I admit it. I’m shallow. I chose to review this book because of the title: Bonk – The Curious Coupling Of Sex And Science. Be honest, tell me that doesn’t get your juices flowing. Well, it worked for me.
I confess to having more than a passing interest in sex, certainly more than many middle-aged working mothers would admit to, or have the energy for. There is very little in the dim, red-tinted world of the squelchy stuff which fazes me, I consumed Kraft-Ebing’s Psychopathie Sexualis with a kinky gusto, though I hid the book when my Mum and Dad came to stay in order to avoid difficult questions over the breakfast table. The tango of the mating ritual fascinates me and I delight in the bloody battle of tactics, expectations and primal urges evident at any boozy gathering.
However, the detailed mechanics of the act have remained a mystery. I realise, now, that I had laboured under a host of widely held misapprehensions, not least about utterly bizarre experiments devised and the tenacious, somewhat anxious scientists who conduct them. I learned that it is possible for a cock amputee to suffer from phantom erections, I discovered that a quarter of all men for whom Viagra is prescribed fail to experience any successful uprisings and rather alarmingly, I read that homosexual couples probably have a far more satisfying time under the sheets than I do. Those are just a few of the facts that remained with me at the end of the book and they are not even the most fascinating. Typically, I review books with a pad of sticky post-it notes by my side so that when I write it up, I can find the interesting bits again. By the fourth chapter of Mary Roach’s fabulous book I gave up; there was a little yellow flag poking out of almost every page.
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