Title: Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
Author: Mary Roach
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Year: 2008
319 pages
Roach is an entertaining writer, and I especially admire a book on sex that has a footnote on presidential running mates. In Bonk, she's more hands-on than you'd expect, sometimes astonishingly so. She's sort of the George Plimpton of sexology.
I'd have given the book 4 stars were it not for the last chapter. There, she seems to breezily excuse Masters and Johnson's instructions for conversion therapy (same-sex to other-sex orientation) without much acknowledgement of how cruel this practice was (and is), or even an adequate exploration of its lack of efficacy. The chapter could have ended the book with a cautionary tale about how professional or cultural ideas about healthy sexuality don't always match the data. Instead, there's a blip about homosexuality and its mis-treatment, the end. I expect better of Roach and her editors.
No comments:
Post a Comment