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When Kelly Suschinsky needs subjects for her PhD research at the University of Lethbridge, the 25-year-old puts up posters around campus that read: Volunteers Wanted for Sexual Arousal Study.

Underneath, she prints her phone number and e-mail address, along with a promise of $50. Amazingly, she has never received a dirty phone call.

“A colleague of mine who is studying bisexual people has had some prank calls,” she said. “But I haven't had anything offensive.”

Ms. Suschinsky is one of Canada's sex researchers, a population of open-minded academics who study everything from orgasm after spinal-cord injuries to the physiology of the muskrat penis. Their work can lead to cures for sexual dysfunction and new ways of understanding the human body, but they must still endure the tittering of colleagues, the rejection of grant proposals and sighs from parents who wonder why they couldn't just be regular doctors.

As Mary Roach reveals in her new book, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Sex and Science, the life of a sex researcher can be hard, and not just because of all the puns.

While investigating sex research, Ms. Roach confronted the assumption that anyone who studies sex must do so because it turns them on – that people study sex “because they are perverts.”

“If someone was studying the esophageal sphincter you wouldn't say, why are you studying that? We all know how to eat!” Ms. Roach said this week. “People treat it like it's a naughty behaviour that you're getting funded to study.”

Ms. Roach herself is no stranger to unusual subject matter. Her previous books Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers and Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife brought attention to little-known corners of the research world.

Her new book was inspired by the work of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, pioneering researchers who filmed an act of copulation from the inside through the wonders of an acrylic dildo outfitted with a light source and a camera.

Ms. Roach became so dedicated to the cause of sexual knowledge while researching her book that she actually had sex with her husband in a laboratory, while being observed by scientists.

“I wanted to make the case that this work is needed and that there's nothing wrong with it,” she said. “It's not scary or weird or creepy.”

Ms. Suschinsky feels the same way about her work, even though what goes on in her lab would make more faint-hearted students blush.

She is studying the patterns of sexual arousal, an issue that requires her to find subjects willing to be “moved” in the name of science.

Her male subjects are hooked up to a device called a penile phallometer, which is basically an elastic band containing mercury.

“The man places the band on the middle of his penis all by himself in a private room – I can't stress that enough,” explained Ms. Suschinsky. “As he's listening to stories or watching videos and he becomes sexually aroused he gets an erection and the rubber stretches and the mercury within the tubing gets thinner, and that's what's actually measured.”

Her female subjects are studied using a vaginal photoplethysmograph, a probe the size and shape of a tampon that contains an LED light and a light detector.

When a woman is sexually aroused, blood pools in the walls of her vagina and they become darker in colour.

“So the darker the walls of the vagina are, the more light gets reflected back to the light detector,” explains Ms. Suschinsky.

Most of her subjects are completely comfortable with the process, she said, but friends and strangers sometimes find it bizarre.

“I say I study arousal and if they say, ‘Wow! Cool,' then I'll tell them more,” she said. “But a lot of people are really embarrassed by the subject.”

And the sex researchers themselves can also be made to feel uncomfortable.

In 2006, a grant given to Albrecht Schulte-Hostedde, an assistant professor at Laurentian University, was singled out by Ontario Progressive Conservative Leader John Tory as “frivolous” because it funded his study of mate selection among squirrels.

“I understand why it's funny and that studying aspects of sexuality can be considered bizarre,” Dr. Schulte-Hostedde said this week. “But people have to realize there's real research behind it. It's not like I'm running Penthouse magazine out of my lab.”

Having done his undergraduate work in evolution and his master's degree in zoology, Dr. Schulte-Hostedde now studies sexual selection and genital characteristics in the natural world.

“Reproduction is inherently important, and when you talk about that you have to talk about sex,” he said. “But try explaining to your mother-in-law that you are studying ejaculate investment in water snakes.”

*No pun intended