Bonk by Mary Roach Page A

the parts line up.” It is, I guess, yes. But you can’t even see the real estate in question without a hand mirror. I would wager that most men can better visualize a woman’s vulval particulars than can most women.
    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. No one should have to see that. It’s bad enough you just had to read it. Also, put the tape measure away when you’re done. My husband saw it on the bedside table and said, “What were you measuring?”
    Bonaparte also discovered a correlation between a woman’s height and how close together her vulval features are. Shorter women tend to have shorter spans. Wallen says the relationship is less reliable among taller women, owing to certain vagaries of puberty, but a general trend seems to exist. Then again, women were a lot shorter in Bonaparte’s day; Wallen is less comfortable with this part of the equation.
    By the time you are reading this, Wallen’s analysis of Bonaparte’s data will likely have been published. The journal editor already has plans to issue a press release. If you publish this, I said to Wallen last week, think what it will do to tall women. Are men going to hear about this and think tall women are a difficult lay? Wallen didn’t think men would give it all that much thought. He also believes—or, at least, hopes—that the long-spanned nonorgasmic-in-intercourse woman might be relieved to learn of an anatomical (rather than psychological) explanation for her situation.
    Based on a small, anecdotal survey that he’d probably prefer I not mention, Wallen has also been finding that women with small breasts seem more likely to have shorter distances. Put it all together and it spells bad news for the stereotypical American male. The stereotypical ideal female—Barbie tall with Barbie big breasts—is the one least likely to respond to a manly hammering.
     
    r oy Levin has a mildly different take on the intercourse orgasm debate. Levin is the founder of a sexual physiology lab at the University of Sheffield and the author of all the most eye-catching papers (e.g., “The Isolated Everted Vagina,” “Wet and Dry Sex,” * “Vocalized Sounds and Human Sex”). Sadly (for me and for you), Levin has retired and so I could not watch him at work. I had to make do with watching him at lunch, which was less, but not that much less, of a spectacle. Levin’s father was a butcher, and the family affinity for meat lives on. Levin lustily dispatched a calf’s liver that, in my memory anyway, was as big as his shoe.
    Levin ran a small investigation that focused on the erotic sensitivity of the female urethra. More specifically, his interest was in the toenail-sized patch of tissue that surrounds the outlet of the urethra: the periurethral glans. In men, this glans, which lies at the tip of the penis, is exquisitely erogenous. Levin has observed that when women have intercourse, the female glans, as he calls it, is repeatedly pulled partway inside the vagina—as much as half of it typically disappears into the crevasse with each thrust. Perhaps women who have orgasms during intercourse, he reasoned, are women who are more erotically sensitive in this spot. (Though you’d think that, here again, proximity might play a role; i.e., the closer the glans is to the vagina, the more gets pulled inside.)
    I asked Levin how he had documented the disappearing glans. I pictured him in his lab with a camera and headlamp, hunched over a copulating couple. In fact, he was hunched over a TV. He took his measurements off freeze-frame images from porn video close-ups. “These guys know how to shoot this stuff,” Levin said, spooning English mustard onto his plate. “They’ve got the good lighting, they get the angles right, they’ve