Science Vs - The Great Mysteries of Sex with Mary Roach

Episode Date: March 26, 2026

Today, best-selling author and nerd Mary Roach joins us to talk all about sex. We’ll uncover the secrets of the female orgasm (does “upsuck” exist?), detail the bizarre methods of pioneering sex researchers like Masters and Johnson (including a famous penis camera), and get into the nitty-gritty of how to sexually stimulate a pig in Denmark. Plus, Mary tells us what it's like to have sex while getting an ultrasound — all in the name of science. Mary’s new book, Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy, is out now. Find our transcript here: https://tinyurl.com/ScienceVsMaryRoach In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Meet Mary Roach, one of our favorite nerds (22:31) The masturbating fetus (27:53) Mary bonks in the lab  (47:31) Oddball questions This episode was produced by Wendy Zukerman, with help from Meryl Horn, Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, Michelle Dang, and Rose Rimler. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Video editing and sound design by Bobby Lord. Music written by Emma Munger, So Wylie, Peter Leonard, Bumi Hidaka and Bobby Lord. Thanks to Skyline Studios and Humdinger Studios. Science Vs is a Spotify Studios Original. Listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us and tap the bell for episode notifications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you're going to have sex in front of a researcher with an ultrasound wand, Dr. Dung would be a good, you know, he's just so kind of matter of fact. He did over to play some music, right, as well? Oh, God, yeah, he goes, and I was kidding, and I said, where's the romantic lighting and music? And he goes, oh, wait, on my laptop, I have the soundtrack to Les Mis? Okay. Science chats with our favorite nerds. Yeah. Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and today on the show we are talking about the science of sex.

And in particular, how scientists have desperately and awkwardly tried to study sex for decades. Yes, today we bunk, which is possibly the best word for sex, followed closely by Stup. But Bonk is also the title to Mary Roach's best-selling book on this very topic. And even though Bonk was written a hot minute ago, it is still this fabulous, highly relevant book. The science is still mind-blowing. So today we are talking to Mary about her book. We uncover the mysteries of orgasms. We'll tell you how to sexually stimulate a pig, also a human. Yes. We'll talk about how to have me. Mind rippling sex.

If you are listening to this on Spotify, you could be watching it too. It's on video. After the break, my interview with The Amazing Mary Roach. Coming up. Welcome back today on the show, my interview with the amazing science writer Mary Roach, and we're talking about her book, Bunk, which is absolutely fabulous. So let's just get into it. Mary Roach, I'm so excited.

They say never meet your heroes, but here we are. So thank you so much for joining us on the show. My pleasure. I have heard you say that in high school you thought science was a drag. What changed for you? When did you start to kind of fall in love with science? Well, I had that sense of, you know, science was, I equated it with science homework and, you know, the textbooks that I had to read.

And I just, it seemed like a slog. And then I started. I started out doing just mainstream journalism, was given these assignments that were just, that were so interesting and they were so, I mean, I did a lot of traveling. And I began to realize that science is basically you, your body, your computer, your dog, the world. I mean, how could it be boring? It's basically how the world works. Science is, it's all about following your curiosity and just sort of asking why and how. So then what made you one around? write a book about sex or really this is the science of sex.

Yeah, that was, well, I was looking around for another book topic. This is my third book. And around that time, I was looking through, it was an old back issue of some film, some really kind of nerdy film journal. I don't remember why or what waiting room I was in, but there was a reference to the colposcopic films of Masters and Johnson, and I was thinking colposcopy, that's something to do with the cervix, and I'm like, holy crap, did they actually film inside a woman's body? And in fact, they did. They made a penis

camera, and they put it in, and the woman was like having sex with this phallus with a light source and a camera. And I was like, holy crap, that's my next book, sex research. It's like, how delightfully awkward is that to bring people into a laboratory. setting and have them do sexual things and you're the researcher in your white coat. And I just thought that scene is very Mary Roach. Got to do a book about that. What made it, I mean, it's a delightful and awkward and fabulous scene. What made it Mary Roach?

It's just science that you don't really expect. And I think also I'm drawn to the human body just because it is this kind of weird foreign planet, you know, when you get beyond, you know, we walk around mostly as minds. thinking of ourselves as this personality and this mind, but we're in this big bag of meat and bones and stuff and all this weird crap's going on. And that's kind of cool. You know, it's almost like travel.

I used to love to do a lot of travel for my reporting. And I at some point realize that the human body is kind of a foreign planet that is fun to play around on. Yeah, for sure. And particularly all these very important areas, but that we just don't probe or talk about that much, all the more the dark side of the moon or whatnot. Yeah.

Now there's this wonderful quote that comes from your book. It's from the psychologist John B. Watson, writing in the early 20th century. And basically, he was a bit miffed at science's reluctance to study human sexuality, which I would say still exists today. And he says that we should have our questions answered, not by our mothers and grandmothers, not by priests and clergymen in the interests of middle class moors,

nor by general practitioners, not even by Freudians. We want them answered by scientifically trained students of sex. And I love this. It's true, and it's even more true today. We don't have so many Freudians, but we have influences in our own version of this.

Why did you sort of open, with this, you know, it comes early in your book. What, you know, I can see you smiling as you're remembering. What does this passage mean to you? Well, it was amazing to me when you think about the act of sex, even independent from fertility, just sex. This is a biological, physiological thing. And yet, even up through the mid-1900s, nobody was, you wouldn't find it in a textbook,

like a classic physiology textbook. there be no mention of like intercourse, arousal, orgasm, like, doesn't exist. Move along, move along. You know, and particularly for people who are having any kind of trouble sexually or, you know, with whether or not just not satisfied or not conceiving or whatever, you know, it behooves us to understand. And it's not just, it's good to know because of the sake of knowing. It was also actually really helpful for people to know what could be going wrong. I mean, you look back at Robert Latu Dickinson, who was the one who got Kinsey interested in sex research. Kinsey had been studying gall wasps.

Dickinson was like, hey, I got something a little more interesting for you. How about sex? Dickinson was this amazing guy who would – he was a gynecologist, but he was very open with his patients. and he talked about how, you know, he would have patients who were having trouble conceiving because they didn't realize, like, the penis has to actually go in there. Yeah. Like, they didn't know how to do it.

And in which hall? It can't go in the butt. It can't go in the butt, you know. No, not that hole. This hole. Yeah. Well, maybe that hole later. But, you know.

Yeah. But they. Exactly. People felt so uncomfortable bringing it up. Who do you ask and who do you talk to? People didn't feel like they could talk to their partner or their doctor. And so anytime you can break down a taboo like that, I think it's a good thing. And it was really hard for Kinsey and Masters and Johnson, the early researchers, it was so taboo.

What did you kind of learn about what it was like to be a trained student of sex or a science researcher back then? Not only difficult and it's such a taboo, even more than today. But they were also quite creative, as you mentioned, with the penis cameras. Yeah, I mean, and I really wanted to see that penis camera. I mean, it should be in the Smithsonian, and I tried to find it. Virginia Johnson's son was like, look, we don't want to talk to you. I'm like, well, just where is it?

I finally heard that it had been dismantled, like it doesn't exist anymore. Are you kidding me? Yeah. You know, it was attached to a motor and it was like, and the woman could control the speed, and, like, they were cranking it up, and it was... And Kinsey didn't even have a lab. Kinsey was using his attic.

People were coming up to the attic, and just, you know, the creativity was kind of amazing. At one point, there was this... There was a belief that when a couple was having trouble conceiving, it's because the sperm, the semen wasn't coming out enough. It wasn't shooting out, and there was this belief that it should be shooting out. And Kinsey was like, no, it just kind of glops. And I'm going to prove this, and he went out and hired a bunch of male prostitutes,

set up a camera and put down two, I remember it was oriental carpets, and had them jerk off and then filmed the stuff coming out and did show that it mostly just glops, although there were some people with some very, you know, projectile ejaculations. But anyway, I'm like, he had a question and he figured out a way to answer it. Yeah. And that is super important because if you expect it to shoot out, so many people would think there was something wrong with them. And people who are having trouble conceiving would be like, oh my God,

my stuff isn't coming out right. You know, it's like, no, no, it is. You're good. It just needs to glop. Don't worry. It's a cloppy thing. It's not like a glorious fountain. And in your book, you mentioned you have a favorite line because obviously you were reading Kinsey and Masters of Johnson. What is your favorite line of Kinsey's from sexual behavior in the human female, I think?

Okay, here's my favorite line. There's lots, but this is the favorite. Okay. Cheese crumbs spread in front of a pair of copy. regulating rats will distract the female, but not the male. I just love that. And you know that he did that. He put the crumbs out.

Of course. And he watched. You know. And the female's like, oh, what's that? Oh, something to eat. And the male's like, what are you talking about? Why are you even, oh, my God. So one of the big questions you tackle in this book is female orgasm.

I mean, sort of this mystery of why females orgasm at all. Why, for those who've never really thought about it, why is this a mystery? Well, with men, orgasm is obviously tied to reproduction. You know, you ejaculation, which delivers the semen, and that is how conception happens. So it's obvious what function it serves. And with women, it wasn't so clear.

But there was for centuries this belief that it was tied to conception and that the contractions, uterine contractions that happened during orgasm, they thought there was this belief that they were sucking up the semen, like delivering it more quickly and therefore boosting the odds of conception. You know, as far back as the 1700s, there was this belief that, and it was good for women because, you know, If a woman was having trouble conceiving, they sort of take the man aside and go, like there was a famous line, who knows if it's true, Empress Maria, the Habsburg monarchy, Maria Teresa was having trouble conceiving, and the royal physician takes the husband aside and goes, it's just, you know, the opinion of the physicians that the vulva of her majesty should be titillated for some time prior. to intercourse. Yeah, so let's make sure she's enjoying this.

And that was, you know, hundreds of years. That was a belief. Wow. How wonderful. Yeah. How wonderful, exactly. But to answer this question and really get into the deep mysteries of female orgasm across the animal kingdom, you went to Denmark to meet some pigs.

Can you tell me about this adventure? And how did you feel when you got that invite as well? Oh, I'm always very excited when somebody agrees, because, you know, I send these emails like, oh, hello, you don't know me. And you guys inseminate sows, and I've heard that you sexually stimulate the sow before you deliver the semen and that that boosts the odds of conception. And can I come watch you do this? So, you know, and they're like, sure, come on down. And I'm always very excited, you know, when somebody says, yeah, you can come watch us stimulate the sows in the barn. So, yeah, this was the National Committee for, the Danish National Committee for Pork Production was, I believe, the name of the group.

And, yeah, there's this, I think it's a 6% increase in the farrowing rates, which is the, you know, how many piglets does it produce? So they had found that, right, that if you sexually stimulate a female pig a sow, while artificially inseminating her, it leads to a 6% improvement in fertility. So how exactly do you sexually stimulate a so of a female pig? Oh, Wendy, I'm glad you asked me that. I actually, they gave me a poster of the different steps. I mean, what you do is not, with the exception of one step, it is not like anything you do with a human partner.

Okay. Okay. I feel like I should be taking notes. The male, the boar, that is, is using his snout, and he does stuff like he sticks his snout in the inguinal fold, which is where the thigh meets the torso and kind of lifts her up a little bit, which I guess is exciting for the sow. Yeah.

And then kind of poking. similar to what we do, right? Just lifting up and dropping a little bit for a while, very exciting. And then kind of poking around the vulva also with the snout. Because he doesn't have hands. Right. Yeah, he doesn't have hands. I can see some similarities, right?

Maybe the snout comes in handy. Uh-huh. So that's what the worker, the inseminators are doing. They're lifting, they'll go and lift the sow up, like that, lift her up, and then like drop her down a little bit, and then poke around the vulva of the sow. And then they also, and here's the overlap, pigs and people, they lie on the sow's back, which mimics the weight of the boar on the sow's back, and then they reach around and kind of fondle the mammaries, the teats. Oh, interesting.

And that's the part where I think the Danish pig farmers felt a little uncomfortable. Oh, that was it. That was what tipped them over the end. That was what did it, yeah. There's a scene in the video where, and I felt it was intentional. This is an instructional video, right? Yes, it was. Exactly, an instructional video.

And they have this handsome, blonde Danish young man. And at one point they kind of zoom in on his hand as it's down near the, teats. And you can see, he's wearing a wedding ring. It's kind of like to, I felt that they were kind of going, you know, we just want to reassure you. There's nothing weird going on with the pig. He's happily married.

It was just like, but I have the poster if you want to see it. Please, I want to see the poster, yes. It's totally disintegrating because this has been a while, and they must have used, oh my God, it's just falling apart. It's like a little, I know, yeah. It's in Danish. It looks like a pirate's treasure map at this point. It's totally crumbling.

It's called optimal reproduction. And did the sew look like she was having a good time? No, the sound looked very bored, but they... She's like, where are the cheese crumbs? No, not... But they told me, or someone told me, look, a pig, like a dog, expresses its emotion and its delight, et cetera, with its ears more. Emotion in animals is often with the ears. And I was, you know, looking at the eyes and the mouth.

So I wasn't tuned into how the sound might have been showing her delight. Wow. Yeah. Pigs have, I feel, the pigs have a... Pigs have a very vibrant sex life. Not only is the ejaculation going on for minutes at a time, five minutes, apparently, the female, the clitoris, is right just inside the vagina. So it's getting stimulated.

So if the sow is enjoying things, then it is, you know, it does affect conception. And I was like, whoa, does that mean, you know, whoa, how do we drive that with, It does this mean that women in women does this happen also? Because there's a number of studies. There was like hamster and gerbil and rodent, other rodent studies that maybe it did affect fertility. So along come Masters and Johnson. Masters and Johnson to the rescue. They're like, I don't think so.

I don't think so at all. And we're going to prove it. And so they did. Here again, the creativity of these researchers was amazing. And they're like, okay, here's what we do. we make some artificial semen, okay? And I had the recipe in the book. I think it involved corn starch.

Anyway, they wanted to be the right viscosity and everything. They put it in a sort of a cervical cap and installed it or the woman put it in. And then they set her up in front of an x-ray machine and she masturbated and they took x-rays because, you know, the radio opaque so it'll show up. So the semen will show up so they can see if it's being sucked up during orgasm. And that's what they did, and they didn't see any upsuck. So when the women orgasmed, the sperm didn't move more inside them? No, no, they didn't find that that happened. Also, someone else pointed out that the uterine contractions are explosive.

They're not sucking in. They're shooting out, like they're pushing out. Like they do during a woman's period, they kind of help the material the blood come out. So there was that argument. When else then came along and said, well, no, it cycles during certain parts of the woman cycle. It's sucking in, and then certain parts of the cycle is going. So anyway, amazing that all this confusion and work that's been done in the name of proving or disproving up suck. Personally, I just like to say up suck because it's a great word.

It's an excellent word. Up suck. And then I have looked, I did look into the research pool since you published your book to see if there's been any new studies, new exciting studies, exploring what's going on with female orgasm. Why do those with vaginas orgasm? And I did, it's funny that, you know, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Because I did find this study from just a couple of years ago that looks like it could have come straight out of Masters and Johnson. They got six women, put a sperm stimulant into their vaginas.

And then they were asked to masturbate, but with the flip of a coin, it decided whether they were going to orgasm or not orgasm. And then they put a moon cup into their vagina and walked around for an hour. And then the researchers looked at what fell out. How much dropped out and how much was sucked out? And how much was sucked up? Exactly. Exactly.

And in this study of only six people, they found that there was more retention of this sperm stimulant if they were to orgasm. It was large by about 15% leading, of course, the tabloids in the UK to scream. Women up to 15% more likely to get pregnant if they orgasm. Oh, wow. Well, this is, okay. Good. Good.

Let them believe that. Let them believe that. Yes, exactly, which is not that the study did not test actual pregnancy. So yes, but yeah, as you say, so we keep going back and forth on this, why does, you know, this orgasm happened? And I'm excited to say the research will continue. It will continue. So in your book, you look at some fascinating sexual discoveries that have been made by scanning people either in an MRI or an ultrasound. And there is one case report that I cannot get out of my mind in the book you called it jaw-dropping.

Do you remember, do you know which case report I'm talking about? The seven-month-old? Yeah. In utero. Okay, this is a seven-month-old male. A fetus. Wow. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. And this was a sonogram. ultrasound sonogram, and the researcher, this was just written up as a letter to the editor in a journal like, hey, I saw this and it's pretty weird. It's pretty interesting. And they have two still images from the ultrasound. One is there's the fetus and his little hand is right on his little penis. Uh-huh.

Oh, no, near it. It's near it. And then the second image, he's grasping it. So it's two stills. But in the art, if you read the letter, he says, the researcher, Israel Meisner, says that he observed a little guy playing with himself for like 15 minutes. 15 minutes. Yeah, yeah. But when you think about it, I mean, there's nothing to do in there.

You're seven months. It's true. If you discovered that, you'd be like, oh, this is going to make the time go faster. Exactly. It must have happened a lot. If we've got one case of it, there must be doctors who have seen this and are just turning a blind eye or something, right? Yeah, exactly. You would think so, yeah. What did you think when you saw the images and read that case report? Oh, I just like sprinted to the copy machine.

This is going in the book. This segment is brought to you by the all-new Audi Q3. Here's an impressive fact. The Q3 features a roomy, comfortable, refreshed interior with a 12.8 inch touchscreen. Now let's go to Dinner Party Genius. I'm Merrill Horn, and in this segment, sponsored by Audi, will give you a fun and delightful science facts that's sure to impress your friends and get the conversation going at your next party. And to talk about this, I'm here with producer Akheti Foster Keys. Hey, Akheti.

Hey, Merrill. So do you struggle with small talk at parties? Yeah, sometimes. I really don't like when a lot of people are looking at me and expecting me to say something funny. Right. Yeah, it can be hard, but I have a fun science fact for you to help you out. And it's about nightmares. Do you struggle with nightmares?

I do. There's this one that comes up, like, quite a bit where I'm being chased through, like, a building by a tiger, and the tiger can bust through different walls and climb through really small spaces, even though it's ginormous. That sounds terrifying. I'm sorry. But, you know, nightmares are super common, but we are not helpless. Science has a way to help us to stop having these scary dreams.

So, yeah, there's this technique. Here's how it works. So first, you take your scary dream, but you kind of reimagine it. So that instead of the tiger just like, you know, catching you and mauling you or whatever, you kind of give it a happy ending. So maybe you're thinking of the dream, the tiger's chasing you, and then you have like a magic wand and you turn around and go like presto and change the tiger into a little kitten. And then the kid's just like meow, meow, meow, hi a kitty.

And it's not scary anymore because it's a cute kitten. And then, so after you have your happy version of the dream, when you're awake, you just think about that version of the dream again and again and again and again until it kind of gets cemented into your brain. And so the idea is to kind of retrain your brain while you're awake. the next time you actually have the dream, that happy version will kick in and you'll like end up with a cute kitten at the end. Oh my gosh, that's so awesome. I would love to have a cute kitten that's just like crawling over me as opposed to a tiger that's mawling me. That sounds like way better. Right, yeah. I didn't know science did this. Yeah. And so several studies find that this works like really well. So yeah. And you know, not only when you have a cute dream, but you'll have a great

conversation starter at your next party. So do you think you'll use this next time you're at a party? Oh yeah, next time someone's telling me about their nightmares, I'm going to come in like Dr. Who and just be like, well, presto. This is what you do. Perfect. Thanks, I'm kidding. Thanks, Mero. That segment was brought to you by the all-new Audi Q3. Here's a few more fun facts. The all-new Audi Q3 features more power and more space than ever before. Plus, Quatro, all-wheel drive gets you there with confidence. It's built to impress, kind of like you at your next dinner party. Say yes to the all-new Audi Q-3, made for the yes-life. Learn more at AudiUSA.com. Welcome back.

The brilliant best-selling science writer Mary Roach is here with us. We're going to keep bunking along. You and your husband signed up to be guinea pigs in an ultrasound experiment. Tell us about this. Yeah, well, you know, it wasn't my plan to be a subject in this study. this was, again, an ultrasound study, so you could take this sort of moving image, three-dimensional image of whatever the body part was. And the researcher in question had done this three-dimensional imaging of a penis, erect penis. And the idea being if somebody had, say, Peroni's

disease where the erect penis goes crooked, which can be kind of painful. Like he could, he could preview by having, you know, by taking a 3D ultrasound movie of the patients erecting penis, he could get a sense of what he was going to do in the surgery. That was the idea. And so I wrote to this doctor, Dr. Dung, Deng, and I was like, wow. And then in that paper he said, you know what, and then my next, for my next act, I'm going to bring a couple in. and I'd like to film genitals in sexual Congress,

and I'm like, I need to be there for that. So I wrote to him, you know, and I'm like, would it be okay if I came to London and saw, was there to observe while you did this project? And he's like, yeah, we could arrange that, but I've been unable to find a couple who want to do this. So if your organization can provide a willing, couple, so my organization called its husband.

And I'm like, yeah, you know, I said you haven't been to London in a long time. Let's go to London. We could go see a play, like, yeah, Jeremy Irons is in something. We can go see a play, and we'll go out to eat, and we have to have sex in front of some guy with an ultrasound one. And my husband is such a good sport, you know. He's like, yeah, I mean, because early on he'd been like, oh, sex research. signed me up for that. You know, like, okay, here's your chance.

And it was so awkward, though. Oh, my God. Tell me everything. It was just so, you know, because we're in the, you know, it's after hours. We're in the radiology department. There's no one around. And we were in, you know, first we're waiting for a while. And sitting in the hallway.

And then, like, we see him coming down the hall. And Ed goes, Ed's my husband. He's like, here he comes. Oh, my God. He was like, we were both just watching. Why did we say yes? This is so weird. And, you know, it was, if you're going to have sex in front of a researcher with an ultrasound wand, Dr. Dung would be a good, you know, he's just so kind of matter of fact.

And he's making conversation while this is going on. We had a lie. He had the wand up to my belly. So this had to be a from behind situation, right? He did over to play some music, right, as well? Oh, God. Yeah. Yeah, he goes, and I was kidding, and I said, well, or no, Ed said, where's the romantic lighting and music?

Because we're in this, you know, lab with fluorescent lights. And he thought Ed was being serious. And he goes, oh, wait, on my laptop, I have the soundtrack to lay miss. Okay. And he also, he gave, like, he gave Ed, you know, it was like some stimulative literature to quote Masters and Johnson's term for porn. But it was an issue of like men's health or some like with the esquire where there's like one kind of not naked but scantily clad woman. He's like, okay. Okay, great.

You know, and we're wearing those horrible hospital johnnies, you know, the little ugly, you know. And it was kind of chilly. So he's like, yeah, with the back open. And it's kind of chilly. So he's like, you can leave your socks on. So you got the scene. You have the scene. Afterward, Ed's like, I can't put it.

Well, also, Viagra was involved. Okay, I was going to say, just how could you possibly. So Viagra was used. Exactly. You go through all this effort, you fly to London, you know. And then, right, and was it enjoyable at all? Like, no, no, no, no, no. But yes, in the sense that I'm taking notes and I'm writing down what's happening,

and I'm like, this is going to be so fun to write up. Right. So I'm like the female with the cheese crumbs because I've got a notepad and I'm writing. I'm like, I don't know what's going on back there, but whatever. But I did feel kind of bad that I dragged Ed into this. I felt kind of bad. The instructions from the doctor that you describe in the book are quite funny. Now, he said, now please make some sort of movement.

In and doubt. Yeah. Yeah. And then at one point he goes, I think it was something like he's asking about, and the littlest one, how old is she now? And then he's like, you can ejaculate now. Oh, my God. Wow, but Ed was able to ejaculate in that situation? Yeah.

I think so. Wow. It's a people pleaser. He's a people pleaser. It's like, yeah, the worst sex ever for me. Did you get to see the images at the end, and did you learn anything? He did send me an image, and at some point I sent it to Slate, and they had it online. So it was on the internet.

It's like two seconds long. It's the most G-rated, X-rated footage you will ever. It's just like, bo-bo-oo. In and out. Yeah, yeah. It's not very sexy. Yes. Okay, the last experiment I'm going to ask you about that you signed up for is you did use a

vaginal photo pletsmograph. Pleithymograph. Pleithesmograph. Probe, yes. Which you describe in the book as Cinderella's tampon. If you have to see through, it's glass. It's glass. It's like a little glass tampon.

Yeah. Because it, okay, this is a device for measuring arousal. It goes in the vagina and like the photoplasthymogram. is measuring blood flow in the vagina. And so if you're aroused, there's more blood flow to the vagina. So it's sending out like a light signal. And depending on how aroused you are a vet, you know, how thick and aroused and engorged the walls of the vagina are,

it sends a signal back. But this little see-through thing that you, this is about the size of a tampon and you put it in. and then this was a study about female arousal. And so I was a subject in that study. The interesting thing about when you study penises and them getting aroused, it's fairly obvious. When they get erect, they get aroused.

Not always, not always. You can obviously feel arousal without erection, but if you have a vagina, it's more complicated, right? Because sometimes you can feel arousal, but you don't get wet, So it's not so clearly one for one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so there's the work of, this is Cindy Meston at the University, U.T. Austin, University of Texas, Austin. She was studying arousal in women.

It's interesting because if you show them stimulative literature, sorry, porn, stimulative media, pornography, women tend to respond across the board, whether it's gay, lesbian, straight, I mean, hetero, animals, whatever. Women tend to have a response. Men are much more, men are like, that's what I like to see, and that's what arouses me. So women will respond, but the difference compared to men is they don't necessarily realize it, because they're not getting a boner.

It's like there's something going on in there, and you can measure it with a photoplasism graph. You can measure it, but then afterward, you interview the person, as they did me, and they said, so that, were you aroused? How aroused you think that you were from this part of the film and then that part of the film? You know, and if you say, you know, it didn't do anything for me. It was like some really creepy porn.

The guy was disgusting. He had a horrible mustache. The sex was boring. I wasn't aroused at all. They'll look at the ratings or the, you know, the data that they're getting and go, actually, you were. You were responding. Very interesting. Does that mean that we're not being honest with ourselves about what truly arouses us or more that we genuinely weren't aroused, but some physiological reaction happened?

There's physiological arousal, but it's not necessarily tied to a psychological arousal. Like in terms of you having a satisfying sex life, it's not like, you know, somebody's going to say, well, we put a little see-through device in your vagina. In fact, you were responding. You were having a good time in, you. You know, you'd be like, no, it wasn't. Yes. Nah, no. Moving on to then, I guess we've been talking about sex the whole time. I don't know how I'm going to do a segue into more sex. You look at the, in your book, you look at the many things that can trigger orgasms. Sex, obviously, or good sex, dreams.

But tell us the story of a woman from Taiwan. Yeah, they're, well, orgasm is a, it's a reflex. and it can be triggered in ways that you wouldn't imagine. It doesn't sort of jive with how you imagine orgasm. But they're all manner of people are wired very differently. So anyway, this woman would have an orgasm when she brushed her teeth. And I would think that that'd be a delightful thing. You'd be like you'd have really great gum health.

You know, you'd be like, I don't need to go to the dentist because I'm brushing like three times. time today. Yeah. But it bothered her, and she was avoiding. I mean, it's weird. And there's another, there was a woman in the book who had spontaneous orgasm. And she was a practicing Muslim, and it was, you know, sometimes it would happen during devotional periods. And it was very upsetting, very disturbing. And there was someone else, like rubbing her eyebrow. What was interesting, after I did a TED talk that was based on things in the book. And, After that talk was put online, I got a lot of interesting email from people saying, they thought, well, they thought I was a researcher.

So people would write to me this, you know, I got a woman who said on a good day, putting lip gloss on, we'll do it. And another, a guy wrote to me and said, you know, every time I ride a bicycle, I have an orgasm. And when I go somewhere, I'm anticipating it's going to happen. And if it hasn't happened, I'll kind of ride around for a while and it makes me late. It was this whole story. Wow. So just, you know, people are wired in different ways.

Right. Then it can somehow get that response going. It just triggers that response, yeah. In Bonk, you visit a Dildo manufacturing store, which had the model of an anus, which was based on a pawn star. And in your book, you have in Capslock the guys showing you around this factory. and he goes, you know, yeah, you have an anus in caps lock. When it comes to the anus, I mean, it is so taboo.

I've heard you talk about how, you know, people don't even describe when they have anal cancer and there's no ribbons for, you know, brown ribbons for anal cancer or whatnot, or there's no day for anal cancer. Like, it's like anything to do with the butt. Right. Why do you think this is? And, yeah. Why?

because it's where crap comes out, where shit comes out. It's just very personal and it's smelly and germy. And so there's all kinds of reasons why it would be taboo. But the fact that it is taboo, there's risks associated with that. Like you mentioned, you know, there was no ribbon for anal cancer. Farrah Fawcett died of, anal cancer and they in the the news it just was reported as colon cancer it was like down there cancer like nobody yeah nobody really even talked about it and and and and i remember reading

about the early days of anatomy uh partly because this was before air conditioning and uh you know it was often hot or room temperature or warm in the dissecting room and and the colon was you know stinky and full of bacteria. So they would take the whole thing out and throw it away. So nobody was really even looking at it. Nobody's studying it. You know, and even today, I imagine, the guy who does my colonoscopies, he said that his son for a long time believed that surgeons were assigned a specialty.

Because he's like, why else would you become the guy who's looking up everybody's asshole? He's like, you mean you chose this? But, you know, with any taboo, whether it's the asshole or it's just something relating to sex, if somebody feels that they can't speak about it openly with their partner or with their doctor, then they're unhappy. They're putting their health possibly at risk. And so it's, I think it's just healthy to talk about it. I mean, when the book came out, I remember my publicist saying, Mary, how are you going to promote this book?

Are you going to just stand in front of like 100 strangers and say things like clitoris and orgasm? I'm like, yeah, that's what I'm going to do. And I think the audience really appreciated that because it would come to the question and answer time, and people would actually ask pretty personal questions. And I got the sense that people appreciated having the freedom to just ask things. You know, and that's why some of, that's why I felt like these researchers were so heroic in a way, you know, that they, they dared to break down that taboo, especially the 40s, you know, when Kinsey was working, the 50s, 60s, Masters in Johnson, and, you know, Robert Latu Dickinson before all of that. And so it's, I don't know, I had a lot of respect for people who do this, who do this work. Yeah.

Yeah, it's interesting having, you know, yeah, reported on a bunch of different sex topics, how I had thought we were so much more advanced than we are, you know, but they still say it's so hard to get funding, it's so hard to be taken seriously. Oh, yeah, yeah, there was, Roy Levin talked about how he was at a, I think it was a conference of urologists maybe, and he was, he did a paper about, I think it was vaginal secretions. He's like nobody knows, nobody has ever looked at vaginal secretions, what's in them, how are they secreted? I mean, nobody had looked at that, so he's like, I'm going to look at that. Yeah. And he described being in the men's room inside the stall and hearing people like joking about him in the bathroom. You know, just, yeah.

Yeah. And these are MDs. Now, your last chapter. of bong, opens with this line. When I began this book, I harbored a naive fantasy that I would find a team of scientists working to discover the secret to amazing mind-rippling sex. So, Mary, what's the closest you got? You know, I wasn't finding very many papers just about like, what works best for amazing sex? But then I found this paper. It was from 1979, and it was Masters and Johnson, and they have brought in, they called them reacting units, couples.

They were couples. They were couples. The reacting units, he brought in hetero-reacting units, gay and lesbian reacting units, and he had them. He actually had people hooking up. And he found that the couples that were actually in relationships, particularly gay and lesbian relationships, were having the best sex.

And part of that he was saying was gender empathy, which is to say, if you're a man, you know what feels best. And if you're a woman, you know what feels best. And so the gay and lesbian couples, it was very easy for them to, you know, based on their own experience of their own bodies, to know kind of what to do and what feels good. Whereas in the hetero couples, like the men would complain that the woman wasn't holding the penis hard enough,

and the women would be like, You're too rough. Stop it. You know, so it would be like this kind of mismatch. But also, he talked about just how the couples who were very attuned to the reactions and the arousal of their partner. And they were aroused by that arousal. So it was this really, there was this connection there. Yeah. You wrote that they did watch the couples.

having sex with with stopwatches and tartar charts as you wrote got to have the stopwatch otherwise you're just a pervert you're not a scientist you need a clipboard

and you need a stopwatch and then you can come in and watch yeah are you right that the best sex which was being had by committed gay and lesbian couples they took their time they lost themselves in each other

moved slowly lingered Yeah. So that's if you're in a relationship with someone with different genitals to yours, there's ways to overcome this empathy gap with communication, I suppose. To cap us off, we have a lightning round of oddball questions, which I suppose is sort of funny in the context of some of the questions I've been asking you about. But here we go. Are you ready?

I'm ready. Yeah. We might even have a jingle by the time this episode comes out. What was your favorite title to a paper that you read while researching this book? Oh, definitely. Sexual Intercourse as a Potential Cure for Intractable Hiccups. Oh. Yeah.

Yeah, somebody had, some guy was reporting like, if you have sex, the hiccups go away. And then he's like, I don't know if it's intercourse or orgasm that's doing it. But, you know, unattached hiccuppers. I love the demographic, unattached hiccuppers, could try masturbation. This is a journal paper. Again, ran to the copy machine. I got a copy of that. Also, attached hiccuppers are also allowed to masturbate to.

Yeah, right. Yes, exactly. Hickupping. Amazing. All right, finish the sentence. Now that I know blank, I'll never look at my blank the same way again. Oh, yeah. Now that I know.

know how a bolus is formed inside the mouth when you're chewing before you swallow. Bolus formation, like you eat food, like you take it apart, and then your tongue forms this bolus, this sort of like pickle-shaped thing that you swallow. I don't know, the study of chewing and mouth stuff to me was like so gross that I began to think people should have sex in public but then eat in a room on their own. It's disgusting. They're chewing, their bolus forming, they're, ugh, yeah. So yeah, kind of ruined eating out for me for a while. Funnest object sitting in your house. You know what? I brought an object. Really? It's called the Feminine Personal Trainer,

and it's resistance training combined with kegling. Okay, so you insert it in the vagina and you're lifting this weight. You want to see it? Yeah, oh, my God, of course I want to see it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. And so you, depending, okay, depending on which side goes in,

like if you have that heavy side down, that's hard to lift, so that's the advanced kegling, right? Yeah. I only used it one. How was it? It looked like I was giving birth to a doorknob. It's like this thing. Like it's, you know, and you're supposed to walk around the house.

You're supposed to walk around with it in. Walk around with that? Wow. But that's dangerous because if that sucker drops out on your toe, you're going to have a broken toe. Is it heavy? I use it as a paperweight. Not during our interview. You had it. to see. Yeah, I just pulled this out right now. It's a little damp.

I wrote about it actually years ago for a column I used to write. And the guy, the company, it's like this Christian company. And I'm like, really? Huh. And he goes, why is that surprising to you? He said, you know, he said, good sex is a gift from God. I'm like, okay. That's wonderful. Thank you so much, Mary. This was so, so much fun. Oh, my God, Wendy. Thank you. much. I thoroughly enjoyed myself. It was so fun. It's such a great podcast. Oh, thank you. Thanks. And, you know, if you want to try the feminine personal trainer, I'll send it to you. It's just collecting dust. Mary Roach's new book, Replaceable You, is about adventures in human anatomy and replacing body parts.

And it's out now. I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and I'll back you next time. Thank you.