Sexology 101

When Mary Roach researches a book, she doesn't do it half way.  For the best-selling "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers," she spent a year in morgues, medical labs and crematoriums. Researching "Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife," she went around the world talking to psychics and scientists about what happens when we leave those bodies behind.

Short of actually dying, it's hard to imagine that anyone could be more familiar with the subject—or funnier about it. So it's no surprise that when writing "Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex," she didn't just interview sex researchers, or pore through centuries of lab notes—she actually volunteered to have sex in the name of science. And by that we mean she brought her heroic husband, Ed, from their home in California to an exam room in London to have a physics professor do some real time, 4-D ultrasound footage of their bodies (or at least the relevant parts) in motion.

It's difficult to say who deserves more credit for bravery, Mary or Ed, but the result is a hilarious scene for a book that she calls a tribute to the men and women who brave ridicule to investigate why we do what we do, in bed--or don't. She writes about Danish pig farmers who take animal husbandry to a whole new level, a researcher in Cairo who investigated the effects of polyester on sexual activity. (He dressed rats in polyester pants, and found that they, unlike John Travolta in the 1970s, got less action than the cotton-clad rats.) And she went to a sex-machine trade show—why not? But perhaps most interesting, are her observations on how changes in attitudes toward sex are mirrored in the way the research has been done from the Victorians to the Viagrans.

NEWSWEEK's Susanna Schrobsdorff talked with Mary Roach about the perils and pleasures of her latest obsession. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: Are you perhaps the only writer who has had sex in front of a stranger in the name of research?
Mary Roach: Well, there are all those prostitutes who keep writing books, but they're doing it for money, not research.

But your books make money….
[Laughs.] True, I guess we're basically having sex for the same reason-- me and the prostitutes.

How exactly did you get your husband to agree to have sex in an exam room?
He's been a such great sport about my work. He'd do anything to help. Once I did a "Mars and Venus" story and we had to talk to these other couples about our love needs, which of course he hated. It was a tongue-in-cheek piece. [Laughs.] When I told him [about the ultrasound project], he said, yeah, sure, without really thinking. By the time he thought it through, it was too late, the tickets were booked. Afterward, he said, "I feel really weird."

I bet. Sex at home must seem great after that.
Yeah, especially since I don't have to wear a hospital johnny [gown].