Mary Roach

A New York Times Bestseller “Rich in dexterous innuendo, laugh-out-loud humor and illuminating fact. It’s compulsively readable.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review In ?Bonk, ?the best-selling author of Stiff turns her outrageous curiosity and insight on the most alluring scientific subject of all: sex. Can a person think herself to orgasm? Why doesn't Viagra help women-or, for that matter, pandas? Can a dead man get an erection? Is vaginal orgasm a myth? Mary Roach shows us how and why sexual arousal and orgasm-two of the most complex, delightful, and amazing scientific phenomena on earth-can be so hard to achieve and what science is doing to make the bedroom a more satisfying place.

Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex

Bastien Vaucher

Women who came to him (Aethios) for contraceptive advice were told to wear a piece of cat liver in an ivory tube attached to their left foot. Though 1 suppose this might well keep you from getting pregnant, in the same way that wearing Crocs might.

I will leave you with the story of a fifty-six-year-old government officer in India who told emergency room doctors that he had cut off his penis in order to cure a longstanding case of incontinence. One of the physicians, who wrote up the case for the Indian Journal of Psychiatry, suspected deeper mental turmoil was at play, as the patient had earlier jumped into a well, in what was ruled an attempted suicide. Though given this man's flair for therapeutic over-kill, it's possible he was merely thirsty.

My conclusion, a conclusion you will encounter many times in the course of these pages, is that the sexual anatomy and responses of the human female are as uniform and predictable as the weather.

Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex quotes

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