Bonk: Procreation, Recreation, and Deviation

By Breanne Boland April 17, 2008 Issue

I recommend this book with a couple of reservations.

One: while I laughed a lot while reading this book, I winced almost as often. Those readers with penises will wince more, and in a more informed way. Like much medical research, many of the studies Mary Roach explores are not for the faint of heart.

Two: reading this book and absorbing its far-ranging and frequently bizarre subject matter will make you a most disturbing dinner guest - or perhaps a very absorbing one. If your social circle includes those who are uptight or easily offended, you may want to keep yourself to more colorful company for a while. It could also cause you to breach your office’s sexual harassment policies.

Bonk is the latest pop-science survey by author Mary Roach, whose last book, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, explained that there’s more to the afterlife than bright lights and pearly gates. In Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, Roach uses her boundless curiosity and appropriately perverse sense of humor to dive into human sexuality, a field that encompasses biology, theology, sociology, and some of the weirdest public records on God’s green earth.

It’s a subject designed for a writer like Roach, who has few qualms about asking awkward questions and an unerring sense of how important those awkward questions are for her readers. She explores historical texts and applications from the U.S. Patent Office. She observes monkeys, professional pig inseminators, and delicate penis operations. She learns how a scientist finds subjects for sexual studies in a Muslim country, where small appliance and sex toy manufacturing intersect, and what goes into having sex for science in an MRI machine. That last one is learned firsthand.

The personal perspective is the biggest departure from her previous book, which was similarly thorough and whimsical in its exploration of an unavoidable but often hushed-up subject. However, while few have close, regular encounters with cadavers, almost everyone of a certain age has experience with sex. As such, it’s nearly impossible for a writer known for injecting her wit into her work to divorce herself from her subject matter. It’s not so simple for her husband, either, considering that he found himself in a compromising position in an MRI machine.

Often, Roach explores things like this herself because ethics kept her sources from allowing her to witness their subjects in this kind of delicate experiment. Fortunately, her background in science writing means that she’s a reliable source, carefully noting facts alongside her frequent pithy observations. However, to have her very personal experiences interjected into her long sections of deep research gives the book a sometimes crooked feel. Sex is, by its nature, a personal subject for every human. For the author to discuss herself at all brings an element of memoir or confessional into what’s otherwise an impartial survey of the subject. For a character to appear amongst the interviews and quotations and then to disappear leaves an uneven feeling, like an intrusion uninvited but then missed.

Still, a writer as talented as Roach can’t help but make something worthwhile with such pregnant subject matter. As idiosyncratically as sex is treated in modern society, it pales in comparison to its place in the past. To have such a witty guide to such annals of the bizarre is a perfect match.

Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, 319 pages, W.W. Norton and Company. Available at bookstores, libraries, and online booksellers.

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