I’ve been tripping over the cringe factor all year. It is my habit and preference, as a writer, to go on the scene and report things as they happen. When those things are happening to subjects in sex research labs, this is sometimes impossible. The subjects are queasy about it or the researchers or the university’s human subjects review board, and sometimes all three. There are times when the only way to gain entry into the world of laboratory sex is to be the queasy one yourself: to volunteer. These passages make up a tiny sliver of the book, but writing them was a challenge. All the more so for having dragged my husband into the fray. My solution was to apply the in-law test. I imagined Ed’s parents (my own are dead) reading these passages, and I tried to write in a way that would not make them slam shut the book as though a silverfish had crawled onto the page. “Oh, for god’s sake, Billy, she’s taking off her pants!” If they don’t cringe, hopefully you won’t either.
I promise, no vibrating eggs.
* $345
* Incredibly, Victorian physicians practiced gynecology and urology on women without looking. Even something as tricky as a catheter insertion would typically be done blind, with the doctor’s hands under the sheets and his gaze heading off in some polite middle distance. Fortunately, budding MDs were allowed to look upon – and rehearse upon – cadaver genitals, and that is how they learned to practice the Braille edition of their craft.
* They don’t mean to tidy up afterwards.
* FYI, it’s the newest use for Botox. Because what paralyzes your frowning muscles will just as effectively paralyze your clamping vagina muscles.
ALSO BY MARY ROACH
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Sex and Science
Credits
Photograph credits: title page: Underwood & Underwood/Corbis Getty
Images/Robert Holmgren Getty Images/Derek Berwin Hulton-Deutsch
Collection/Corbis Getty Images/Digital Vision Mary Evans Pictures
Collections Getty Images/Wallace Kirkland Getty Images/Andrea
Pistolesi H. Armstrong Roberts/Corbis Hulton-Deutsch
Collection/Corbis Getty Images/Andrea Chu courtesy of Grant
Sperry Bettman/Corbis
About the Author
Six Feet Over
Mary Roach is also the author of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. Her writing has appeared in the Guardian, Salon, Wired, GQ, Vogue and the New York Times Magazine. Her next book Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Sex and Science, will be published by Canongate in May 2008. She lives in Oakland, California.
Copyright
First published in Great Britain in 2007 by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE
Originally published in the United States of America in 2005 as Spook:
Science Tackles the Afterlife by W.W.Norton & Company, Inc.,
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
This digital edition first published in 2009 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Mary Roach, 2005
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on
request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84767 692 4
www.meetatthegate.com
Mary Roach, Six Feet Over: Adventures in the Afterlife
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