Sex: A Horizon Guide Page #2

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of how much they earned every night

in tips.

They also asked the dancers

to record data

about their menstrual cycles.

Looking at how earnings

varied over their monthly cycle,

they discovered something

remarkable.

During six days around the middle of

their monthly cycle,

when the dancers would have been

at their most fertile,

they were earning an average

of around 70 an hour.

In the rest of the month

they earned just 45 an hour.

If money talks, this suggests

that male clients found the dancers

far more attractive

when they were

at their most fertile.

The men may have been responding to

chemical or physical signals

that the women were

unconsciously producing.

Understanding what turns us on

is one thing,

but scientists wanted to find out

about the physiology of sex.

In the 1950s, two researchers

opened the bedroom door

in an attempt to quantify exactly

what happened to the human body

before, during and after sex.

The films they made

as part of their research

still make for uncomfortable

viewing.

In a physiology laboratory,

you have to have means...

create means and measures of

evaluating response.

We needed to know heart rate,

body temperatures,

skin changes...so on.

And we're the first to say

that our work was primitive.

In 1958, William Masters and

Virginia Johnson made this film

of volunteers in their laboratory

having sex

and becoming sexually aroused

through masturbation.

The areolae begin to swell,

the entire breast shows

increase in size.

Unsurprisingly,

their work was controversial,

but they made an effort to be

as objective as possible

in the way they collected

and reported their findings.

We did everything to take out the

titillation in those early times.

We kept a very low profile,

and yet a very strong one

within the research and medical,

scientific community,

but they still find it

very discomforting

to think about the means, which is

someone in a laboratory,

someone under lights,

someone wired up.

Even though there's a lot of that

going on

at every other kind of research

under the sun...

when it's sex, it's different.

From the 1950s onwards, scientists

continued to investigate sex,

building on the work of

Masters and Johnson

and delving even deeper

into the physiology of sex.

And now, with orgasm,

the involuntary contraction

of the outer vaginal ring.

Laboratory studies led to

revelations

about what happened to

the female body during sex.

The lubrication of the vagina

came from its walls

and not from the cervix

as previously thought,

the important role of the clitoris

in female orgasm was confirmed,

the vagina could contract and expand

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