Mary Roach

It was often hot or room temperature or warm in the dissecting room, and the colon was, you know, stinky and full of bacteria.

So they would take the whole thing out and throw it away.

So nobody was really even looking at it.

Nobody's studying it.

You know, and, you know, even today, I imagine...

The guy who does my colonoscopies, he said that his son for a long time believed that surgeons were assigned a specialty.

Because he's like, why else would you become the guy who's looking up everybody's asshole?

He's like, you mean you chose this?

But with any taboo, whether it's the asshole or it's just something relating to sex, if somebody feels...

that they can't speak about it openly with their partner or with their doctor, then they're unhappy.

They're putting their health possibly at risk.

And so I think it's just healthy to talk about it.

I mean, when the book came out, I remember my publicist saying, Mary, how are you going to promote this book?

Are you going to just stand in front of like 100 strangers and say things like clitoris and orgasm?

I'm like, yeah, that's what I'm going to do.

And I think the audience really...

appreciated that because it would come to the question and answer time and people would actually ask pretty personal questions and, you know, and I got the sense that people, like, appreciated having the freedom to just ask things.

You know, and that's why I felt like these researchers were so heroic in a way, you know, that they dared to

break down that taboo, especially the 40s, you know, when Kinsey was working, the 50s, 60s, Masters and Johnson, and, you know, Robert Latue Dickinson before all of that.

And so it's, I don't know, I had a lot of respect for people who do this, who do this work.