Sex in an MRI tube, anyone?

I finished reading this book about a week ago and thoroughly both enjoyed it and learned quite a bit from it. The book is about historical and and current scientific research that had been done about sex. It dates back to earlier than Kinsey's research and includes accounts of Sex in a MRI tube, and a personal account that the author gives about being a research subject and having sex with her husband while a doctor had a conversation with her husband and performing an ultrasound on the two of them to observe (internally) what happened when they had sex.

The chapter dealing with female orgasm talks about Princess Maria Bonaparte and her research and finding about the distance of the clitoris from the vaginal opening is highly connected to the likelihood that a woman will have an orgasm during normal 'missionary position' sex. (The more distance between the two, the less likely it is for orgasm to be achieved.) Princess Bonaparte has her clitoris surgically moved TWICE in order to cure her problem of 'frigidity' but both times it was unsuccessful.

There's a lot of good information in this book. For example, it talks about why regularly masturbating can help woman who have sexual dysfunction more than Viagra. It has lots of information about male sexual dysfunction and some really cringe-worthy discussions of certain implants and other methods that can be used to helped male sexual problems. The last chapter talks about how homosexual couples who were studied (maybe 20 years ago) were observed as being much more in-tune with their partners sexual needs, while heterosexual couples have a much harder time doing this. She ended by saying that in the 20 years that have elapsed between that study and today a lot of research on sex has really helped couples to better understand both their own bodies and their partners.

I personally like learning about sex because learning about it as a biological and scientific process helps me to disassociate negative and guilty feelings about it. The more I learn, the more I can talk about, and the more I talk about sex, the more comfortable and confident I become around the topic. This book also made me laugh out loud almost every time I picked it up, so there's a another upside to reading it.

If you want to borrow my copy, just let me know.