51 pages • 1-hour read
Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
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Chapters 13-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of sexual stimulation and response.
Chapter 13 Summary: “What Would Allah Say? The Strange, Brave Career of Ahmed Shafik”
Roach profiles Egyptian surgeon-researcher Ahmed Shafik, a prolific, self-funded investigator whose quirky but persistent program of studies centered on sexual and pelvic reflexes. Shafik, famous for experiments as odd as dressing rats in polyester pants, published his findings across urology, andrology, sexology, and proctology, pursuing how specific tactile stimuli during intercourse triggered involuntary muscular responses. He demonstrated methods that simulated penetration (such as condom-shaped balloons and sponge-tipped “penile” probes) to record muscular activity via needle electrodes, arguing that the female reproductive tract functions as an active, reflexive system rather than a passive conduit. Roach recounts a French Doppler study and Shafik’s own claims about the “vaginocavernosus” reflex: Penetration widens the vaginal opening, which reflexively increases clitoral blood flow and compresses the male dorsal vein to help maintain penile rigidity.
The chapter also follows Roach through Cairo as she reflects on social conservatism and logistical hurdles for sex research in a predominantly Muslim society. Shafik explained that he published abroad, recruited adult participants (often sex workers) by offering cash and medical care, and sometimes conducted studies in “special flats,” work that carried legal and cultural risk. When a planned live demonstration of vaginal reflexes fell through, Shafik instead exhibited the cremasteric reflex on a male staffer. Roach recounts Shafik’s prior experiments probing ejaculatory mechanisms and dismissing a simple urethral-pressure trigger. Interviews with a local journalist sketch a broader landscape of sexual silence and misinformation in Egypt, underscoring why Shafik’s public advocacy mattered despite skepticism from Western researchers who rarely replicated his results or saw him at conferences. The portrait presents Shafik as an idiosyncratic, boundary-pushing figure: lavishly self-styled, methodologically bold, culturally transgressive, and determined to map reflex arcs wherever curiosity led—even under difficult political and religious constraints.
Chapter 14 Summary: “Monkey Do: The Secret Sway of Hormones”
Roach observes rhesus macaques at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center with behavioral neuroendocrinologist Kim Wallen to examine how hormones shape sexual desire. The chapter tracks a low-rank female, Page, as she maneuvers near the alpha male, Keystone, illustrating how ovulatory status drives solicitation behavior despite social risks from higher-rank females. Wallen explains that female rhesus avoid males when not fertile but initiate most encounters during peak fertility, and that mating often unfolds as “multimount, multi-intromission” sequences. Roach includes evolutionary notes on covert or rapid primate copulation to reduce conflict, citing chimps’ extremely short mount-to-ejaculate intervals.
The narrative connects primate patterns to human data: Studies show that women’s desire and masturbation rates peak around ovulation, while menopause flattens midcycle spikes. Hormonal contraception can mute libido by leveling endogenous fluctuations; Roach summarizes mechanisms involving sex-hormone-binding globulin and testosterone, and references debate over therapies like a testosterone patch (Intrinsa). Wallen and other clinicians note that some women report decreased desire on the pill, while others do not, and regulatory attitudes toward “behavioral” side effects complicate approvals.
Roach surveys decades of contested “human pheromone” research. Claims about vaginal “copulins” and male-sweat androstenone face methodological critiques and yield inconsistent outcomes. She notes the marketing of pheromone products despite weak evidence and juxtaposes this with findings that certain scents can reduce measured arousal. The chapter closes by describing imaging work by Ivanka Savic that showed hypothalamic activation to steroidal odorants aligned with sexual orientation—responses that suggest a biological component to attraction, though without demonstrated behavioral effects. Throughout, Roach pairs lab protocols and field observation with plainspoken interviews, sketching a picture in which hormones exert powerful, situation-dependent influence over desire in both monkeys and humans.
Chapter 15 Summary: “Persons Studied in Pairs”: The Lab that Uncovered Great Sex”
Roach introduces a little-known Masters and Johnson project, published in 1979 as Homosexuality in Perspective, that compared the sexual encounters of heterosexual, gay and lesbian, and “ambisexual” couples in a laboratory setting. The lab scheduled sessions at night or on weekends to protect privacy. Some volunteers arrived with spouses or long-term partners; others were paired with assigned strangers after a brief orientation. Everyone was screened for venereal disease (pre-AIDS), and the room was kept warm because the couples were nude. Initially, Masters and Johnson quantified “functional efficiency” and “failure incidence,” concluding that the physiology and timing of arousal and orgasm did not differ meaningfully across orientation: Arousal was arousal; orgasm was orgasm.
As the study progressed, the researchers focused on qualitative differences between “efficient sex” and the most satisfying encounters they observed. “Efficient” sex (goal-oriented, skilled, and uninhibited) appeared across groups, especially among people confident enough to volunteer. However, the most consistently satisfying encounters occurred among committed gay and lesbian couples, who took more time, teased, lingered at progressive stages of stimulation, and appeared absorbed in both their own sensations and their partners’ responses. Masters introduced “gender empathy” to explain part of the gap: Same-sex partners often intuit techniques that mirror their own preferred stimulation, while heterosexual partners can misapply their own preferences (e.g., a man’s applying a male masturbation style to clitoral touch, or a woman’s too-light grip of male genitals). Communication emerged as a salient factor: Gay couples, in the lab’s observations, talked more openly about what worked and what didn’t.
Roach notes the project’s controversial second half, in which Masters and Johnson described a conversion therapy program that they stated was limited to particular cases; she records the criticism without dwelling on it. She closes by situating the research within a broader cultural shift: Decades of sex labs, popular reporting, and candid advice columns help normalize open discussion, making it easier for partners to speak up and for clinicians to address sexual function.
Chapters 13-15 Analysis
In the final chapters of Bonk, Roach shifts from cataloging isolated experiments to pulling together a broader picture of what sex research, at its best and worst, reveals about human bodies and relationships. While previous chapters foregrounded devices, lab protocols, and methodological quirks, these chapters reconsider that material in a more integrated way. Reflex arcs, hormonal tides, and interpersonal dynamics are no longer curiosities but building blocks of a more complete account of sexual experience—one that balances physiology with context, and scientific ambition with cultural constraint.
Roach’s portrait of Ahmed Shafik illustrates how scientific discovery is inseparable from social and political conditions. By describing him as a man who “published papers on a total of eighty-two anatomical reflexes that he […] discovered and named” (266), Roach underscores both his prolific curiosity and the skepticism it invited. The numerical precision signals encyclopedic scope, but it also hints at the fragility of findings that rarely receive replication. Here, Roach lets the sheer size of the claim both impress and raise doubts, inviting readers to think about how scientific authority is built in the first place. Shafik’s own commentary—“I publish outside […] conservative people are coming up greatly. Greatly!” (268)—pushes that tension further. Roach includes the emphatic repetition not for comic effect but to foreground the political pressures shaping who can research sexuality, where, and at what cost. Shafik’s need to conduct studies in private apartments and publish abroad positions him as both an innovator and a figure negotiating societal constraints, thematically highlighting The Cultural Politics of Sex Research and reminding readers that empirical progress often depends on a researcher’s ability to navigate censorship, risk, and stigma.
The shift to hormone research addresses the same questions on a different scale, tracing how biology shapes behavior without fully determining it. Roach uses Kim Wallen’s rhesus macaque studies to highlight patterns that challenge entrenched cultural assumptions about female passivity. The observation that fertile females “initiat[e] about 80 percent of the sexual encounters they will have” (281) anchors the analysis in quantifiable data while reframing desire as an active, strategic behavior. Her choice to center a statistic rather than an anecdote sharpens the claim’s authority. Roach then turns to metaphor: “Hormones are nature’s three bottles of beer” (287). This statement translates complex neuroendocrine shifts into an image of lowered inhibition and altered perception. The colloquial comparison preserves accessibility without trivializing hormone-driven behavioral changes. These choices strengthen her broader thematic argument in The Science Versus the Soul of Sexuality: that desire is simultaneously a biological process and a subjective, context-dependent experience that cannot be reduced to hormone levels alone.
The final chapter continues this focus on lived experience by emphasizing relationship dynamics over isolated physiology. In examining Masters and Johnson’s paired-couples study, Roach contrasts technical competence with deeper forms of mutual engagement. When she notes that “efficient sex was not amazing sex” (300) and that the most satisfying encounters occurred among committed gay and lesbian couples, she points readers toward factors that evade quantification: pacing, attunement, communication, and emotional presence. Her rhetorical framing (the clipped contrast between “efficient” and “amazing”) highlights how laboratory measures failed to capture what mattered most to the study’s participants. Masters’s claim that heterosexual couples lacked “gender empathy” offers a succinct explanation: When partners cannot intuit each other’s sensory preferences, communication becomes indispensable. Roach uses this insight to gesture thematically toward The Importance of Communication in Finding Mutual Pleasure, underscoring how the relational skills that enable great sex lie not in physiology but in responsiveness and openness.
Together, these chapters provide a quiet coda in which Roach acknowledges the limits of what science can test while affirming the value of what it can illuminate. Reflexes, hormones, and observational studies offer crucial pieces of the puzzle, but they cannot explain sexual experience without considering culture, emotion, and interpersonal exchange. By blending skepticism, empathy, and measured wonder, Roach leaves readers with the sense that sexuality is best understood not through any single metric but through the interplay of biology, context, and human connection.
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