casts her gaze upon a bull? Can we be sure these uterine contractions imply orgasm? Does any­one know for sure that female animals have orgasms?

Let us check in with the sows.

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he inseminators are working side by side. Morten is lagging behind slightly. He is just now inserting a semen feeder tube into the pig he’s working on. He wears the look of concentration and vague worry that my hus­band wears while snaking the bathroom drain. He tugs gently, making sure the placement is good and then holds up the semen pouch like an IV bag. Next he climbs on the sow’s back. This is intended as a substitute for the weight of the boar. He bounces slightly to mimic the male’s movements. All three men are now sitting on the backs of a sow. They look like people on an antique merry-go — round where everyone, not just the last two to board, has to ride a pig.

One by one, the semen bags are drained. It happens abruptly, sometimes after a few seconds, sometimes after a few minutes. Patience is key. You never rush a sow. (For this reason, there is no clock in the insemination area.) Thomas is said to have a way with the sows. His focus is unwavering. He never talks on his cell phone, as Kaj some­times does. He pushes the sow’s mammaries with his boots and rubs the sow’s neck and behind her ears, though these things are not prescribed on the poster.

Anne Marie and I watch as Thomas’s sow draws in the contents of the semen bag. It happens so fast you expect to hear that sucking noise from a straw at the bottom of a milkshake. The sow appears calm and content, but she does not appear to inhabit a frenzied, ecstatic physical state. I ask Anne Marie whether this pig is having an orgasm.

“We don’t know,” she answers. “And to be honest? We don’t really care whether she has an orgasm. We just know these contractions seem to improve the semen transport and the fertility.” I must have registered chagrin, because she was quick to add, “Me in person, I think it would be nice for her. But it doesn’t improve the economy of pig production.”

I watch Martin’s sow carefully, to see if her expression shifts as the semen is drawn in. I cannot discern a change. Anne Marie cautions against making assumptions. Pigs can be in a great deal of pain, she says, without it registering obvi­ously on their faces, so presumably intense pleasure might not register either—or not in a way we recognize. Animal and human faces are wired quite differently. Our mouths and lower faces are generally more mobile and expressive than those of animals. Whereas animals express emotions more with their upper face—in particular, their ears.

Few scientific studies directly address the question of animal orgasm, because most researchers, like Anne Marie, have little reason to care. One who cared was a graduate student I’ll call Carl Kendall. In his master’s the­sis “Orgasm in Female Primates,” Kendall relates that he “manually stimulated the circumclitoral area and vagina of several adult, adolescent, and juvenile chimpanzee females.” What ensued? Orgasms. How did he know? He felt it. “During intravaginal stimulation,[32] perivaginal mus­cular contractions of about .8-second duration and about one second apart were palpated. The average number of digital thrusts (at an approximate rate of one to two per second) performed before the onset of the contractions was 20.3.” Meaning that the chimps were having orgasms after as little as ten or fifteen seconds of thrusting. As speedy as this sounds, it’s not speedy enough; male chimps ejaculate after five to seven seconds. Meaning that Kendall was most likely delivering a rare treat. By the end of the passage, his scientific veneer had eroded somewhat: “On one occasion,

. . . this female reached back to grasp the thrusting hand of the experimenter and tried to force it more deeply into her vagina.”

Kendall reported that when a female colleague watched one of the “experimental sessions,” she found it hard to believe that the ape was having an orgasm, because the ani­mal’s face registered so little emotion or pleasure—even while Kendall was “palpating intense vaginal contractions.”

And there is your answer. Female animals can have orgasms, after very little stimulation, and without it regis­tering on their faces.

And sometimes with it registering on their faces. Endo­crinologist D. A. Goldfoot studied stump-tailed macaques, a primate species in which the female is occasionally observed making the same round-mouthed “ejaculation face” that the males make. (A photograph is included in the paper; picture a person blowing smoke rings.) Inter­estingly, the face was observed most often on females that had mounted another female and been making thrusting motions.

To be sure the stump-tails’ facial expression corre­sponded to orgasmlike contractions—rather than being merely an imitation of male behavior—Goldfoot put a strain gauge in the uterus of an especially enthusiastic female “mounter” and then put her in an enclosure with five other females. A graph charting the force of the mon­key’s uterine contractions appears in the study. During the nine seconds that she wore her ejaculation face, an enor­mous protracted peak appears on the graph.

Alfred Kinsey brings us additional evidence of female — to-female bliss in the animal kingdom. Cows mounting and thrusting upon other cows, he writes in Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, will sometimes give “a sudden lunge at the peak of response. . . then drop back into inactivity as though they had experienced orgasm.”[33] Kinsey’s source for the cow “data” is our old friend Dr. Shadle, at that time a lecturer at the University of, delightfully, Buffalo.

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hile it is often true that people are pigs, it is never the case that pigs are people. If you really want to know how sperm make their way into a woman’s uterus and whether orgasm has anything to do with it, you should probably study a woman rather than a pig or a monkey. This fact was not lost on history’s gynecologists, and they have done their best, if not always their brightest. A nineteenth — century physician named Joseph Beck writes in his 1874 paper “How Do the Spermatozoa Enter the Uterus?” that inquiring medical minds have upon occasion done autop­sies of women who died suddenly during sex. Beck does not say how the women died, but let us assume—or any­way hope—that they died of a heart attack or stroke brought on by an intense orgasm, and not a blow to the back of the head by an overzealous man of science. As with the ham­sters and the dogs and the rats, sperm were typically found to have already made their way to the woman’s uterus.

Beck felt confident that some sort of uterine upsuck happened during orgasm, and that this was pulling the

sperm along toward the egg. The only way to know for sure, he wrote, would be to watch the cervix “during the sexual orgasm.” And that is what he did. Helping him out was a thirty-two-year-old blonde with a prolapsed uterus (and, Beck adds, for no particular reason, persistent consti­pation and acne). In other words, this woman’s cervix—the gateway to her uterus—was parked in plain view, directly inside the opening of her vagina. Conveniently, this was a woman of such “passionate nature,” as she herself warned Beck, that he must be careful in his examinations. For she was “very prone… to have the sexual orgasm induced by a slight contact of the finger.”

Beck took advantage of this rather exceptional set of circumstances. “Carefully, therefore, separating the labia with my left hand, so that the [cervix] was brought clearly into view in the sunlight, I now swept my right forefinger quickly three or four times across the space between the cervix and the pubic arch, when almost immediately the orgasm occurred, and the following is what was presented to my view: . . . Instantly that the height of excitement was at hand, the [cervix] opened itself to the extent of fully an inch, as nearly as my eye could judge, made five or six suc­cessive gasps as it were. . . .” To bolster the case for upsuck, Beck points out that the cervix reminded him “precisely” of the pendulous upper lip and round mouth of a freshwa­ter fish called the sucker.

Beck had convinced himself that “the passage of sper­matic fluid into the uterus is explained fully, satisfactorily, and in every way beyond the shadow of a doubt.” Just in case, he throws in a quote from a noted peer: gynecologist Marion Sims. Sims envisioned the cervix as “an India rub­ber bottle slightly compressed so as to expel a portion of its contents before placing its mouth in a fluid.” “Hear him!” cries Beck, adding, in an impressive display of professional upsuck, “Indeed words are powerless to express my admi­ration for his acuteness.”

Beck carries on with corroboration from his col­leagues, each of whom had stumbled onto his own version of Beck’s excitable, prolapsed blonde. Either women have changed since the early 1900s, or gyno exams have. Hear this: A Dr. Wernich describes patients who are aroused by “the mere sight… of the preliminary preparations for an examination.” Wernich, in turn, relates the experience of his colleague Dr. Litzmann: “I myself recently had occasion to observe, while examining a young and very excitable female, that the uterus suddenly took on a vertical posi­tion and sank down into the cavity of the pelvis; that the mouth of the womb became. . . rounded, softer and more easily entered by the exploring finger; and that at the same time the high grade of sexual excitement under which the patient was laboring, manifested itself in her hurried respi­ration and tremulous voice.”

Then there was Dr. Talmey,[34] who, writing in a 1917 issue of the New York Medical Journal, relates the tale of a patient who suddenly sat up during an exam, exclaimed, “Doctor, what are you doing?” looked the examiner over “from head to foot,” smiled and said, “Oh, it is all right” and lay back down again. The reason, she later confesses, is that she “experienced an orgasm during the examination of the same quality as in erotic congress and hence thought she was being abused.”

I described these men’s findings to my own gyne­cologist, Mindy Goldman, an associate clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Cali­fornia, San Francisco. “Interesting…” said Goldman in an email reply, adding that she had not, in thirteen years, encountered a woman who responded this way during an exam. The cervix, she pointed out, is relatively insensitive to touch—so much so that biopsies are often done with­out anesthesia. In a small investigation by Alfred Kinsey, 95 percent of the women whose cervix was stroked with a Q-tip or metal probe were unable to feel it.

Masters and Johnson, for their part, were vigorous upsuck skeptics. In Human Sexual Response, they point out that the uterine contractions of orgasm are “expulsive, not sucking or ingestive in character.” They originate at the far end of the uterus and make their way toward the cervix, just as they do when they help expel a baby or a placenta. The pair obtained graphic evidence of these expulsive con­tractions while undertaking a study of masturbation as self-medication for menstrual cramps and backache. Fifty menstruating women masturbated with a wide-open spec­ulum in place, such that it provided the researchers with an unobstructed view of the cervix. “During the terminal stages of orgasmic experience. . . menstrual fluid could be observed spurting from the external cervical [open­ing] under pressure. In many instances, the pressure was so great that initial portions of the menstrual fluid actually were expelled from the vaginal barrel without contacting either blade of the speculum.” I do so hope they wore lab glasses.

Critics of this work point out that uterine contrac­tions—minor peristaltic versions of which are happening all the time, not just during orgasms—have been shown to reverse direction over the course of a woman’s menstrual cycle. Around ovulation, when a woman is most fertile, they pull material in toward the uterus; during menstruation they expel it. (The reproductive system is smarter than you think, and utterly goal-directed. Not only do sex hormones orchestrate the direction of your uterine contractions, they dilate only the fallopian tube that contains the ovum, so that more semen ends up on that side. They even oversee the quantity and viscosity of your discharge. Around ovula­tion, cervical mucus becomes more abundant and takes on the stringy consistency of an egg white, providing sperm with a sort of rope ladder into the uterus.)

In a follow-up study, Masters and Johnson outfitted a squadron of masturbating women, six in all, with cer­vical caps that had been filled with a substance similar to semen: same surface tension, same density. The substance was radiopaque, meaning that it would show up on X-rays. So if indeed it were sucked into the uterus during the women’s orgasms, the researchers would be able to docu­ment it. X-rays were taken during and again ten minutes after orgasm. In the end, there was no evidence of even “the slightest sucking effect.” Here again, there are critics of this work. Some say that the cap would have made suc­tion impossible.

Masters and Johnson had other reasons to be dubi­ous. Their internal home movies had shown no evidence of gasping, sucking, or otherwise fish-mouthed cervixes. What they had shown was a bizarre cervical by-product of late-stage arousal called “vaginal tenting,” wherein the cer­vix begins to pull away from the other side of the vagina, creating a peaked space—or “seminal reservoir”—akin to the upper reaches of a circus tent. (One theory is that this tenting evolved because it improves the odds of conception by creating a pocket to hold the sperm at the upper end of the vagina, preventing what one team of researchers— sounding more like economists than sexologists—dubbed “flowback losses.” Of course, if the woman isn’t on her back, the reservoir would be upside down.) But Masters and Johnson make the point that the tenting cervix is pulled away and out of contact with the semen. And if the cervix isn’t in contact with the semen, it hardly matters whether it’s sucking or not. The straw isn’t even in the pop.

And possibly, if conception is the goal, you don’t want it to be. Sex physiologist Roy Levin points out that sperm straight out of the penis are not yet up to the job of fertil­izing an egg. They need time to capacitate. If all the sperm were immediately sucked up into the uterus, you’d be pre­senting the egg with duds. “Arguably, on this basis,” Levin writes, “coitally induced orgasms and reproductive fitness could be incompatible.”

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ime to check in with some modern fertility experts. See what they have to say on the subject of orgasm and sperm transport. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine supplied, as a spokesman on the topic, an adjunct profes­sor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Cali­fornia, San Francisco. “My whole professional career for the last thirty years has been just infertility,” said Bob Nachtigall. “And I have never had a patient ask me about that.”

And if one did, what would he say?

“To the degree that orgasm sets up uterine contrac­tions, you could argue that it could potentially be useful in sperm transport.”

“You could, but you won’t?”

He sighed. “I think by now you know how science is. You think you know a lot until you start to ask some really basic questions, and you realize you know nothing. I know a lot about artificial insemination, but I have no idea about the answer to your very simple question.”

So why hasn’t anyone done a study comparing women’s conception rates following sex with and without orgasm? Because it wouldn’t be simple, Nachtigall said. ‘You’d need sperm counts on all the men. You’d need physiologi­cal proof of whether or not the woman had an orgasm. And because we know it’s possible to get pregnant without hav­ing an orgasm, you’d need a very large subject pool to prove that it wasn’t just random chance.”

There is perhaps another reason this study will not get done. “By the time a couple gets to an infertility doctor,” said Nachtigall, “their sex life is shot. The intimate, fun, stress-reducing aspect of it is long gone. It’s work. I for one would not want to interject orgasm into the strategy plan for infertility. If we were even to give them the faintest whiff of ‘Gee, if you had more orgasms. . . .’” Nachtigall said that infertility is often perceived as a challenge to one’s sexual identity. “The implication is always, ‘Oh, you’re not doing it right.’ Couples really, really hate that. It’s a very sensitive area.”[35]

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s far back as Dr. Beck and as recently as Masters and Johnson, there was no such thing as magnetic reso­nance imaging (MRI), and medical ultrasound was in its

infancy. I found myself wondering whether modern-day high-tech imaging techniques have shed any light on the secret processes of fertility—or on anything else about sex. And, if so, about how you convince someone to have sex in front of an ultrasound technician or inside an MRI tube.