This is Improbable

by Marc Abrahams

  The main author, Nan Schaffer, is a Chicago-based veterinarian. She published this report in the same year she founded a non-profit organization called SOS Rhino. The group tries to keep the world’s five rhinoceros species from becoming extinct. Schaffer was, and is, one of the foremost researchers in the field of rhinoceros reproduction. The field receives little public acclaim.

  In the rhinoceros, reproduction occurs, if at all, through a two-part process. First, a male produces semen. Then the semen is transported into a female. The process often goes awry.

  Vets try to lend a helping hand. Sometimes this is literally true, and sometimes it involves the use of electromechanical devices. In a 1998 study, Schaffer and her colleagues explain that ‘manual massage of the penis and rectal electroejaculation methods have been minimally effective for collecting semen from the rhinoceros’. That pretty much summed up the state of the art. And that art, of course, applied to just part one of the two-part basic reproductive process.

  This is dangerous work, less for the animals than for the humans. Much less. A human typically weighs only one-tenth, and in some cases one-fortieth, as much as a grown male rhinoceros. The difference in heft is abetted by the spirited muscular potential of a male rhinoceros as it is being stimulated, directly or indirectly, by the exertions of rhinoceros reproduction technicians. This is also painstaking work, requiring careful engineering, to be performed always and only with utmost caution. The veterinarians and their assistants who engage in this activity do so with a small array of specialized, carefully developed procedures and equipment. The rhino’s mighty horn adds, pointedly, to the peril. (The name rhinoceros is derived from Greek words that translate to ‘horned nose’, a description that lends itself to punnery in connection with any discussion of rhinoceros reproduction.)

  But back to Schaffer’s 1996 study.

  The title ‘Monitoring Electroejaculation in the Rhinoceros with Ultrasonography’ grabs your attention. But it is not the most significant thing about the report.

  To appreciate the most significant part, think back to any writing course you ever had, at any level of school. Almost certainly the teacher told you, and repeated many times, a basic piece of advice: when writing a report, it is important to have a good lead sentence.

  Here is the lead sentence in Dr Schaffer’s report. Read it aloud. It says: ‘Electroejaculation is difficult to perform in the rhinoceros.’

  I recommend that whenever you write a report – no matter what the subject – begin it with that sentence.

  Schaffer, Nan, Tom Meehan, William Bryant, and Dalen Agnew (1996). ‘Monitoring Electroejaculation in the Rhinoceros with Ultrasonography.’ Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Society for Theriogenology, Kansas City, Missouri, August.

  Schaffer, N., W. Bryant, D. Agnew, T. Meehan, and B. Beehler (1998). ‘Ultrasonographic Monitoring of Artificially Stimulated Ejaculation in Three Rhinoceros Species (Ceratotherium Simum, Diceros Bicornis, Rhinoceros Unicornus).’ Journal of Zoo and Wildlife Medicine 29 (4): 386–93.

  The Effect of Mobile Phones on Rabbit Sex

  Lest anyone wonder why four scientists studied the effect of mobile phones on rabbits’ sex lives, Nader Salama, Tomoteru Kishimoto, Hiro-Omi Kanayama, and Susumu Kagawa spelled out their reasons. Many scientists had tried (though for the most part failed) to prove that repeatedly holding a mobile phone against a person’s head causes damage to the brain. The four scientists looked ahead to a perhaps different question: will holding a mobile phone near a man’s testicles affect that man’s sexual behaviour?

  They devised an experiment. Given the expense, complexity, and delicacy of doing it with humans, they opted instead for rabbits.

  Salama et al. say, sweepingly, that they are the first to ‘have analyzed the potential effect of exposure to electromagnetic waves emitted from mobile phones on male sexual behavior’. Details appear in their monograph called ‘Effects of Exposure to a Mobile Phone on Sexual Behavior in Adult Male Rabbit: An Observational Study’, published in the International Journal of Impotence Research. The team performed this experiment at Tokushima School of Medicine in Japan.

  They documented the ruttings (under admittedly artificial conditions) of six male rabbits that had switched-on phones placed near their genitals for twelve weeks, six that had switched-off phones, and another six that were phoneless.

  Figure: Types of mounts, with and without mobile phone

  The scientists noted the particulars of each mounting, and watched for the moment each rabbit went into ‘a state of sexual exhaustion’. They report that the bunnies with active phones ‘got sexually exhausted earlier’. This discovery, they emphasize, ‘might have some practical implications’. Research in urology and impotence often involves the interplay — sometimes delicate, sometimes not — of technology and biology. The team knows this well. Three years earlier, they published a report with the mostly self-explanatory title Unusual Trivial Trauma May End With Extrusion of a Well-Functioning Penile Prosthesis: A Case Report. It presents not one, but two instructive cases.

  The first concerns a fifty-seven-year-old man who ‘claimed the prosthesis had been functioning well, giving him and his two wives, as he had a polygamous marriage, an excellent degrees [sic] of satisfaction’. The problem was that ‘he also reported having bumped his penis into the suitcase of the preceding passenger while boarding an airplane five days prior to presentation.’

  The second patient was a sixty-four-year-old-man who ‘described having trapped his penis against a toilet seat while sitting down to defecate four days earlier’. The doctors removed the device from each sufferer. They matter-of-factly report that ‘recovery was uneventful in both cases’. The doctors remark: ‘These prostheses [which are 13 millimetres in diameter] are somewhat bulky and cannot be satisfactorily crammed into relatively small organs. This crowding quite possibly invites ‘easier exposure of patient organs to unexpected trauma’. The big lesson, says the report, is that: ‘When the implantation of a malleable penile prosthesis is considered, appropriate sizing should be taken into account.’

  We will now see if, prosthesis-less and left to their own devices, these men, like rabbits, breed.

  Salama, Nader, Tomoteru Kishimoto, Hiro-Omi Kanayama, and Susumu Kagawa (2010). ‘Effects of Exposure to a Mobile Phone on Sexual Behavior in Adult Male Rabbit: An Observational Study.’ International Journal of Impotence Research 22: 127–33.

  –– (2007). ‘Unusual Trivial Trauma May End With Extrusion of a Well-Functioning Penile Prosthesis: A Case Report.’ Journal of Medical Case Reports 1: 34.

  Research Proposals: Sex with a Stranger

  ‘Gender Differences in Receptivity to Sexual Offers’ should be a screamingly famous research report. Yet most people don’t know about it. Or maybe they can’t believe it exists.

  It exists.

  Published in 1989 in the Journal of Psychology and Human Sexuality, this seventeen-page sizzler tells a simple story. Five women and four men were sent, one at a time, on to a university campus. Each approached strangers of the opposite sex, and said: ‘I have been noticing you around campus. I find you to be very attractive.’ They then invited the strangers to have sex.

  This experiment was performed twice, once in 1978, and again in 1982. The results were the same. As the report describes it: ‘The great majority of men were willing to have a sexual liaison with the women who approach them. Not one woman agreed to a sexual liaison.’

  The study was conceived and directed by two psychology professors, Elaine Hatfield of the University of Hawaii at Manoa and Russell D. Clark III of Florida State University. It begins with a declaration: ‘According to cultural stereotypes, men are eager for sexual intercourse; it is women who set limits on such activity.’ It ends with a declamation: ‘Regardless of why we secured these data, however, the existence of these pronounced gender differences is interesting.’

  The paper never does exactly explain why they secured the data, but it does supply a list
of fifty-nine earlier published studies that they found useful, interesting, or at least worth listing. These include four other sex-related reports by Hatfield and three technical reports from the prestigious US Commission on Obscenity and Pornography.

  Fourteen years later, Hatfield and Clark published a study called ‘Love in the Afternoon’, in which they tried to explain why they had done the experiment and what happened as a result. Here is a nutshell version of their explanation:

  In the spring of 1978, Russ Clark was teaching a small class in experimental social psychology ... Russ dropped a bomb. ‘Most women’, he said, ‘can get any man to do anything they want. Men have it harder. They have to worry about strategy, timing, and “tricks”.’

  Not surprisingly, the women in the class were incensed. One woman sent a pencil flying in Russ’s direction.

  In one of Russ’s finer moments, he observed: ‘We don’t have to fight. We don’t have to upset one another. It’s an empirical question. Let’s design a field experiment to see who’s right!’

  Journal after journal refused to publish their paper, giving harsh comments of which this one is typical: ‘The study itself is too weird, trivial and frivolous to be interesting. Who cares what the result is to such a silly question.’

  But Hatfield and Clark were undaunted. As they explain at the end of ‘Love in the Afternoon’: ‘The trivial, uninteresting, and morally suspect research of today often turns out to be the “classic study” of tomorrow.’

  Clark, Russell D. III, and Elaine Hatfield (1989). ‘Gender Differences in Receptivity to Sexual Offers.’ Journal of Psychology and Human Sexuality 2 (1): 39–55.

  –– (2003). ‘Love in the Afternoon.’ Psychological Inquiry 14 (3–4): 227–31.

  Bed Mates, Always

  Nobody sleeps alone. This has little or nothing to do with morals. It is simply a law of nature, a fact. Census after census finds that, with or without the niceties of formal marriage, dust mites are the great silent majority in every bed.

  Professor J. E. M. H. van Bronswijk, of Eindhoven Technical University in the Netherlands, took a good, long, scientific look at who’s in bed with what. Van Bronswijk discussed all the dirty details at a meeting of the Benelux Congress of Zoology in 1994. Her study is called ‘A Bed Ecosystem’.

  A bed is a crowded place. Even without the people, it is full of biomass. Van Bronswijk wrote that this biomass ‘consists of domestic mites (mainly of the family Pyroglyphidae) and domestic fungi (mainly the genera Apserfillus, Penicillium, Wallemia), with a smaller contribution of insects, spiders and bacteria’. Mostly, it’s mites.

  This was exciting news. In the decades since van Bronswijk’s charming public pillow talk, many other scientists have taken up the practice of bedroom biological voyeurism.

  Krzysztof Solarz, of the Silesian Medical Academy in Katowice, Poland, conducted a study of three beds in Sosnowiec, Upper Silesia. This was, Solarz reported in the Annals of Agricultural and Environmental Medicine in 1997, the first such investigation ever done in Poland. The city of Sosnowiec had, at that time, a human population of about 250,000. The number of dust mites was anyone’s guess.

  Solarz counted mite population samples at different times throughout the year. He then compared these with previously published data from beds in the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Romania, England, Spain, India, Hawaii, and elsewhere.

  Dust mites are not everyone’s cup of tea, even though they might be in everyone’s cup of tea, if the cup is allowed to sit long enough. For some people, dust mites lack interest – sleeping with them is as far as most folks are willing to go.

  For the new enthusiast, though, there is plenty to learn, and no end of good things to read. Anyone who enjoys poetry, even a mite, might do well with H. R. Sesay and R. M. Dobson’s 1972 ‘Studies on the Mite Fauna of House Dust in Scotland with Special Reference to that of Beddings’. For the mite-lover who detests poetry, there is J. Z. Young’s 1981 prose masterpiece: ‘Morphological Adaptation for Precopulatory Guarding in Astigmatic Mites’.

  Acarologists – scientists who study ticks and mites – are, like the objects of their study, happy to gather in groups. Acarologists in search of bed partners, inhuman or otherwise, convene each year at the International Congress of Acarology. You can join them, if you wish. According to past conference organizers, ‘We look forward to meeting … anyone with a keen interest in mites and/or ticks.’

  Professor van Bronswijk received the 2007 Ig Nobel Prize in the field of biology for her census of our bed mates.

  Van Bronswijk, J. E. M. H. (1994). ‘A Bed Ecosystem.’ Lecture Abstracts – 1st Benelux Congress of Zoology, Leuven, 4–5 November.

  Solarz, Krzysztof (1997). ‘Seasonal Dynamics of House Dust Mite Populations in Bed/Mattress Dust from Two Dwellings in Sosnowiec (Upper Silesia, Poland): An Attempt to Assess Exposure.’ Annals of Agricultural and Environmental Medicine 4: 253–61.

  Sesay, H. R., and R. M. Dobson (1972). ‘Studies on the Mite Fauna of House Dust in Scotland with Special Reference to that of Beddings.’ Acarologia 14: pp. 384–92.

  Young, J. Z. (1981). ‘Morphological Adaptation for Precopulatory Guarding in Astigmatic Mites (Acari: Acaridida).’ International Journal of Acarology 18: 49–54.

  In Brief

  ‘Traumatic Love Bites’

  by M. Al Fallouji (published in the British Journal of Surgery, 1990)

  Anon’s Sex Life

  Has anyone done scientific research about beards? Well, yes. Most of it concerns beards that are attached to scientists. Most of those researchers are men. Most of them are British. Why that should be, I don’t know.

  In 1970, the journal Nature published a letter called ‘Effects of Sexual Activity on Beard Growth in Man’. The author’s name was suppressed for reasons that may be self-evident. I’ll call him here, as Nature did there, ‘Anon’. Anon’s letter said: ‘During the past two years I have had to spend periods of several weeks on a remote island in comparative isolation.’

  Anon went on to say that he had measured his beard growth ‘by collecting and weighing the shavings from the head of a Philips Philishaver razor after a single shave once every 24 hours’. He learned two things. First, that during the day or so before he resumed sexual activity, his beard grew much faster. Second, that within a day or two after resuming the festivities, his beard growth slowed.

  Changes in beard growth during a short stay on the island

  Anon’s letter provoked an influx of letters to Nature, from proud men named Hardisty, Huxley, Bullough, Parsons, Goodhart, and Cook. All were published under the general heading ‘Sexual Activity and Beard Growth’. Hardisty, Huxley, Bullough, Parsons, Goodhart, and Cook raised a variety of points, only some of which constitute hair-splitting.

  Hardisty inquired whether Anon had been shaving more closely whenever a conjugal meeting was imminent. Huxley questioned whether Anon had consistently measured his beard every day at the same time. Bullough delved into the matter of tension exerted by the follicle erector muscle. Parsons offered a helpful hint about measuring the fluid content of the facial skin. Goodhart vented the opinion that Anon ‘ought, in the interests of science, to try abstaining from sexual activity during some of his returns to civilization’. Finally, Cook, who was employed at the Clinic for Nervous Disorders, in London, suggested that ‘slight emotional stress may have a stimulating effect on beard growth’.

  There have been numerous other scientific reports about beards, many of them fully as consequential as Anon’s.

  Of perhaps greater import to bearded men is a series of letters that appeared in 1998 and 1999 in the journal Anaesthesia. A pair of doctors, Ames and Vincent, at the Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead, in Sussex, England, wrote: ‘Maintaining an airway using a facemask in patients who have beards can be difficult ... A simple solution to this problem is to wrap cling film repeatedly around the face and head of the unconscious patient.’ This prompted letters from physicians in Sutton Coldfield and So
uthampton, begging to differ.

  Vincent, C., and W. A. Ames (1999). ‘The Bearded Airway.’ Anaesthesia 53 (10): 1034–35.

  Voracek on the Centrefold Model

  Dr Martin Voracek is a shoes-and-ships-and-sealing-wax sort of specialist. His expertise ranges from romance and jealousy, to the ‘accuracy of volume measurement in human cadaver kidneys’, to the effects of solar eclipses on suicide, and also politics, intelligence, and much else.

  A man of many degrees (specifically, DSc, PhD, MSc, and MPh), Voracek is a research resident at the department of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy at the University of Vienna Medical School. His work is known best to, yes, specialists. But he has enjoyed at least two rounds of public notice.

  His 2002 study in the British Medical Journal, called ‘Shapely Centrefolds? Temporal Change in Body Measures: Trend Analysis’, is an exercise in statistical voyeurism. Written together with Maryanne Fisher of Canada’s York University, it contains language that one might call ‘solve-for-x rated’. Here is one passage: ‘We looked at the trends in Playboy centrefold models’ body measurements by analysing 577 consecutive monthly issues, from the magazine’s inception in December 1953 to December 2001. We extracted centrefolds’ anthropometric data: height, weight, and measurements for bust, waist, and hip. We calculated composite measures from these data: body mass index, waist:hip ratio, waist:bust ratio, bust:hip ratio, and an androgyny index.’

  Voracek and Fisher topped themselves four years later in the Archives of Sexual Behavior with their study ‘Success Is All in the Measures: Androgenousness, Curvaceousness, and Starring Frequencies in Adult Media Actresses’. Its language is sensationally statistical, even in a snippet: ‘We retrieved movie and magazine starring frequencies of 125 adult media actresses from a company’s database, operationalized starring frequencies as female physical attractiveness measures, and tested their relationship to actresses’ anthropometric data.’