In light of the recently revived interest in sexologists William Masters and Virginia Johnson – subjects of Showtime’s new series Masters of Sex – Jesse Bering calls attention to lesser-known sex researchers, such as Kurt Freund:
A prodigious theorist and researcher, Freund’s main claim to fame was his invention of the erection-detection machine (otherwise known as the “penile plethysmograph”). … In the early 1950s, Freund—a Holocaust survivor who’d somehow managed to avoid being deported to the concentration camps altogether during the Nazi occupation—was approached for help with a queer sort of problem by the Czechoslovakian army. Straight recruits were pretending to be gay to avoid their compulsory military service. It occurred to Freund that a soldier’s single dumb erection to a pretty naked lady, or the lack of one thereof, would betray his hidden sexual orientation. The specifics have gotten more complicated in the decades since his original erection-detection machine was patented, but the basics of the procedure have remained largely the same:
A man sits down in a chair, his penis is connected to an erection gauge that can pick up very subtle changes in penile tumescence (it’s so sensitive that it can detect a blood-volume increase of less than one cubic centimeter, which most men wouldn’t even experience consciously), and he’s then shown randomized images of nude models representing distinct erotic categories. The scientist, meanwhile, measures what’s happening with the man’s own equipment as these photographs appear.
A far cry from its initial purpose, Freund’s machine is today used mostly in forensic studies, ascertaining pedophilia in men arrested for sex crimes involving children.
The Dish 