Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex

In these chapters, Roach uses devices and lab protocols as entry points to larger questions about what counts as sexual “health” and who gets to define and treat it. The narrative still moves through clinics, instruments, and trials, but the emphasis shifts from technical novelty to how knowledge evolves: how researchers decide that a therapy works, and how they translate intensely subjective experiences into scales, diagnoses, and product claims. This section, more than earlier ones, highlights the tension among private desire, public medicine, and the uneasy fit between numbers and lived experience.

Roach’s discussion of the Eros clitoral therapy device highlights how measurement tools can reframe ordinary pleasure as a medical intervention. Her summary that, in a 2002 paper, women’s scores on the Female Sexual Function Index (FSFI) improved significantly after three months of Eros therapy seems, at first glance, to confirm the device’s efficacy. The surrounding context, though, shows that the improvements partly reflect how the FSFI scores “sexual activity” itself: A structured protocol that mandates frequent sessions will almost automatically generate more reportable activity. Roach is not dismissing the women’s experiences but probing how survey design can inflate quantitative “success.” This scrutiny thematically ties into The Cultural Politics of Sex Research, showing how regulatory and commercial pressures incentivize outcomes that can be neatly graphed, even when the underlying phenomena (desire, satisfaction) are more ambiguous.

The section further examines how medical legitimacy can depend less on physiology than on cultural comfort. Roach preserves the understatement in investigator Maryann Schroder’s remark that “‘Masturbation […] is a touchy area’” (209) to convey the underlying institutional unease. The pun works rhetorically, but its content is serious: Masturbation remains hard to fund, prescribe, or discuss openly, whereas an FDA-cleared device performing a nearly identical function can be reimbursed and marketed. Roach juxtaposes this with Cindy Meston’s observation that “sex in and of itself can be therapeutic” (217), inviting readers to compare a free, nonindustrial practice with a costly gadget. In doing so, she further develops The Science Versus the Soul of Sexuality as a theme, illustrating how institutional taboos and economic structures channel research and clinical advice toward technologies that seem “respectable,” even when simpler options may align just as well with the goal.

Chapter 11 complicates the very definition of orgasm by focusing on participants with spinal cord injuries, whose experiences force medicine to redraw its boundaries. Roach quotes Dr. Marcalee Sipski’s formulation: “Sipski defines orgasm as a reflex of the autonomic nervous system that can be either facilitated or inhibited by cerebral input (thoughts and feelings)” (232). The definition compresses multiple systems (spinal reflex arcs, autonomic output, conscious appraisal) into a single mechanism. Its balanced structure (“facilitated or inhibited”) emphasizes that the brain’s role is modulatory rather than all-powerful, accounting for cases in which intense stimulation triggers a reflex climax despite limited sensation, as well as instances in which anxiety or trauma blocks orgasm even when circuitry is intact. Roach’s decision to foreground this wording shows how a clinical definition can respect both neurological constraint and subjective experience, aligning her narrative with participants who insist that their erotic lives continue, albeit in altered forms.

Roach’s handling of subject testimony shows how she works to preserve participants’ dignity within a clinical setting. When a quadriplegic woman describes her climax by saying that her “whole body feels like it’s in my vagina” (235), the metaphor is left to stand without commentary. Instead of translating or diminishing it, Roach uses it as evidence for a redistributed sensory map, in which nongenital stimulation above a lesion recruits spinal reflexes into a globalized experience of orgasm. The tone here is markedly different from her treatment of gimmicky historical devices; the humor recedes, and the focus falls on how research can validate bodily realities that standard diagnostic categories overlook.

Chapter 12 returns to the problem of measurement, now framed around the mismatch between genital response and felt desire: “You have no idea what a perplexing mess is female arousal” (246). This statement works as a thesis for the chapter’s many research puzzles. She then cites Meredith Chivers’s finding that “[w]omen, both gay and straight, will show immediate genital arousal (as measured by a photoplethysmograph) in response to films of sexual activity, regardless of who is engaging in it—male, female, gay, straight, good hair or bad” (253). The humorous tail clause (“good hair or bad”) underscores a serious point: Automatic vasocongestion is broad and fast, but it does not map cleanly onto orientation, attraction, consent, or willingness. By preserving both the rigor of the protocol and its absurd implications, Roach cautions against treating any single physiological index as a stand-in for complex internal states. This has clear thematic implications for The Importance of Communication in Finding Mutual Pleasure, suggesting that partners and clinicians must interpret bodily signs in context, rather than assuming that measurable arousal equates to enthusiastic desire.

Throughout these chapters, Roach’s main strategy is to set technical data and personal accounts next to each other, often presenting clinical definitions and participant voices side by side. Devices, scales, and scans offer indispensable insights, but they are constrained by funding priorities, cultural unease, and limits on what can be counted. By moving from prescription vibrators to spinal cord injuries to mind-body mismatches in women’s arousal, Roach invites readers to see sexual science not as a straightforward march toward objectivity, but as an ongoing negotiation among bodies, minds, markets, and meanings.