On Friday, The Atlantic published the essay Donating Orgasms to Science: A Day in the Life of a Real Life Sex Researcher. In it, sex therapist and cognitive neuroscientist Nan Wise details the anxieties and intricacies of doing research that requires people to engage in sex acts while being observed by a team of scientists. Wise's stories range from stressful to humorous (dildos launching out of vaginas), but never are they particularly sexy. Which — unless you find banging it out on a cold metal table while wired up to expensive research equipment the height of kink (live your life, gurl) — is probably not all that surprising.


Wise's primary focus in her research is genital stimulation and the female orgasm — specifically, how it all connects with the somatosensory cortex (the part of the brain that "processes the input from parts of the body that are sensitive to touch, temperature, and pain"). Her own particular worries in the study range from having clean linens to making sure subjects' heads don't move too much during orgasm (too much movement disrupts the MRI) to occasionally having to participate in the study herself:


Wise details one of these more hilarious experiments here:




"Houston, we have a problem," I respond. "The dildo went into orbit." I laugh so hard I can hardly speak.

Can't wait for them to borrow this story for the next season of Masters of Sex.

Wise's essay (you can read the whole thing here) is funny and informative. It's also interesting to see how sex research is one part boring paper filing, another part painstaking technical work and finally, one part actual sex — sex which, if Wise is to be believed, never gets any less stressful, awkward or uncomfortable for the any of the people involved. "If I ever write a memoir, it will be called A Watched Orgasm Rarely Boils," Wise jokes.


To be fair, I know a lot of people who would read that.