Things I Learned from Mary Roach (part 17 1/2):
1. "[P]eople's earlobes swell when they're aroused, [and, according to Kinsey,] 'the membranes which line the nostrils may secrete more than their usual amounts of mucus… If one's mouth is open when there is a sudden upsurge of erotic stimulation and response, saliva may be spurted some distance out of the mouth.'"
2. Sex education needs to be more descriptive. Positions favored, for female response, by the first modern sex manual, Van de Velde's Ideal Marriage: "Second Extension Attitude: Supersensory (Variation [b])" and "the Anterior-Lateral Attitude, [which] has the woman 'half-lateral, half-supine, with a corresponding half-lateral, half-superposed attitude of the man, which is possible by appropriate arrangement of pillows.'"
And then there's this, which kind of breaks your heart: "Robert Latou Dickenson writes that he encountered, over his many decades of clinical practice, eighteen women whose virginity had remained intact despite having (what they took to be) intercourse for years. 'The husbands and wives, though otherwise intelligent, thought the cleft of the vulva was as deep as his organ was expected to go.' Then there was the woman written up in a 1965 issue of JAMA whose husband was mistaking her urethra for her vagina."
3. Scientists are bad people. Towards discovering whether or not the contractions of female orgasm "upsucked" sperms towards helping out 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… Five years later, a second dog experiment found what Hausmann had found, as did an 1853 guinea pig experiment, a 1930 rat experiment, and a 1960 golden hamster experiment… I find it hard not to project a sliver of sadism upon the scientists. The hamster guys are especially easy to mistrust, having stated in their paper that 'the mated hamster was killed by a bow to the back of the head.' Who clubs a hamster? What would you even use to deliver 'a blow' to a head that small?"
Answer, Mary Roach: nobody, now-a-days. Boyfriend, who, two jobs ago, used to engage in mouse genocide for UNC-Chapel Hill, would generally lay a mouse's stomach upon a metal surface, press a metal rod to the back of the neck, and pull its tail. If a metal rod was not nearby, he would press his own thumbs to their necks. For larger specimens – monkeys and dogs, for example – this method is never used. Scientists usually propel CO2 into an air-tight atmosphere, causing asphyxiation, or they use deadly injections. Apes are treated best, and put into a special animal reserve, which fact makes many scientists roll their eyes, as they are bad people.
4. People do not understand the limits of the anus. "Urological Oddities, a 1948 compendium of memorable cases, includes an 'elderly fellow' with a corsage pin that got away from him, a man who died from infection after inserting a twig from the family Christmas tree, and a farmer who 'lost a rat's tail.' There is always an explanation. The man, toting three sets of three-inch surgical steel forceps, for example, insisted that Nos. 2 and 3 had gone in an effort to remove Nos. 1 and 2, a story that collapsed upon examination, when all three turned out to be in there handle-first. As embarrassing as these hospital visits must have been, they pale in comparison to the Houston man who was taken away, on his back in an ambulance, with a large water tank from a public commode stuck on his penis. 'The patient had attempted intercourse with the water-tank,' reports B. H. Bayer, M.D., in one of those rare, shining moments when urology approaches high comedy."
Some hundred pages later, there is more: " 'Rectal Foreign Bodies: Case Reports and a Comprehensive Review of the World's Literature' includes a list of objects doctors have removed from rectums over the years. Highlights: a frozen pig tail (one of the 7 female cases in a total caseload of 202), a bottle of Impulse Body Spray…, a parsnip, a plantain (with condom), a dull knife, a cattle horn, a salami, a jeweler's saw, and a plastic spatula. Multiple holdings in the same rectum are listed under the heading 'Collections.' These include several that would pass as still-lifes ('oil can with potato,' '2 apples,' '402 stones'), several that probably couldn't ('umbrella handle and enema tubing,' 'lemon and cold cream jar') and one that suggests a quiet evening in the Biltmore ('spectacles, suitcase key, tobacco pouch, and magazine')."
5. It is generally useful to read scientific footnotes. To wit: "A comforting word about the crooked penis. Dr. Hsu says it is rare to see one that stands perfectly straight. Actually, what he said was: 'Most men are communists! Lean to the left! Second most common: bow down, like Japanese gentleman! Number three: to the right. Four: up! Like elephant!'"
6. The fifteenth century was probably awesome. "'What, then, is to be thought of those witches who… sometimes collect male organs in great numbers, as many as twenty or thirty members together, and put them in a bird's nest or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members, and eat oats and corn, as has been seen by many and is a matter of common report?' It's a question I cannot answer. I can only lament the long, dry journey that legal publishing has made in the centuries since 1491."
7. France in the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was probably less awesome, if you were a bad husband. "This was the era of the 'impotence trial'… If the wife won the case, the man would not only be fined and forbidden to remarry, but would have to return the dowry he had received from the woman's family… The team would arrive at the appointed hour and wait outside the bedroom until the defendant yelled through the door that he was ready for viewing. The examiners would file into the room and gather around the bed, whereupon the accused would pull back the bedclothes and show them what he had. These were tough critics. 'We did find him in a state of erection upon our arrival, but he did not have sufficient attributes to consummate a marriage.' How did they know? They leaned in a groped ('Touching this swelling, we felt it to be flabby')."
8. "People with spinal cord injuries may develop a compensatory erogenous zone above the level of their inquiry… Applying a vibrator to these spots can have dramatic effects… 'My whole body feels like it's in my vagina,' said the subject, a quadriplegic woman who had just had an orgasm – evinced by changes in blood pressure and heart rate – while applying a vibrator to her neck and chest. Komisaruk and Whipple's book The Science of Orgasm includes a description of a 'knee orgasm' experienced by a young (able-bodied) young man with a vibrator pressed to his leg. 'The quadriceps muscled as the thigh increased in tension… At the reported orgasmic moment, the leg gave an extensor kick… and a forceful grunt was emitted.'"
9. Lady-smell is excellent, although those adverts for "pheromones" in the backs of Esquire are stupid. "The rickety notion of rhesus – and, by implication, human – sex pheromones can be traced to… [that] in 1971, Richard Michael claimed to have pinpointed compounds in the vaginal secretions o his females that, when sniffed, caused the male monkeys to initiate sex. (But not very many of them. Critics point out that just two males accounted for 50 percent of the data)… In 1975… a team of researches from the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia launched an investigation of changes in the 'pleasantness' of women's vaginal odors across their monthly cycle. Seventy-eight subjects were asked to sniff tampons that four women had worn during the various phases of their cycle. (For obvious reasons, the women were asked not to eat onions, garlic, or asparagus for the duration of the study. Less obviously, the women were discouraged from eating broccoli, Brussels spouts, cabbage, chili, curry, kale, sauerkraut, and pineapple.) The supposition was that the odors might be more appealing during a woman's ovulatory phase than at other times during her cycle. And they were: Subjects judged them slightly more pleasant and less intense than at other times. However, the authors noted, the data did not go so far as to 'support the notion… that vaginal secretion odors are particularly pleasant to human males"… [Although] a Google search on 'soiled panties' produced 78,000 hits, most of them direction you to freelance sellers, women who throw up a Web site with a couple of photos and a PayPal link. Wikipedia says some Japanese sex shops operate panty exchanges to girls, who wear a pair overnight and then exchange them for a new pair on their way to school. 'The more soiled they are, the more they will fetch at sale,' says Wikipedia, yet further distancing itself from stuffy rival Britannica."
