Bonk — The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex

Science in a Difficult Room

Mary Roach begins Bonk with a confession: she is attending a study at a research hospital in which couples are measured during sex, and she has brought her husband because the study requires participants to arrive in pairs. The scene is simultaneously mortifying and illuminating, and it establishes Roach’s method: she goes to the primary sources, attends the actual research, and reports what she finds without squeamishness or prurience.

The historical sections are revelatory. Victorian physiologist John Hunter conducted the first systematic observations of sexual anatomy. Masters and Johnson’s laboratory work in the 1960s was both groundbreaking and deeply strange. The various researchers who have spent careers studying topics their colleagues consider at best marginal and at worst embarrassing are treated by Roach with the same respect she gives to everyone who does serious science in difficult conditions.

Why It Matters

Sex research is, as Roach documents in detail, underfunded, poorly understood by the public, and regularly attacked by politicians and religious groups. The consequences are medical: conditions like dyspareunia (painful sex) affect a significant portion of the population and receive almost no research attention. Female sexual dysfunction in particular has been systematically ignored.

Bonk makes the case for taking sex research seriously by making readers laugh at the researchers who do it — and then making clear that the laughter is affectionate rather than dismissive.

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set Bonk apart: The historical sections on early sex research are fascinating and largely unknown; Roach’s willingness to attend research sessions and report from inside the laboratory gives the book authenticity; and The footnotes are, as always, their own comedy. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Core Ideas

The central arguments the book develops are worth summarising. Sex research has been systematically underfunded and stigmatised throughout scientific history, to the detriment of human health. Most of what we think we know about sexual anatomy and physiology was unknown or wrong until surprisingly recently. Scientists who study sex deal with the same discomfort from colleagues and institutions as anyone else — perhaps more so. These ideas are grounded in evidence and example rather than speculation, which distinguishes this book from comparable titles that rely on anecdote alone.

The Reading Experience

Bonk is the kind of book that changes slightly depending on when you read it. The surface — plot, character, setting — remains constant, but the reader brings different things to it at different points in life, and the book meets them there. This is a property of enduring work, and it distinguishes Bonk from titles that are consumed once and not returned to.

Limitations

Some readers find the subject matter uncomfortable despite Roach’s non-prurient approach. The episodic structure means the book doesn’t build toward a single argument. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Readers who enjoyed Stiff or Packing for Mars and want Roach’s method applied to a subject that is simultaneously taboo and universal.

The Science Nobody Studies Comfortably

Bonk tackles a subject that is simultaneously universal and almost impossible to study without embarrassment: the physiology of human sexual response. Roach’s framing argument is that sex research has always been hampered by the very thing that makes it interesting — the difficulty of observing, measuring, and discussing an activity surrounded by taboo, shame, and social prohibition. The book is partly a survey of what science actually knows about sex, and partly a history of the often heroic, frequently ridiculed researchers who tried to find out.

A History of Brave and Eccentric Researchers

Some of the book’s most compelling chapters are historical, reconstructing the careers of pioneers who risked reputation and career to study sexual physiology. Roach traces the lineage from early, secretive investigations through Alfred Kinsey and Masters and Johnson to the contemporary laboratories where arousal is measured with instruments. She is consistently attentive to the courage these researchers required, working on a subject their colleagues regarded as disreputable and their funders regarded as embarrassing. The book is, among other things, a defence of the legitimacy of studying sex scientifically.

Roach as Participant

Bonk is the most personally involved of Roach’s books, and notoriously so: at one point she persuades her husband to join her as a research subject in an imaging study of sexual activity. The episode is characteristic of her method taken to its logical extreme — if the way to understand the science is to get into the room, then sometimes the way to understand sex research is to become the subject. It is told with the same deadpan precision she applies to everything, and it dramatises the book’s central point about how difficult, awkward, and necessary this research really is.

Curiosity Without Prurience

What keeps Bonk from sliding into either titillation or clinical dryness is Roach’s tone, which treats sex as a fascinating biological problem rather than as either a joke or a scandal. She is curious rather than prurient, and respectful of both the researchers and the strangeness of the subject. The result is a book that manages to be genuinely funny, genuinely informative, and quietly humane about one of the few human activities that science still struggles to discuss in the open. It belongs squarely in the tradition of her other work: rigorous reporting from the rooms where uncomfortable questions get serious answers.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 4.1/5 — Roach’s funniest book and her most technically challenging subject — she handles both the science and the social awkwardness of sex research with her characteristic intelligence and wit.