I married a sex researcher

In which your humble narrator comments on his Wife's profession and a book he recently managed to finish reading.

It's an absolute delight to tell people that you're married to a sex researcher. It's even better if you're telling local, born 'n' bred Minnesotans. Their little eyes get big and narrow quickly. Then they pronounce it "interesting," which is Minnesota-Speak for either "that is so boring that I will probably die right now" or "that is too horrifying to even contemplate; I have no choice but to go into a coma."

Wife wasn't a sex researcher when I married her, but that's what she does now. It's actually much, much, much more boring than you think it is. She mostly does fancy (and sexy) math and writes statistical program syntax and consults on research methodology for the faculty in her department.

If you know the history of sex research (or as I prefer: sexy research) you know that it all started with Alfred Kinsey, a voyeuristic, scientific, hedonistic, occasionally masochistic researcher at Indiana University who collected a lot of super-smutty data from a lot of perverted people. He was also one of two main characters in T.C. Boyle's The Inner Circle, a fictionalized account of Kinsey's sexy research as told by a fictional assistant, John Milk. Boyle's portrait of Kinsey isn't particularly flattering. He is presented largely as a somewhat cold, compulsive man whose control over those who surrounded him extended even into the bedroom. All in all, Liam Neeson seemed a lot nicer in the movie.

What was striking about this book was the listlessness of the novel. Boyle usually creates characters, that even if you don't particularly like, are at least interesting. In this volume he took a man who was arguably one of the more interesting scientists of the twentieth century and makes him into a stern, creepy controlling father figure for a bleating little weiner-man narrator.

Somehow I thought the book would be a lot more salacious. But then again I thought being married to a sex researcher would be too.