Mary Roach: 10 things you didn't know about orgasm | TED

21,808,000 views ・ 2009-05-20

TED


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00:22
Alright.
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I'm going to show you a couple of images
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from a very diverting paper in The Journal of Ultrasound in Medicine.
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I'm going to go way out on a limb and say that it is the most diverting paper
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ever published in The Journal of Ultrasound in Medicine.
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The title is "Observations of In-Utero Masturbation."
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(Laughter)
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Okay. Now on the left you can see the hand -- that's the big arrow --
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and the penis on the right. The hand hovering.
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And over here we have,
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in the words of radiologist Israel Meisner,
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"The hand grasping the penis in a fashion resembling masturbation movements."
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Bear in mind this was an ultrasound,
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so it would have been moving images.
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Orgasm is a reflex of the autonomic nervous system.
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Now, this is the part of the nervous system
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that deals with the things that we don't consciously control,
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like digestion, heart rate and sexual arousal.
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And the orgasm reflex can be triggered by a surprisingly broad range of input.
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Genital stimulation. Duh.
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But also, Kinsey interviewed a woman
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who could be brought to orgasm by having someone stroke her eyebrow.
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People with spinal cord injuries,
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like paraplegias, quadriplegias,
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will often develop a very, very sensitive area
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right above the level of their injury,
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wherever that is.
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There is such a thing as a knee orgasm in the literature.
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I think the most curious one that I came across
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was a case report of a woman
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who had an orgasm every time she brushed her teeth.
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(Laughter)
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Something in the complex sensory-motor action of brushing her teeth
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was triggering orgasm.
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And she went to a neurologist, who was fascinated.
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He checked to see if it was something in the toothpaste,
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but no -- it happened with any brand.
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They stimulated her gums with a toothpick, to see if that was doing it.
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No. It was the whole, you know, motion.
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And the amazing thing to me
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is that you would think this woman would have excellent oral hygiene.
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(Laughter)
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Sadly -- this is what it said in the journal paper --
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"She believed that she was possessed by demons
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and switched to mouthwash for her oral care."
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It's so sad.
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(Laughter)
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When I was working on the book,
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I interviewed a woman who can think herself to orgasm.
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She was part of a study at Rutgers University.
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You've got to love that. Rutgers.
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So I interviewed her in Oakland, in a sushi restaurant.
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And I said, "So, could you do it right here?"
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And she said,
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"Yeah, but you know I'd rather finish my meal if you don't mind."
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(Laughter)
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But afterwards, she was kind enough to demonstrate on a bench outside.
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It was remarkable. It took about one minute.
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And I said to her,
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"Are you just doing this all the time?"
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(Laughter)
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She said, "No. Honestly, when I get home, I'm usually too tired."
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(Laughter)
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She said that the last time she had done it
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was on the Disneyland tram.
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(Laughter)
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The headquarters for orgasm, along the spinal nerve,
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is something called the sacral nerve root,
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which is back here.
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And if you trigger, if you stimulate with an electrode,
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the precise spot, you will trigger an orgasm.
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And it is a fact that you can trigger spinal reflexes in dead people --
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a certain kind of dead person, a beating-heart cadaver.
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Now this is somebody who is brain-dead,
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legally dead, definitely checked out,
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but is being kept alive on a respirator,
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so that their organs will be oxygenated for transplantation.
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Now in one of these brain-dead people,
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if you trigger the right spot,
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you will see something every now and then.
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There is a reflex called the Lazarus reflex.
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And this is -- I'll demonstrate as best I can, not being dead.
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It's like this. You trigger the spot.
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The dead guy, or gal, goes... like that.
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Very unsettling for people working in pathology labs.
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(Laughter)
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Now, if you can trigger the Lazarus reflex in a dead person,
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why not the orgasm reflex?
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I asked this question to a brain death expert,
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Stephanie Mann, who was foolish enough to return my emails.
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(Laughter)
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I said, "So, could you conceivably trigger an orgasm in a dead person?"
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She said, "Yes, if the sacral nerve is being oxygenated,
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you conceivably could."
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Obviously it wouldn't be as much fun for the person.
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But it would be an orgasm --
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(Laughter)
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nonetheless.
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There is a researcher at the University of Alabama
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who does orgasm research.
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I said to her, "You should do an experiment.
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You know? You can get cadavers if you work at a university."
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I said, "You should actually do this."
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She said, "You get the human subjects review board approval for this one."
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(Laughter)
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According to 1930s marriage manual author,
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Theodoor van De Velde,
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a slight seminal odor can be detected on the breath of a woman
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within about an hour after sexual intercourse.
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Theodoor van De Velde was something of a semen connoisseur.
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(Laughter)
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This is a guy writing a book, "Ideal Marriage," you know.
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Very heavy hetero guy.
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But he wrote in this book, "Ideal Marriage" --
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he said that he could differentiate between the semen of a young man,
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which he said had a fresh, exhilarating smell,
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and the semen of mature men, whose semen smelled, quote,
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"Remarkably like that of the flowers of the Spanish chestnut.
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Sometimes quite freshly floral,
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and then again sometimes extremely pungent."
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(Laughter)
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Okay. In 1999, in the state of Israel, a man began hiccupping.
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And this was one of those cases that went on and on.
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He tried everything his friends suggested.
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Nothing seemed to help.
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Days went by.
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At a certain point, the man, still hiccupping, had sex with his wife.
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And lo and behold, the hiccups went away.
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He told his doctor, who published a case report
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in a Canadian medical journal under the title,
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"Sexual Intercourse as a Potential Treatment for Intractable Hiccups."
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I love this article because at a certain point they suggested
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that unattached hiccuppers could try masturbation.
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(Laughter)
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I love that because there is like a whole demographic: unattached hiccuppers.
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(Laughter)
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Married, single, unattached hiccupper.
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In the 1900s, early 1900s,
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a lot of gynecologists believed that when a woman has an orgasm,
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the contractions serve to suck the semen up through the cervix
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and sort of deliver it really quickly to the egg,
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thereby upping the odds of conception.
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It was called the "upsuck" theory.
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(Laughter)
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If you go all the way back to Hippocrates,
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physicians believed that orgasm in women
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was not just helpful for conception, but necessary.
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Doctors back then were routinely telling men
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the importance of pleasuring their wives.
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Marriage-manual author and semen-sniffer Theodoor van De Velde --
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(Laughter)
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has a line in his book.
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I loved this guy.
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I got a lot of mileage out of Theodoor van De Velde.
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He had this line in his book
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that supposedly comes from the Habsburg Monarchy,
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where there was an empress Maria Theresa,
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who was having trouble conceiving.
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And apparently the royal court physician said to her,
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"I am of the opinion that the vulva of your most sacred majesty
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be titillated for some time prior to intercourse."
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(Laughter)
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It's apparently, I don't know, on the record somewhere.
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Masters and Johnson:
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now we're moving forward to the 1950s.
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Masters and Johnson were upsuck skeptics,
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which is also really fun to say.
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They didn't buy it.
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And they decided, being Masters and Johnson,
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that they would get to the bottom of it.
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They brought women into the lab -- I think it was five women --
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and outfitted them with cervical caps containing artificial semen.
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And in the artificial semen was a radio-opaque substance,
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such that it would show up on an X-ray.
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This is the 1950s.
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Anyway, these women sat in front of an X-ray device.
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And they masturbated.
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And Masters and Johnson looked to see if the semen was being sucked up.
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Did not find any evidence of upsuck.
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You may be wondering, "How do you make artificial semen?"
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(Laughter)
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I have an answer for you. I have two answers.
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You can use flour and water, or cornstarch and water.
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I actually found three separate recipes in the literature.
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(Laughter)
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My favorite being the one that says --
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you know, they have the ingredients listed,
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and then in a recipe it will say, for example,
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"Yield: two dozen cupcakes."
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This one said, "Yield: one ejaculate."
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(Laughter)
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There's another way that orgasm might boost fertility.
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This one involves men.
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Sperm that sit around in the body for a week or more
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start to develop abnormalities
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that make them less effective at head-banging their way into the egg.
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British sexologist Roy Levin has speculated
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that this is perhaps why men
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evolved to be such enthusiastic and frequent masturbators.
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He said, "If I keep tossing myself off I get fresh sperm being made."
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Which I thought was an interesting idea, theory.
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So now you have an evolutionary excuse.
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(Laughter)
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Okay.
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(Laughter)
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All righty. There is considerable evidence for upsuck in the animal kingdom --
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pigs, for instance.
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In Denmark, the Danish National Committee for Pig Production
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found out that if you sexually stimulate a sow
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while you artificially inseminate her,
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you will see a six-percent increase in the farrowing rate,
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which is the number of piglets produced.
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So they came up with this five-point stimulation plan for the sows.
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There is posters they put in the barn, and they have a DVD.
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And I got a copy of this DVD.
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(Laughter)
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This is my unveiling, because I am going to show you a clip.
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(Laughter)
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So, okay.
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Now, here we go, la la la, off to work.
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It all looks very innocent.
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He's going to be doing things with his hands
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that the boar would use his snout, lacking hands. Okay.
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(Laughter)
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This is it.
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The boar has a very odd courtship repertoire.
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(Laughter)
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This is to mimic the weight of the boar.
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(Laughter)
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You should know, the clitoris of the pig is inside the vagina.
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So this may be sort of titillating for her.
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Here we go.
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(Laughter)
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And the happy result.
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(Applause)
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I love this video.
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There is a point in this video, towards the beginning,
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where they zoom in for a close up of his hand with his wedding ring,
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as if to say, "It's okay, it's just his job.
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He really does like women."
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(Laughter)
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Okay. When I was in Denmark, my host was named Anne Marie.
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And I said, "So why don't you just stimulate the clitoris of the pig?
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Why don't you have the farmers do that?
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That's not one of your five steps."
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I have to read you what she said, because I love it.
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She said, "It was a big hurdle
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just to get farmers to touch underneath the vulva.
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So we thought, let's not mention the clitoris right now."
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(Laughter)
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Shy but ambitious pig farmers, however, can purchase a -- this is true --
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a sow vibrator,
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that hangs on the sperm feeder tube to vibrate.
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Because, as I mentioned, the clitoris is inside the vagina.
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So possibly, you know, a little more arousing than it looks.
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And I also said to her,
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"Now, these sows. I mean, you may have noticed there.
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The sow doesn't look to be in the throes of ecstasy."
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And she said, you can't make that conclusion,
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because animals don't register pain or pleasure
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on their faces in the same way that we do.
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Pigs, for example, are more like dogs.
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They use the upper half of the face; the ears are very expressive.
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So you're not really sure what's going on with the pig.
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Primates, on the other hand, we use our mouths more.
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This is the ejaculation face of the stump-tailed macaque.
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(Laughter)
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And, interestingly, this has been observed in female macaques,
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but only when mounting another female.
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(Laughter)
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Masters and Johnson.
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In the 1950s, they decided, okay, we're going to figure out
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the entire human sexual response cycle,
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from arousal, all the way through orgasm, in men and women --
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everything that happens in the human body.
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Okay, with women, a lot of this is happening inside.
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This did not stop Masters and Johnson.
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They developed an artificial coition machine.
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This is basically a penis camera on a motor.
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There is a phallus,
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clear acrylic phallus, with a camera and a light source,
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attached to a motor that is kind of going like this.
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And the woman would have sex with it.
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That is what they would do. Pretty amazing.
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Sadly, this device has been dismantled.
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This just kills me, not because I wanted to use it --
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14:49
I wanted to see it.
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14:52
(Laughter)
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14:55
One fine day,
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14:58
Alfred Kinsey decided to calculate
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15:02
the average distance traveled by ejaculated semen.
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15:06
This was not idle curiosity.
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15:08
Doctor Kinsey had heard --
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15:12
and there was a theory going around at the time, this being the 1940s --
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15:15
that the force with which semen is thrown against the cervix
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15:19
was a factor in fertility.
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15:22
Kinsey thought it was bunk, so he got to work.
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15:25
He got together in his lab
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15:28
300 men, a measuring tape, and a movie camera.
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15:33
(Laughter)
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15:35
And in fact, he found that in three quarters of the men
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15:40
the stuff just kind of slopped out.
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15:42
It wasn't spurted or thrown or ejected under great force.
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15:46
However, the record holder
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15:50
landed just shy of the eight-foot mark, which is impressive.
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15:53
(Laughter)
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15:54
(Applause)
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15:55
Yes. Exactly.
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15:57
(Laughter)
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15:58
Sadly, he's anonymous. His name is not mentioned.
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16:01
(Laughter)
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16:04
In his write-up of this experiment in his book,
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16:07
Kinsey wrote,
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16:10
"Two sheets were laid down to protect the oriental carpets."
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16:14
(Laughter)
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16:16
Which is my second favorite line in the entire oeuvre of Alfred Kinsey.
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16:20
My favorite being, "Cheese crumbs spread before a pair of copulating rats
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16:24
will distract the female, but not the male."
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16:27
(Laughter)
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16:29
Thank you very much.
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16:31
(Applause)
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16:35
Thanks!
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