Sex can feel very, very nice.

If you do it one particular way, with a particular kind of person, during particular days of your or your partner’s menstrual cycle, assuming you or your partner are old enough but not too old to ovulate or inseminate then, yeah, you can also reproduce.

Oh, unless by “sex” you mean only “penis-in-vagina intercourse to male ejaculation between ages 15 and 25, or as long as both of you are still ‘hawtt’ enough that someone else would want to watch.” If you mean that then yeah, you get a lot of reproduction that way.

But that’s a pretty limited definition of sex.

An extravagantly limited definition.

That doesn’t mean a lot of people don’t enjoy PIV intercourse, or even that they shouldn’t. It just means it’s a bit of a framing trap to assume it’s about, or even mostly about reproduction.

I’ve mentioned elsewhere that the last chapter of Mary Roach’s Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex discusses Masters & Johnson’s final research project, Homosexuality In Perspective, published in 1979. (It’s a bit disreputable because M&J thought they might be able to find a “cure” for homosexuality. Barely excusable then and contradicted by later research anyway.)

But while the book ultimately heads off on an, um, tangent Roach says the researcher’s actual methods and observations were pretty valuable. You may recall from my earlier post that M&J observed sex between hundreds of couples with (in Roach’s dry parlance) all combinations of “one, two, or zero penises between them.” They observed both long-term partners and people who agreed to be assigned to each other at random.

Now just a note from Roach on who, exactly, signed up since almost any time you talk about sex research someone or other will mention self-selection bias. — “Basically anyone who signed up as a Masters and Johnson volunteer — gay, straight, committed or not — tended to have, as they say, 100 percent orgasmic return. Because really, why would people who knew themselves to be iffy responders volunteer for this project?” Not to mention the common criticism of M&J that they were, as Roach summarizes, “the mechanizers of sex, obsessively focused on ‘effective stimulation,’ reducing passion to a series of impersonal physical manipulations.” All well and good, yes — self-selected, fairly consistent sexual responses so… what might the variables be and what of interest (to non-homophobes anyway) might have come out of the research?

Well, actually there were some interesting results, especially so if you’ve ever wondered what’s so special about heterosexuality anyway. Well, how about..

...ultimately the team set aside their stopwatches and data charts and turned a qualitative eye upon their volunteers. What emerged were two portraits. There was efficient sex — skillful, efficient, goal-directed, uninhibited, and with a very low “failure incidence.”

...

But efficient sex was not amazing sex. The best sex going on in Masters and Johnson’s lab was the sex being had by the committed gay and lesbian couples.

Source: Bonk; pg. 301

Ok, that’s interesting, but wait, there’s more (emphasis Roach’s)

Not because they were practicing special homosexual sex techniques, but because they “took their time.” They lost themselves — in each other, and in sex. They “tended to move slowly … and to linger at … [each] stage of stimulative response, making each step in tension increment something to be appreciated …” The teased each other “in an obvious effort to prolong the stimulatee’s high levels of sexual excitation.”

Ok. At this point I’m going to say you should just go buy the book, because there’s a ton of interesting information, funny and often very personal anecdotes, great analysis, and a wonderful and, I think, successful effort to humanize sex research while, where appropriate, gently criticizing the obsessions and shortcomings of the researchers… and making clear as well just how difficult everyone from government to grant review boards to family members make life for researchers. It’s also got this wonderful section, that I’m going to quote a lot of because it just says so much about heterosexual sexual assumptions.

So, go buy the book, m’kay? Now, where was I?

Another difference was that the lesbians were almost as aroused by what they were doing to their partner as was the partner herself. ... Masters and Johnson’s 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. “Not only were committed lesbians more effective in satisfying their partners, they usually involved themselves without restraint… far more than husbands approached their wives.” ...

The straight man, in most cases, “became so involved in his own sexual tensions that he seemed relatively unaware of the degree of his partner’s sexual involvement. There were only a few instances when the husband seemed fully aware of his wife’s level of sexual excitation and helped her to expand her pleasure… rather than attempting to force her rapidly to higher levels of sexual involvement.

Ok, so that’s not too surprising. The whole idea behind “foreplay” isn’t to heighten anybody’s enjoyment but instead to prepare the woman for more satisfactory penis-in-vagina intercourse. Same, of course, with the baseball bases metaphor for seduction: nobody goes to bat hoping to spend an eternity at first… record books don’t dwell for long on those who linger longer at second… and if anyone but the third-base coach has spoken fondly about that position sports writers have failed to record it. (3rd-base coaches, incidentally, are most often seen in highlight reels frantically urging runners to speed towards home.)

Gay and lesbian couples, freed of the assumed inevitability of PIV intercourse, evidently took more time in the M&J labs to not just enjoy finishing (not forcing anyone rapidly anywhere) but to enjoy getting there.

Not that we can lay all the blame on heterosexual men.

The same criticism applied to straight women: “This sense of goal orientation, of trying to get something done… was exhibited almost as frequently by the heterosexual women as by their male partners.” They ignored their husband’s nipples and just about everything else other than his penis. Meanwhile, the homosexual men lavished attention on their partner’s entire bodies.

...

“Rarely did a wife identify her husband’s pre-orgasmic stage … and suspend him at this high level of sexual excitation…”

Roach says M&J noted that heterosexuals have a disadvantage since they have to do a little more guessing about what their respective partners might enjoy in the way of physical stimulation — the old “it takes someone with a clitoris to know what to do to someone else’s clitoris” line. (Cough, bullshit, cough, cough.) Roach, more politely, agrees.

But the empathy gap is not insurmountable. One has only to speak one’s mind.

It’s not so much, says Roach, that gay men or lesbian women had shared anatomy, they just seemed more comfortable talking about sex than the straight people in the study.

Masters gives the example of the heterosexual men’s finger insertions: “Though many heterosexual women evidenced little pleasure… and were obviously distracted by [it]... only twice did they ask their husbands to desist.”

Wild, huh? All possibly a bit more obvious in retrospect than back in the late 1970s, but here’s what kills me: Masters and Johnson undertook their study in order to better understand homosexuality in order to better understand how to “cure” it. And consequently they blew what might have been a much bigger story that would have fit wonderfully with a revolutionary narrative that at the time of publication was only just emerging: sex is more than scoring; sex is more than intercourse; women can act as well as be acted upon, men can be acted upon as well as acting; and heterosexuals don’t have all the answers.