“The paper is all about visualizing the arrangement of organs during coitus. People have tried to figure out how the pieces all fit together internally using cadavers and their imagination, by using a speculum and poking around with their fingers, and by clever tools, like hollow glass tubes shaped like a penis. This paper tries something different: the investigators had people have sex in an MRI tube, and snapped a few pictures while they were at it. This wasn’t easy. If any of you have seen an MRI tube, they tend to be small and cramped, difficult for claustrophobics to handle, and a tight enough squeeze for one person, let alone two. The methods section is the most interesting I’ve ever read… ‘The volunteers were shown the equipment in the two rooms, and personal and gynaecological histories were taken. The experimental procedure was explained, and all investigators left the imaging room. After a preliminary image for positioning the true pelvis of the woman was taken, the first image was taken with her lying on her back (image 1). Then the male was asked to climb into the tube and begin face to face coitus in the superior position (image 2). After this shot—successful or not—the man was asked to leave the tube and the woman was asked to stimulate her clitoris manually and to inform the researchers by intercom when she had reached the preorgasmic stage. Then she stopped the autostimulation for a third image (image 3). After that image was taken the woman restarted the stimulation to achieve an orgasm. Twenty minutes after the orgasm, the fourth image was taken (image 4). At the end of the experiment, the images were evaluated in the presence of the participants.’” — ScienceBlogs.com (US)

PervScan does not usually take material from other blogs, but this was simply too amazing to pass up. The details are fascinating. Most of the guys in the study appear to have had performance anxiety. Only one couple — amateur street acrobats — were able to complete the experiment without a chemical assist from sildenafil (Viagra). The women all had a “complete sexual response” but “described their orgasm as superficial.” (Perhaps the scientists did not include foreplay in the experiment protocol.) Studying the resulting images, scientists discovered that “the penis is more contorted than expected” inside the female. Conversely, “intromission didn’t seem to do much to the female anatomy.”

It’s exciting to know that the scientists who work at the vanguard of various disciplines — from neuroimaging to spaceflight — have their prurient or pervy side too. After all, if your job was to play with a machine that took pictures of the insides of people’s bodies, wouldn’t you wonder sex looked like from the inside? It’s the science equivalent of sitting your naked ass on the photocopy machine and results in a pornography not of surfaces but of interiors.

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