Mary Roach · 319 pages
Rating: (44K votes)
“It is the mind that speaks a woman's heart, not the vaginal walls.”
― Mary Roach, quote from Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
“Hormones are nature's three bottles of beer.”
― Mary Roach, quote from Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
“The paper does not provide the exact number of penises eaten by ducks, but the author says there have been enough over the years to prompt the coining of a popular saying: 'I better get home or the ducks will have something to eat.”
― Mary Roach, quote from Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
“Sexual desire is a state not unlike hunger.”
― Mary Roach, quote from Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
“Footnote: In 1998, a woman in Saline, Michigan received a patent for a Decorative Penile Wrap...The patent included three pages of drawings, including a penis wearing a ghost outfit, another in the robes of the Grim Reaper, and one dressed up to look like a snowman. ”
― Mary Roach, quote from Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
“Homo sapiens is one of the few species on earth that care if they’re seen having sex. The impala is unconcerned. The dingo roundly flaunts it. A masturbating chimpanzee will stare straight at you. To any creature other than you and I and 6 billion other privacy-needing H. sapiens, sex is like peeling a mango or scratching your ear. It’s just something you do sometimes.”
― Mary Roach, quote from Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
“Viagra isn't the only drug being prescribed off-label for women with arousal problems. Los Angeles urologist Jennifer Berman told me some doctors are prescribing low doses of Ritalin. Drugs like Ritalin improve a person's focus, so it stands to reason that it would make it easier to stay attuned to subtle changes taking place in one's body. 'It enables a woman to focus o the task at hand,' said Berman, managing, though surely not intending, to make sex sound like homework.”
― Mary Roach, quote from Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
“Masters points out that the heterosexuals were at a disadvantage, as they do not benefit from what he called “gender empathy”. Doing unto your partner as you would do unto yourself only works well when you’re gay.”
― Mary Roach, quote from Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
“Cheese crumbs spread in front of a copulating pair of rats may distract the female, but not the male.”
― Mary Roach, quote from Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
“Kinsey wanted Dellenback to film his own staff. There are three ways to read that sentence, all of them true.”
― Mary Roach, quote from Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
“This is what primate sex hormones do: “They make individuals perceive other individuals as more attractive than they’d normally perceive them.” Hormones are nature’s three bottles of beer.”
― Mary Roach, quote from Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
“Anne Marie's beauty and style belie a down-and-dirty education in the particulars of practical AI (artificial insemination). She has miked a boar of his prodigious ejaculate--over two hundred milliliters (a cup), as compared to a man's three milliliters--and she has done it with her hand. For, unlike stallions and bulls, boars don't cotton to artificial vaginas. (in part, because their penis, like their tail, is corkscrewed.) AI techs must squeeze the organ in their hand--hard and without letup--for the entire duration of the ejaculation: from five to fifteen minutes. "You should see the size of their hands," she says, of the men and women who regular ejaculate boars.”
― Mary Roach, quote from Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
“All good research—whether for science or for a book—is a form of obsession.”
― Mary Roach, quote from Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
“Women who routinely have orgasm in intercourse without explicit clitoral stimulation all say that it makes little difference what the guy does, as long as he doesn’t come too soon,”
― Mary Roach, quote from Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
“Monkeys offer an unadulterated demonstration of the power of hormones, as the females are not concerned about pregnancy or what their friends will think.”
― Mary Roach, quote from Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
“Last year, I was conversing by e-mail with an acquaintance who was investigating the black market in cadaver parts. She came into possession of a sales list for a company that provides organs and tissues for research. On the list was “vagina with clitoris.” She did not believe that there could be a legitimate research purpose for cadaver genitalia. She assumed the researcher had procured the part to have sex with it. I replied that physiologists and people who study sexual dysfunction still have plenty to learn about female arousal and orgasm, and that I could, with little trouble, imagine someone needing such a thing. Besides, I said to this woman, if the guy wanted to nail the thing, do you honestly think he’d have bothered with the clitoris?”
― Mary Roach, quote from Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
“heterosexuals failed to grasp that if you lost yourself in the tease—in the pleasure and power of turning someone on—that that could be as arousing as being teased and turned on oneself.”
― Mary Roach, quote from Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
“If you try this yourself, I recommend doing so when no one is home. Otherwise, you will run the risk of someone walking in on you and having to witness a scene that includes a mirror, the husband’s Stanley Powerlock tape measure, and the half-undressed self, squatting.”
― Mary Roach, quote from Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
“Sex is one of those rare topics wherein the desire for others to keep the nitty-gritty of their experiences private is stronger even than the wish to keep mum on one’s own nitty-gritty.”
― Mary Roach, quote from Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
“Your genes want you to get pregnant, and hormones are their magic wand.”
― Mary Roach, quote from Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
“The only conclusion I feel sure of at this point,” he mused, “is that women are too complicated.”
― Mary Roach, quote from Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
“The organism is driven toward nature’s singular goal—conception, the passing on of one’s genes—and anything that stands in the way is pushed into the background.”
― Mary Roach, quote from Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
“The feminist in me, who is small and sleeps a lot but can be scrappy when provoked, took umbrage at this description.”
― Mary Roach, quote from Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
“Sipski defines orgasm as a reflex of the autonomic nervous system that can be either facilitated or inhibited by cerebral input (thoughts and feelings).”
― Mary Roach, quote from Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
“He simply believed that lame sex destroyed more marriages than did anything else, and that “considering the inveterate marriage habit of the race,” something ought to be done.”
― Mary Roach, quote from Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
“Téléclitoridienne means simply “female of the distant clitoris,” but it had a lovely, aristocratic ring to it—calling to mind a career woman in heels and sweater set, cabling reports from her home in Biarritz. At the very least, it had a nicer ring to it than “frigid.”
― Mary Roach, quote from Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
“We were unable to obtain any lesbians,” Pomeroy says, as though perhaps they hadn’t been in season, or his paperwork wasn’t in order.)”
― Mary Roach, quote from Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
“This book is a tribute to the men and women who dared. Who, to this day, endure ignorance, closed minds, righteousness, and prudery. Their lives are not easy. But their cocktail parties are the best. p”
― Mary Roach, quote from Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
“I am of the opinion that the vulva of Your Most Sacred Majesty should be titillated for some length of time before intercourse.”
― Mary Roach, quote from Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
“Wallen, like Masters and Johnson, thinks it’s possible that a majority of the so-called vaginal orgasms being had during intercourse are in reality clitoral orgasms. But unlike Masters and Johnson, he doesn’t suggest that most women are having them easily. He believes, like Bonaparte, that the women having them—the paraclitoridiennes of the world—are an anatomically distinct group whose sexual response is different from that of the majority of women. And that maybe these women are “where the whole notion of the vaginal orgasm originally came from.”
― Mary Roach, quote from Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
Mary Roach
Born place: Etna, New Hampshire, The United States
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“Some current critics of the U.S. Supreme Court like to point out that it does not allow the Ten Commandments, though written upon the walls of its own chambers, to be displayed in public schools. But where do we find churches, right or left, that put them on their walls? The Ten Commandments really aren’t very popular anywhere. This is so in spite of the fact that even a fairly general practice of them would lead to a solution of almost every problem of meaning and order now facing Western societies. They are God’s best information on how to lead a basically decent human existence.”
― Dallas Willard, quote from The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God
“[John] Dalton was a man of regular habits. For fifty-seven years he walked out of Manchester every day; he measured the rainfall, the temperature—a singularly monotonous enterprise in this climate. Of all that mass of data, nothing whatever came. But of the one searching, almost childlike question about the weights that enter the construction of these simple molecules—out of that came modern atomic theory. That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to the pertinent answer.”
― Jacob Bronowski, quote from The Ascent of Man
“Let's get it over with, so I can stop wondering. How many have there been?"
Lauren stared at him."How many what?"
"Lovers," he clarified bitterly.
She could hardly believe her ears. After treating her as if her standards of morality were childish, after acting as if promiscuity was a virtue, after telling her how man preferred experienced women, he was jealous. Because now he cared.
Lauren didn't know whether to hit him, burst out laughing or hug him. Instead she decided to exact just a tiny bit of revenge for all the misery and uncertainty he had put her through. Turning,she walked over to the bar and reached for a bottle of white wine. "Why should the number make any difference?" she asked innocently. "You told me in Harbor Springs that men don't prize virginity anymore, that they don't expect or want a woman to be inexperienced.Right?"
"Right," he said grimly, glowering at the ice cubes in his glass.
"You also said," she continued, biting back a smile, "that women have the same physical desires men have,and that we have the right to satisfy them with whomever we wish.You were very emphatic about that-"
"Lauren," he warned in a low voice, "I asked you a simple question. I don't care what the answer is, I just want an answer so I can stop wondering. Tell me how many there were. Tell me if you liked the, if you didn't give a damn abou them,or if you did it to get even with me.Just tell me.I won't hold it against you."
Like hell you wouldn't! Lauren thought happily as she struggled to uncork the bottle of wine. "Of course you won't hold it against me," she said lightly. "You specifically said-"
"I know what I said," he snapped tersely. "Now,how many?"
She flicked a glance in his direction, implying that she was bewildered by his tone. "Only one."
Angry regret flared in his eyes,and his body tensed as if he had just felt a physical blow. "Did you...care about him?"
"I thought I loved him at the time," Lauren said brightly, twisting the corkscrew deeper into the cork.
"All right.Let's forget him," Nick said curtly. He finally noticed her efforts with the wine bottle and walked over to help her.
"Are you going to be able to forget him?" Lauren asked, admiring the ease with which he managed the stubborn cork.
"I will...after a while."
"What do you mean,after a while? You said there was nothing promiscuous about a woman satisfying her biological-"
"I know what I said,dammit!"
"Then why do you look so angry? You didn't lie to me,did you?"
"I didn't lie," he said, slamming the bottle onto the bar and reaching for a glass from the cabinet. "I believed it at the time."
"Why?" she goaded.
"Because it was convenient to believe it," he bit out. "I was not in love with you then."
Lauren loved him more at that moment than ever. "Would you like me to tell you about him?"
"No," he said coldly.
Her eyes twinkled, but she backed a cautious step out of his reach. "You would have approved of him. He was tall, dark, and handsome, like you. Very elegant,sophisticated and experienced. He wore down my resistence in two days,and-"
"Dammit, stop it!" Nick grated in genuine fury.
"His name is John."
Nick braced both hands on the liguor cabinet,his back to her. "I do not want to hear this!"
"John Nicholas Sinclair," Lauren clarified.”
― Judith McNaught, quote from Double Standards
“the International Monetary Fund basically acted as the world’s debt enforcers—“You might say, the high-finance equivalent of the guys who come to break your legs.” I launched into historical background, explaining how, during the ’70s oil crisis, OPEC countries ended up pouring so much of their newfound riches into Western banks that the banks couldn’t figure out where to invest the money; how Citibank and Chase therefore began sending agents around the world trying to convince Third World dictators and politicians to take out loans (at the time, this was called “go-go banking”); how they started out at extremely low rates of interest that almost immediately skyrocketed to 20 percent or so due to tight U.S. money policies in the early ’80s; how, during the ’80s and ’90s, this led to the Third World debt crisis; how the IMF then stepped in to insist that, in order to obtain refinancing, poor countries would be obliged to abandon price supports on”
― David Graeber, quote from Debt: The First 5,000 Years
“It is perhaps a sign of the strength of our republic that so few people feel the need to participate. That must be the reason.”
― Jon Stewart, quote from America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction
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