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By Claudia Kalb
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Sex isn't always fun. Just ask Jeffrey Deckham, who volunteered to have his brain scanned while he lay flat on his back inside an MRI machine watching erotic video clips. The room was freezing, the MRI magnets clanked like a cement drill--and then there was the pediatric-size blood-pressure cuff wrapped around his penis. As Deckham stared up at a small video screen, health psychologist Linda Banner monitored changes in his heart rate, brain activation and sexual arousal. The goal: to better understand the physiology of sex. "Not exactly romantic," says Deckham, a family physician in Los Gatos, Calif., "but I did it in the name of science."
A half century after biologist Alfred Kinsey published his groundbreaking and controversial exposes on American sexual behavior, sex research--whether low or high tech--is as illuminating and contentious as ever. While researchers are studying subjects ranging from aphrodisiacs to arousal, conservative politicians continue to crusade against funding the science of human desire. In the midst of all this, the grandfather of sex research is being catapulted back into the spotlight. Next week, just days after the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality holds its annual meeting in Orlando, "Kinsey," the Hollywood film starring Liam Neeson and Laura Linney, debuts in New York and L.A., and a companion book hits bookstores nationwide. T. C. Boyle has recently been on tour with his new novel, "The Inner Circle," about a Kinsey disciple, and a PBS documentary on the scientist airs this winter. Nearly 50 years after his death, Kinsey is once again heating things to a sizzle.
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It was Kinsey who shattered any vestiges of Victorian modesty, leading curious Americans from bedroom peephole to upfront view between the sheets. In his best-selling tomes, "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" (1948) and "Sexual Behavior in the Human Female" (1953), the scientist, who was first obsessed with the biological diversity of gall wasps, laid out human sexual behavior--from foreplay to orgasm--in methodical detail. Kinsey's data, taken from in-person interviews with 18,000 people, were exhaustive. And both the questions ("Have you ever had group sex?") and the findings (10 percent of males were homosexual, 62 percent of women masturbated) shocked the public. In 1954, as a result of McCarthy-era politics, he lost his funding; two years later, at the age of 62, Dr. Sex was dead.
Kinsey's methods were far from perfect. Conservative critics charge he skewed science and corrupted sexual mores. Even his defenders say that his population sample--volunteers, with an overload of prisoners and college-educated women--was flawed. And as anyone who's ever been a teenager knows, people don't always tell the truth about sex. By the late 1980s, when University of Chicago sociologist Edward Laumann launched what is today the most comprehensive U.S. survey of sexual behavior, interviewees were chosen randomly, and they answered the most sensitive questions (how often do you masturbate?) in writing. Even Laumann's study, published in 1994, ignited such controversy that federal funding was pulled. His latest effort, a global survey of 27,500 men and women, is underwritten by Viagra manufacturer Pfizer, which has a vested interested in learning more about what people do--and can't do--in bed.
In the post-Kinsey era, technology allows researchers to study sex without relying exclusively on embarrassing questions. Using brain scans at Emory University, Kim Wallen has found that the amygdala, which processes emotion, is more strongly activated in men than in women in response to erotic photos. Wallen says this may support the view that males are more visually oriented when it comes to sexual stimuli. (It might also explain why Playboy's circulation is nine times higher than Playgirl's.) At Indiana University's Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, Erick Janssen is documenting the effect of mood on sexual response and behavior. After viewing film clips from "Sophie's Choice" (to induce depression) or "Silence of the Lambs" (anxiety), participants watch erotic videos. Their reactions are tracked using a tampon-shaped "photoplethysmograph," which measures vaginal blood flow in women, and a comparable "rigiscan" in men. One day, says Janssen, the findings may help diagnose and treat mood-related sex problems. Kinsey, an obsessive cataloguer of biological diversity, would have applauded such research. He knew what people did and how often they did it--he only scratched the surface of why.
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